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I got Julian Dorey and Tommy G on at the same time, two of the hardest working people in this space, and we spent an hour on one question. What would it actually take to change this country?
Tommy opened with his answer. We need a flashpoint. Something that gets young people united in the streets regardless of party. Julian pushed back, and his pushback is worth hearing. We have had plenty of flashpoints this year and nothing moved. He also made the case that revolutions almost never end the way people imagine they will, and that America is one of the very few places in history where it actually worked.
Then we got into what they are each working on. Tommy is digging into Epstein’s lawyers and accountant, the men who were named co-executors of the estate roughly 48 hours before he died, each in line for tens of millions, and who would have seen every financial transaction. He also wants to talk to Denise George, the former US Virgin Islands attorney general who went after the estate and recovered $105 million, most of which went to tax settlements rather than the victims. Julian added that the accountant named several high profile clients in congressional testimony, which is a thread almost nobody has pulled.
Tommy also talked about Mississippi, a homeless camp, an organization called Operation Good that walks into areas where gun violence is about to happen and tries to stop it before it starts, and why he is using his audience to fundraise for people doing that work.
The second half is the part I keep thinking about. Julian’s point on complacency is that people now have just enough comfort to make everything else tolerable. A place to sleep, a streaming subscription, food delivered, and a phone to scroll until tomorrow. That is enough to keep anyone from acting. His test for it is simple. On your deathbed, is this stretch of your life a highlight or a lowlight?
Tommy’s answer to that is what I loved. I can’t boil the ocean but I can boil my pot. Know your neighbors. Run the men’s group. Be the guy with the chainsaw when the tree falls. Coach the wrestling team like it matters. Social media has broken our sense of what an effect even is, and reaching three people well is still a real thing.
And then we landed on the fix, which Julian laid out plainly. Term limits and getting money out of politics would solve about 90% of this overnight. The problem is the exact people who would have to pass it are the ones who benefit most from it never passing. So we talked about the general strike question, whether it is realistic, who would actually have to participate, and the enormous group of disengaged young men in both rural and urban America who have the numbers to move the entire country and do not believe they have any power at all.
Book recommendations are in here too. River of Doubt, The Worst Hard Time, the H.W. Brands and Isaacson biographies of Ben Franklin, Our First Civil War, and Dungeon Crawler Carl.
Go follow Julian Dorey and Tommy G. Both of them are doing real work.
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