This is an I-Heart podcast.

Welcome back to a numbers game podcast of Ryan Grodowski.

Thank you for being here on this Thursday episode.

On our last episode, we had a listener request from a woman named Patty to do an entire thing on California politics.

So the second part of our show will be about California.

This is for you, Patty.

I'm doing this show for my listeners. I'm here for you guys. So if you have an idea for a show,

send me an email at Ryan at Numbersgamepodcast.com and I will do my best. But before we get to California radio host John Phillips talking about the state, I want to talk about Elon Musk for a second.

Over the 4th of July weekend, Musk announced that he was going to start his own political party

called the America Party. He conducted a poll on Twitter asking his audience if we should have a third

party and 65% said yes. So the following day on July 5th, he tweeted, by a factor of two to one, you want a new

political party and you shall have it. When it comes to bankrupting our country and with waste

and graft, we live in a one party system, not a democracy. Today, the America party is formed

to give you back your freedom. At the focal point of creating a new party is Musk's frustration with

congressional Republicans and President Trump's big beautiful bill, which failed to balance the budget

and add in trillions of new debt over the next decade. Musk said he was hoping to target a handful

of seats in the House and Senate, which would give the party leverage in the next Congress,

especially the margins between Republicans and Democrats were tight.

Basically, if Speaker Johnson needed the votes of people from the America Party to become

Speaker, because there wasn't enough outright Republicans, he'd have to make certain some

concessions on the debt and spending and vice versa if it was a Democrat speaker

with the similar margin. This instantly earned criticism from the media in comparison to the last

...