Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to

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please consider becoming one. I'm here with Sarah Longwell and Tim Miller. Sarah, Tim, thanks for joining me. Great to be here. It's been years I've been waiting for this invite, and I have to share it with Sarah. Well, yeah, exactly. Oh, it's so hard for you. Well, you're in good company. I got to say, first of all, I'm just huge fans of both of you. Tim, you interviewed me on

one of your podcasts. I don't know how long ago that was, but I don't think I had heard you

before that interview. I haven't gone back to watch that, but I really didn't realize I was in

the company of greatness when you were interviewing me. Oh, God. But you, the two of you have just

been going after Trump and Trumpism so, uh, entertainingly with Hammer and Tong for, um, I mean, you know, you've been doing it longer than I think I've noticed, but for the last, uh, year or so, I've been, um, I've been watching you closely and it's really, it's just, I'm tempted to just walk out of the studio now and let you guys just roll and do an episode of the bulwark podcast over here. But how many podcasts do you guys have?

I just watch more of you and your colleagues in various frames. But feel free to name your

actual principal properties now so that people can find you. Whoa. Okay. So Tim's main pod is the bulwark pod. And I, this is the only nice thing I'm going to say about Tim the whole time. But when Tim took over the podcast, we did not know, I did not know, he was going to be as good as he is. Like he, this was a, you know, Charlie Sykes, who had been, uh, the host of the original pod when we started, retired, and we're like, well, Tim will take it over. And he has crushed it. He's doubled its audience. And so that's sort of the main pod that you see up in the top 10 charts all the time. And then not that far below it. Me, Tim and JVL have our sort of weekly roundtable called The Next Level. And then we do takes, which was kind of a more recent invention where we're all jumping on all the time. And then I have the focus group podcast where I listen to voters and play the sound. So people believe me that this is what America can sound like. And then we've got a whole bunch of other ones. I don't want to like leave people out, but they're just, we've got a big crew now at the bulwark, and they're all excellent. So you should tune into all of them. Yeah, so Bill Crystal's over there and JVL and you've got other colleagues. And it's really, it's fantastic. Well, what is the origin of the name bulwark, I know, but just tell people how you guys got started? All right. I'll do this too, which is when I, I had a really dumb idea a long time ago, circa like 2017, maybe 2018, where I was like, hey, we should have an aggregator where we take all the Republicans and conservatives who don't like Trump and we create, like we aggregate them all into one website. Like a drudge reports. Like a never-trumped Drudge report.

That's right.

It was,

I did.

It was going to be a same

drudge report as I pitched it.

And I got some seed money.

Which is just the drug report now,

by the way. Drudges come around. But, yeah, that's true. That's true. And we were trying to find, you know, the bulwark as a name, some people didn't like it at first because they were like, what is that?

But of course, a bulwark is the thing that's a nautical term.

But it's a nautical term, but it's like the thing that stands between you and the bad thing. Like you build a bulwark, you build a fortress, a fortification between you and the bad thing, maybe cannon fire. That's the, and it was actually one of our sort of junior members named it for the aggregator, but then when the weekly standard was summarily sort of had the lights taken down or, you know, it was just taken offline because it was insufficiently pro-Trump. I was like, actually, the aggregator's a dumb idea. I'm going to take a bunch of these people from the weekly standard. Bill and I were doing a bunch of other things together at that point. I'm going to give them jobs and we're going to start something for real. And then my buddy Tim, who I've known forever, was kind of at the time in Oakland and he was very sad and filled with rage. And I went to him, you know, like that scene from Hoosiers where they dunk somebody in the, he's dunking the guy in the tank and say, get it together. I was like, Tim, come do this with us. And then he showed up. And he was like a never Trump hunter-ass Thompson. I was like, where's this guy? This is amazing. And then we all just, then we started rolling. Sadness and rage. There's a good fuel. They burn cleanly, was if you if you let them so before we jump into the topics about which we are all sad and filled with rage,

give me each of your potted bios.

I mean, how is it that, I mean, I know you're never Trumpers,

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