Hello,

Sam and I are ten episodes into Cashed Out. We recorded this one just hours after footage of the Learjet crash in Florida circulated online. We talk about twitter (or what what Sam likes to call the “trauma delivery system”), reality destabilization, and the latest fear of power outages.

I also tell Sam about my recent time shooting clays with Tucker Carlson.

Many thanks, as always, to all the paid subs who help sustain my work. I am extremely grateful.

Sincerely,

Shane

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People in the bleachers keep telling him that he should run for president. He’s heard it in just about every city he’s been to as he zigzags through the United States dressed as President Theodore Roosevelt. Fans of both teams tell Wiegand they’d vote for him. He’s been getting that a lot during the 2016 election cycle. He might’ve spent more time in public as Roosevelt than as himself this year. But that doesn’t stop him from feeling a little embarrassed changing into his costume in the stadium’s parking garage.

The Cubs haven’t won a World Series since 1908. Not since Theodore Roosevelt was in office. Though he lives in Colorado Springs now, Joe is an Illinois man. A Cubs fan for life. Joe spent the morning as Teddy at local schools in Davenport, Iowa and took a detour to the game on his way to Buffalo, New York.

“I wish I were the first president to throw out a pitch,” Wiegand says. “But that was Taft.” Even when he isn’t performing, Wiegand tends to speak in first-person as Roosevelt with TR’s brassy, rhythmic timbre.

The Cubs win 4-1 and Wiegand is already dreaming of the chance to bring Roosevelt to Wrigley Field, the Cubs’ home stadium, for this year’s World Series.

After the game, everybody wants a picture with the dead president.

He leaves St. Louis in his Ford Flex, which he’s named Manitou after the horse Roosevelt rode across the Badlands of North Dakota in 1884. The vehicle is wrapped in images of a young Teddy. He’s on his way to Buffalo, where he’ll re-enact the moment Roosevelt was sworn in as the nation’s youngest President at 42.

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Wiegand, 51, has been on the road since January, performing at high school reunions, gospel brunches, middle schools, safari clubs, national parks, and ecological foundations. In February alone, he appeared in Nevada, California, Georgia, Washington, D.C., Colorado, and London. In the last decade of bringing his version of Theodore Roosevelt to the public, Joe has had the opportunity to perform at sites such as the deck of the USS Missouri at Pearl Harbor, a cruise ship through the Panama Canal, and Yosemite. But there’s still one place he’s always wanted to perform: Sagamore Hill—the house in Oyster Bay, Long Island where Teddy lived and died.

Joe will get his first chance to bring Teddy to life at Sagamore this year. He’s avoided marketing himself to Sagamore because there is a man, James Foote, who has been doing Teddy at Sagamore for many years.

“I don’t want to take bread off anyone’s table,” he says.

But the National Park Foundation has invited Joe to perform for the members of their Theodore Roosevelt Society. It will be an event honoring the centennial of the National Park Service. The guests he’ll be performing for at Sagamore will have given at least a million dollars each to national parks.

“You don’t say no to that,” he says—though the more one spends time with him, the more it becomes increasingly difficult to tell who is behind the wheel—Joe or Teddy.

Being on the road year-round means he has to rely on different barbers to keep his hair Theodore proper. He Googles Theodore Roosevelt on his phone before a haircut to show the barber—a little longer on top than on the sides with a high part.

“I’m just delighted I don’t look like Calvin Coolidge,” Wiegand says. “I’d be doing very short programs in Vermont and New Hampshire.” (Coolidge, a man of notoriously few words, was nicknamed “Silent Cal,” and came from a long line of New Englanders.)

It’s not lost on Joe that his parents met at a Theodore Roosevelt High School on Chicago’s north side. When Joe was six, he remembers his father, Jim, telling his mother that he wanted to pursue a career in stand-up comedy. At the time, he was a heating and air conditioning contractor. But Jim had a vision.

“That was one of those early examples of if you’re going to dream, you have to be willing to sacrifice for it,” Joe says. He remembers searching the couch cushions to find change so his dad could have enough gas money to get to a gig. And in 1976, Jim moved the family to Hollywood.

In Hollywood, they moved into what was once a “whorehouse”—or as Joe thinks Teddy would have called it “a former house of ill repute.”

They called it Whig’s Place. There were twelve rooms downstairs that they renovated into little apartments. Young performers would rent the rooms out on a weekly basis. One of Joe’s first jobs was cleaning out those communal bathrooms.

His dad joined the scene of young comics with Freddie Prinze and Richard Pryor and Robin Williams. The family once went to a party at Jay Leno’s. Over thirty years later, Joe’s father, known professionally as Jim Wiggins, The Last Hippie in America, made his debut on Jay Leno’s The Tonight Show—with long silver hair, a cane, and a baseball cap that asked, “Did you poop today?”

Back in the early eighties though, Jim Wiggins was still developing his on-stage persona.

“I think he became jaundiced through the period of Vietnam, the race riots, the assassinations. Tough times to try and maintain your resiliency as a wide-eyed optimist,” Joe says of his father.

Teenage Wiegand rebelled against his hippie father. “I became a Christian, Republican, NRA member who passed fliers out for Reagan,” he says. But Wiegand’s enthusiasm for Reagan only inspired his dad to plan a road trip centered around his son’s interest in politics.

On July 4, 1981, the Wiegands drove their white Ford Econoline cross-country to the White House. They stopped at campgrounds and state fairs, asking people to write postcards to President Reagan, which they planned to hand-deliver to the man himself. The mayor of Topeka, Kansas made the Wiegands honorary Topekans.

In the two months that they were on the road, Sandra Day O’Connor had been nominated to become the first woman Supreme Court justice; Major League Baseball went on strike; MTV debuted; and Reagan was still healing a gunshot wound.

On September 16, the Wiegands were featured on Good Morning America. They arrived the next day in Washington DC, September 17—Citizenship Day—the anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution.

Despite the national attention, the White House had no idea who they were when they arrived. Joe and his family spent three hours driving circles around the White House. They were eventually invited in to tour the Oval Office. But it was empty. The president was in Michigan dedicating the Ford Library. Joe left behind heaps of postcards, and in turn got a Ronald Reagan tie clip. Something he treasured.

After his family moved back to Illinois, his father turned an Irish pub into a popular comedy club that hosted the likes of George Carlin and Pat Paulsen—a cutting satirist who ran six comedic campaigns for the presidency. Meanwhile, young Wiegand began to devour political and military history. He competed in extemporaneous speaking competitions at school and developed strategies to help liberate the people of the Soviet Union from Communist rule. He later attended Sewanee: The University of the South, and became the only underclassman—and the only Yankee—to ever be voted President of the student body. His senior portrait had a strategically placed painting of Ronald Reagan in the background. Wiegand set his sights on returning to the White House.

It’s Teddy Roosevelt Weekend in northern New York’s logging-truck and woodpile country, about a hundred miles south of the Canadian border. The cluster of small towns in this area—Newcomb, Tahawus, and North Creek—have done well to capitalize on the fact that, in September 1901, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt vacationed here. When he climbed the top of Mt. Marcy in the Adirondacks, the highest point in New York State, he got word that President McKinley was dying from a gunshot wound.

Now, Wiegand’s Theodore Roosevelt holds the door for people as they walk into Newcomb’s middle school, located just off the Roosevelt-Marcy Memorial Highway, a two-lane mountain road that twists up into the clouds.

“There was no presidential pension in my day,” Wiegand says, “so I’m working for tips as a doorman.” His voice hops an octave when he commits to Roosevelt’s speaking manner, a lyrical, Victorian accent, frequently punctuated by a big laugh that cuts through the auditorium like a bugle call.

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There’s a Donald Trump sign in the yard across from the school. There are cars in the school’s parking lot, some with Bernie Sanders bumper stickers, others supporting Hillary Clinton. Both sides of the aisle have congregated to hear President Roosevelt speak about foreign policy.

The host is Roy Ginsberg, a professor of International Politics at Skidmore College. He’s a tall, bald man with a white beard. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announces, “the President of the United States!”

The crowd jumps to their feet. The sound guy plays “Hail to the Chief.” Wiegand strides across the stage, in full TR mode, and hands a large stuffed teddy bear to a boy in his mother’s arms.

On the stage, decorated like a campsite with a fake fire and full moon, the guest presides over the audience. Ginsberg lists some of Roosevelt’s accomplishments: “First to go abroad as sitting President… First President to receive a Nobel Peace Prize… First sitting President to have published a book.”

Joe has disappeared into Teddy. Teddy nods. Teddy is proud.

“OK, let’s turn to some of your shortfalls…” the professor says, looking at his index cards. But Teddy interrupts.

“Let’s return to my firsts!” he booms. “I was the first president to go down in a submarine. Much to the disappointment of my opponents in Congress, we came back up.”

“You didn’t get along with Congress?” the professor asks.

“The opposite of progress…is Congress!” The line, which is, in fact, a Mark Twain quote, kills. The crowd all but says a collective amen.

Two women stop Wiegand outside of the school after the performance. It’s as if they believe they are speaking to TR himself, and confess their grief over the current presidential campaign circus of 2015.

Wiegand, happy to appease them by staying in character, says, “I do take comfort, ma’am, in the fact that we’ve survived all of the previous administrations… While we perhaps lament the situation that we’re in during this election year, may I remind you that the highest office in the nation is not President… it is citizen.”

Earlier this year, a child asked Wiegand what he—Roosevelt—thought about Donald Trump. Wiegand, a proud conservative Republican, told the audience he thought Trump was a buffoon.

“Teddy wasn’t beyond name-calling,” Wiegand reminds audiences. Roosevelt himself called President Taft a “pudding-head” and a “puzzlewit.”

There was a time when Wiegand dreamt of being a well-known politician in his own right. After college he became a county commissioner in DeKalb County, Illinois, a campaign manager for Republican gubernatorial candidate Jim Oberweis, and ran twice as a candidate for Illinois state legislature, but came up short. He went on to work for Citizens for a Sound Economy, a political advocacy group founded by the Koch brothers, hosting debates in different cities between politicians about tax codes. Once, to generate interest in these debates, he marched through Downtown St. Louis dressed as a Revolutionary War soldier with a tri-cornered hat, holding a handmade sign: “Our Tax Code Is Revolting!”

The next day he made the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and realized there is something powerful about becoming a costumed character for a cause.

Wiegand remembers the day he told his wife Jenny that he wanted to get out of Illinois politics after nearly twenty years of service, and move on to his real passion.

“Imagine that family meeting?” Wiegand says. “‘Sweetheart, I think I’d like to become TR for a living.’”

“He’s like a general,” Jenny admits. “‘Just listen to me, follow me, I don’t have time to explain,’” she does her best Joe impression. “He could see this whole vision, and I had no clue as to all the different avenues that you can get gigs at as this kind of entertainer.”

His early attempts at Teddy featured a much lower voice—with not nearly as much vigor. He developed the voice over time. He studied recordings of Teddy and watched silent films of the man on file at the Library of Congress. He read every book about the president, read many letters he wrote, read from his diary too—which he can now quote from memory. He practiced the voice and the mannerisms around his house and in the mirror.

One Minnesota-based Roosevelt impersonator told Wiegand he doesn’t like doing Teddy because trying to nail the voice tears up his throat. When performed correctly, the voice soars high and cracks for emphasis and excitement, though, when somber, sinks into a rasp. Wiegand never experiences pain when contorting his voice to sound like Roosevelt, but it does dry the throat, and he sucks cough drops before and after gigs.

Wiegand’s first-ever performance as Roosevelt was in 2006 at his home in Illinois. He and Jenny invited over family and friends for the presidential resurrection.

Wiegand hid an outline of his script on cue cards. Jenny says the trouble with that first performance was Wiegand spoke for an hour before the narrative even saw Roosevelt charge up San Juan Hill with the Rough Riders in Cuba. (TR hadn’t even been elected Governor of New York yet.) That was the last time Wiegand ever used any kind of script.

“I know President Obama wrote The Audacity of Hope,” Wiegand says. “My book would be The Audacity of Believing I Had the Chops to Bring TR to Life.”

He cut his teeth at Rotary clubs and homeschool gigs, making gas money—all while working his biggest job yet in politics: running Mike Huckabee’s 2008 presidential campaign in Illinois. It was the culmination of his political career, yet, after helping pass just one property tax reform as county commissioner, he was disenchanted with politics and felt like he could offer the public more. Wiegand decided to take TR on the road. He chose not to call himself an impersonator or re-enactor. So he coined the term repriser.

“In Article I of the Constitution,” Wiegand explains, “it includes the power to issue letters of marque and reprisal which allows a licensed pirate to capture our enemies’ vessels and present them in exchange for reward… So what I try to do is capture the essence of Theodore Roosevelt and present it in exchange for reward.”

Joe had grown to physically resemble Teddy Roosevelt, too. To the point where family members were amazed at the likeness.

“Teddy’s daughter Alice said that the way their father taught them to swim was to throw them off a boat into the bay. So I just jumped off.”

As Barack Obama ran for election against John McCain, Wiegand booked gigs across the country, sometimes showing up to a national park unannounced, performing on the fly. Wiegand’s wife and daughter joined him on the road for months, visiting every state.

In October 2008, the White House called Wiegand out of the blue. The Bush Administration wanted him to help celebrate Teddy’s 150th birthday in Washington. This was shortly after Vice President Cheney had accidentally shot a fellow hunter in the face on a hunting trip.

“Let me put to rest a pernicious rumor,” Wiegand opened his White House debut. “I have not returned because someone needs a hunting lesson.”

The audience wasn’t sure if they should laugh or not—until President Bush, sitting in the front row, laughed.

Later, Wiegand—speaking as Roosevelt, who, after his two terms in the White House, returned to run on a third-party ticket and lost—told President Bush, “When you get to your ranch in Texas, I should tell you that if you feel like running for president again…lie down until the feeling passes.”

Fifty people wait at the McNaughton Cottage for Teddy to emerge from somewhere in the forest. No one has yet to see him. Everyone’s seated in folding chairs that have formed a horseshoe facing the cottage. It’s as if the small town organized a town-wide séance to bring Teddy back to the living.

The McNaughton Cottage is an old yellow structure on a stone foundation. All the windows are boarded. This is the house from which Teddy left to become president after McKinley died.

Teddy emerges. The séance worked.

Today he’s dressed in Roosevelt’s “tramp-about costume”: a khaki jacket, white vest, safari hat, and binoculars around his neck. His boots are covered in mud. He places both fists on his hips, pushing back his jacket to expose his barrel shape.

“I just couldn’t resist getting down into the mud by the river,” he tells the audience. Behind the cottage are the first few miles of the Hudson River—spilling from its source in Lake Tear of the Clouds.

“Today’s not so much a celebration as much as it is a commemoration,” he begins, reminding the crowd that they are only here to see him because an anarchist had assassinated President McKinley.

As a man who makes a living resurrecting the past, Joe’s own history rises to the surface when his character mourns death before a crowd. Joe shares with them how death framed Teddy’s life, but also how each death was a landmark which gave the man a kind of scaffolding that kept him upright in times of profound grief.

Both Joe and Teddy chose to face their grief by running headfirst into nature. Later in Roosevelt’s life, after the death of his wife and mother on the same day in the same house, he traveled west for the Badlands of North Dakota. A month after Wiegand’s mother died, he hiked through a blizzard under a full moon on Friday the 13th. He intended to propose to Jenny, on Valentine’s Day. But the blizzard slowed him and Wiegand hitched a ride on a chicken truck, ultimately proposing on the fifteenth.

As he tells the story of Theodore dealing with the unexpected death of his father, Joe can empathize with his character, and as Teddy takes a long, sorrowful moment of silence, so does Joe, who might reveal his actual self to the public here, as he also feels the terrible loss he felt when his mom took her own life. Like when Teddy lost his father, Joe was also a student in college. There are strange parallels like this between the men, that it’s impossible not to think that perhaps Joe was destined to mutate into Teddy.

In front of the audience at the cottage, Roosevelt’s cloud-splitting voice breaks the silence. “I wrote in my diary, ‘I thought I might go insane from sadness.’”

Even this year, as Joe travels the country, he does so with the spirit of his father, who passed away the previous year.

“Before my father passed, he went to a funeral for another comedian. He heard another comedian lamenting… ‘Oh, poor Frankie, he died penniless.’ My father said, ‘sounds like good timing to me.’”

“We’ve all been in the dark house. It’s not having been in the dark house that counts, it’s the getting out of it…” Joe tells the crowd. It’s something Teddy once wrote.

“Let your children climb the trees. Let them fall and demonstrate to themselves that when they get up they can wipe away the pain and get back in the game.” He makes the bare-knuckled boxer pose at the people.

Afterwards, two young girls run to him for autographs. He tells them that he sees a future president in them both. He kneels down in the grass so that he can hold both girls on his lap, plus their dog, for a photo.

When everyone has gone, the cottage in the middle of nowhere seems to be as quiet as it was in Teddy’s time. Joe yells, “great fun!” up into the trees. The evergreens reach up behind him like a cathedral. He cuts a path back down to the Hudson River and jumps from boulder to boulder across the rushing water.

A line of people wait to board the Saratoga to North Creek train in Saratoga Springs, NY. It’s a two-car locomotive that rides the same tracks Teddy took on his way out of the Adirondacks to become the president upon McKinley’s assassination.

Today, Teddy stands at the front of the line. Someone asks if he’s seen the recent Ken Burns documentary The Roosevelts?

“I lost interest on the 3rd night right after I died!” he says.

There are people on the train because they are Theodore fans. Old couples with National Park fanny packs. And there are people here because they got a good deal on Groupon.

When the train arrives in North Creek, it pulls up to the exact platform that Theodore Roosevelt stood on when he found out, via telegram, that McKinley had, in fact, died of his gunshot wound.

A crowd of re-enactors and a three-piece band with fiddles waits on the platform eager to greet Mr. Roosevelt.

He leaps from the train. The crowd applauds. He sees a re-enactor in a Victorian dress. “Good to see the women’s vote represented here!” he says.

Another re-enactor rushes through the horde to hand Teddy the telegram saying President McKinley has died. It’s triumphant, the audience cheers, but Joe’s Teddy is mournful.

He jumps up onto a bench so that he is as tall as the train. The sky is low and blue and reflects off his bifocals.

“Tell your children about President McKinley. The last living president to serve in the Civil War. I picked up the ball from McKinley’s hands, and ran it across the goal.”

The crowd erupts and the band plays Glory Glory Hallelujah. Teddy jumps into the audience. It seems for a moment the man might crowd surf across the tops of the citizens. Not a hand goes unshaken. A suffragette takes a selfie with Teddy.

“I think he thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt,” one lady whispers to another.

There are members of the Roosevelt family, like Tweed Roosevelt, the great-grandson of Theodore, who have spoken out against Teddy impersonators. Tweed’s made a point of requesting that no impersonators of Theodore Roosevelt should be present at any function where a member of the Roosevelt family might be in attendance.

Not all of Roosevelt descendants disapprove though. Once, at the Houghton Library in Boston, Joe was at an unveiling of some unpublished Roosevelt photos. Joe was not in character that night. He was in a sport coat. Word got around the library about Joe, and what he did for a living. A granddaughter of FDR walked up to him, looked him up and down, and said, “you have the right shaped head.”

No matter what, the rightful preservation of Theodore Roosevelt, as Joe sees it, is too important a cause.

In 2014, Joe started the Gathering of the TRs in Medora, North Dakota. Medora is the gateway to the Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

Joe reached out to as many Teddy Roosevelt impersonators as he could find and invites them every July to talk craft.

Larry Marple, of South Charleston, Ohio, has been performing as Teddy for about eight years. “Medora is the perfect spot to gather TR,” he says. “It’s where he overcame his asthma and grief and would become the man that would become the president.”

Larry says the Gathering is a collegial atmosphere. “Joe goes out of his way to never make it feel like competition. In our world, Joe is a rock star.” He compares the first call he received from Joe to getting a phone call from one of the band members of KISS.

The first time Joe ever saw anyone else perform Teddy was when he sat in the audience when Larry and his wife Julia, who performs as Teddy’s second wife Edith, first came to Medora. Joe took down notes and afterwards met with them in the basement of the old town hall theater.

“Larry, have you ever hit a man?” Joe asked.

“I never hit a man,” Larry said.

“Well, I had two older brothers,” Joe said. “I’ve hit and been hit. So, when you tell the story of the Mingusville Bully and you say you hit the man in the bar…”

Joe demonstrated a lousy punch. “That’s not the way you hit a man in a bar… Do your character a favor and in the off season take some boxing lessons.”

As Joe puts it, “iron sharpens iron.”

Joe talks to the re-enactors on the side of the train tracks at North Creek. Although there’s a distinct difference in the seriousness with which Joe approaches his character compared to the re-enactors—he seems eager to be amongst others who care about the craft. Though, side-by-side, it is clear what the difference is between a re-enactor and a man who calls himself a repriser. The re-enactors are simply people in costume—scenery.

Joe breaks slightly out of character and reveals himself for a moment to share stories from the road with the re-enactors.

“If you counted everyone who told me their forbears charged with me up San Juan Hill, it would have been a whole division not a regiment.” The re-enactors laugh. “Sort of like how everybody says they were at Woodstock,” he says.

The band on the platform plays The White House blues and a few old couples dance:

Roosevelt’s in the White House, he’s doing his best

McKinley’s in the graveyard, he’s taking his rest

James Foote smokes a cigarette in the parking lot at Sagamore Hill in Oyster Bay, Long Island. It’s raining and he’s dressed like Teddy Roosevelt.

Foote has been the in-house Theodore Roosevelt at Sagamore for over twenty years. He is now twenty years older than TR ever was. The staff has begun to freak. They are closing down the grounds for the evening for the event being thrown by the National Park Foundation in honor of the donors of the Theodore Roosevelt Society. People who’ve recently donated at least a million dollars to the National Parks will arrive soon—along with Joe. And James is still on the grounds, as if waiting for a confrontation. Teddy vs. Teddy.

None of the staff want Joe’s Teddy to cross paths with Foote’s. They don’t know what could happen, if anything, but they just want to avoid—perhaps—a Teddy Roosevelt turf war. Foote might feel a bit snubbed having not been hired to work such a major gig at his own job. But the director of the National Park Service, Director Jim Jarvis, handpicked Joe Wiegand himself for the centennial celebration.

Eventually Foote takes off. He looks deflated after flicking his last cigarettes into the parking lot.

When Joe arrives only minutes later, wearing his three-piece suit and top hat, his wife Jenny rides shotgun. It’s the first they’d seen each other in almost a month.

Old Orchard Museum—which used to be Theodore Jr.’s home, sits across the lawn from Sagamore Hill. Old Orchard is a big brick house. A path behind it leads down to the harbor near where Teddy first got into a submarine, where he taught his kids to swim, where the mute swans and blue herons now wade among sail boats.

The party starts with an open bar in the museum; donors are allowed to view special Roosevelt relics, such as the top hat he wore to President McKinley’s funeral.

“TR is here,” one staff member yells to his coworkers. “I want to shake his hand!” The staff claps as Wiegand enters.

“Call me Colonel, my friends call me Colonel,” he says.

Joe slips out of character just enough to introduce Jenny to the staff. “This is a very patient bride whose fellow thinks he’s Theodore Roosevelt.” She likes to tease him about how he wanted to be the President since he was ten. “Well, now he gets to play a dead one,” she says.

Roosevelt’s visit to the Old Orchard Museum today gives the character the unique experience of getting to see his own death mask. The man who acquired the mask, Jay Purell, a member of the Friends of Sagamore Hill—an organization that finances the cleaning of Roosevelt’s animal head trophies displayed throughout the home, among other Sagamore-related endeavors—speaks to Wiegand, not Roosevelt, momentarily.

“Apparently,” Purell says, “Teddy was embalmed in the village…” He stops mid-sentence. “You were embalmed in the village,” he corrects himself, “and walked back up to Sagamore.”

If Wiegand was already nervous bringing Roosevelt to life at Sagamore for the first time, now he is doubly so: Tweed Roosevelt has arrived just in time to hear his descendant tell the story about the time he gave a speech for ninety minutes after having just been shot in the chest.

The guests, with Tweed in tow, follow Teddy up the hill to Sagamore, where the Roosevelt family motto is carved above one of the entrances: Qui Plantavit Curabit—“He who has planted will preserve.”

These men and women devoted to preserving American land surround Teddy on the porch of the house, as though inspecting the man to see if he is fit to be preserved officially by their institutions. Might he be the man himself?

The lights are kept low in the big house for a special night tour. Park rangers hand out flashlights. Guests move through the hallway upstairs like planchettes on a Ouija board. The floorboards creak. They hover in the doorway of the room where his wife, Edith, put Teddy to sleep on January 6, 1919. He died here that night in his sleep.

Everyone looks into the master bedroom. Teddy and Edith shared a bed—uncommon in those days.

The guests shine their flashlights into the room—looking at the bedframe. Then Wiegand yells from downstairs, startling the guests. “Join us for supper in the tent on the lawn!”

“It’s good to have his voice back in the house,” one guest says.

Tweed Roosevelt watches the image of his great-grandfather pace across the stage beneath the tent before him like a lion. Wiegand performs one of Roosevelt’s most famous speeches, “The Man in the Arena.”

“The credit belongs to the man and woman in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood,” Wiegand recites. The speech is apt for a nation anxious to recover from a brutal election year; it speaks to risk takers who charge fearlessly into life—and to the son of a comedian who dared to bring Roosevelt back to life.

It is possible that Wiegand, whose energy is ceaseless, could play Roosevelt for the rest of his life. But he’s never liked politicians that “clung so tightly to their office—as if it belonged to them and not the people.” He says he owes it to Teddy to ultimately step back and let some other young, ambitious guy have a go at it.

Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice, once said, “Father wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral and the baby at every christening.” And with the annual Gathering of TRs growing every year, it’s possible that by 2020, a century after his death, Teddy Roosevelt could run for mayor, governor, President and Vice President simultaneously.

Right after Wiegand got a standing ovation for his performance of “The Man in the Arena,” Tweed Roosevelt gets up from his table to intercept Teddy. The men could be related. Tweed smiles and embraces Wiegand. It’s as if he’s getting the chance to hug his great-grandfather. Guests raise their drinks to the National Park Service centennial. Then, Theodore Roosevelt yells, “See you all at the bicentennial!”

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The main image was taken by Vi Nguyen

Hello all,

In this new episode of CASHED OUT, Sam and I talk about Netanyahu posting an AI image of a nuclear bomb going off in a city.

Is this all fear porn for election season? Or do you think we’re heading towards a new form of lockdowns?

Thank you for the support. I’ll be dropping a new story tomorrow that will be available to everyone.

Sincerely,

S…

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Hello all,

Casey Anthony’s Substack, riots in France, Martial Law, Scientology, Bill Cooper vs Alex Jones, 9/11, and you’ve heard of Dead Internet Theory—but have you heard of Fed Internet Theory?

Please enjoy the latest episode of my show with Sam.

Thank you all for the support. If you like what I’m doing here, please share. Your comments help us break …

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In 2016, five days after Thanksgiving, Margaret Corbin’s grave was dug up for the second time since her death in 1800. It began by accident. Contractors were working on a retaining wall near the West Point Cemetery, at the U.S. Military Academy, when a hydraulic excavator got too close and chewed through the grave.

As soon as they noticed bones spilling from the soil, they alerted the military police. The plot was quickly cordoned off, her monument was wrapped in tarp, and rumors started to spread about Corbin’s resting place—that is, if it even was her resting place. When forensic archaeologists arrived at the scene, they were perplexed: The bones seemed oddly large.

The monument to Margaret Corbin is West Point’s only monument to a woman veteran, and it greets visitors near the main gate, just feet from a neoclassical chapel. It faces Washington Road, where the Academy’s top brass live, and depicts Corbin in a long dress, operating a cannon as her long hair and cape fly in the wind. She wears a powder horn and holds a rammer to load cannonballs; the rest of the rather cramped cemetery sprawls out behind her. The monument portrays the moments before Corbin became a prisoner of war.

The story goes that Corbin joined her husband, John, to fight in the American Revolution. At the time, many women followed their husbands to war, where they were commonly known as “camp followers.” Typically, they foraged for food, cooked, and did laundry. Before Martha Washington was the United States’ first first lady, she was also a camp follower. In fact, she and Margaret were with the same company—though the two experienced different lives, since George was a general, and John manned a cannon.

At the Battle of Fort Washington, on November 16, 1776, in what is now Washington Heights, the British and Hessians advanced far enough to make the Continental Army’s position untenable. George Washington retreated with his forces to White Plains; John Corbin was shot dead at his cannon. But Margaret was there to jump into John’s position and help fire the cannon. During the battle, her jaw and shoulder were seriously injured, and grapeshot tore off part of her breast. Despite the Continental Army’s efforts, the fort was soon surrendered, and Corbin was captured along with approximately 2,837 soldiers.

The British may have been unsure what to do with an injured woman, because she was released fairly soon after the battle. The ordeal was one of many traumas in her life: According to records collected by the historian Stella Bailey, Margaret was only five years old when her father was killed in a conflict with Native Americans in Pennsylvania, where they lived. Her mother was kidnapped, and Margaret and her brother moved in with an uncle. They never saw her again.

After Corbin’s return, she joined the Corps of Invalids, a group of wounded soldiers who were still able to contribute to the war effort. They were stationed at West Point, New York, where Corbin became known as a cantankerous woman who had a tough time making a home for herself in the neighboring village of Highland Falls. She moved between various local families who tried to care for her. Having witnessed her husband’s death and sustaining wounds, she was probably in constant mental and physical pain.

When Margaret Corbin died in 1800, she was buried in a pauper’s cemetery in Highland Falls, just three miles from West Point. But in 1926, the national society of women known as the Daughters of the American Revolution saw to it that Corbin would earn her vaunted cemetery plot. The society, which is made up of women who can trace their lineage to participants in the American Revolution, was celebrating the sesquicentennial of American independence, and saw Corbin as the consummate symbol of both their organization and the Revolution. A year-long effort convinced the U.S. Military Academy to help them exhume and transport the remains to the prestigious cemetery, to be reburied with a military funeral.

Exhumation was not a simple task: By the time the DAR began their campaign to move Corbin, the location of her exact burial was known only by word-of-mouth, passed down through generations. In collaboration with West Point, the Daughters found the great-grandson of the man who supposedly dug Corbin’s original grave, a steamboat captain by the name of Farout. Her burial site was apparently marked by the stump of a cedar tree; during the exhumation process, the gravedigger accidentally drove the shovel through the skull. Still, the Army surgeon reported injuries to the skeleton that were consistent with grapeshot. The remains were given a new, flag-draped casket and delivered to West Point by horse-drawn hearse.

Every year since then, the Daughters have gathered at Corbin’s monument for Margaret Corbin Day. On the first Tuesday of May, the Daughters fill the chapel, share Corbin’s story, sing hymns, and stand at the grave while soldiers perform a 21-gun salute.

After the U.S. Military Academy unintentionally reopened the grave beneath Corbin’s monument in 2016, they decided to conduct an emergency forensic archaeological excavation. They enlisted the help of Elizabeth A. DiGangi, an anthropology professor at Binghamton University, and Michael K. Trimble, an archaeologist for the Army Corps of Engineers. Almost immediately, the pair noticed that the size of the bones didn’t match Corbin’s description. Corbin was reportedly a stout woman. “One of the first bones I saw when I was on site was the humerus, or upper arm bone,” DiGangi says. “It was very large, which is not what you would expect with an arm bone from a woman.”

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DiGangi took the remains to her laboratory at Binghamton University to do a full analysis. Some worried that other remains were mixed up with Corbin’s. (In the past, West Point has discovered unknown remains when they’ve broken new ground for construction.) Ultimately, DiGangi’s analysis revealed something even more shocking: The remains in Corbin’s grave actually came from an adult male. DiGangi determined that it was a large man, who could’ve been anywhere from five-foot-seven to six and a half feet tall. The remains of Margaret Corbin were not in Margaret Corbin’s grave.

Once the archaeological excavation teams completed their reports, the Army National Cemeteries contacted the Daughters of the American Revolution. They wanted a meeting at DAR headquarters in Washington, DC.

Jennifer Minus, the head of the New York chapter of the DAR, was among those present at the meeting. Minus, a graduate of West Point and a former member of the Corbin Forum, a club for cadet women, knew her Corbin history better than most. She asked how it could’ve been a man in the grave, if in 1926 the Army surgeon said that grapeshot injuries were present. In her report, DiGangi explains that what the surgeon considered a grapeshot injury was, in fact, post-mortem damage to the remains.

So where is Margaret Corbin? Since the attempted reburial of Corbin’s remains, in 1926, her original gravesite in Highland Falls has been lost to time. Sometime in the 1970s, the town dropped a sewage plant where many believe it was once located. Yet Minus remains optimistic that Corbin’s remains will one day be found.

As upsetting as it was to learn that her remains were missing, the Daughters also tried to see the discovery as an opportunity to spread Margaret’s story. It’s as though they picked up right where the 1926 DAR members left off. Minus formed an unofficial Margaret Corbin Task Force, drawing on the strengths of DAR members: One was a genealogist, and another was a Navy veteran who had worked on locating the remains of American soldiers overseas.

On April 30, 2019, Minus combed the woods of Highland Falls, looking for the original gravesite. They tried to match up the old photographs with newer ones, but this proved difficult, because most of the trees in the photographs were saplings at the time. They looked for flat areas that would have been suitable for burials: It was common at the time to bury people in elevated areas, to avoid rising water tables that could push the caskets back up to the surface.

The next day, the Daughters gathered again around Corbin’s monument, dressed in large hats and sashes. The ground looked as though it had never been disturbed. A casual viewer would’ve never known that Corbin wasn’t under their feet.

It was an important day for the Daughters, but especially for Minus, who joined the DAR in part because of Corbin. Once, before she graduated from West Point, she told her grandparents about a lunch honoring Margaret Corbin. Her grandmother told her that her heritage made her eligible to join the Daughters of the American Revolution, and a few years later, when she returned from a post in Germany, her grandma prepared the necessary papers.

Minus is hopeful that they’ll find Corbin near the river, not far from the grave that the Daughters dug up in 1926. “When they started digging, they found bones. So, they didn’t make, like, 10 different holes over a field. They got it on their first attempt and found bones. What I’m hoping is that they just had to do a 180, and she would’ve been five feet over.”

The man they found in Corbin’s grave has since come back to the West Point cemetery, to be reinterred with the other unidentified remains found in the area. No one yet knows who the man could be. Some theorize it’s Corbin’s second husband—but there’s no proof that she remarried. Others believe it was a Native American. It’s possible that the unknown man might be dug up a third time, should the proper clues demand his participation. Corbin’s original gravesite did not turn up in 2018, but the search continues.

On Corbin Day in 2019, after the 21-gun salute, the Daughters held another luncheon. That time, the Margaret Corbin Task Force had something special on display: a machine that looked like a souped-up lawn mower. Many Daughters filed into the room and asked what it was. “Just wait,” Minus answered. Then Lieutenant Colonel Mindy Kimball, an environmental science professor at West Point, held a demonstration. It’s a ground-penetrating radar machine, which shoots electromagnetic waves into the ground and sends information back up to the antenna, to identify underground disturbances that could reveal human remains.

Minus is fascinated by the many identities that Corbin came to inhabit. “She’s an army spouse, and then an army widow, and then she was a soldier, and then she was a wounded soldier, and then she was a prisoner of war, and then she was a veteran,” she says. Corbin was also the first woman to receive a military pension from the government, and is mentioned by name in the Congressional Record. “I really think of her as that building block for women in the military.”

Stella Bailey, the town historian of Highland Falls, has been researching Margaret Corbin for decades. She’s pored over old maps, trying to pinpoint exactly where Corbin might have been buried in 1800. She even gets emails from people who think they might be related to Corbin.

Sitting in her office, overlooking Main Street in Highland Falls, Bailey sighs. “We know she was real. West Point’s records acknowledge her existence,” she says. But she can list discrepancies in Corbin’s story. Some say her husband was shot in the head; some say he was shot in the heart. Others say Corbin dressed as a man to fight in the war. Sometimes she wonders whether she will ever find answers. Perhaps these conflicting stories are just a part of Corbin’s mystique. “The more I research, the less I know,” Bailey says.

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Hello everyone,

Here is the latest episode of Cashed Out with my friend Sam.

We talk about Shane Gillis on SNL, Sam’s recent appearance on Kill Tony, Jonah and the big fish, gatekeepers, James O’Keefe’s “Citizen Journalist” Gala, and what it’s like when our moms hear something they don’t like on one of our podcasts.

Also, we look at this crazy James Tal…

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Hello,

I went live on my new YouTube channel yesterday to talk about Trump rebranding AI to Super Intelligence. It’s funny to see the party that opposed compelled speech become the party of compelled speech. But that is human nature. You tend to become the thing you hate.

We shouldn’t hate or fear AI. It is, at its best, a tool. At its worse, it is a death machine built by lizard people.

No one should be surprised that Trump has embraced the tech freaks. His VP was created in a test tube in a Palantir lab by Peter Thiel—who, as we all know, drinks Clavicular’s blood.

These livestreams have been fun, and I appreciate everyone joining in and asking questions. I’m planning on doing lives here on Substack as well. My goal is to do a monthly series where we go over a specific short story or book. Stay tuned. I’m currently reading True Grit. It’s one of the greatest of the westerns.

In the meantime, here I am talking about digital gulags, compelled speech, the importance of definitions, and bloodthirsty closeted neo cons AKA Jeremy Boreing.

On today’s episode of Cashed Out, Sam and I talk about the Flydubai hijacking, the Cornell 7 case, man attempting to engineer the return of the messiah, this lady who keeps stealing my cat and much more.

If you have an indoor/outdoor cat, I recommend checking it for CIA listening devices at least once a day.

Thank you all for the support.

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The Junes had called Bear Mountain State Park to let them know there was going to be another funeral in Doodletown. Arthur June had died on March 31, at age 72. He was born here, in Doodletown, and now his family was returning him to the land he loved.

No one has lived in this abandoned hamlet in upstate New York since 1965, but the Junes, and other former residents and descendants, retain life rights to the old cemeteries concealed in the woods of Bear Mountain, high above the Hudson River.

After some rain, the funeral procession made its way up the winding mountain pass to Doodletown. Park employees unlocked the gate on Lemmon Road—a nearly invisible dead end to passersby that seals off the ruins of the town from unwanted motor traffic. Aside from some foundations and cellar holes, the Second June Cemetery—named after two of Arthur’s ancestors, Ithiel and Charity—is one of the few things the state didn’t demolish as soon as the last June left Doodletown.

The park is supposed to maintain the road, specifically for funerals, but it’s an uneven, half-paved trail that fades into dirt, rock, and foliage, lined with barberry bushes and old rock walls built by the Junes’ ancestors, which date as far back as Doodletown’s founding, in 1762. Disused electric wires, which were only strung through the hamlet in 1946, look like man-made vines now, sagging down into the brush—another part of this once vibrant village that’s being swallowed by nature.

Arthur’s procession went as far down the winding, narrow path as it could, until the early April mud became impassable. The cemetery, beyond the trees, was still about 50 yards away. The park employees made a path out of plywood for the family to walk safely to the gravesite, carrying Arthur’s urn the rest of the way.

When Junes die now, they’re typically cremated, to ensure there’s enough space for future descendants who might want to join their family on the mountain. (The only thing former Doodletown residents and descendants are legally allowed to do up here now—aside from hike, which anyone can do—is bury their dead.)

Cradling Arthur’s urn, his wife, Vera, joined by their six grandchildren and a host of extended family and friends, walked past the Doodletown Brook where Arthur and his siblings—Eileen, Sharon, Caroline, William, and Gilbert—once swam as children, and the plots of land where they used to help their mother hang drying clothes between the trees.

The cemetery is a single craggy acre, situated at the edge of Doodletown Lake—a spleen-shaped body of water that looks clean enough to drink. There are signs nailed to trees here that say CEMETERY CLOSED — AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. A dead pine twists up through the middle of the cemetery, separating the newest June graves from the weather-beaten graves of their ancestors.

Arthur’s sons—Curtis, Richard, and Scott—proceeded to dig their father’s grave. The Junes have always dug their own graves. It’s been that way since the first June—Charity—was buried in the First June Cemetery, sometime in the late 1700s, when the town was a center of mining and logging.

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Arthur and Vera were the last couple to be married in Doodletown, in the little white church that was a five-minute walk west from the Second June Cemetery. That was just three years before New York State kicked everyone out of Doodletown by way of eminent domain. Almost immediately after the town was emptied, the state sent bulldozers to level the 70 homes, the church, and the beloved school.

Arthur, like many from Doodletown, worked for the park up until his death—a job he unhappily held for 53 years. “He did not take that very well,” his widow, Vera June, said. “The people he worked for were the very people kicking him out.” She half-joked that if the state decided to drop a condominium on top of Doodletown, Arthur might’ve burned it down. Bitter as he was to have lost his home, the park offered steady work. Other former residents have made a similar peace. If you look at a roster of park employees today, you’ll see the family names of many former residents.

The park that replaced the town had been creeping in for decades. In 1908, New York State used convicts to clear the land that is now the field outside the Bear Mountain Inn, a large Adirondack-style structure. The state had planned to build a prison.

Matt Shook, Director of Development and Special Projects, said it was Mary Harriman, widow of a railroad magnate, who put a stop to the prison.

“She didn’t want that in her backyard,” Shook said. So she offered the state 10,000 acres of land, plus $1 million, if the state and other private donors would match her gift.

“At that point,” Shook said, “the goal was to keep expanding the park to conserve, but also for recreation.” A lot of parcels were bought during the Great Depression. Shook’s offices have thousands of deeds, one for every parcel the park has bought during its expansion.

In 1964, the state gave residents of Doodletown, and other mountain hamlets nearby, two options: take a buyout or be condemned. A ski resort was coming, whether they were ready or not. (The ski resort never materialized. The area was absorbed into Bear Mountain State Park instead.)

Doodletown was the last of the hamlets to be taken. It was also the largest. The other villages, such as Sebago, have tiny graveyards hidden in the forest as well, but none as active as Doodletown’s.

Clarence June Sr., Arthur’s father, was one of the first to sell. It’s something that his daughter, Eileen Bramsen, is still slow to admit. She fears that her father’s decision provided the impetus for others to sell, rather than put up more of a fight. Then again, there weren’t any good options. “It was going to happen no matter what we did,” she said. Her parents, Clarence and Irene, had eight children and bills to pay.

Eileen was born on the second floor of her parents’ house in Doodletown in 1940. Even though she now lives three hours upstate and is still working, she already has a headstone waiting for her in Doodletown.

Those who grew up here remember it as an intensely quiet, idyllic place. The dense woods and high elevation seemed to block all sound from the outside world. As a child, Eileen and her friends and siblings would jump into “the 10 foot,” a swimming hole that young Junes still swim in today (although it’s illegal to do so, even for Doodletown descendants). She remembers exploring caves, climbing trees, and playing hide-and-seek until it was dark. On summer nights, fireflies illuminated the woods. On fall mornings, a thick, serpent-like band of fog hovered above the Hudson River.

Eileen recalls learning how to make holiday wreaths with her mother, for extra money. She’d go out and collect vines and twist them into circles. They’d spend the month leading up to Christmas making wreaths. One time, she helped her mother build one 25 feet in diameter for the Bear Mountain Inn to hang from its façade. On Halloween, all the kids would meet to go trick-or-treating as a small costumed crowd, traveling house to house.

Today Doodletown is defined locally by its many myths. People in the towns at the foot of the mountain speak of feral children up here. And Dunder the Troll, who lives in the woods. And pirate treasure hidden in the mica mines below the surface of the mountain.

Then there’s the myth of the town’s namesake. If you grew up in this area, you might’ve heard that Doodletown was named after British troops who marched through singing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” on their way to conquer Fort Clinton. The British did come through, but Doodletown was already named. Letters dated before the Revolutionary War attest to that. The real provenance of the name comes from the Dutch word Doddel, which means “Dead Valley” or “Dead Wood.”

Toward the end of Doodletown’s existence, there was a wave of strange tourism. People would drive into town asking where all the activity was. There’d been articles in the papers about the hamlet being bought out, so curious motorists drove down Lemmon Road to see what was going on. It probably hadn’t been that busy since those thousand British troops marched through.

There was no mass exodus from Doodletown. Everyone moved out individually, one at a time. Some dug in their heels more than others, but eventually everyone left. Many settled in the towns at the foot of the mountain: Highland Falls, Fort Montgomery, Stony Point, and Tomkins Cove.

Eileen’s brother, Clarence Jr., had his home turned into a park building, but he was allowed to stay on for a little while as a maintenance man. During his last days here, he watched state workers start to flatten everything, even tearing up the roads. Soon after, vandals found their way into the empty village. They destroyed the Herbert-Weyant Cemetery and set the beloved school—the heart of Doodletown—on fire.

Clarence June Jr. was the last person to live in Doodletown—a matter of pride for him. He and his family left for good on January 16, 1965. Before everything was torn down, he and his father spent time shooting 8mm film of every building. It was happenstance that Clarence Sr. was there the day the bulldozer tore down the school.

Thirty years later, when Eileen helped plan the first official Doodletown reunion, she used her father’s footage. Approximately 200 people showed up. Eileen made sure to plan that reunion, and all future ones, on Columbus Day, in hopes that it would be too cold for the rattlesnakes and copperheads. (There’s always been a snake problem in Doodletown.)

Eileen bought a machine to transfer her dad’s 8mm films to VHS. She made a virtual tour out of the old footage. Eileen narrated. The footage played on a loop. Nearly everyone who attended the school in Doodletown cried at the sight of its demolition.

Now a siren tower sits where the school was, rising above the tallest trees. It once stood ready to bray warnings if there was an emergency at the nearby nuclear plant, the Indian Point Energy Center.

Most of the current June grandchildren have only known Doodletown as a ruin, but they’ve spent their young lives exploring the forest, the caves, and the brooks just the same. It’s illegal, but if a ranger were to find them, there’s a good chance he or she has a personal connection to Doodletown, making the chances of getting in trouble unlikely. Still, the Junes have become tourists in their ancestral home.

Before Arthur passed away, his granddaughter, Leah, said she wanted to be the new last person married in Doodletown. She got engaged not long before he died. Arthur was able to help her get the proper permits for the wedding. One year after Arthur’s funeral, Leah was married in the field by the lake, opposite the cemetery. Arthur was practically in attendance.

The Junes still maintain their own gravesite. They bring their own lawn mower to tend the grass, their own chainsaws to cut fallen trees. Vera’s sons have restored a park bench and placed it beside Arthur’s grave, so that their mother can sit with their father. His headstone reads: “Do not stand at my grave and cry, I am not there, I did not die.”

Sometimes when Vera is in Doodletown to visit Arthur, she meets curious hikers who find their way to the isolated cemetery. They stop at the edge, afraid to walk past the signs, wondering how and why there’s a cemetery on this secluded mountain, and who’s there mourning among the ruins. Vera and her family will often invite them in, so they can tell someone else the story of Doodletown.

Thank you for reading. For those who would like to support my work, you can become a paying member here on Substack or send a donation via Venmo @shanecashman. Paid subscribers get access to my show with Sam Tripoli—Cashed Out. We just released a new episode yesterday.

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Hello,

I electrocuted myself right before filming this episode. Not on purpose.

Waiting to see what superpowers I get.

I also fought a giant spider while talking to Sam.

I don’t want to exaggerate, but it was literally this big:

In today’s Cashed Out, Sam and I discuss pain, joy, industry plants, false gods, AI PR, dark jokes, the 19th Amendment, angry moms, Manchurian candidates, and the death of the jester.

I’m also pretty sure we answered some of the most pressing questions that face civilization.

I look forward to recording these episodes with Sam, and I look forward to sharing them with you all.

Cashed Out is for my paid subscribers. Thank you so much for the support. I’m extremely grateful.

I have some new stories that will be up soon for everyone. You can also see my latest livestreams on YouTube. I’ve been building up a new channel from scratch and talking about AI war crimes, Jeremy’s Boreing’s wig, and Trump’s nihilism.

In other news, I will start publishing a series of conversations on here that I’ve had with pro-wrestlers from the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA). Billy Corgan owns the NWA, and I was able to speak with him about wrestling and America. That conversation is in Good Villains. Now I’d like to share a bunch of the talks I had with the guys and gals in the ring. Thank you to the great EC3 for arranging all of that. My interview with him will also be a part of this series.

In the meantime, I’m going to see if I can control the microwave with my thoughts yet.

I’m just kidding. We don’t have a microwave. We’re Amish. I’m sending you this telepathically.

I hope you enjoy the latest episode of Cashed Out.

Sincerely,

Shane

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Sam’s in Kansas. I just got back from Vermont. And we have a lot of stories from the road.

In today’s episode: chaos, sarcasm, fatherhood, losing friends, chickens, voting, breaking spells, Rogan, Katt Williams, writing jokes, and angry 6pm audiences, etc.

The sad news of Carrot Top recovering from a suicide attempt reminded me about a great comic I met in Austin, TX a few years ago—Nick Roche. Nick unfortunately took his life in 2023.

This was a cathartic episode. Always good to catch up with Sam and find the joy amidst the wreckage.

If anyone’s near Lawrence, KS tonight, you can catch Sam @ The Comedy Club.

Thank you so much to everyone who’s supporting my Substack with paid subscriptions. This one’s for you.

I will publish new stories this week—available to all.

Have a great weekend.

Here’s a pic I took in Stowe, VT.

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—Shane

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On July 2nd, 1881, Charles Guiteau fired his revolver twice into the back of President James A. Garfield. This would be the second assassination of an American President in sixteen years, but it was Garfield’s that inspired Naval engineers to develop a method to keep the president cool as he slowly died that summer.

The average temperature that July in Washington, D.C., was 77.4 degrees Fahrenheit. And, as the New York Times reported in August 1881, it was a summer of “sleepless nights and thousands seeing the sea-shore.”

One of the bullets had been lodged behind his pancreas. His doctors notoriously probed the wound with non-sterilized tools and unwashed hands.

Professor Simon Newcomb oversaw the various apparatuses struggling to cool Garfield’s sickroom. He rigged together an engine connected to pipes that powered a fan to blow over a large bucket of ice. He was able to lower the room’s temperature from 95 to 75 degrees. His contraption would eat hundreds of pounds of ice an hour. Garfield lay dying in a room cooled by ice, a machine built to hold death at bay for a few more days.

If you were in the ice-selling business, this wasn’t such a bad thing. By the late 1800s, the United States Ice Trade was worth some $28,000,000. At its peak, the Ice Trade employed nearly 90,000 people—men with axes and saws cutting blocks of ice from lakes and ponds in the winter, then packing and shipping those blocks before they melted to cities across the country and overseas. People used the ice in iceboxes to keep food from spoiling, in hospitals, and for cooling drinks and rooms long before mechanical refrigeration existed.

Humans have been attempting to control the temperature since ancient Egyptians hung moistened reeds in windows to help cool rooms. From Rome to Persia to the Song Dynasty there have been efforts to manipulate weather. 17th-century English nobility would stash snow underground throughout the year to chill their drinks.
In Tom Shachtman’s Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold, he writes of King James’ “fascination with the occult and his continual search for entertainment.”
This interest led him to invite Dutch inventor Cornelius Drebbel to build some of his contraptions and perform them for the king and his parties. Drebbel, who also invented an early version of the submarine and the thermometer, promised to be able to “turn summer into winter.”

The king asked him to present this weather-bending sorcery in Westminster Abbey in the summer of 1620. Drebbel didn’t leave behind notes detailing his experiments, but Shachtman believes he most likely achieved his effect by mixing snow with water and salt and potassium nitrate—which formed ice crystals and cooled a corridor of Westminster Abbey.

King James, so the story goes, ran away from the magic shivering. Even still, “turning summer into winter” was a curious, unnatural delight, mostly saved to impress the rich or the dying. The general public, however, was reluctant to invest any faith in magic or science that would influence the elements.

In our own archaic way, my family didn’t have an air conditioner until I was in my twenties. Memories of summer in my childhood home are a parade of fans: box fans, oscillating fans, window fans, and desk fans. My dad’s faith in fans peaked when one summer he cut a large square hole into the ceiling at the top of the stairs and installed a 24-by-24-inch four-blade steel fan. With the flick of a switch the fan draws in any outside breeze through the screen door and open windows and runs it through the house. It sounds like a lawn mower hovering over your head.

Having grown up without air conditioning, in the age of air conditioning, I became acutely aware of it whenever I was in its presence—like in pharmacies or supermarkets or commuter trains that tend to keep themselves unrealistically cold.
What surprised Salvatore Basile while writing his book, COOL: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything, was the way the public consistently mocked the idea of what used to be known as manufactured air. Even into the 20th century, the United States Congress tried to avoid the use of manufactured air in the Capitol—they feared the voters would ridicule them for not being able to live with the heat like everyone else.

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“I always assumed that people who had spent their lives stewing through the summer months would be overjoyed to learn that there was a machine that could cool the environment and that wasn’t the case,” Basile told me. “But the idea that a machine could control the weather was sinful.”

Basile, 62, can remember people saying, “God made hot weather, so you should put up with it.”

Just ask any 19th-century woman who used to keep smelling salts at the ready should they have sensed a fainting spell coming on due to the heat, intensified only by their heavy dress and tightened corset.

Three decades before Garfield’s assassination, Dr. John Gorrie in Apalachicola, Florida, was approved for patent 8080—the first ice machine. Gorrie had been treating malaria patients with high fevers in the panhandle when he designed an engine that could pull in air, compress it, then run it through pipes, allowing the air to cool as it expanded.

Gorrie did not set out to invent an ice machine. Initially, he wanted to help suppress his patients’ fevers by fighting off the aggressive Floridian humidity and cooling his space. But people at the time saw no need for such an achievement. So when the pipes on Gorrie’s machine unexpectedly froze and began to develop ice, he saw a new opportunity—stepping on the toes of the Ice Trade.

Forty years later, Stuart Cramer, a North Carolina textile engineer, would coin the term air conditioning. Carrier is remembered as the man who brought the air conditioner into the American home—but not without delay first. Carrier’s breakthrough came at the beginning of the 20th century when he installed his Apparatus for Treating Air in the Sackett-Wilhelms Publishing building in Brooklyn in July 1902.

Even though Carrier envisioned a world where homes would be cooled by air conditioners, his machines were, for a while, mostly used commercially.
Between the time it took for the modern air conditioner to become a household appliance, there were numerous attempts made to convince people that they actually needed to cool themselves with suspicious, even dodgy contraptions.

Not unlike Wile E. Coyote trying to capture the Road Runner, 19th -and 20th-century inventors schemed up a mess of harebrained ideas to beat the heat—some of which, as Basile points out in his book, even made it through the patent office. One man believed he could take a balloon connected to a fire hydrant and a hose and create personal rainstorms. Another man came up with the idea of towers with carbon dioxide bombs at the top that would explode above a neighborhood and cool the air upon detonation.

Frigidaire sold the first “room cooler” for the home in 1929. This contraption looked like a storage locker for the living room.

“Now you can turn on the cold as easily as you turn on the heat,” Frigidaire copy bragged. The first unit that could be mounted in a window at home was the 1932 Thorne Room Air Conditioner. It looked like the grill of an old car shoved through a window. In some early ads the air conditioner stood amidst a happy family, but seemed rather alien itself, like a spacecraft that had landed in the living room of a friendly nuclear family.

Air conditioning’s big public debut was at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York at The Carrier Igloo of Tomorrow expo. 1.3 million visitors would experience air conditioning for the first time in a tall space-age cone-shaped igloo. The Carrier brochure from the Fair boasted of converting folks into loyal fans of air conditioning: “People who visit barber shops, beauty salons, funeral homes, and drug stores, have acquired the habit of seeking only those places that provide for their comfort.”

Basile points out another big boost for the air conditioner that came mid-century: “The U.S. government gave an unintended endorsement of air conditioning in 1959 when the U.S. Weather Bureau announced the creation of its Discomfort Index.” Or, as we know it today, the Heat Index. If Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window were made just five to ten years later, it could have been a lot harder for James Stewart’s character, Jeff Jefferies, to peer through all his city neighbors’ windows to solve a murder.

As is the case with most everything on the planet today there are groups of people who are anti-air-conditioning and there are groups who are anti-anti-air-conditioning. There are groups who accuse the air conditioner of being too bourgeois and there are people who prefer not to use air conditioning who are themselves accused of being too bourgeois. Air conditioning has been labeled recently as a chauvinist tool in the workplace forcing women to dress warmer inside their offices even when it’s brutally hot outside. The machine has been accused of being unhealthy (bacteria hiding in the filters) or doing irreversible damage to the atmosphere. They have, for some, also become a symbol of human ingenuity, and for others a sign of the coming man-made apocalypse. There are even those who deem the air conditioning as an invention that’s working to weaken our species—by making it so our bodies can no longer withstand any heat unsupervised by a machine to manipulate it.

According to the latest data, as of 2026, at least 90% of households in the United States have an air conditioner or central air.

By 1989, not that long after the initial surge in air conditioning sales, the Montreal Protocol went into effect. This began to cut out the release of chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs (the Freon used in old air conditioners included) into the atmosphere, many of which were used in refrigeration and eat away at the ozone.

I had a roommate in Brooklyn who didn’t trust open windows—even in summer. He warned of thieves climbing the fire escape to cut us and rob us if we left the windows open. This roommate was my wife’s grandfather, Joe. He was born in 1928—one year before Freon was synthesized, and two years before the United States Senate finally, after years of resistance, hired Willis Carrier to install their first air conditioning unit.

Joe did have an A/C sagging out of the window, stuck there like a criminal trying to break into the apartment, but he trusted his antique fan to keep us cool.
“This thing’s older than me,” he’d say. I think he turned the A/C on for the sound alone—it hardly worked. It grumbled like an old truck engine fighting to make it up a steep hill. You could hear all the mechanisms suffering inside. It did do a good job of drowning out the sirens outside.

As it turns out, Joe wasn’t alone in using the air conditioner’s sound as a sleep aid. The sound of this machine people less than a century ago never knew they needed has become the sound millions of people need to sleep to every night. It’s become a source of nostalgia and comfort. There are millions of people who every night use YouTube videos that play ten hours of that droning A/C sound. There are even videos as specific as the A/C sound from the Silver Sevens Casino in Las Vegas or from a hotel room in San Angelo, Texas. Some commenters will go as far as to ask the people making the videos to upload even more specific videos of, say, an A/C with the compressor kicking off and on. (There are multiple videos of fans whirling on YouTube for anyone who might use them for sleep, but these have much less of a demand.)

It would have been interesting to see the personal rainstorm machine become today’s de facto technology for cooling, but the air conditioner as we know it today has allowed us to live and work, whether we like it or not, in claustrophobically small spaces.

“Think about the changing room in a department store,” Basile says. “There are many windowless spaces which, years ago, either wouldn’t exist or that would be considered pure, unadulterated hell.”

When these machines we rely on to fight off heat start to malfunction, we call the Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning companies.

Matt Thompson, 24, from Santa Clarita, California, works for Sol-Aire Air-Conditioning Co. I asked Thompson to explain what goes on inside a modern air conditioner.

“Air conditioning removes the hot air from the room or space, conditions it, then replaces the existing hot air with conditioned air. Many people are under the assumption that air conditioning provides new fresh air. While it may feel that way, the cool air is the same air that was previously hot,” Thompson said.

That became clear one summer when wildfires in Canada sent thick smog all the way down the East Coast to my town in West Virginia. Some family were visiting and refused to go outside in what they called the “toxic air.” They thought the air conditioner would filter it out. It doesn’t. It just takes that same outdoor air, cools it, and blows it back inside.

Of all the gadgets we use every day, I find it odd how the air conditioner has not gone through a dramatic change aesthetically like the phone or television.

“By the 1960s designs became standardized and, for me, were not as interesting,” Kenneth Horan said. Horan, 69, collects vintage air conditioning units. Originally from Chicago, Illinois, he has been collecting window-mounted air conditioners since he was seventeen. His favorite landmark in air conditioner history is Ward Thorne’s design for the first window-mounted air conditioner. It looks like an anvil balancing in a window. Something very few were able to enjoy when it was trotted out of the factory.

Nowadays, most anyone can purchase a brand-new A/C window unit found stacked on shelves, or in the corners of Home Depots and Walmarts—stuffed next to blow-up pools and window fans and sprinklers.

There are companies trying to revolutionize the future of air conditioning. Take for instance Zero Breeze (whose commercial shows people camping in a tent using their fog machine-shaped air conditioner), or Coolware (an A/C collar that uses evaporative water), or Wristify (an A/C bracelet) or the bulky Japanese-made air-conditioned shirt that balloons out when turned on, and the Evapolar, which is branded as “the world’s first personal air cooler.”

Just as the computer once took up an entire room and eventually shrunk to fit into our palms, it’s possible that the air conditioner of the future will do the same. Evapolar promotes the idea of a “micro climate.” It makes it sound as if one day global warming will be a personalized matter for those who can’t afford to otherwise shake it out of their custom-made atmospheres with expensive, private gadgets.

“Evapolar works like your own personal lake. You can feel its breeze, similar to a natural breeze,” Eugene Dubovoy, CEO and co-founder of Evapolar, told me.
The Evapolar is a small cube with a water reservoir and a fan. It’s not exactly an air conditioner; it’s more along the lines of an early swamp cooler. Instead of compressing air it uses evaporative water to cool temperatures. The same way the landline all but went extinct in many households, decommissioned by the cellphone, it’s not out of the question that the air conditioner could soon fall out of fashion and be swapped out for some of these smaller, hyper-personal technologies. Might there be a future skyscraper filled with cubicles, each equipped with micro-climates, so that employees can dress according to their own bespoke atmospheres?

A hundred years from now our descendants might find it funny how we never really put much mainstream stock in rerouting hurricanes or earthquakes or comets—the same way we once mocked the idea of manufacturing air. Even though I grew up without air conditioning, it’s still hard to imagine a world unsupervised by these machines.

Since the 1970s, in many industrialized parts of the world, they’ve become as ubiquitous as the warm seasons in which we turn them on.
Less than a hundred years ago, in Brooklyn, my grandma and her family spent hot nights sleeping outside on benches and fire escapes to keep cool.

“We were just happy to have a fan,” she said. And later she controlled the temperature of her entire house with a remote and said things like, “I’m going to turn the air down,” as if it’s the TV volume.

Maybe it’s because some of the early models of the air conditioner were installed in hospitals to keep fevers at bay, and subsequently in morgues to keep cadavers fresh for study, but the air conditioner, to me, seems like another memento mori at large. Something we invented to avoid death. Some hypochondriacs believe these machines will have a hand in our future global death or even extinction—this chorus of machines humming in the windows, reminding us every summer that we’re only human—filled with human weaknesses that the natural elements will exploit until we’re gone.

My grandma remembers a different kind of first encounter with the machine. July 1963. She had just come home from a major surgery. The average temperature that July in Queens, NY, was 77.5 degrees, so my grandparents decided it’d be a good idea to put a window unit in the living room—expensive, but worth it for her recovery. My mom, eight at the time, was playing outside with her little brother as the electrician and his assistant installed the new machine.

“Call an ambulance!” the assistant screamed. My grandma thought something happened to one of the kids. She ran outside. It wasn’t the kids. It was the electrician. He had dropped dead of a heart attack. My grandma’s not sure if the heat did him in or what.

Not long after, the electrician’s son called to apologize and said he’d come finish the job.

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Sam’s new special is out right now via Gas Digital.

It’s hilarious, and I’m honored to get a shoutout in it.

He tells the true story of how one of his jokes got me out of a ticket.

That joke actually got me out of two tickets.

The same cop pulled me over for the same busted taillight about six months later, remembered the joke, and let me go again.

I hope you enjoy the latest episode of CASHED OUT with Sam Tripoli and yours truly.

Episode 3 is available below for my paid subscribers. I am grateful for your support.

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I went to the Pavilion at Star Lake outside Pittsburgh to see a Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie concert—it also happened to be the anniversary of the night Terminator said Skynet took over.

The amphitheater holds about 23,000 people, and most of them were there. The remnants of a full moon hung above the stage. Overhead, drones moved through the dark sky.

This is a twenty-one-date amphitheater run. Freaks on Parade—a co-headlining tour with Manson and Zombie.

After the set I talked to Tim Skold, Manson’s bassist. I told him he reminded me of Leatherface from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. He laughed and asked, “Is it my face?”

“No,” I said, “it’s because you swing the bass the same way Leatherface swung his chainsaw.”

Skold pointed to one of the drones overhead. He’s the one who reminded me it was the Judgment Day anniversary—when Skynet becomes self-aware.

I told him Terminator 2 was my favorite documentary.

In Cameron’s screenplay the future is in ruins: three billion dead after August 29, 1997, Skynet online on August 4, self-aware at 2:14 a.m. on the 29th, human judgment pulled out of the defense grid, a machine that learns at a geometric rate and, when they try to pull the plug, answers with missiles. The survivors are hunted through a landscape of ash.

The movie’s answer is not to uninvent the machine. Future John Connor captures a T-800—the same model that once tried to kill his mother—reprograms it, and sends it back in time. The T-1000 is newer, liquid metal, and harder to kill. The older machine wins because it has been hijacked. John tells it not to kill. By the end they lower the Terminator into steel so its chip cannot be harvested to build Skynet. It’s a good lesson: you’re going to have to fight the machine with machines.

There will be no erasing tech from the planet. Anyone who thinks they can eradicate tech is fooling themselves. It’s like the wars on drugs and terror. These are abstract ideas, symptoms of human behavior—they won’t disappear.

You will not smash every server. You will not exile every engineer. The people building this system already have the warehouses, the models, the defense contracts, and the new federal category for anyone who talks back. If you refuse the tools, they keep them. The only move left is the T-2 move. Use the tech at your disposal. Create with it. Film with it. Organize with it. Publish outside their channels. Hijack the machine to subvert the tech freaks who want to run the world and call the rest of us backwards. Just don’t outsource your imagination to the machine. It is a tool, not a replacement.

At Star Lake, we could hear 23,000 people chanting for Rob Zombie’s set. A night like this is proof that no matter how badly the machines might want to take over, humans still want the real thing. Real people on a stage playing rock and roll.

I think people are walking out of the synthetic and back toward the tactile. They want the physical world, volume, a body swinging a bass like a weapon. They want the thing itself—not a digital regurgitation of the thing.

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Pittsburgh once put four in ten workers into manufacturing. In 1952 the region had more than 400,000 factory jobs; 160,000 of them were in primary metals. Then the mills died in a decade. Homestead Works had employed 15,000. It is a shopping center now. Unemployment hit 17 percent. The air over Clairton still carries what the coke ovens leave behind. Last summer the White House came to town to announce more than $90 billion in data center pledges and called it the future being built in Pittsburgh. The old sites are being repurposed for the new machines. The last industry that defined this valley needed armies of men. The next one needs a skeleton crew and a river of power.

Imagine the band of 19th-century textile workers, led by the mythic Ned Ludd, smashing stocking frames and power looms that were destroying their skilled trades and livelihoods. They were not anti-technology. Many of them were the technicians. They used the technology of the day. They attacked the machines being used, as they put it, in a “fraudulent and deceitful manner”—to slash wages, skip apprenticeships, and flood the market with cheaper goods. They opposed being replaced by mass autonomy—by machines that could run without their skill, their wages, or their say. In 1811 and 1812, the Luddite uprisings spread across the English Midlands, and the British government responded by deploying as many as 12,000 troops to suppress them. Machine-breaking was made a capital crime. Seventeen men were executed, and many others were sentenced to penal transportation—effectively exiled to Australia. The state treated resistance to the machines as an existential threat.

Two centuries later, we are watching the rise of a new wave of neo-Luddites. In the UK and the United States, people are covering surveillance cameras, blocking self-driving cars, and organizing against sprawling AI data centers.

U.S. data centers already consume more than 4 percent of the nation’s electricity, a number projected to double by 2030. In 2023 alone they used roughly 17 billion gallons of water, with AI-driven hyperscale facilities expected to dramatically increase that number. Since 2022, more than 160 new AI data centers have been proposed or built in water-stressed regions, triggering protests from Utah to Virginia to Maine. By mid-2026 the resistance had scaled into coordinated nationwide actions, including 142 protests across 42 states in a single day in July, drawing farmers, environmentalists, local officials, and ordinary residents into an unlikely bipartisan coalition over water, power rates, farmland, and the right to say no.

The costs are not abstract. Household electric bills rise as utilities build for a load that never sleeps. Cooling systems dump blowdown (the controlled release of fluid from a pressurized system) laced with biocides and corrosion inhibitors; some of the new coolants and fire suppressants rely on PFAS, and after a Meta contractor in Cheyenne flushed contaminated wastewater into the city system, the reuse network had to be drained and disinfected. Regulators in places like Virginia still do not require that discharge to be tested for forever chemicals.

West Virginia is already paying for warehouses it did not vote to host. The state sits on the PJM grid with Virginia’s Data Center Alley. When those facilities pull power, the cost of keeping the regional grid standing gets spread across the pool—including West Virginia taxpayers. Lawmakers in Charleston made it clear: West Virginians are helping underwrite Virginia’s data centers. In-state utilities have also asked to put a surcharge on ordinary customers to help finance generation aimed at future data-center load.

The politicians say data centers will create jobs and revive dying towns. But the staffing math doesn’t add up. A modern hyperscale hall can run with a few dozen people on site—sometimes 20 to 30 permanent staff per 100 megawatts. Construction work is real and temporary. Permanent operations are a skeleton crew in a building that can draw as much power as a small city. In West Virginia, the tax design makes the local promise even thinner. Under the state’s high-impact data center rules, most of the property-tax increment does not stay where the warehouse sits. Fifty percent is steered to a state income-tax reduction fund. The host county gets 30 percent. Schools and local governments that would normally keep the bulk of a factory’s property tax lose that ordinary split. Communities that need help are told the “golden goose” is in the field. But these eggs are exported, and, as of now, don’t seem to bring the help the politicians promised. (It’s hard to believe a politician would lie…)

If a warehouse is going to sit on the grid, the tenant should pay for it—dedicated rates, long contracts, collateral posted per megawatt so a canceled campus does not land on a household bill. Virginia has started forcing large loads onto their own tariff. FirstEnergy has asked federal regulators to make data centers cover interconnection upgrades. A White House pledge from the same companies building the halls says they will fund the power they use. It’s worth watching to see if this plays out—and how.

The White House answered the backlash by calling it poverty. On August 31, President Trump posted:

Beating Beijing is not a reason to copy Beijing. China runs a social-credit machinery—blacklists, scores, cameras, preemptive compliance. We are building the warehouses that make that kind of scoring cheap, then feeding government and contractors the same commercial data streams, the same fusion-center lists, the same “risk indicators” for speech.

And listen to how Silicon Valley tells the China story. In one breath we have the best chips and the best models and we must beat China. In the next breath China is only catching up because it smuggles our servers and distills our models. Both can be partly true. The Justice Department has charged people tied to a Silicon Valley server maker with diverting billions in restricted AI hardware. Epoch estimated hundreds of thousands of advanced-chip equivalents moved through illicit channels by the end of 2025. DeepSeek’s founder said the embargo on high-end chips was the constraint. So which is it? If our lead is real, a county saying no to a warehouse is not surrender. If the lead depends on export cops and dummy crates, the emergency is not a lawn protest in Maine. It is a supply chain that talks like a fortress and ships like a sieve.

The split inside MAGA was instant. Some treated Trump’s post like scripture. Others treated it like a betrayal. Rep. Tim Burchett said, “I guess I’m backwards and poor.” Marjorie Taylor Greene said, “Everyone hates data centers.”

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And now the authorities want to label much of this AI resistance as dangerous extremism.

Earlier this year I warned that the powers that be would soon start redefining hate speech in real time. I imagined that at some point hate speech would encapsulate criticism of AI and would even go so far as to be considered domestic terrorism.

In May we received confirmation. A Wired investigation revealed more than 1,000 pages of unpublished documents from the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the NYPD. These reports are constructing a new category—“anti-tech violent extremism”—that had never appeared in any prior public DHS or FBI extremism guides.

In April a man threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s San Francisco home. That is the pretext. Officials are seizing a lone attack to turn tech executives into a protected class and to treat criticism of AI as a pipeline to violence. The documents show law enforcement is already surveilling people they call “anti-tech” threats. A New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau report warns: “The chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent AI technology in the next five years may fuel large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity, especially in large urban areas such as New York City.” Fusion-center bulletins have continued to flag data centers as potential targets while acknowledging a lack of specific plots, and some have treated observation and photography of those halls as risk indicators.

The man who created JD Vance in a Palantir test tube, Peter Thiel, has called critics “legionnaires of the Antichrist,” lumping AI skeptics together with figures like Greta Thunberg, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Nick Bostrom in private lectures that frame opposition as part of an apocalyptic battle. His longtime partner, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, has been equally blunt. Karp proudly speaks of building what he calls the “digital kill chain,” software that speeds up the entire process from identifying targets to destroying them. In one talk, he went further, saying he loved “the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us.”

They warn that AI will take driving jobs, creative work—everything we know. Then it’s utopia: paradise, universal basic income, a dream we’re all building together. Sam Altman speaks of selling intelligence like electricity or water. Yet any criticism is quickly painted as extremism by pointing to the violent fringe—the Molotov attacker, or the ghost of Ted Kaczynski—as the inevitable endpoint of skepticism toward AI and data centers.

Let’s be clear: smashing machines, throwing firebombs, or spraying chemicals is not the answer. But the emerging protected class of tech executives and their allies in government will use the extreme cases to argue that skepticism itself leads there, as they fear the rise of the neo-Luddites. Peaceful critics of unchecked AI development, data center proliferation, and the surveillance state will be lumped in with the violent few. That is how free speech gets recoded.

This isn’t really about stopping violence. It’s about controlling the narrative. We saw it after 9/11, when “terrorism” was stretched so wide it caught all kinds of dissent. That’s no coincidence—Palantir itself was created in the aftermath of 9/11 and the Patriot Act, with early funding from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel.

We have every right to speak out against this. Being critical does not make you an extremist. It does not mean you endorse violence. That equation is ridiculous, desperate—and they know it.

The solution isn’t more surveillance lists or broader definitions of extremism. It isn’t a vow to live like 1811. It’s transparency, genuine oversight, and the basic right to question power—and to use the same tools they use, in public, against the people who want those tools to be a one-way mirror. When questioning power is labeled extremism, the only real extremists left are the ones hijacking the definitions.

The drones over Star Lake might’ve just been recording the rock show. (Or they were scanning my biometrics…)

Pittsburgh already learned what happens when an industry that needed men is replaced by one that needs almost no one.

23,000 people didn’t show up to witness a simulation; they showed up to sing along to Manson’s setlist of fight songs. People are rejecting the manufactured digital realities. We’re OK with new tools and innovation. We just don’t want to be replaced by the machines that’ve been built by people who are also trying to warp the social contract to fit their dystopian nightmare.

You don’t have to embrace the machines. You don’t have to reject the machines either. They aren’t leaving—unless, of course, Elon brings them all with him to Mars. The way to fight them is to use them as tools, not as replacements—against the people who say they are building freedom when they are really building a cage.

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My new book, Good Villains, is out in the world. Here’s another behind-the-scenes story for you.

I know some of you might find this hard to believe, but there was a time when the whole internet was mad at me. I had written a story that they did not like—that story is also in Good Villains.

After that story and after all the controversy that followed, I thought it would be a nice little palate cleanser to go look at a train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio. That was when the horrible explosion happened. (It didn’t have to happen—we know that now. I think a lot of us knew that at the time, but it really turned into a nightmare for that town.) The vinyl chloride inverted the atmosphere. A large amount of birds and bees died. They couldn’t eat their livestock. It was just a disaster. (This story is also in the book.)

Soon after the train wreck, I was scrolling on YouTube looking for a little pick-me-up, and I came across the Theo Von and Riff Raff podcast. It was their first one, and it is one of my favorite podcast episodes. It’s hilarious stream-of-conscious dialogue. They are both savants with mullets.

I watched it, and then I tweeted out that Riff and Theo are two of our greatest living poets.

And then, to my surprise, I heard from Riff Raff. I’ve been a fan of his for a long time—ever since I heard “Now They Mad.”

It turned out he and his team were familiar with my Kanye story. And that led to me then spend a week in Florida at Riff’s house—walking his Huskies, going to a monster truck rally, watching him make music—watching him make one of my favorite Riff Raff songs, “Neon Hong Kong.” I watched him make that at like 2am after coming home from the monster truck rally.

It was surreal to trade cold and sad Ohio for palm trees and neon with Riff in Florida.

We talked about creativity, the music business, and the things he dealt with—going through the sensational headline machine. They tried to destroy his career, but I think it only made him stronger.

And that’s what a lot of the people in this book face: going up against the mob for one reason or another.

Also, Riff is one of the funniest people I’ve met.

I think he should be on Kill Tony. If this ever gets to Tony Hinchcliffe or Redban, it’s got to happen.

Thank you guys.

You can find Good Villains at shanecashman.com.

*

I have a new article going up tomorrow about the very organic, totally normal data center conversation and a rock & roll show I recently went to.

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Many thanks to Sam for doing these shows with me, and many thanks to YOU GUYS who are helping me keep the lights on.

Like I said last time, I imagine we will share some of these episodes publicly, but this show is a special thank you to everyone who is supporting me with paid subscriptions. I am grateful for you.

Right after we finished recording, I stepped outside into a tornado. I was trapped inside my car, dodging hail and tree limbs—while uploading this episode. As soon as I returned from Oz, I saw an 18th century barn collapsing, trees and flagpoles thrown all over the place, and lakes where there weren’t lakes this morning.

And then a rainbow and sunshine. Which, I suppose, is fitting seeing as how we discussed Jonah and the chaos storms he experienced when he tried fleeing from God’s command.

I hope you enjoy the latest episode with Sam.

There will be new stories available here for everyone in the coming days.

As always, thank you.

—Shane

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I wrote this on the road during the first part of my book tour to promote the upcoming release of GOOD VILLAINS (Out through Skyhorse 9.1.26.)

If you feel so inclined, please share, like, or leave a comment. That would be a major help. Thanks to you, at the time of this writing, my page is #47 on Substack’s “Rising in Culture.”

Thank you for reading.

Don't look back in sorrow
Just hope you'll see tomorrow

—John Anderson, Dan Auerbach, Pat McLaughlin, and David Ferguson, “Years”

Over a lifetime of road trips through America, I’ve gotten pretty good at determining which gas stations will have tuna sandwiches that won’t poison you. Typically, the gas stations that have electric sliding doors will have the safest options for tuna, cheese, or hard-boiled eggs. If you have to open the door yourself, it’s no shade at the gas station for not renovating itself into modernity, but it is a possible indication that the tuna sandwiches in their refrigerator could be radioactive.

I’ve always liked gas station culture. I probably developed this love for gas stations when they helped sustain me while touring through the country with my old band. I picked up some bad habits this way—like trusting tuna from Citgo. It was a good way to eat cheaply, while also playing Russian roulette with highway food. And this was before the gas station renaissance. Now some of these gas stations seem to be on their way to a Zagat rating. I could relapse any day now and get sushi from a Circle K.

I do like being able to visit a Buc-ee’s, which I’ve done in Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, and South Carolina. It’s like a giant exposed nerve of hundreds of gas pumps and thousands of hungry road-weary drivers. This gas station Mecca somehow pulls off the impossible and has the cleanest bathrooms anywhere in the whole country. Despite this, I’m still more of a Sheetz and Wawa guy. Wawa, while it’s great, is more of a nostalgia act from the early days of the gas station renaissance. It wasn’t until I moved from New York to West Virginia that I realized the South might have technically lost the Civil War, but they won the war on gas stations. By that I mean, their gas station culture has evolved to a level I didn’t know possible. Drive-thru food, coffee that rivals local cafes, bathrooms that could double as spas. Some of them appear to be in competition with Walmart.

One of the things you learn on the road is how different the roads themselves are from state to state. In West Virginia, they basically just slap concrete over the mountains. You’re in a constant up-and-down, twisting roller coaster through Appalachia. South Carolina has long, narrow roads cutting through dense pine forests, the trees pressing in on both sides like a green tunnel. Florida’s been decimated by tons of concrete, doing its best to hold back the Everglades from re-devouring everything. And then there’s New York with its mismanaged roads riddled with potholes. Everything’s an obstacle course, thanks to the snowplows scraping the highways raw. It’s like navigating a minefield.

I love driving through this country. But there’s also the sadness of so many dead small businesses, chewed-up landscapes where data centers and Costcos have moved in. Cow fields ripped up by 5G towers next to barns with silhouettes of Sasquatch painted on them. Solar panels where goats and sheep used to graze. Wind turbines standing where grain silos once rose into the sky.

My family used to take road trips to Nebraska, upstate New York, and up into Canada. I enjoyed seeing how the country actually changes from place to place. In Nebraska you’d get a runza, that weird little pocket of bread stuffed with beef and cabbage that makes sense when you’re driving through endless fields. In Canada we'd watch the locks on the canals, those massive concrete chambers filling and emptying with water, lifting entire ships up or lowering them down. The landscapes shift too—mountains giving way to plains, forests turning into farmland, the air feeling different as you cross from one region into another.

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I’ve always preferred driving to flying. Finding the radio station finally playing the music you were looking for, until you leave that area and lose the signal. It turns into static, then something else— I’ve heard a lot of Black Sabbath and Alice In Chains turn into Ritchie Valens or a John Hagee sermon.

The world you knew as a kid is like these radio stations from state to state. It starts clear and familiar, then slowly turns to static before switching to something else entirely. You can reconstruct the past as best you can from memory while everything around you changes. You can fly over all of it and never know—save for tracking the way the landscapes move between nature and glass. Or you can drive through it and feel the whole contradictory, half-sterile, half-haunted country pressing in through the windshield. The road trip is still the only way left to see the country before the concrete finishes the job. (Although gas prices have begun to rival airfare—and I’m not opposed to the idea of traveling by train, but the last time I did that from NY to FL, I got stuck in a blizzard on a bridge just south of DC. After two days of not moving, the train finally budged. We all cheered, but then someone told us we weren’t moving forward, we were moving backwards.)

It’s natural for the world you grew up in to disappear. Societies, nations, towns—they’re constantly coming and going. The Florida my grandparents moved to was not the same Florida they died in. The road outside their community was a two-lane dirt road. By the time they died, it was a four-lane highway with big intersections surrounded by cameras and gas stations. The Everglades have been shrinking more and more, forcing the alligators into the man-made lakes behind the little Monopoly houses around the network of cul-de-sacs. It’s impossible to stop this so-called progress. Whether through economic fallout or towns modernizing themselves out of their historical looks or through catastrophes. Take St. Augustine. On April 2, 1914, a fire started in the kitchen boiler room of the Florida House hotel before daybreak and swept north of the Plaza, destroying six hotels, the opera house, the courthouse, and countless homes and businesses. The city has always been vulnerable to fire—Francis Drake burned it to the ground in 1586. Much of what remains is coquina stone and later Spanish Renaissance Revival hotels. The wooden structures burned quickly. The stone and concrete survived.

It feels like you slip into a weird time loop on these road trips now. Strip malls and brand-name gas stations flatten everything. Every intersection starts to look the same. Every town looks like the last town. You might start to think you’re trapped in a wormhole. Concrete and glass buried on top of history. The internet already condensed the world into a small town; now the physical world is following suit. Small towns morph into the same sterile look, erasing what once made them unique. The hotels today have incredible photos online, but when you arrive, they seem to be made out of cardboard. In every hotel I stayed in on this trip, everything has an outlet except the wall. Why does the lamp have three outlets and a USB port when it can’t even charge a phone properly?

I’ve been taking long road trips since I was born. My parents were harness racers. That’s where you hook a buggy to the back of a Standardbred horse and race around a track. In that sport, you’re competing year-round, traveling up and down the East Coast with your horses from Monticello, New York down to Delray Beach, Florida. When I was old enough to start remembering those trips, I noticed how my parents always tried to beat their last record of how fast they could get from NY to FL. It used to be twenty-six hours. Then it was twenty-four, then twenty-three. We’d race down, stopping only for quick bathroom breaks. My dad would pack food to bring with us so we wouldn’t waste time or money on the gas station food I’d later rely on.

It wasn’t until I became a father and started doing the same road trip that I realized we didn’t have to do it in record time. That we could take our time. It dawned on me that my parents had taken me and my sisters on road trips the same way they would ship horses. That revelation really hit me on the first road trip we took with our son, who at the time was just a few months old. I had planned on beating my parents’ record. We’d get there in twenty-one hours. We made it to North Carolina and decided the baby might want to get out. And we did. He was completely stuck in the shape of his car seat. His posture was that of a jumbo shrimp. My wife looked at him and said, “He better be okay by the morning.” I put him in his Pack’n Play in the hotel we wound up getting and whispered in his ear, “You better be straightened out by the morning or your mother’s going to kill me.”

The road is the only real barometer left of how America is these days—the gas prices, the supermarket shelves, a politician’s popularity gauged through the amount of yard signs. There aren’t as many Trump flags as there once were. Democrat ones are scarce too. I have seen some Wu-Tang for president signs…

Getting to Florida, I made my way to The Villages. It’s a massive retirement community, like a cruise ship that goes nowhere, with a ton of old people crammed in next to one another. There was that old article about the STD outbreak there that maybe got blown out of proportion, but it also seems entirely possible given the setup. Also, isn’t it nice, in this economy, to be in an area like this with so many old people, knowing that if need be, you could rob at least a hundred people… leisurely?

While I was there, I visited my friends in the Nephilim Death Squad and did their podcast. We talked about robots and psyops and religion. They broadcast out of the back of Standard Coffee in The Villages. What’s bizarre is that the last time I came down to see these guys, it was to host their event called Brohemian Grove. They put me up in a hotel and I decided to take a long walk one morning before the event. I walked for about an hour until I found a parking lot that I made my way into and saw that there was a coffee shop there. This was before they had their podcast there. I spent an hour in the coffee shop writing jokes for that night. Then they came across the place, became friends with the owner, and now I’m back here again.

I met the owner, Matt Hepner, who’s also the host of Straight Bible. I had a great discussion with him. He invited me to see his farm where he has a few acres just outside The Villages. He has an amazing Seminole pumpkin patch. Seminole pumpkins are small, round, and striped, with a sweet, nutty flavor. And then he has all these banana trees. Banana trees aren’t actually trees, they’re giant herbs with thick, fleshy stalks and enormous, paddle-shaped leaves that can grow up to nine feet long. They grow in seasonal cycles, shooting up new stalks each year that fruit once and then die back. We ate leaves and berries right from the garden as we walked through and I carried a giant pumpkin that Matt pulled out of the ground. And there are banana spiders with giant webs stretching from banana tree to banana tree. Banana spiders, AKA golden silk orb-weavers, are huge, with leg spans that can reach five inches across, and they’re known for their strong, golden-yellow webs. The cobwebs are massive, intricate structures that glisten in the sunlight. They eat insects, which makes them good for the farm as natural pest control.

Driving north on the Turnpike out of Florida, a giant garbage bag flew out of the truck in front of me and almost took out my windshield. Thank God I learned to drive by playing Mario Kart. Then an eighteen-wheeler nearly finished the job, so I got off at the next exit and took the long way home through Virginia, through some old towns that were more or less still intact. Fields and byways, mountains and valleys, bike gangs, stone foundations of Revolutionary homes, a perimeter of American flags around the old cemetery—some of them celebrating the 250th birthday of America—clouds scraping the tops of silos, high school football teams practicing, weathervanes, orchards, lumberyards, willow trees, battlefields, sunflowers staring at the sun, tombs of the unknown soldiers, and drive-in theaters. The bowling alley and the roller rink. Gas pumps that still don’t take credit cards. The propane salesman next to the Burger King next to the Revolutionary War cannon next to the trailer park next to the field with the burn pit. Water towers watching over the small towns, the churchyards, the tire swing on an apple tree. Sunday services under a bright blue sky. The old trees that have been leaning toward the light for ages. Generationally long lines at the ice cream stands. The old Econo Lodges by the lake with pontoons. The corn about a month from harvest. The little yellow leaves of the tulip poplars falling to the ground.

These old towns feel like déjà vu—the feeling of “Have I been here before?”

Driving through the south, watching the horses graze and the big green tractors holding up Main Street, reminds me why I like finding the folk and country radio stations on these drives, the old artists like Waylon, Hank, and Cash—and the new artists like Sierra Ferrell, Charlie Crockett and Benjamin Todd.

At one point the Virginia byway rises at the top of the hill and I can see the highway in the distance. For a brief moment, in the distance, I can see strip malls, futuristic gas stations, and car dealerships—and it immediately disappears from view as I get to the other side of the hill. The spell of nostalgia is broken when I see a Cybertruck drive past a plantation in Middletown. Then I see a hundred Dollar Generals, one after another, as if they’re an invasive weed.

The towns and cities we knew might disappear, or mutate beyond recognition, but at least the stories remain. It’s like living with ghosts.

*

A day ago, before I left Florida, I drove to Miami to see my ninety-year-old Aunt Gloria. She is my late grandmother’s sister, which makes her my great aunt. Gloria always liked that a compliment was baked into the term.

I hadn’t seen her in many years. When she answered the door, it was like seeing my grandma—same coiffed, silvery-golden hair and unreasonably white skin for someone who lives in the Sunshine State—the same complexion as Bram Stoker’s Dracula. They don’t go outside. She stays in her refrigerator apartment. We had a good time talking, catching up, showing her pictures of my kids. She has an aide now to help her get around during the day. She can no longer walk like she used to. I remember her days of loving to dance and bringing bottles of bubbles to me and my sisters. Since I drove down, she said she’d like me to have something—a painting. It was a painting she saw on a cruise ship. She used to work for Royal Caribbean, and she was a notary. She would marry people on the ships, but they’d have to wait until they were back to shore because you’re not allowed to get married out at sea. It’s no-man’s-land out there, and the marriages wouldn’t be recognized by our country. So, over the years, she married multiple people in dock. One day, toward the end of her career, she saw a painting of a rowboat on one of the ships. She told her colleagues it was calming. She loved looking at it. She says it lowered her blood pressure. So they surprised her and gave her two. She wanted me to have one now. It was in bubble wrap behind her couch, the other was on the wall by her front door. I carried it into the parking lot to the car, and unfortunately it didn’t fit. When I told her it wouldn’t work, there was a moment of silence. I believe she was going to say, when you come down to clean out my house when I pass away, make sure to put it in your mother’s truck. It’s a weird, sad, mournful goodbye every time you say goodbye to someone you don’t know if you’ll see again. Which, to be sure, could be anybody. But when you’re saying goodbye to someone who lives far away and who’s ninety, it’s an implied final goodbye.

Gloria walked with me outside to say goodbye. She clutched her walker. Her friend from upstairs, who’s young in comparison at eighty, with a British accent, also a widow, followed behind us making sure she’d be okay when she walked back to her apartment. And she walked into the sunlight with me, out of the shade of her apartment complex. Her friend yelled, “Do not go into the sun.” She yelled back, “Why not?”

I looked at her and said, “He’s afraid you’re going to burst into flames.”

I’m currently on the road, so please forgive my audio/video quality. (I think this hotel’s internet is still running on dial-up.)

These “CASHED OUT” episodes with Tripoli will be for paying subscribers, though I imagine we will occasionally air some for everyone.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Tripoli about division psyops, SSRIs, the death penalty, human sacrifice, and the latest Alex Jones verdict news.

P.S. New stories will be posted this week for everyone. I’ve been traveling around Florida doing a ton of promo for the upcoming book release. I’ve picked pumpkins, saw my 90-year-old aunt, did five shows in three days, and saw a Marilyn Manson concert.

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Five thousand three hundred years ago, high in the jagged Ötztal Alps on the border between modern Italy and Austria, a man was murdered. We call him Ötzi. It was around 3300 BC. He was shot in the back with a flint-tipped arrow that severed a major artery near his shoulder. He bled out, collapsed face-down in the snow, and stayed there frozen solid, sealed in a glacier, forgotten and undisturbed while writing was invented, while Rome was built and destroyed, while Christ was born and crucified, while the Mongols conquered 9 million square miles, while the Crusades spread across Europe and Africa, while the World Wars were fought, and then, finally, Ötzi reemerged just after the first public display of the World Wide Web.

Here’s what happened: In September 1991, two hikers saw a leathery shoulder poking out of the ice at 10,500 feet. They thought they’d found a lost climber. What they had actually found was the oldest naturally mummified human in Europe. Today Ötzi rests in a climate-controlled cold cell at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy, kept at the temperature of the glacier that took him.

And this year, scientists decided to eat him. Well, more like, eat food grown from his corpse.

Microbiologist Mohamed Sarhan and his team at Eurac Research found four strains of cold-adapted yeast still alive on and inside Ötzi’s body after 5,300 years. The same body that allegedly told us he had arthritis in his spine, knees, and ankles, that he carried Lyme disease, that he was lactose intolerant. They extracted the yeast, placed it in petri dishes, brought it back to life, and fed it into a living sourdough starter. The lab filled with the warm, tangy smell of fresh bread. They sliced into it and ate it. They described it as “very, very good.”

This is the same kind of mindset driving Colossal Biosciences, the world’s leading de-extinction company—the business of using gene-editing to resurrect extinct species, or at least engineer living animals to stand in for them. They’ve already produced gene-edited “dire wolves.” They’re working on woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. They just announced twenty-six chicks hatched from artificial eggs as a step toward resurrecting the giant moa—a giant flightless bird.

While Colossal races to bring back extinct species, other scientists are pulling living organisms out of a 5,000-year-old corpse and baking them.

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And then, on July 1st of this year, a team at the University of Minnesota led by Kate Adamala and Aaron Engelhart announced they had built a cell from scratch. Not modified. Not cloned. Assembled. It was put together piece by piece out of non-living chemical ingredients, then switched on. They named it SpudCell. It feeds. It grows. It replicates its genome. It divides into daughter cells. It runs a complete life cycle using only components whose identities and quantities are fully known, and when they tweaked one gene to make it grow faster, the faster variant outcompeted the original within five generations. That’s not a machine running a program. That’s natural selection, in a dish, in something that was chemistry a moment ago.

Adamala said they had replicated in chemistry what used to be possible only in biology, and that it proves the most fundamental functions of life—growth and replication don’t require any mysterious magical spark.

If life needs no spark, then death takes nothing irreplaceable, and everything sacred becomes a supply chain problem.

Adamala insists SpudCell isn’t alive. But notice what’s happening on both ends at once: on one side, scientists reviving organisms out of a Copper Age murder victim; on the other, scientists assembling something that behaves like life out of ingredients that were never alive at all. Resurrection at one end, manufacture at the other. Death squeezed from both directions until there’s nothing left of it but an engineering deadline.

And the men funding this are not neutral parties. They want to live forever.

Technology such as Cryonics is back in the news because of the Epstein files, which revealed that Jeffrey Epstein wanted his head and his penis frozen after death. Peter Thiel, a major Colossal investor, has been signed up for cryonic preservation for years. Thiel is the man behind Palantir, the data-scraping and surveillance giant, and he’s funded everything from Orchid—a controversial embryo-screening company with eugenic overtones—to cloud seeding to a spread of radical life-extension projects. In a 2023 interview he admitted, “I don’t necessarily expect it to work, but I think it’s the sort of thing we’re supposed to try to do.” (And Thiel can’t be that bad, he only emailed Epstein a few thousand times…)

Another key Colossal backer, billionaire Tim Draper, is funding a startup developing “bodyoids”—headless, brainless human-shaped biological systems grown for organ harvesting and drug testing. Human bodies with the “person” carefully left out. Even Tom Brady is an investor. In 2025 he revealed that his dog Junie is a clone of his late dog Lua, who died in 2023, and said Colossal “gave my family a second chance with a clone of our beloved dog.” A second chance. As if grief were a subscription you could cancel.

None of this is new.

In the 1950s, Soviet scientist Vladimir Demikhov performed over twenty head transplants on dogs, grafting the head and front legs of one animal onto the neck of another. Both heads reacted independently—one lapping milk while the other barked. Some of these creatures survived nearly a month. A month of two consciousnesses stapled into one suffering body, held up as progress.

In the 1960s, Robert Ettinger, the father of cryonics, argued that legal death is not true death: if future technology could revive you, freezing was simply pressing pause. Cryptographer Ralph Merkle sharpened it into “information-theoretic death”—you’re not really dead until the information in your brain is irreversibly destroyed. You are not a soul. You are a file, and files can be recovered.

The mindset was stated plainly by Chinese scientist He Jiankui. After secretly creating the world’s first gene-edited babies, he was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison. His conclusion afterward was not remorse. It was: “Ethics is holding back scientific innovation and progress.”

That is the quiet motto of the entire industry.

Most recently, biohacker and multimillionaire Bryan Johnson says we may be the first generation that won’t die. In a tweet just yesterday he doubled down—“Some of us will live forever”—and announced he’d renamed his company to Immortals. He argues life expectancy will soon outpace the rate of aging, so natural death stops being the expected ending. He points to biology’s existing reset buttons: embryos starting the clock at zero, the immortal jellyfish reverting its adult cells to an earlier stage and beginning again. And he says AI is now supercharging our ability to crack biology’s hardest problems. (Is it strange to anyone else that Johnson, presently, looks like Ötzi, presently?)

Sam Altman has chased it too. In 2018 he paid a ten-thousand-dollar deposit to Nectome, a startup proposing to chemically preserve the brain by turning it into glass so it could later be scanned and uploaded—a procedure that is one hundred percent fatal. You must die correctly in order to qualify for not dying. Ray Kurzweil is running the softer version on his father, who died in 1970, collecting his writings, letters, and records to one day assemble a digital reconstruction of him. A father rebuilt from paperwork.

From bread baked with five-thousand-year-old yeast, to cells built from scratch, to cloned pets and glassed brains, the message never changes: death is no longer a boundary. It’s an obstacle.

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Once you start redefining death, you inevitably start redefining life.

If a cell built from chemicals counts as life, and a frozen head counts as not-death, and a digital reconstruction counts as a person, then the words stop meaning anything. And when the words stop meaning anything, the people who control the definitions control who counts as alive, who counts as dead, and who counts as worth bringing back.

Polymarket is letting people bet on whether humanity cracks radical life extension in our lifetime. Musk has said he wants a pet miniature woolly mammoth, calling it really cool and pretty epic. There’s talk of artificial womb factories—so… sorry, moms.

There isn’t much of a distinction anymore between science fiction and reality now that the richest men on the planet are funding these radical technologies.

And underneath all of it sits something darker than ambition. The people working hardest to defeat death appear to hate life as it actually is—finite, embodied, fragile and painfully beautiful. And to hate that is, in the end, to hate humanity itself. Death is the one experience that belongs to every single person. You can’t purchase a ticket out of it. We can delay it, sure. We can improve the years we get, blend the best of Eastern and Western medicine, find what works for our own bodies. But there is no beating death.

They cannot accept that. They cannot accept being subject to the same ending as the rest of us. So they pay to attempt to ascend it. They want to be both the resurrector and the resurrected. They want to manufacture heaven on earth and stay here forever.

And a heaven you have to build yourself, behind a wall, with someone else’s body or caged inside a computer—that isn’t heaven at all.

The Book of Genesis opens in Eden with abundant life, and it closes with Joseph, the leader who saved Egypt from famine, lying dead in a coffin. That is the nature of life on Earth, whether you think you can pay your way out of it or not.

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UPDATE:

I am no longer employed at Timcast.

I will continue to cover the stories that matter to me. If you’d like to support my work, the best ways are:

• Subscribe here to my Substack (free or paid subscriptions are a big help)
• Or send a one-time donation via Venmo (my username is ShaneCashman)

Your support directly funds the reporting, the travel, the time, and my family. I’m extremely grateful for every person who can help. Thank you.

By now you’ve probably seen the video of the machine ripping the spines off books and feeding the pages into large language models. It might have reminded you of what Sam Altman said a decade ago—before ChatGPT, before most people had ever typed a sentence into an LLM: that AI would “probably most likely lead to the end of the world…but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.”

Now Elon Musk is predicting AI will generate such abundance that scarcity itself disappears and money stops meaning much of anything. One man calls it doom, the other deliverance—and neither has ever said who gets paid in the years between here and either one.

Listen to these tech vampires long enough and the pattern shows itself: they take turns selling heaven and hell, and they’ve arranged to cash in whichever one arrives. The men warning loudest about the danger are the same ones building it, owning it, and setting its price.

At the same time Musk was describing his utopia, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, proposing that the public take a fifty percent ownership stake in the largest AI companies through a one-time tax paid in stock. Those shares would seed a sovereign wealth fund that Sanders estimates could reach seven trillion dollars and pay every American at least a thousand dollars a year.

In Musk’s telling, the interim sorts itself out—the companies grow so rich the problem dissolves on its own. Sanders rejects that. He describes a mechanism—tax, fund, dividend—for routing the gains to the public now, instead of waiting for a handful of companies to decide the terms later.

If intelligence really is about to become essentially free, the question is who gets paid while the old economy still matters?

Large language models don’t create knowledge out of thin air. They are trained on the collective output of humanity—every book, article, tweet, forum post, and line of code ever posted online, fed into the machines. That corpus is the one input these labs cannot buy off a shelf or conjure in a data center: compute is for sale, capital is for sale, but the accumulated record of human thought exists exactly once—and it is ours. Our thoughts are the greatest currency these companies possess. Yet the people who produced that currency receive nothing, while a handful of CEOs become astronomically wealthy—and those same companies openly predict they will soon put millions of us out of work. Musk has said advanced AI will do almost any job better and cheaper than humans. Altman has warned that entire job categories will be “totally, totally gone.” That end-of-the-world line he offered a decade ago wasn’t hyperbole for a conference stage—it reads now less like a warning than a business plan the industry has spent the years since executing. They are telling us, plainly, that we may have to re-evaluate humanity’s social contract. The apocalypse is priced in, and so is the upside. You and I are written into neither.

Betting markets have spent 2026 pricing AI-driven layoffs as not merely likely but climbing, while a Duke–Federal Reserve survey of more than seven hundred fifty chief financial officers projected roughly half a million AI-attributed American job cuts this year—about nine times the prior year’s total. The displacement the executives describe in interviews is the same displacement traders are now staking real money on. Thank goodness—at least we can bet on the end of the labor force.

The New York Times is suing OpenAI over training on its articles. Authors reached a record $1.5 billion settlement with Anthropic last year, but that money was for pirated books. A federal judge drew the distinction himself: scanning books the company had legally bought was ruled fair use, while training on pirated copies was not. To stay on the legal side of that line, some firms, as I previously stated, are now bulk-buying rare and pre-2022 books, slicing off the spines for high-speed scanning, and destroying the physical originals once they’ve been digitized—a process detailed by 404 Media and confirmed in court filings covered by Ars Technica. If the pending cases side with creators, the bill for what was taken could still run into the tens of billions.

We are asked to consent to almost nothing else this consequential without a signature. An American can decide what becomes of their own organs after death—opt in, opt out, on the record. Yet no one was ever handed a box to check before their thoughts, words, and creative output were fed into Silicon Valley’s robot brains. We govern the disposition of the body and surrender the output of the mind by default.

Technically, every internet user on the planet should share in the returns, since everyone who posts, writes, or codes is teaching these machines. But starting with American citizens is both practical and politically necessary.

The Sanders bill would send that dividend—at least a thousand dollars a year—directly to American households. A thousand dollars won’t offset a career erased by automation, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But it isn’t meant to be the finish line. It’s the first working mechanism for routing AI’s gains back to the people who generated them, and by design it grows as the fund grows.

Why did Sanders choose half and not a token five or ten percent? Because the point isn’t a symbolic slice of the profits—it should give the public a so-called seat at the table. A controlling-but-shared stake gives the public voting power over how these companies behave, not just a check in the mail. That is also what makes the number sound radical, and what makes critics reach for the word socialism.

But it is public ownership of equity, not state control of production. The fund would hold shares and distribute dividends; it would not dictate what the companies make or how they run. Norway’s oil fund and Alaska’s Permanent Fund are the closest precedents, yet both rest on geography—resources under the ground or under your feet. AI wealth comes from something more personal: the contents of our minds. Nothing like it has existed before.

The idea is also less fringe than it sounds. OpenAI has floated a public wealth fund—suggesting they know they’re mercilessly feeding off of us. Anthropic has suggested national equity stakes. Even Musk has endorsed “universal high income” as the answer to AI-driven unemployment—though, tellingly, without ever naming a funder. And in New York, Assembly member Alex Bores has proposed an AI dividend of his own, funded partly by government equity stakes in AI companies—the same lever Sanders is pulling, arrived at independently. Bores is also a congressional candidate, which is why AI super PACs are pouring money into defeating him. Sit with that: the man proposing to share AI’s wealth is being buried under spending by the very people who would have to share it.

None of this is free of real problems. The hardest is constitutional: forcing a fifty percent equity transfer invites a Fifth Amendment takings challenge, and a serious reader assumes the whole thing dies in court. It’s a real risk—but the government already compels payment in kind and already values private firms it doesn’t own, for taxes, estates, and bankruptcy. The mechanism is novel; the legal building blocks are not. Taking half the equity could also chill investment, though the same Norway and Alaska funds kept attracting capital despite taking large cuts. And the payout could prove premature: even sympathetic analysts at Forbes warn that many frontier AI firms aren’t yet profitable, and distributing a fixed share of a fund’s paper value could force it to sell assets in a downturn. That’s an argument for pegging dividends to real returns, not against building the fund at all.

The sharper objections are about power. We should not hand any more control to Washington. But the bill routes that control through an Independent Commission for Democratic AI—seven bipartisan members nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate—using the public’s voting shares to block decisions that harm Americans. Set that against the reality it would replace. In the first half of this year, eleven of the largest tech, social media, and AI companies and their trade groups spent forty-one million dollars lobbying Washington—and several of those executives now sit inside the administration’s own AI policy apparatus. They spent the money and got the seats. (See Stargate Project.) Public voting shares don’t tighten the grip a dozen oligarchs already hold over both the technology and the rules that govern it—they begin to loosen it. This is closer to trust-busting than to socialism—the same public-interest logic that broke up Standard Oil and AT&T.

Still, be honest about where those votes actually land. Under the bill as written, the shares sit in a federal trust and the ballots are cast by that seven-member commission—appointees, however bipartisan, and not you. The people get the check; the government gets the vote. Sanders’ bill doesn’t so much end the concentration of power as relocate it, from twelve tech billionaires to seven Washington appointees whose makeup turns over with every administration.

But that’s a design choice, not a law of physics—and fixing it is where the idea gets genuinely better for the people it’s named after. Give the vote to us. A growing number of index funds already let ordinary investors direct how their shares are voted—proof the machinery to poll millions of owners already exists at scale—and the fund could do the same, passing its voting power through to the citizens who own it: by direct ballot, by elected trustees, or by a public-interest mandate the commission is bound to follow rather than free to reinterpret. Ownership without a vote is just a rebate. Ownership with a vote is power. If the whole premise is that the public built this and deserves a say, then the public—not a panel in Washington—should be the one who says it.

And the race the skeptics keep invoking is no longer hypothetical—the government has already given it a name. In December the Pentagon, newly rebranded the Department of War, pushed generative AI out to some three million personnel through a new military-wide platform and branded the effort “America’s next Manifest Destiny,” its under secretary for research declaring there is “no prize for second place in the global race for AI dominance.” Manifest Destiny was the doctrine used to justify taking a continent that already belonged to someone else. Now it’s the banner over intelligence built, once again, from what already belongs to all of us—except this time the thing being annexed is the contents of our own minds, conscripted into a fighting force without so much as a receipt. If the public’s creativity is valuable enough to be declared a national destiny, it is valuable enough to be paid for.

Which brings us back to China. (Obviously all criticism of AI and data centers is totally funded by China too…) Take half the equity, the argument goes, and American firms fall behind while Beijing races ahead. But if Chinese models are trained on the same global data—American creativity included—then the answer isn’t to let a handful of US firms keep the spoils untaxed; it’s to price that theft directly, through tariffs or sanctions on those who take without paying. Falling behind isn’t the cost of making AI pay its debts. Refusing to make it pay is.

Because the alternative is the one we’re already living. Without a mechanism to share the gains, AI will concentrate unimaginable wealth in a few hands while displacing millions of the people whose work made it possible. The technology was built on public data and collective human creativity. It is only fair that the public shares in what it helped create.