00;00;08;27 - 00;00;35;09
Unknown
Hello and welcome to The Premise. I'm Jennifer Thompson and I'm Chad Thompson, and today we are here with Sasha Abramsky, who is frankly one of the most fascinating journalists authors. Your work is so human centric and beautifully written and so well researched. I'm a huge fan. Sasha, it's really, really lovely to have you here with us today. It's lovely to be on.
00;00;35;09 - 00;01;02;01
Unknown
And how could I possibly be in a bad mood after an introduction like, well, you know, I gotta tell you, I'm going to be super honest with with our readers. You and I were scheduled to do a podcast for your last book, Chaos Comes Calling, and I actually wasn't able to do it. It was too much for me to dig into the emotions around that book and the the second.
00;01;02;02 - 00;01;34;00
Unknown
I think it was the second administration for our current president. And I'm so glad that you wrote another book so I could talk to you about this one. Well, if not, because I'm glad to, that this is such a better content and so much more uplifting. Right? Well, you know what I mean. I do feel like chaos has been calling, and I think you even said this one time or I don't know who said it, but it was at one of the events where you were speaking, and it feels like we're sort of on the Titanic and we're sinking, but everything seems normal.
00;01;34;00 - 00;02;05;03
Unknown
We're still at the ballroom dancing and listening to music. Right? It's like there's so much happening politically and emotionally and economically that it's really hard to wrap your brain around it and feel happy, if I'm honest, you know? Yeah. I mean, but what you're saying about sort of things seeming superficially normal, it's so strange. I mean, look, I go to the beach every day when I'm in San Diego to just walk and to clear my head, and you walk along the Pacific Beach boardwalk and everything seems normal.
00;02;05;03 - 00;02;29;19
Unknown
People are having a good time. There are people in the water swimming. There are kids playing. You know, there are people with their feet in a bucket because they got stung by stingrays, whatever it might be. Everything just seems sort of run of the mill and normal. And then you put on the news and you just get bombarded with this absolutely head spinning, surreal diet of, I mean, I put news in parentheses because it's not even really news.
00;02;29;19 - 00;02;59;22
Unknown
It's this weird combination of propaganda, of reality TV, of social media, of artificial intelligence and deepfakes. And all of this stuff is all coming together in this absolutely sort of epochal Trump presidency, which in the worst ways possible, is upending everything we think we know about the United States. And it's creating this incredibly mutated version of what America is or what America can be.
00;02;59;22 - 00;03;16;14
Unknown
And, you know, I think the default for a lot of people is I can't deal with this. I've got to turn away. I've got to put my head in the sand. It's just too painful. And, you know, I understand that I really do because as I said, you know, it's easier on a daily basis to just pretend that life's going on as normal.
00;03;16;16 - 00;03;40;18
Unknown
And, you know, weirdly enough, you can do that in many places. You know, if your city isn't being raided by ice or you don't live in a neighborhood where, you know Border Patrol is rampaging, or you aren't sort of in an area where people are getting arrested for what they're saying and thinking. You know, for most Americans, most of the time, life is still functioning in a fairly normal basis.
00;03;40;19 - 00;04;04;29
Unknown
And, you know, for me as a journalist, it's one of those really strange moments in history where, you know, I don't have privileged information, but I spend my time thinking about these things. So the more I think about it, the more I realize just what a crisis the Trump presidency represents. And yet it's quite hard on a daily basis to dovetail that with just the realities of life every day.
00;04;05;05 - 00;04;28;26
Unknown
Well, and I wanted to ask you how you balance knowing so much, being so steeped in what is happening and doing the research and really seeing how horrific it is with maintaining some semblance of, you know, a normal life, that you don't feel like the world is coming to an end, so to speak. Well, it depends who you talk to.
00;04;28;27 - 00;04;45;23
Unknown
I think some of the people in my in my circle would say I'm a catastrophe, but I spend a lot of my time saying, the end of the world is nigh. But I, you know, I don't I mean, look, I over 30 years, I've written a lot about the underside of America. I spent much of my 20s writing about the criminal justice system.
00;04;45;24 - 00;05;05;06
Unknown
I spent much of my 30s writing about economic inequality and poverty, and I spent my 40s and early 50s writing about Trump and the rise of this sort of nationalist, xenophobic, irrational movement around MAGA. And it is easy to sort of look at all of this and say, well, you know, what on earth is there to look forward to?
00;05;05;08 - 00;05;26;06
Unknown
And you have to work out ways to navigate life that allows you to function. So for me, I go on walks every day. I love I love being at the beach. I love going up into the mountains, I love skiing, you know, if I can find a little bit of solitude on a fairly regular basis, I can get my head back in order and I can sort of gird myself for whatever comes next.
00;05;26;08 - 00;05;46;17
Unknown
I'm very social. I like going out in the evenings. I like having drinks with friends. I like going to see theater and all that stuff. And, you know, the other thing is I teach I teach journalism at UC Davis, and it's really, really interesting to talk and meet with young people. They don't always see the world the same way I see the world.
00;05;46;17 - 00;06;06;19
Unknown
They don't always read the same news source as I read, but I think it's really important to ground yourself by talking to people who have other experiences, especially younger people who see the world in a different way and navigate the world in a different way. And so for me, you know, those are the ways I cobbled together a sense of normalcy.
00;06;06;21 - 00;06;22;05
Unknown
But I will say the Trump era is a challenge because the Trump era is so irrational. You know, when you have a president who one minute is saying, we're going to invade Greenland and the next minute is saying we're going to destroy our civilization at 8:00 at night, and the next minute is tweeting that he's a reincarnation of Jesus Christ.
00;06;22;07 - 00;06;42;28
Unknown
You know, when you get to that point, you're in a sort of weird Huntress Thompson kind of hallucination, right? Right. And, you know, I sometimes sort of really feel that that I, you know, I've gone down the rabbit hole and that the world that we are living in is not the world that it's supposed to be there. Is no known.
00;06;42;29 - 00;07;11;21
Unknown
There is no political metric that gets you to a president as insane as Donald Trump. There's no known metric that gets you to a moment in time where you know everything that you think is familiar about the way the political system functions suddenly doesn't hold anymore. Right? And I think that, you know, not just for me, but for anybody who's covering the Trump era, it's a real challenge because we've been trained to interpret politics in a certain way.
00;07;11;21 - 00;07;34;05
Unknown
And one of the foundational things, you know, we all think about is that democracy is irrational, and we think about America as being a sort of preeminent democracy, a larger than life democracy with this sophisticated governing system and all these checks and balances and all these breaks on irrationality. And it turned out that a lot of those breaks were timorous, that they were just ready to disappear.
00;07;34;07 - 00;07;58;12
Unknown
And a lot of the things that we thought about, the way the American system functioned, actually don't hold water. They were customs, but they weren't sort of embedded into the system nearly as weight. Ali, as we'd like to think. That's so, you know. Yeah. You know, I know a lot of political journalists all around the country, and every one of them seems to be having this same thing that the world we thought we knew is actually very different.
00;07;58;12 - 00;08;24;00
Unknown
And it's different in a very unpredictable way, a very snarling kind of nasty way. And it forces us to recalibrate how we think and talk and write about the world that we're, you know, being paid to write about. Yeah. The thing that gets me is, is how quaint ideas like the parliamentarian and Jimmy Carter having to give up his peanut farm seem, in retrospect.
00;08;24;03 - 00;08;45;14
Unknown
Well, I mean everything. Look, I mean, you know, when I was a young, young adult just starting out and reporting, the biggest scandal was Bill Clinton, who may or may not have had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. And that was an impeachable offense. Well, if you fast forward to the Epstein era, we've got a president of the United States who is implicated in, you know, far and away the worst.
00;08;45;17 - 00;09;18;26
Unknown
I mean, I don't even know what to call it. It's so far beyond the sex scandal. But he's deeply implicated in one of the most shorted sexual scandals in modern political history. He's deeply implicated in numerous corruption scandals. He's doing absolute self-dealing around cryptocurrency, around his golf courses, around his hotels. You know, he's basically declared that the white House is for sale, and yet he's got a party behind him that is tolerating all of that and enabling all of that.
00;09;19;00 - 00;09;55;15
Unknown
He goes to war not by addressing the nation, but with a middle of the night social media video. Right. And doesn't bother to inform Congress. Yeah. So, you know, you have things that are so far outside the norm. So yes, when you're talking about, you know, the fact that Jimmy Carter had to give up his peanut farm, now we're talking about the fact that we've got a billionaire president surrounded by billionaire oligarchs, all of whom are self-dealing and none of whom feel the slightest compulsion to even show a modicum of deference for authority or deference for legality in how they're self-dealing.
00;09;55;18 - 00;10;16;28
Unknown
So, you know, it's a completely different ball game. If you if you want to understand Trump's America, there's no point in looking at the behavioral characteristics of someone like Jimmy Carter. It's not a point of comparison. If you want to understand Trump's America, you look at Putin's Russia or you look at Victor Orban's Hungary. Until Viktor Orban was unceremoniously booted out by his own voters last week.
00;10;16;28 - 00;10;39;21
Unknown
But you look at the authoritarians of the early 21st century, and that tells you the political footprint that Donald Trump's aiming for. And it's radically different from the political footprint that any other president of any other party is aimed for an American political history. Does Orban give you any hope? Absolutely. In fact, I'm going to Hungary to report on it for the nation in a couple of months.
00;10;39;24 - 00;11;02;07
Unknown
But it gives me tremendous hope because you have somebody who spent 16 years consolidating power, breaking the independent media, breaking independent academic organizations, going after independent think tanks and trying to rig the electoral system to make it almost impossible for him to lose. And at the end of the day. Not only did he lose, but the opposition party got two thirds of the seats in Parliament.
00;11;02;14 - 00;11;21;22
Unknown
So absolutely, if you are looking for a pinpoint where the sort of xenophobic kind of populism, the rationalist populism of Auburn and Trump runs its course, we saw it in Hungary last week. So the question in America is will it run its course sooner rather than later? It will run its course eventually. I mean, all political movements eventually wipe out.
00;11;21;24 - 00;11;42;02
Unknown
Sure. At the moment Trump's doing a pretty good wipe out. I mean, every day you see his his his bases fracturing. You see it around the Iran war. You see it around the price of gas. You see it around some of what he's done with these, you know, tweets where he's sort of saying, well, I'm a wing incarnation of Jesus, which doesn't sit very well with Niven Base.
00;11;42;04 - 00;12;10;27
Unknown
You're seeing all these sort of hints that Trump's lost his, his rhythm, that all the things that allowed him to be a very, very successful demagogue are suddenly turning against him. And he's lost the ability to control his own narrative. And I think partly that's because he's getting increasingly senescent. And, you know, you look at the tweets and social media posts that the issues in the middle of the night when he's Sun Downing and he's alone and it's very hard to spin them as being cunning as a fox.
00;12;10;27 - 00;12;45;06
Unknown
I know there are still some people out there who are saying this is just Trump and madman theory. This is just Trump wanting to show that he's edgy. Well, it's not if you actually read what he's writing, they're the rantings of a lunatic, right? I mean, quite literally, if you read the 482 word post that he did last week about making Kelly and Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor Greene, it literally could have been the rantings of somebody off his medications on a street corner, the kind of person that you grab your child's hand and you walk away from because you're worried that he's going to explode in violence and you avoid eye
00;12;45;07 - 00;13;05;04
Unknown
contact with him because you're worried if you in any way engage with him, he's going to hurt you. And that is the president of the United States with his hand on the nuclear trigger. Right? I find it absolutely terrifying. And I think a critical mass of Americans are waking up to just how terrifying and a rationalist this moment actually is, indeed.
00;13;05;06 - 00;13;27;03
Unknown
And I think what I like most about American Carnage is that you've chosen to tell the story through the intimate lives of people who have been affected by Dodge. And, you know, let me just tell our listeners again. So we sort of skipped in. We're really here to talk about American carnage, how Trump, Musk and Doge butchered the US government.
00;13;27;04 - 00;13;48;26
Unknown
Your latest book, now available were all books are sold and after you, if you hang on till the end, I'll tell you where you can get it at a discounted rate. But in this book, we meet many people who their lives have been upended and. And you do it in such a way where it's intimate, but you also go into the facts of what's happening on such a large scale.
00;13;48;29 - 00;14;24;07
Unknown
What made you decide to tell the story in this way? Well, I was looking for ways to tell the story of the Trump era, and everything we've talked about now is the sort of authoritarian, a rationalist endpoint of Trump in 2026. But if you want to understand how Trump in 2020, in 2026 accumulates all of the power that allows him to be unleashed, you have to look at what happened with the Doge purges in early 2025, and the reason for that is Trump and his acolytes Trump, Elon Musk, the Heritage Foundation, people who were behind project 2025.
00;14;24;09 - 00;14;42;05
Unknown
All of them had this idea that there were large parts of the American government that you could just eviscerate. You could do it without congressional input. You could do it without legislation, but that if they were in some ways blocks to Trump's increasingly extremist agenda, you could do end runs around them. So they came in with this plan.
00;14;42;05 - 00;15;07;02
Unknown
And the plan was you would create a department that would have a mandate to eviscerate government function. Well, the thing is, you create a department in the American system through Congress. Congress legislates agencies and departments into being. Conversely, if you want to get rid of a department, you do it through Congress. Congress passes a law saying, we no longer believe we need a, you know, Department of Education or USAID or whatever it might be.
00;15;07;03 - 00;15;46;02
Unknown
But Trump must didn't have the patience for that. So they came in. And through a series of social media posts, Trump conjures this illegitimate department of government efficiency into existence. And then through social media posts, he appoints Elon Musk, the world's richest man, to head the Department of Government Efficiency. Again, with no congressional input, Musk comes in, brings a whole bunch of tech pros in with computer skills to hack government, and I say that quite literally, their mandate was basically to come in and go into the financial and information pipelines of all of the different government departments, and there are more than 2 million people, or there were more than 2 million people in the
00;15;46;02 - 00;16;09;28
Unknown
federal civilian workforce. These guys came in and they were determined that anything to do with environmental policy, anything to do with workplace safety and regulation, anything to do with public health, anything to do with overseas aid, anything to do with climate change research would just immediately be on the chopping block. And they came in and in the space of a very few weeks, they bulldozed huge sectors, sectors of government.
00;16;09;28 - 00;16;32;18
Unknown
And you're right, I write about them very intimately. In my book, I found 11 federal workers who were willing to trust me with their stories over six months, and I basically followed them for the first half of 2025, as their lives were being upended and their lives were being upended in a few ways, they were being told either they didn't have jobs or that they did have jobs, but they weren't allowed to work at the jobs, or that they did have jobs.
00;16;32;18 - 00;16;50;06
Unknown
They still could work at the jobs, but they would have to do all of this make work stuff like sending into Elon Musk five things that they'd done each week that justified their continued employment. And the aim was very explicit. There was a man called Russell Vote who basically authored large parts of project 2025, and he's now in the cabinet.
00;16;50;08 - 00;17;15;05
Unknown
He's a member. He's the head of the Office of Management and Budget, which puts him basically in control of the entire federal civilian hiring and firing force. And Russell vote was caught on camera a month before the election, saying, if we win, our goal is to, quote unquote, put federal workers into trauma. And he then explained that he wanted to make life so unendurable for federal workers that they would voluntarily leave the federal workforce, if you like.
00;17;15;05 - 00;17;37;15
Unknown
They were self-report from the federal workforce. And this is the goal. They set out to do so in the first part of 2025. The goal was to break large parts of the government. The headline was that they were doing it in the name of government efficiency, Department of Government Efficiency, and that they would generate hundreds of billions of dollars of savings and that every American taxpayer would receive a Doge refund check.
00;17;37;23 - 00;18;00;06
Unknown
None of that materialized. You know, I mean, we laugh about it now because it's comical. Literally none of it materialized. There were no refund checks. The savings were minuscule. They weren't hundreds of billions. They may have been a few billion dollars. And the consequences were absolutely vast. So in the space of 2 or 3 weeks, USAID, which was the crown jewel of American soft power overseas, was destroyed.
00;18;00;06 - 00;18;21;14
Unknown
And all of that medical expertise that distributed life saving medicines in some of the poorest countries of the world were shattered. And the estimates are that millions of people have already died as a result. In just the one year since Doge got rid of USAID and that many, many millions more will die in the next years leading up to 20 2030 because of this.
00;18;21;14 - 00;19;02;10
Unknown
So we're seeing just these absolutely extraordinary and destructive real world consequences. But here's the thing. What I realized very early on when I was reporting Doge was that if you wanted to break the federal system in order to bend government to an authoritarian project, there's no better way to do it than to eviscerate the federal workforce, because what you do is you show every single federal worker that they're expendable, and they know they're expendable because their colleagues, their workplace neighbors, have lost their jobs, lost their health insurance, lost their pensions in many cases, and been told by some of the most powerful people on Earth that they are the enemy within or the enemy of
00;19;02;10 - 00;19;26;13
Unknown
the people. So when you do that, when you humiliate hundreds of thousands of federal workers, the survivors, the ones who haven't lost their jobs are that much more likely to be terrified into bending to the will of an authoritarian. So if you want to understand everything that's going on in 2026, how do we end up in a war in the Middle East where nobody in the State Department raised the issue?
00;19;26;13 - 00;19;47;10
Unknown
If you start bombing Iran, there's a pretty good likelihood that Iran is going to respond by closing the Straits of Hormuz. How did we get there? Well, we got there because all the experts in the State Department were fired, and the ones who were left were too scared to raise a voice. Right. If you want to understand, how do we get to a position where Ice is rampaging in Minneapolis and shooting people dead in broad daylight?
00;19;47;14 - 00;20;09;20
Unknown
The same thing. If you fire all the decent people, the ones who are left and the ones who are willing to work with the gangster government tend to be the ones who are willing to bend not to what is right, but to what they think their political taskmasters want to see and hear. And you can go through the federal government and all of this irrational, cruel brutalist politics that we're seeing.
00;20;09;21 - 00;20;33;06
Unknown
None of it would have been possible without Doge in 2025. And so that's the project of my book, American Carnage. And that's the story that I tell. It's not a big book. It's 170 pages. That is the story that I tell. If you get the book and if you read it will take you a couple hours to read, you will understand much better at the back end of the book what the Trump era is really like and what's going on in the Trump era, what's really happening?
00;20;33;12 - 00;21;00;07
Unknown
Well, I find I found myself like underlining things that I thought were really important. And then I realized I was underlining the whole book and I just needed to stop. If anyone finds this book, they're going to think that I was a student, and this was like my thesis project. One of the things that I think is so shocking and I, I have family, people who I love very much, who are strong Trump supporters.
00;21;00;07 - 00;21;30;20
Unknown
And this has been incredibly difficult for me to see. How can someone who I know has compassion for others, who who has empathy, how can they make these decisions? And I realize and you illustrate this very well in your book, not just this one, but in previous books that it's it's misinformation. You know, this idea that, you know, US aid is costing us so much money and yet you explain, it's, well, let's talk about Musk, let's talk about Musk and how much money he earns, because I found this to be fascinating.
00;21;30;20 - 00;21;57;16
Unknown
So it's $0.40 to save a child's life with plumping nut. And I'll let you talk about what that is. And Musk earns $600 million per day. So while it would maybe cost $40 to save a child's life, this man's one man who was quoted as saying, you know, empathy is a bad thing. One day of his earnings could feed 12 million children.
00;21;57;18 - 00;22;15;13
Unknown
Yeah. So, you know Musk. I, I have a particular loathing for Musk and what he represents because Musk didn't just say empathy is bad. He said empathy. Too much empathy leads to civilizational death. And this has been his sort of modus operandi throughout is that you make an awful lot of money. You do an awful lot of things.
00;22;15;13 - 00;22;34;16
Unknown
You break an awful lot of institutions you fast charge through. And if people get hurt, so what? As long as I make money and as long as my my oligarchical friends make money. And if you sympathize or empathize with people at the wrong end of all of that, somehow you're weak. And there's nothing worse and worse in the Musk world than to be weak.
00;22;34;16 - 00;22;54;29
Unknown
And so Musk comes in with this idea that US government has to be re-imagined away from anything to do with empathy. And the most important part of the US government is USAID, which distributes vaccinations and life saving medications and anti starvation interventions and disaster relief in some of the most challenging poor countries on Earth. And you're absolutely right.
00;22;55;01 - 00;23;19;05
Unknown
There's this thing called plumping art. It's got this, you know, silly sounding name, but it's a very important intervention. It was it's a high protein, nutrient rich sachet of basically peanut butter paste that French scientists developed in the 1980s. And if a doctor is in a starvation zone and recognizes that a young child is about to die of starvation, they put them on plumping up.
00;23;19;06 - 00;23;35;07
Unknown
And it's got this extraordinary track record of bringing kids back from the verge of death. And if a doctor says the kid needs to be on peanut, they need about four sachets a day and they need it for about 6 to 8 weeks. So a total course of plumping over that 6 to 8 weeks, it's about 40 or $50.
00;23;35;07 - 00;23;59;24
Unknown
And Elon Musk, who's saying we can't afford any of these things anymore, we got to downsize government. Elon Musk in the early part of 2025, when he was head of Doge because he was so close to the center of power, he was able to increase his wealth on a daily basis by orders of magnitude. So in the first few months of 2025, his wealth increased by a couple hundred billion dollars.
00;23;59;24 - 00;24;19;29
Unknown
So you mentioned 600 million, but there were some days when it was way more than 600 million a day. So I did a back of the envelope calculation. And what you find is that if Elon Musk had been willing to give up one day of his gains in February of 2025, when he was gutting USAID, somewhere in the region of 12 million kids could have been put on.
00;24;19;29 - 00;24;44;05
Unknown
Plus, Peanut and Elon Musk wasn't willing to give up one day of his income. He was sitting there playing video games. He was sitting there, you know, spouting white nationalist tweets on his X platform. And he was doing what he called feeding USAID to the wood chipper. And the consequences have been literally millions of excess deaths around the world in the years since then.
00;24;44;05 - 00;25;10;05
Unknown
And so, you know, if you're thinking of the Trump project and, and American Carnage really sort of dives into this, you can't think of the cruelty and the violence and the excess death as being incidental because it's not it's actually a core part of the Trump project. This imposition of a brutalist might is right forces, right vision of the world, both domestically and in terms of foreign policy.
00;25;10;05 - 00;25;30;26
Unknown
And we've seen it time and again. Stephen Miller, Trump's right hand man, went on CNN and gave this just infamous quote in which he said that, you know, the world's always been about force and always been about might, and it always will be. Force and power go together. And the idea is that we no longer care about soft power in this country.
00;25;30;27 - 00;25;53;27
Unknown
We only care about hard power. We no longer care about international law. And, you know, Defense Secretary Seth has said this explicitly, that international law holds you back. It's weak, and you want to unleash your army to do anything. And in the recent war, the war in Iran has been calling for God to, you know, basically bless the killing without mercy of of opponents.
00;25;53;27 - 00;26;13;23
Unknown
And when the Pope had the temerity to step in and say, well, you know, I know a little bit about theology and you're speaking, we didn't say horseshit, but he basically said, you're speaking horseshit, Seth. The entire Trump administration rounded on the Pope and basically accused him of not understanding theology. Well, this is an absurdity. It's an absolute absurdity.
00;26;13;23 - 00;26;33;15
Unknown
But this is where we are in the post. Elon Musk, you know, Donald Trump world, this world where empathy is shunned and where if you can abuse, you do abuse, and if you can pillage, you do pillage. And if you can rape and plunder, you do rape and plunder. I mean, this is what the Trump administration is like.
00;26;33;17 - 00;26;59;24
Unknown
It's sort of watching medieval Vikings marauding through a conquered country. Except they're not medieval, they're modern, and they're not marauding through an overseas country. Well, they are at times, but basically they're marauding through the United States. They're plundering their own country for private gain. It's quite extraordinary. We've seen episodes of corruption before in American history, many episodes. We've never seen something so systemic as what we're witnessing now.
00;26;59;24 - 00;27;18;04
Unknown
And we're talking to me is that people like my family, who think he's doing a great job, don't see what's right in front of them. They think he's doing an amazing job. And any time I come up with an example, they think I'm lying or I'm I'm watching the wrong news and my head's being filled with untruths. How do you a question?
00;27;18;05 - 00;27;33;28
Unknown
Well, I'd be interested. Are they still saying that after the Iran war, or has this been a bit of a breaking point because the MAGA movement seems to be splintering at the moment? Well, I will be honest with you. I haven't asked the question because I'm always afraid of the answer. But I will ask, you know what I mean?
00;27;34;00 - 00;27;59;02
Unknown
I kept thinking, oh, now, now you see it, right? Nope, nope. I don't see it because there white people in northern Idaho. Well, that is true. And eastern Washington and and even western Washington, in fact, you your last book featured people in swim, Washington. That's right. I mean, look, my last book was set in the Washington, the Olympic Peninsula and in Shasta County in Northern California.
00;27;59;04 - 00;28;18;27
Unknown
And it was very much about what happens when you get this sort of very toxic local political environment. You get people who are sort of in a very right wing echo chamber in the media, social media world, and they start being very politically active based around disinformation. So my book was focusing more on the disinformation around the pandemic and around vaccines.
00;28;18;29 - 00;28;49;01
Unknown
But you can update that, and you get the same disinformation today around immigration or around, you know, any, any American group that Trump has declared to be the enemy. And, you know, it's almost secondary. Which group that is, what's most important is that there is an enemy that Trump can focus on. So it shifts with the winds. One moment it will be, you know, Somalis, the next moment it will be Haitians, the next moment it'll be transgendered Americans, the next moment it will be, you know, woke Americans or whatever it might be.
00;28;49;02 - 00;29;07;20
Unknown
As long as there's an enemy that Trump can harness his, you know, focus his rage on, then you're going to have an element of the population that is all in for him, because they respond very well to his demagoguery. But I find fascinating about the last few months, though, is that his as I said earlier, his control of the narrative was breaking down.
00;29;07;20 - 00;29;25;15
Unknown
So what used to be a sort of somewhat controlled demagoguery is now completely out of control. And things are being said by Trump and by his inner circle that are so manifestly insane that you even get people like Marjorie Taylor Greene publicly breaking with Trump and saying, look, the man's insane. We need to talk about the 25th amendment, right?
00;29;25;15 - 00;29;49;00
Unknown
I mean, that's fascinating. That wouldn't have happened a year ago. You know, Trump would have been doing, you know, much of the same awful shit that he's doing today he would have been doing a year ago, but he would have had cover because people like Tucker Carlson would have stuck with him. Today. They're not sticking with him. And I think that provides an opening for a gradual thawing of American politics, because we're not going to stay frozen in the Trump era forever.
00;29;49;02 - 00;30;15;24
Unknown
Nothing stays frozen forever. It sure feels like it, though. I'll tell you what you know I constantly battle with myself. Are these people wanting to break the government? Because that's what it feels like, you know, it feels like. And I don't understand how so many people could be okay with what's happening when it's so obvious. And then that begs the question, do they just not realize what's happening, or is this really what they want?
00;30;15;25 - 00;30;35;15
Unknown
Is this the outcome they seek? They really, literally want to break government? I think some do. I mean, there's certainly the Heritage Project 2025 wing, which has a deep ambition to break not all parts of the government. They don't want to break the military parts of government, they don't wanna break the national security parts, and they don't want to break the anti-immigration parts.
00;30;35;15 - 00;31;00;27
Unknown
So as long as there's a well-funded military that's capable of bombing any country on Earth, and as long as there's a well-funded ice that's capable of terrorizing any community in the country, that for them is government doing it's functioning. What they don't want is government that regulates. They don't want any kinds of regulatory breaks on private business. They don't want any acknowledgment of the reality of climate change, because if you acknowledge it's real, then you kind of have an obligation to do something about it.
00;31;00;27 - 00;31;26;25
Unknown
And that impinges on profit. They don't want any federal involvement in education, because if you can localize education, you're going to get an awful lot of people in places like Texas or Idaho who are getting nothing but a right wing vision of what the world looks like in their schools and their universities. So you have this idea that the federal government can be reimagined to break the inconvenient parts and to then bulk up the security parts.
00;31;26;25 - 00;31;46;00
Unknown
And I think that's where the MAGA movement is at the moment. You know, it's not about getting rid of all aspects of government. It's not libertarian. I mean, Rand Paul may sort of staying in the Senate and vote largely with with Trump, even though he's a libertarian. But by and large, the MAGA movement is not now and never has been a libertarian movement.
00;31;46;00 - 00;32;18;15
Unknown
It's a deeply authoritarian movement that is very, very comfortable with using every part of the security apparatus of the state to clamp down on dissidents within the United States. But it's not comfortable having a functional government that can ameliorate inequality. So it's not got any time for, let's say, universal healthcare or any time for an education system that tries to redress social or racial inequalities, or any time for housing policy that tries to provide decent housing for millions of Americans who have insecure housing.
00;32;18;16 - 00;32;42;12
Unknown
That's not the vision of government that they want to be a part of. But I think the interesting thing is that as the consequences of MAGA are becoming more obvious and you see it all over the place, you see parts of government that are utterly dysfunctional. You see people waiting months to access Social Security or Medicare. You know, things that used to be relatively smooth are taking forever because so many people have been fired by Doge.
00;32;42;19 - 00;33;15;24
Unknown
And I think that that opens up a new conversation because even really conservative people who've been fed a diet of Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson and everything else for the last 20, 30 years. Yvonne, they're getting pissed off at the breakdown of functionality of government. And so you starting to see these huge crowds, like anti oligarch crowds at Bernie Sanders and AOC rallies, even in really conservative cities and states, because so many people are just up in arms about what is being done in our names, to the functionality of government and to the behavior of government agencies.
00;33;15;24 - 00;33;40;29
Unknown
What is being done is so brutal and so cruel that people are starting, I think, to break with the with the MAGA coalition around this, and it is so brutal and so cruel and there's so many examples in the book. But one of them who I'd like to talk about is a particular woman who, well, actually, many people were fired for the reason that you're not good at your job, essentially.
00;33;40;29 - 00;34;01;20
Unknown
And now these people are never going to be able to get a job in the federal government again, like the cruelty of ruining their lives for no other reason than just breaking down government is stunning. That's right. I mean, there's several people in the book who were fired erroneously for, you know, after being told they had poor performance reviews, even though they didn't.
00;34;01;21 - 00;34;26;00
Unknown
So one of them was a woman called Kelsey Hendricks. And she's blind. She's always been blind. And she was working, basically on the paperwork side at the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. She was one of the people who handled contracts and brought people into the organization. And she was fired with a couple hours notice. She lost access to a health insurance, and she was told erroneously it was because she had poor performance reviews.
00;34;26;01 - 00;34;48;23
Unknown
Now, that happened all over the federal workforce. I interviewed forest fighters who said the same thing, interview people at the CDC who said the same thing. In fact, there was one day where 800 employees at the CDC all received the same letter, a form letter saying you're being fired for poor performance. Now, the vast majority of those 800 were not poor performers and didn't have poor performance reviews.
00;34;48;23 - 00;35;15;06
Unknown
It was an excuse to fire people, and the courts ended up pushing back against that and saying, you actually can't do that, right? A lot of these people ended up being very reluctantly brought back onto the payroll, but then they were told they couldn't work. Which is the other ultimate absurdity. If you're the Department of Government efficiency, how on earth does it make any sense in terms of efficiency to bring people back, pay them thousands of dollars a month in salary, but tell them they have to sit on their hands and do nothing to access that salary?
00;35;15;09 - 00;35;36;13
Unknown
I mean, it makes literally no sense. It's one of those. Alice down the rabbit hole moments. There's there's two things. I'm so sorry to interrupt you, but I just want to I want to. There's two things that happened that I found just crazy. So, like you said, they get these these emails, cease any pending investigation, cease all supervision and examination activity.
00;35;36;13 - 00;36;01;10
Unknown
This is in the prolog, which is sort of like a a masterclass on this, frankly. In short, they were mandated to stop doing everything that their agency had been created to do and reading directly from the book. Two days later, the acting director followed up by telling the CFP staff that the headquarter building they worked in was closed and that employees should not come into the office.
00;36;01;14 - 00;36;23;06
Unknown
Please do not perform any work tasks and then 18 days later, they're told they have to send in examples of what they've been working on to prove that they should still have a job. What you just mentioned, the five bullets describing what you accomplished last week. I mean, that's insane. It's insane. And it's part of our strategy of putting workers into trauma.
00;36;23;06 - 00;36;47;09
Unknown
So the CFPB, CFPB stands for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And it was set up by Congress after the 2008 financial crisis and after all of the housing and banking crises that followed in this week to protect ordinary Americans from predatory lenders. So it's one of the sort of better angels of the American government. It works to basically stop exploitative credit card companies, exploitative mortgage loans, and so on.
00;36;47;09 - 00;37;10;04
Unknown
And it has a team of investigators. It has a team of lawyers, it has a team of advocates. It has some of the most highly skilled people in the American government. And these people are on the side of ordinary, everyday Americans against big corporations who are behaving badly. And the Republicans, or at least one wing of the Republican Party, has long hated this because they think it's onerous and over regulatory.
00;37;10;04 - 00;37;28;23
Unknown
So they came in and again, this was part of the original Doge purchase. They came in and they started trying to strip it down to bare bones, and they came up with this sort of ludicrous legal argument that you could fire almost everybody at the CFPB and yet still have it performing the functions that Congress had legislated it to perform.
00;37;28;23 - 00;37;55;29
Unknown
Well, of course you can't. If you fire 90% of your workers, the other 10% aren't going to be able to in any, you know, reasonable manner, do the work that Congress said they had to do. But even when the legal arguments were going on about whether or not you could strip down the employment to that extent, as you said, the people who were still being employed were being paid, but they were literally told you were not allowed to do any work and you were not allowed to come into the office.
00;37;56;02 - 00;38;22;13
Unknown
Well, it's a manifest absurdity and you know it. Again, if you want to understand why America in 2026 is so dysfunctional, look at decisions like this. You've got government being done in the most irrational way possible. It's being done in a way that literally looks like a bad dream. You sort of think, oh, I'm going to wake up and everything's going to be okay, because in reality, surely things can't be this around.
00;38;22;20 - 00;38;40;10
Unknown
It turns out they are. You go to agency after agency after agency, and this is what's going on, that you have these young men and women who are hired by Doge to come in and break the government in any way, shape or form that they could. And now we're hearing these stories that have started coming out in the last few months that a lot of them were just using ChatGPT.
00;38;40;17 - 00;38;59;13
Unknown
They were literally asking ChatGPT scour the federal government and work out which agencies we can get rid of or which people we can get rid of. And they were using code words. So if they had any of the words associated with Di or with diversity, those agencies were in the sights of Doge. And you know, that's a ridiculous way to do government.
00;38;59;19 - 00;39;16;27
Unknown
If you have these group of techies in their early 20s making decisions that affect millions of people's lives, and they're using chat to decide how to do it, you know, what a stupid way to do American government. But that's, again, you know, this is Trump's America. And this is what the story of American carnage in my book talks about.
00;39;16;28 - 00;39;42;13
Unknown
Yeah. There was an example. Someone at the CDC received a letter and it came from employee notification at CDC. Gov. The subject line said read this immediately. And then it said, good afternoon. Please read the two attachments to this email immediately. Thank you for your service to the American public. Anyone in their right mind would think, oh, that's spam and throw it away?
00;39;42;16 - 00;40;02;08
Unknown
Absolutely. I mean, look, you know, I'm sure you receive I will say we will receive emails like, yeah, that looks just like that. You know, your train never in a million years to open them. It's like when you get these, you know, these deals time sensitive offer. You know, give your give your bank account details to this person, you know, in Nigeria.
00;40;02;09 - 00;40;23;16
Unknown
And we'll give you, you know, we'll give you access to this unique business opportunity. Nobody in the right mind does that. But these were emails that were coming from Doge and they basically were I mean, they weren't legitimate in any real shape, but they were real emails coming from Doge. And those attachments basically said, we're firing you because you no longer align with the new government priorities.
00;40;23;22 - 00;40;57;04
Unknown
And then the second attachment would say, and you have the right to appeal this, but, you know, these were incredibly unprofessional communications. They were issued from outside the official government, systems of communication. They were basically these ad hoc email systems set up by Doge, but they carried the force of government policy behind them. And as long as Trump and as long as Trump was willing to go along with the way Musk was behaving, and as long as Congress was willing to turn a blind eye to it, then Doge was able to go about doing its destructive job.
00;40;57;04 - 00;41;20;17
Unknown
But here's here's the other thing. You know, in addition to fracturing the way that government and the way that employment for government functioned, the other thing was these Doge operatives were stealing a vast amount of data. And, you know, again, there have been all these stories coming out in recent months about how people were walking around with thumb drives full of millions of Social Security and other deeply, deeply personal data on millions and millions of American citizens.
00;41;20;17 - 00;41;46;25
Unknown
So, you know, one way to look at the dots, and you were talking about your very conservative family who still go along with all of this. Ask them if they're comfortable with the fact that these young Doge operatives basically stole all of their information, hacked all their information about healthcare, hacked all their information about Social Security, hacked their taxpaying history, hacked their information on, you know, if they were immigrants, what visa status they were on, hacked their information.
00;41;46;25 - 00;42;10;16
Unknown
If they've ever used public housing, what housing systems they used, this was the biggest. Yeah, exactly. This was literally the biggest information heist, probably in human history, but certainly in American history. And it was done with no public accountability whatsoever. Yeah, yeah, it's absolutely maddening. But her emails but her emails, but her emails. Lock her up. Lock her up.
00;42;10;18 - 00;42;35;18
Unknown
Yeah, exactly. I want to go back. And I do want to just, you know, impress upon our listeners that, you know, American Carnage is a really sublime book because you so beautifully show what's happening on both a granular scale but also the big picture of it, which helps. I think it helped me understand a lot of like, why is this madness happening?
00;42;35;18 - 00;43;04;17
Unknown
There is some method to the madness, and that is the scary part. But now I would like to turn our attention to a specific address five Hill Way. We are pivoting to a different. We are. We want to. We want to talk about Sasha Brown skin we were talking about. I want to talk about like you and how you became this, this journalist who uncovered such important topics in, you know, you're a humanitarian in so many ways.
00;43;04;17 - 00;43;33;08
Unknown
And it started at that address at Five Hill Way. So can you can you bring us there and talk about your book, the House of 20,000 books? So yeah, I can because it's probably the book I'm, you know, both proudest of. And it also means the most of me emotionally has 20,000 books, is about my grandparents and their lives and the book collection that they had in north London and the house they lived in from World War two, all the way to where my granddad died in 2010, in his mid 90s.
00;43;33;15 - 00;43;57;13
Unknown
And it was this extraordinary house. My granddad was a completely self-taught man. He'd grown up in Russia under Stalin and his family had been exiled. And somehow out of that experience, he actually became for many, many years, until the 1950s, a communist and a self-taught historian, and he became one of the leading book collectors in England on socialist history and also on Jewish history.
00;43;57;13 - 00;44;21;23
Unknown
And the house was absolutely full of ideas, and it was full of ideas, both in terms of the physical books in the house, but also my grandmother loved to host. And so there were always people coming in and they were, you know, people from the world of intelligentsia and the world of politics and the world of philosophy. And there were always people from all over the world with all their different viewpoints, and they were always around the dinner table arguing and talking.
00;44;21;23 - 00;44;41;18
Unknown
And as a kid growing up, I used to love going from my parents house in West London over to my grandparents house, and I'd spend the weekend there and they'd bring me into the conversations. So when I was a very young kid, I was, you know, engaged in all these, like, very adorable political. Yeah, well, not just adult, but just these really sort of ferocious back and forth to politics.
00;44;41;18 - 00;44;47;03
Unknown
I was always sort of taught to hold my own and.
00;44;47;05 - 00;45;04;09
Unknown
You know, growing up in that environment, there are things you start to care about and things you start to sort of understand are important. You know, I don't know if I would have gone into political reporting if I'd never been in that house, but I do know it's shaped my vision of what kind of reporting I wanted to do.
00;45;04;10 - 00;45;34;07
Unknown
And, you know, after my grandparents left the Communist Party, they became humanists. I mean, deeply, deeply committed liberal humanist people who didn't have a shred of nationalism in their ideas, didn't have a shred of xenophobia. Neither did my parents. And, you know, growing up, I was taught that I was taught empathy. So, you know, when when Elon Musk says empathy equals civilizational death, I can't think of anything more antithetical to the values I was taught when I was growing up.
00;45;34;09 - 00;46;00;28
Unknown
And they've, you know, they stuck with me. And, you know, I'm 54 now, and I hope I've written things that in some ways impact the country and the world a little bit. I've certainly, you know, the issues that I focused on, I have felt have been morally important issues poverty and equality, how we treat the stranger, the immigrant in this country, how we treat poor people on the margins who can't afford houses or can't afford health care.
00;46;01;01 - 00;46;22;22
Unknown
What we do with, you know, young inner city men, when we dump huge numbers of them in prison for unfathomably long periods of time. These are the things I focused not all, but most of my writing on over the years. And now I'm sort of a venerable middle aged journalist, looking back a little bit. And, you know, I don't think there are very many things I change about the way I've done journalism.
00;46;22;24 - 00;46;56;11
Unknown
I've always thought, Natoma students this, that, you know, journalism at its best is about bringing voice to the voiceless, and it's about telling the stories that tend to be ignored. Yeah. And journalism at its worst, is just recycling the achievements of celebrities. Anybody anybody can do that. It's not very interesting journalism. It's not very interesting storytelling. So, you know, I think, yes, if you're if you want to sort of understand where the kinds of things I think and write about come from, starting at Five Hill Way is not a bad place to start.
00;46;56;12 - 00;47;17;24
Unknown
Yeah. Well, I was really moved by the video. There's a book trailer for the House of 20,000 books where you you're in the house and you're talking about your experiences and, and how your grandfather shaped you and your view of the world by reading Spinoza. You know, the Dutch philosopher, the radical rationalist, as these were a morality tale for you.
00;47;17;24 - 00;47;38;09
Unknown
And how old were you at that time? Oh, God, I was young. I mean, Shimon would, you know, do these things which with hindsight, were, you know, quite I mean, not inappropriate, but quite ambitious, let's say. But he would, you know, he would treat children seriously. Yeah. And, you know, with my own kids, I've tried, you know, I'm not a book collector in the way my granddad was.
00;47;38;09 - 00;48;01;02
Unknown
But, you know, I, I am part of the world of ideas in a small way. And I have two kids. They're both grown now. And, you know, as they were growing up, I tried very hard to, you know, immerse them in the world of ideas and conversation and get them self-confident in talking about ideas. And I, you know, same with my students at UC Davis.
00;48;01;05 - 00;48;20;21
Unknown
You know, I can teach students to write, but I also think a very, very profoundly that a part of the mandate of a writing teacher is to teach people to think critically and think creatively. And so a large part of my classes are just conversations about how to engage with the world and how to think critically about the world.
00;48;20;23 - 00;48;45;20
Unknown
And your grandfather, I mean, you had said, I think this is a direct quote. You know, the world of ideas fascinated him, and I, I that resonates with me so deeply because I grew up where books to me, we didn't have television. In fact, we didn't really have electricity for a good portion of my child and my. So I looked to books and, and my father would read so many books to me as a child.
00;48;45;20 - 00;49;04;29
Unknown
In fact, I'm pretty sure my little sister. Red Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad when she was eight, you know, so kind of a similar like, you know, inappropriate. Yeah, absolutely. When you said in a private, I was like, I might I might have one for you, you know, this, this idea that we're not reading anymore, you know, that journalism is dying and we're not seeking the truth.
00;49;04;29 - 00;49;23;15
Unknown
And so many people pride themselves on doing their research and finding the truth. And I hear this a lot from both the left and the right, but no one's actually doing that. No, I think that's true, that there's this real sort of disconnect because everybody thinks, well, I can just, you know, do it myself as a citizen journalist and citizen journalism is great.
00;49;23;15 - 00;49;44;22
Unknown
But to be a journalist of any stripe, citizen or otherwise, you've got to also be reading widely and voraciously, and you've got to be thinking widely and voraciously. And it's the lack of reading that is quite terrifying to me. And there's data out there showing year on year declines, especially in nonfiction book reading. And basically you see it.
00;49;44;23 - 00;50;12;06
Unknown
You see it every day. You know, I've spent many years of my life living in London and living in New York. And those are both subway cities, the London Underground, the New York subway. And until very, very recently, when you went on the underground, everybody had either a book or a newspaper. They were reading physical, physical things. And, you know, there were entire book print runs, like the everyman classics that were printed in a size that allowed them to fit in a coat pocket while you were on the underground.
00;50;12;06 - 00;50;38;20
Unknown
And, you know, they were marvelous because the the half an hour commute that people would do every day was a time when for half an hour, you could immerse yourself, maybe not in the most comfortable environment, but you could stand there, strap holding and immerse yourself in reading. And now when you go on the underground, you know I still bring a book and I feel like a dinosaur because I go on the underground or, or the subway and I'm the only one with a book, and I'm the only one with a newspaper.
00;50;38;20 - 00;50;53;28
Unknown
And I'm looking at, you know, there are people who are reading the news on their cell phones, but an awful lot of people, you can just see they're scrolling or they're playing games or they're on social media. And I'm not morally judging. I mean, there's room to sort of, you know, let yourself go and spend time on social media or spend time playing games.
00;50;53;28 - 00;51;20;05
Unknown
But it should be in addition to book reading, not instead. And I think one of the most damaging aspects of the way our technology is evolving at the moment is we're discouraging critical thinking. We're shortening our attention span so greatly through our technologies and through the way we're using our technologies, that we end up in this world where people say, too long didn't read and too long didn't read, used to be an entire book, and now it's an entire magazine article.
00;51;20;05 - 00;51;39;02
Unknown
And soon it will be, you know, an entire short news article that all we're good for now is the headlines, the headlines, some things we skim, things we don't get the context. We don't get the sort of behind the scenes story. And then we move on to the important stuff, which is social media or playing games. And, you know, this is where I sort of do get kind of apocalyptic.
00;51;39;02 - 00;51;57;00
Unknown
I struggle to see how a culture survives when critical masses of people just cease to have the ability to think critically about important issues. Indeed, indeed, pretty soon we're going to be putting Gatorade on our our plans.
00;51;57;03 - 00;52;16;01
Unknown
Well, that's a scenario to think about. I have a question for you, Sasha. Go for it and I will try and have an answer. How do you think we find meaning in our lives? Well, you know, I think everybody finds their own meaning. I'm not I'm not religious. So, you know, I know a lot of people find meaning through religion.
00;52;16;01 - 00;52;45;21
Unknown
I don't, but I think you have to find meaning through companionship, whether it's, you know, your partner, whether it's your children, whether it's your other family members or friends, people you love, people you respect, people you can have conversation with and break bread with. I think you find meaning in art and in culture. And, you know, I'm also, as I said earlier, when you asked how I, you know, how I relax, I think you find meaning, you know, in nature, no matter how.
00;52;45;23 - 00;53;14;17
Unknown
I mean, I'm an urbanist. I love roaming around great cities, and I love going to museums and theater and everything else. But I get very claustrophobic after a while. And, you know, I need to go and have a little bit of solitude and gone a long hike. And I think, I think it's less important exactly how you find meaning, but that you're willing to find these spaces that give you meaning and that, you know, I don't know.
00;53;14;19 - 00;53;33;02
Unknown
I guess as I get older, I'm sort of a little bit more comfortable at giving advice as to how you find meaning. But at the end of the day, I do think, you know, everybody has to find their own meaning and they have to find their own rhythm for getting their, but I do know that a lot of what we do at the moment is a distraction.
00;53;33;04 - 00;54;00;04
Unknown
You know, if we spend all our time just looking for the next outrageous comment or scene on social media, or the next ridiculous YouTube video or the next, you know, completely ludicrous social media post from Donald Trump in the middle of the night. None of that really gives us meaning. That's all a distraction. That's all white noise. And I do think that we live once, and we really should use our lives as wisely as possible and as as humanely as possible.
00;54;00;06 - 00;54;24;01
Unknown
That is beautifully said. Thank you. I really, really appreciate you having this conversation with us and and all the work that you do. It's so important and I think it does make a difference. So I thank you for that. Well, it was a pleasure to be on on the podcast today. Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist and a part time lecturer at the University of California at Davis.
00;54;24;02 - 00;54;56;08
Unknown
Abram skis latest book, American Carnage How Trump, Musk and Doge Butchered the US government, is now available. You can visit overbooked to get a discounted version of that book, but it's available where all books are sold. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, New York Magazine, The Village Voice, and rolling Stone. He has a weekly column for The Nation called A watch that I highly recommend, a regular column for Truthout, and also a column for the Santa Fe Reporter.
00;54;56;08 - 00;55;19;22
Unknown
He is a busy man indeed. Originally from England with a bachelor's in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford University, and a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he now lives in San Diego, California. Again, Sasha, thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it. It was a joy. Thank you again. This has been another episode of The Premise.
00;55;19;23 - 00;55;38;19
Unknown
You can visit us online at The Premise podcast, and subscribe and rate or review the premise wherever you get your podcasts. Those reviews really help us get the word out and help sell more books. You can also follow me, your host on Instagram at Jennifer Thompson Consulting, or follow me on Facebook at Jennifer Thompson Consulting. Until next week.
00;55;38;19 - 00;55;41;10
Unknown
Thanks for listening. Goodbye. Goodbye.