Elon Musk is back in the news, with a New York Times investigation detailing his rampant drug use right as he hightails it out of Washington. Lovett and Dan compare notes on their own White House drug tests, then dig into Trump’s most recent comments on his Big Beautiful Bill, the legislation’s fate in the Senate, and Sen. Joni Ernst’s psychopathic consolation for people being kicked off Medicaid. Then Lovett sits down with author and history professor Erik Loomis to talk about whether the U.S. is still capable of mass mobilization—do liberals actually care about workers? How do we meet people where they’re at? And are we all too individualistic to show true solidarity?For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [email protected] and include the name of the podcast.
Chapter 1: What are the latest allegations about Elon Musk's drug use?
Musk told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, and he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.
Also, the Times went further into the bladder issue, saying that Musk publicly endorsed Mr. Trump in July. Around that time, Mr. Musk told people that his ketamine use was causing bladder issues, according to people familiar with the conversations. You know, Dan, you think you can trust somebody.
You think you can show them your box of pills and tell them about the fact that the ketamine you're taking has led to incontinence, and then they go and tell fucking Megan Thewey.
What happened to the bro code, Dan? Have we reached the age in our life where bro code now includes incontinence? Do not reveal my bladder issues to the world.
Yeah, I think that's where we're at. I think that's where we're at. Yeah, first it's like, you know, Yeah. It's just different things.
Yeah.
Everyone knows what we're talking about. Everyone knows what we're talking about. So Trump gave a press conference with Elon standing by his side where Trump talked about the end of Musk's time as a special government employee, talked about the future of Doge. Peter Doocy asked them about the time story and it didn't go great.
The president mentioned that you had to deal with all the slings and arrows during your time at Doge. There's this... Some of the people, you know, some of the media organizations in this room are the slingers. Well, so, there is a New York Times report today that accuses you of blurring the line between...
Is the New York Times, is that the same publication that got a Pulitzer Prize for false reporting on the Russiagate? Is it the same organization? I got to check my Pulitzer counter. I think it is. I think the judge just ruled against New York Times for their lies about the Russiagate hoax and that they might have to give back that Pulitzer Prize. That New York Times? Let's move on.
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Chapter 2: How do drug tests work for government employees?
It must be pretty disconcerting, must be unmooring beyond the ketamine to discover that all these people that have gotten pretty close to you are talking to reporters about this. We should also note that if you're listening to this, Elon Musk does seem to have a black eye. which adds to the kind of sense that things are off the rails. He was also asked about that.
I wanted to ask quickly, Mr. Musk, is your eye okay? What happened to your eye? I know this was a bruise there.
Well, it wasn't anywhere near France. So, but... What does that mean? I didn't notice it. First lady of France. I didn't notice it. So, yeah, no, I was just horsing around with little X, and I said, go ahead, punch me in the face, and he did. It turns out even a five-year-old punching you in the face actually does. No, it was X that did it.
X could do it.
If you knew X, you could do it. I saw his mom right now. But I didn't really feel much at the time, and I guess it bruises up. But I was just horsing around with the kids.
I didn't notice it, actually. Did you understand? How broken-brained are you? I understood what he was referencing when he said France. Did you understand it, or did you need somebody to remind you?
I needed the reminder, and then I was mad at myself for not connecting the dots.
Yeah, so for all those, that is a reference to the fact that there was a video of Emmanuel Macron getting pushed in the face by Brigitte. Yeah. And then realizing that he's exposed because the door to the plane is open. That's the joke that Elon is making there.
glad we'll be have a little break from getting to talk about elon musk i hope but man what a what a deeply unserious and broken person to have been given so much power by this president and it's so strange to see donald trump in that setting trying to be protective of elon musk who he sees struggling standing next to him so you like like there's a kind of odd generosity that trump is giving trying i didn't even notice the black guy
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of Trump's Big Beautiful Bill?
So people are not, well, we all are going to die. Some people haven't said it.
Tough comment from Jody. Tough. It's true. We are all going to die. In the long run, we are all dead. But that was in response to questions about Medicaid cuts and cuts to SNAP, which is help food aid, that it could lead people to die. And she didn't like the question very much, gave a pretty flip answer. I do appreciate...
that answer more than just lying about it and saying that they're not cutting Medicaid and they're not cutting SNAP.
I guess if you want points for honesty, yes. Like what she said, like would, if fact checkers are people who still exist, she would not get any Pinocchios for that statement. We all will die eventually. That is a fact.
Yeah, this is, I will say like they are, you know, the bill is not getting- it's not aging well, right? The longer they're out there defending it, the longer this conversation goes on, the longer this debate goes on, the longer there's stories about the battle to cut Medicaid and cut taxes for the wealthy.
I think the more, I don't, Joni Ernst is not somebody I think that Trump can easily lose, but the harder it will be to get a bill that looks like this or mostly looks like this through the Senate and back to the House for them to pass it.
I think – I guess I'd say I think there's a chance that Democrats can make the bill so politically toxic that Republicans will have to trim back some of the cuts, right? They can make them – like maybe get some of the food stamp cuts back. Maybe they make the Medicare cuts worse.
Maybe get the funding for Planned Parenthood back or take the provision that defunds Planned Parenthood out of the bill. There are some things you can do around the margins. But really what we're trying to do here, we can't stop the bill from passing. Like that is not – we don't have the votes to do that. And I'm operating the assumption that they have to pass something.
Our goal is to make sure that every person in this country knows how bad a thing they just passed. And there's been... So we're recording this on Friday. It's only been a few hours since the Joni Ernst clip made the rounds on the internet. This would be, in a different media environment, different world, a gigantic story. This is the whole thing.
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Chapter 4: How does Joni Ernst respond to Medicaid cuts?
Dan, if a Democrat leaps at an opportunity in the woods, but nobody hears it, Does it make a sound?
I mean, this is ultimately the question of like, there is a very good piece in the bulwark about how Democrats did not do a lot with the must piece. And it's like, and it went through all the people who did not tweet about it. And it's like, are we really like two Chuck Schumer tweets away from like mass public opinion change?
No, when I say Democrats, I don't, yes, every Democratic member should do something, but I also sort of mean,
like we're talking about it right now, which is part of the point, but every person who is in the sort of democratic media world, all the influencers out there, people, TikTok accounts, making content about this, sharing content about this, like average everyday people putting the Elon Musk clip in their group chat with their Musk fanboy cousin who disagrees with Trump on a lot of things.
Like there are opportunities here and we all should be jumping at them.
Yeah, I agree. There's something, there's like this deeper challenge, which is like, I hear what you're saying, because it's like, no, it's not really about like, does Schumer do a tweet? Are there enough politicians tweeting about it? It's like as an organization used loosely. Yes, quite loosely, yes.
As throngs of human beings collectively, generally, ideally having the same outcome of defeating Donald Trump and his allies, there is this deeper problem where A lot of Democratic discourse online is about how to win, and a lot of Republican discourse is just about winning. We have Fox News on in our office all the time. Look, we like to hear from a range of people.
I like to get all the views before I make my decisions. They have a lot of content about making fun of Democrats for endlessly talking about how to win men, right? But when they're trying to... trying to win bin back women. They're not having people on to debate the Republican problem with women. They're talking about immigrants attacking women in the streets.
And so like, there's just this sort of, it's almost as if there's this like kind of sense on the right that how you help your side is by helping your side. And on our side, we really all put on our white gloves And like kind of have a kind of sophisticated debate about the future of the Democratic Party. But not a lot. And by the way, this applies to me, too. We're doing it right now.
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Chapter 5: What can history teach us about labor mobilization?
And it was a huge mistake by the LAPD and by the corporate leaders, and it leads to a big victory that spreads across the country and sort of brings a lot of janitors and other low-wage service workers into SEIU and makes it the powerful force in American labor unionism and American progressive politics that it is today.
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Let's talk about the air traffic controllers under Reagan. The air traffic controller union at the time, which no longer exists, it's a different union now, it endorsed Ronald Reagan. What I thought when I saw that as well, you know, this election we just went through, we had the Teamsters head speaking at the Republican National Committee. So it felt resonant.
Take us from the air traffic controllers union endorsing Ronald Reagan to within a span of a few years being destroyed by Ronald Reagan.
In the 70s, like. Planes crashed all the time. Of course, this may be happening now with Trump and the gutting of air traffic control. So this may become more relevant again. But air traffic controllers do not have the technologies that they have now. I mean, you're basically like dots in the sky on a radar screen and trying to get them to not run into each other. And it was very stressful.
And the way the FAA worked is that most of the leadership were old officers, often from the Vietnam War. And a lot of their everyday traffic controllers were rank and file guys from the Vietnam War. And their bosses basically treated them like they were enlisted men, telling them what to do, yelling at them, just adding to the stress.
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Chapter 6: How did the 1919 Seattle General Strike unfold?
Beginning in 1965, it engages in a nationwide boycott against table grapes because the grape growers were so anti-union. This sort of galvanizes liberals across the country. It becomes a national movement. People volunteer for this and they live in like UFW houses in various cities around the country.
working, flyering, getting people to support the movement, getting stores to not buy these grapes. And it becomes a national movement that eventually leads to some pretty major victories for the farm workers and really solidifies Chavez and Huerta as legends of American organizing and American progressivism.
They were able to take a really small group of workers and make it a national cause by building on a kind of a broader sense of solidarity between that existed at that time where people in New York or LA or where I live in Providence saw these workers out in California that they barely knew existed and learned about their conditions. And people were horrified about this.
Yeah.
Is it just as simple as their demands were reasonable, their conditions were terrible? Or was there something about the ask of Americans who obviously were not directly impacted? What exactly, to drill down, made it catch such attention?
It was the appeal to a broader sense of justice that was a big part of American life in the 1960s and 70s. You know, that this was a way in which everyday people, I mean, think about it today, right? Like, you know, there's a lot of people out there who, no doubt listeners of this podcast, who really don't know what to do right now, right?
I mean, they're flummoxed, they're flustered, they're horrified, they're angry, but their anger other than like, you know, got to make sure we win the House in 26 and try to find somebody else. They don't know what to do necessarily. And that's been kind of a theme, I think, since the election. Yeah. Well, you know, part of what the UFW boycott does is give people something to do, right?
It gives them a way that they can become invested in a movement by handing out flyers, by, if nothing more, by like taking the flyer and then saying, I'm not going to support buying these table grapes, right? I'm going to boycott a store that is selling these grapes. I'm going to engage in me, you know, I'm going to engage in a solidarity action.
That might slightly inconvenience me because, I don't know, my kid likes grapes and, you know, I like this store or whatever. But I'm going to put pressure using my consumer power to live by this boycott that then means that I am actively helping these workers out in California who I've never seen because I've never been to Fresno.
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Chapter 7: What lessons can we learn from the Flint sit-down strike?
We're in this political moment where you have a lot of kind of Republicans saying, oh, we need I think it was the White House spokesperson yesterday. We see we need fewer LGBTQ graduates from Harvard and more plumbers and more kind of people that work with their hands. And there's this sort of, I don't know, nostalgia for the factory because those are the real jobs for the men. Right.
Those are those are real jobs with dignity for men. But it almost seems to me that it kind of gets it backwards, that that the reason we associate those jobs with dignity and that American spirit is because people fought to make them well compensated. And because they were well compensated, they had a kind of prestige and a respect, right?
And that there's nothing inherently more dignified about that job than a service job. It's just that unions successfully organized those places when these people were forming memories about like a Rockwell style America.
Yeah, that's right. I mean, just from the work perspective, we know absolutely that there's nothing inherently better about a factory job than working at McDonald's or working as a home health care worker. Right. Jobs that actually exist today, as opposed to factory jobs that are not coming back.
Even if all the tariffs happen and, you know, all the production comes back to the U.S., it's going to be automated. Right. There's maybe a few workers in there, but we're not talking about 1950 anymore where you've got 25,000 people working in the same factory. That is never happening again. But I do think that there is a tremendous amount of instability in the workplace today.
There's been a huge amounts of attacks on organized labor everywhere. open attacks from Republicans and indifference from too many Democratic leaders, Joe Biden being a very important exception to that, very pro-union guy, and one of his strongest things that did not really pay off politically, unfortunately, with union workers, which is a whole other set of conversations. But
People are going to react to nostalgia, right? People are going to react to a feeling that things were better in the past. The truth barely matters. We have to deal with the reality that people do not feel comfortable and stable in their work lives. The rise of AI is only going to make this worse. And we actually really have to get ahead of figuring out what does the future of work look like
And people value work. Work is one of these things that all societies throughout history have had work in certain kinds of ways as central to their societies, often connected to gender norms. And this is something we're going to have to figure out. We can't just tell people that they're wrong.
We have to, once again, organize them where they're at to try to get them to a place that is less nostalgic and more useful and more organized to moving toward a politics that actually makes sense in the 21st century to make work life better for everybody. And we're not very close to that yet.
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