137. How Russia Made Trump: MAGA Take The White House (Ep 6)

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30:32so david we are in the aftermath of that real shock of an election result in november 2016 when donald trump wins president obama has as we've heard been trying to avoid being seen to influence the election any way in any way and probably been like many people assuming that Hillary Clinton was going to win. He's still in office. I mean, he's got a problem now. Some people might say a problem partly of his own making for not calling out earlier. But now what do you do? I mean, the election is done. Donald Trump is elected. More statements, Gordon. More wagging of the stern statements, wagging of the finger at Moscow.

31:17I mean, up to this point, the only thing that the White House seems to have done is issue that intelligence community sort of the DNI, DHS statement on the 7th of October 2016, calling out the Russians for interfering in the election. That is essentially all that has happened. There is a final warning that's conveyed to the Kremlin on the 31st of October through a secure channel that's actually originally designed to prevent miscommunication between Washington and Moscow leading to a nuclear exchange. And it's known it's the red phone. It initially began as a teletype connection between the Pentagon and the Kremlin, but then became a fax machine.

32:01Now, I think it's finally encrypted email. I actually don't think it's a phone at all. And the late October message very carefully alludes to war. It notes that international law, including the law for conflict, applies to actions in cyberspace and that meddling in the election would represent serious interference in the fundamentals of U.S. society. Russia confirms that it got the message, but offers no immediate reply. Now, I don't know how much of this is just sort of wish casting, but Obama officials have since said that they think that those warnings a week before the election persuaded Putin to abandon any idea of actually carrying out a cyber offensive on election day.

32:45What say you to that? Well, I think it is worth saying that we talked previously about the fact the Russians had got into some of the things like voter databases in states and some of that electoral infrastructure. And it is true that they didn't do anything. There's no sign of them really interfering with the actual voting process or the tallying or the registration on the day. So it is possible the warning did have an impact on that, or it could be that the Russians didn't feel they needed to or didn't want to do that anyway. I mean, it's hard to know, I guess. I think probably impossible to know, but I think it is worth saying, and I think just as we're kind of getting close to the close of this series, that the Senate investigation back into 2016, the Mueller report, all of the journalistic work that's been done on this, there hasn't been anyone who has been able to say that the Russians manipulated vote counts or directly interfered in the actual electoral process.

33:48So that's important, is that that did not happen. And during 2016, that was a massive fear. So you could, whether that didn't happen because it was never part of the Russian plan to begin with, or never on the table, or because it was made clear to the Russians by the Obama administration that there would be massive consequences for doing that, impossible to say. Yeah, and I think that's right. I think there was a view which was if Hillary Clinton had won, it might have been more in Russia's interest to suggest that the voting counts had been interfered with and to start spreading information at least, maybe not to have interfered with it, actually the actual tallying, but to spread that.

34:34but they don't need to do that in the end. So again, there's different scenarios and possibilities here. But so much of it does seem to have been defined by the fact that everyone thought, probably the Russians as well, and probably a lot of people in the Trump campaign, that Hillary Clinton was going to win. And I think that factor, that people were just convinced that Trump wouldn't win, I think does help understand what otherwise seemed quite odd actions by a lot of the key players in this, don't you think? Absolutely. I mean, think about it from Obama's standpoint. He doesn't weigh in really on Russian interference publicly because he doesn't want to, he assumes Hillary will be elected.

35:13He doesn't want to taint the upcoming Clinton presidency. Obama also doesn't punish the Russians before the election because he assumes that once Hillary is elected, she'll be able to finish the job or be able to respond at the beginning of her administration in a more forceful way. And James Comey, we were talking about why does James Comey talk about the Hillary investigation, not the Trump investigation? Because he assumes, I think he's said this since, that Hillary is going to win and he doesn't want to be accused of having suppressed information about her ahead of the vote. So he talks openly about the fact there's an investigation into her, when normally as an FBI director, you wouldn't reveal that there was that kind of investigation.

35:57So again, it's the assumption that Hillary's going to win and Trump's going to lose, which drives behaviors, which actually end up helping the Russians. But of course, Hillary did not win. And we now have a new president-elect, Donald Trump, who's praised Putin and WikiLeaks throughout the campaign, encouraged them at one moment in late July to intervene on his behalf, and has publicly said during the campaign, I think in one of the debates, that nobody knows whether Russia intervened in the election. This kind of tough position that Barack Obama and his administration are in, it continues after the election.

36:38Because what do you do? I mean, there was an idea of, do you appoint if you're Obama, do you appoint a formal investigation? Obama nixes that. He's worried that's going to be too political. He launches another intelligence community review in December that'll be published before the transition. It'll be published in early January. And the CIA, other agencies uncover some information that influences their view that Trump was Putin's preferred candidate. And details of this begin to leak out, I think, to the Washington Post almost immediately. And this is important because although the public had known for months that Russia had intervened.

37:21Nobody knew that CIA believed that it was actually a formal intelligence assessment that the intervention had occurred, the Russian intervention had occurred on behalf of Trump, which makes anybody getting involved in this in the weeks and months after the elections even more politically toxic. I mean, that is the problem because then immediately Donald Trump sees this as being an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of his win in the election and therefore he this is really I think where you start to see the talk of the deep state really taking root with Donald Trump because he comes to view this as a concerted attempt to smear and undermine his legitimacy by using accusations that he'd only been elected by the Russians now we're going to deal with that and that question about the relationship in in the bonus miniseries.

38:11But it is important, these leaks and reports and these intelligence community assessments, which are starting to come out in December and January, in actually defining the whole of the Trump presidency, the first and the second Trump presidency, in terms of how it sees the deep state, how it sees Russia, all of these big questions. I think a lot of them revolve around what's happening in these few weeks. And in the meantime, I mean, the US intelligence community is going to come to this assessment, but what are they going to do to the Russians? I mean, it's pretty weak, isn't it? If you think someone's interfered in an election, I mean, what do they do?

38:47They expel a few GRU and FSB officials from the US? Yeah, I mean, I guess the final tally is there are sanctions, additional sanctions placed on the GRU, the FSB, and three Russian intelligence officials, four companies involved in cyber operations. The U.S. expels 35 Russian, I guess they believe are Russian intelligence officers. Of course, a lot of them are under, all of them are under diplomatic cover. There are Russian diplomatic compounds in New York and Maryland that get shuttered. And the Russians are told they have 24 hours to vacate those properties and 72 to get the expelled officials out of the US.

39:31So again, it's something, but it is pretty weak. Now, what is left unsaid here by the administration of the kind of public unveiling of these punishments is that it seems very likely that the president authorized the CIA, the NSA, and US Cyber Command to deploy malware and implants in critical Russian networks. It could be telecoms, it could be electricity, and that's a long-term game. That's not something you do overnight. To be honest, they should be doing that anyway. I kind of go, why were they not doing that anyway? That feels to me not either a punishment or a deterrence, to be honest, especially if it's secret.

40:20So yeah, I have to say it does, looking back, look slightly bizarre. But I guess they're about to be out of office. I mean, there's a limit to what they can do. Their time is up. Yeah. It comes down to what Trump is ultimately going to do about Russia and its interference in the 2016 election. And that, as they say, is a very different story. What we're not going to deal with today, Trump and how he deals with Russia after the election. I think we may come to that another time. But I guess we're left still with some pretty big questions, aren't we, David? Which is, what were the Russians trying to do with this active measure and how much did it succeed?

40:59Yeah, that's right. I think there's three big questions to look at. The first one is, did Putin get what he wanted? The second one is, what impact, if any, did the active measure have on the outcome of the election? And the third, I think, is what impact did it have on US institutions and the kind of broader society? And I think it's worth thinking about those three things separately. So let's start with the first one. Did Putin get what he wanted? Well, I think it is worth going back to the intelligence community assessment that comes out in January of 2017, after the election, which, and by the way, the findings from this are publicly available and have been declassified so people can read them.

41:41And I think we should probably provide a link to findings in the showdowns. But essentially, the major finding is that the intelligence community assesses that Putin ordered an influence campaign aimed at the U.S. presidential election, that its goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess that Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump, we have high confidence in these judgments. And so I think you could say in one word, yes, Putin got what he wanted.

42:23The fact that we're doing these episodes is a suggestion, an indication that Putin got what he wanted. Yeah. I think if you run through an undermined faith in the democratic process, because people view it as subject to interference denigrated Hillary Clinton yeah um made it harder for her to be elected yes although whether it swung the election we'll come back to but yes I think you can you can argue that it was an active measure which in that sense if that was its objective it worked even though as I think we were suggesting all the way through it perhaps was improvised it wasn't necessarily all coordinated as one great master plan there were bits of improvisation with some of the interactions with different officials, including in the Trump campaign.

43:09But I almost wonder if it succeeded more than they expected it to, because I don't think they expected Donald Trump to win. I think they just thought, let's just mess with this a bit. And we can, particularly I think, we can Hillary Clinton and undermine when she won her legitimacy by being able to kind of call into question what had happened. So I do think it succeeded perhaps in a way they didn't expect. There was not some kind of perfectly well thought out and strategized evil master plan. I think this whole thing was improvised in a lot of ways. I think Putin obviously decided and told his intelligence agencies early on that he wanted them to interfere in the election and to soak chaos in the US.

44:00The active measure was approved at the highest level. But as we've seen, none of his intelligence agencies really coordinated with one another. I think the Russians were responding as much to events in real time as maybe anybody else. And this was very, very improvised. So yes, Putin got what he wanted, but it wasn't a kind of well-thought-out evil master plan. I think the second question, though, Gord, this is maybe the big one. What impact did the active measure have on the outcome of the election? Now, first off, just to remind everyone, no evidence of direct tampering with election infrastructure.

44:40FBI forensic work that's been done in the years since has showed the Russians probed pretty much every state voting system, but there was no breakdown at the polling booths. There was no manipulation of vote counts. The CIA and the broader intelligence community, interestingly, and I think rightly so, haven't taken a position on this question, on the broader question of what impact the active measure had of the election. The intelligence community has not taken a stand on this. Now, it is worth reminding everyone how close this election was. Trump lost the popular vote. He won three important states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, respectively, he won Michigan by 10 ,704 votes.

45:28He won Pennsylvania by 44 ,292 votes, and he won Wisconsin by 22 ,748 votes. That is a roughly 78 ,000 vote swing, and Hillary wins the election. Yeah. So it's very close. Yes. The fact that it's incredibly close could lead you to go, well, the Russians swung the election. But you could also say when it's that close, lots of things can swing at election. I mean, you mentioned Wisconsin there. I mean, the fact is Hillary Clinton didn't bother campaigning in Wisconsin. I think she didn't go there. And there are a number of states where she didn't vote. So you could argue that decision, the decisions of the Hillary Clinton campaign of where to go and try and get out the vote, were the things that cost her the election because it was that close.

46:20So when you've got a really close election, you can come up with lots of things which potentially could have swung it. I think you can definitely make the case that James Comey's decision to publicly announce he was reinvestigating her emails could have swung the election when it's that close. So I think you can make the case that the GRU hack and leak or the social media had an impact and was one of the things which you could say made a difference. But it is always really hard. And I think if you look at the academic work as well, to understand why people make a decision to vote a particular way and what might have changed it and what made an impact.

46:56Did seeing one particular ad make them change their mind and vote a different way? Did a news report about Hillary Clinton's emails or John Podesta's emails make the difference? I think it's really, really hard to measure that. That is the problem. That is the problem. And I do think that the analogy, the overall analogy that comes to mind for me is if you look at a sporting match, right? I think of baseball because I'm an American. I know you won't think of baseball. I have no understanding of baseball, but go ahead. You could have a baseball game that is decided on the very last pitch, right?

47:31Whether that's a strike or it's a home run or whatever it is, like very last pitch. And there is a tendency in the way that you analyze these games and think about them to put a tremendous amount of weight on that thing that happened at the very end of the game. and and yet the result of the game comes down to the lineup of either team decisions that are made about who plays where and when uh at bats that happened much earlier in the game in high leverage situations there's been nine innings of play up to that point that you got to the very last pitch or at bat and to say that the game was won or lost because solely because of that at bat is just not right.

48:18Because it's the sum total of a whole bunch of other decisions and outcomes that happened beforehand. That's one of them. It gets a lot of coverage, but it's maybe not the most important. Now, I do think it's interesting, though, because we've talked in this series about basically two planks to the active measure. There's the social media trolling that Yevgeny Perkosian and the Internet Research Agency led. And then there's the Hackett leak, which was conducted by the GREO. And I think it's interesting if you try to split those two apart to kind of look at, well, what impact? You're right. It's one factor among many, but kind of was it a big, really big factor or was it potentially a smaller factor in the outcome?

49:02And there's a book called Cyber War, How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President, What We Don't, Can't, and Dudo, written by an academic named Kathleen Hall Jameson, who did an interesting analysis of really both of these planks, but she starts with the social media trolling. And she uses data scholarly work for the advertising industry to look at how exposure to messages affects decisions to buy things or to vote. And what she did was she looked at the total number of Americans exposed to the troll content and then kind of walked that down to the potential number of votes affected at the state level.

49:43And in the back of the envelope calculation that she did, even with those really large exposure numbers that we talked about in the last episode on what Edith Ghani-Pragosian was up to, really minor impact on the vote and even the really minor impact that she calculates on the vote is probably an overstatement. of its impact. So the troll content - The social media, the Facebook ads, I agree. The social media content probably had almost no impact. But when you look at the hack and leak content - Yeah, I agree. More interesting. ... that was supplied by the GRU, it is more interesting because it's massively covered in the press.

50:20It's searched by ordinary Americans in the campaign and election cycle. And there's an argument that some have made that say, well, all of this content that the Russians injected into the American bloodstream through their WikiLeaks, like it was just kind of jumped upon by the right wing kind of more pro-Trump propaganda bandwagon, right? That all of this stuff was really only being consumed inside Trump world. And that's really not true. As an example, from the 7th of October through the 20th of October, so really as we're getting into the kind of final days of the election. There were over 8 ,000 headlines that had the term WikiLeaks covered across over 300 outlets.

51:06There was an average of a piece and a half of content per outlet per day. Hashtag Podesta emails was trending on Twitter throughout October. And the stories were big. I mean, they were on the CBS Nightly News. They were on NPR Morning Edition. I mean, these are massive, particularly 10 years ago. I mean, at that point, NPR's Morning Edition was reaching like 15 million listeners. So there's a lot of what Kathleen Hall Jamieson in her book says, there's a lot of agenda setting and kind of framing that the hacked content is able to do in the American media. And I think what is interesting is like, if you look at the 538, which is a kind of polling, they aggregate polls, right?

51:50And do political and sports forecasting. And in their analysis, They looked and they said the percentage of Americans who found Hillary Clinton to be honest or trustworthy, it stayed at around 30 percent in polling throughout October and into November. right, which initially in the face of it would say, oh, this stuff didn't really have much of impact. But the race in late October, which is the period where that Podesta content in particular was regularly framing the news cycle and where you could see real spikes in interest by actual people in that content on Google Trends, in that period, the race is getting a lot tighter.

52:29And Clinton's lead over Trump, it peaks at seven percentage points in polls on the 17th of October. Again, that's according to the 538 forecast. By late October, it's down to 5.7 percentage points. Other polls that are conducted in that same period have the margin at like two to five points. So there's a massive decline even before, and I think this is the important piece though, even before Comey's statement, there's essentially a compression in the race is occurring. Now, I agree with you. But what causes that? I think I find it very, very, the correlation rather than causation to that and the WikiLeaks dumps.

53:06It's the GRU hack and the WikiLeaks content, unlike the social media disinformation control, I think was one of the factors that contributed to the outcome of the election. But how important or decisive it is, I think we just cannot know. No, I agree. In the end, the election is decided or comes down to a swing of 78 ,000 votes. And, you know, it reminds me of the Iran episodes we did where we talk about how do you actually predict these kind of revolutionary environments? And a lot of it gets down to these, you know, what's going on in the heads of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of individuals?

53:45It's not actually a knowable thing. And I agree with you, what you said earlier, which is there are a lot more important factors than the GRU hack and WikiLeaks, which were the character of the candidates, their stances, the charisma the candidates had and their strategies. So not, for example, Hillary not campaigning in Wisconsin is arguably a more important piece of this overall story than the GRU hack ever was. Yeah. And I agree with you that it's unknowable. I think actually the one bit I always found slightly more convincing was the idea, I think I raised it in a previous episode, was that the release of the DNC emails on the eve of the convention in which the DNC was biased against Bernie, I think may have turned off some of those Bernie supporters from supporting Hillary and suppressed some of the support that might have come with it there.

54:36You can see you can make a case for that. But I agree with you. Ultimately, it's just very difficult to disentangle. But I think it's true that it was a factor in a close election. So the third question that you raised was what impact, if any, did it have on US institutions and the broader society? Now, this, I think, is the most interesting one, isn't it? Because this is where the legacy of it is incredible. I mean, active measures were about discrediting, dividing, sowing disunity. Boy, does the 2016 election do that, and does the question of whether the Russians swung the election or not do that?

55:17It's a second order effect in a way. It's not that their posts on Facebook, you know, supporting or opposing Black Lives Matter or whatever other issue actually divide society. It's the question of, did the Russians interfere in the US election? Does that delegitimize Donald Trump's election? What does it mean for that? All of that is enormous, I think. it's interesting to look at the impact that this whole story had on the intelligence community in particular, right? Because the intelligence community throughout the story was sort of forced to make analytic calls on the active measure itself.

55:56And because the active measure was political in nature, and it involved collaboration, even in an indirect way, with the U.S. political system and people in it. It made the analytic calls that the agency and other members of the intelligence community had to make inherently political or at least increased the possibility that they would be politicized or viewed as political in nature. I think Senator Mitch McConnell's reaction to the briefing from John Brennan is a great example of that, where it's being filtered through this intensely political lens. And it became impossible as a result to assess what was happening without being perceived as weighing in favor of one candidate over the other.

56:42And because the CIA and the intelligence community more broadly are set up to collect on and to analyze the actions of foreign adversaries, and in this case, because a foreign adversary had a clear preference for one of the candidates, Trump, it meant that in effect The CIA couldn't do its job without appearing to favor Hillary Clinton. And what that has done, and there has also been a wave of either misguided or totally disingenuous disinformation that has persisted since that has attempted to kind of create a picture that the CIA actually did weigh in, in favor of Hillary Clinton to diminish Trump.

57:24But what all this has done is it's the active measure in a lot of ways has fueled and created a very conspiratorial partisan view of the intelligence community. And in a lot of ways has kind of created the modern like deep state idea. It's eroded trust in the U.S. intelligence system. And weirdly, this is one of the weird effects of it, Gordon, is like for when I worked at the CIA, I would say that we were sort of bashed more by the left. Right. You look at the call on Iraq WMD, enhanced interrogation slash torture, like the criticism of the agency and a lot of the criticism of what the agency had been in the past really came from the American left.

58:13And what's so bizarre and topsy turvy about the world right now after this act of measure is that it's kind of flipped. And the CIA is critiqued much more by the kind of Trump right as being the deep state, as being advocates of Hillary Clinton. So it's actually made it a lot harder to understand what actually happened because a significant section of the electorate just doesn't believe the actual analysis that the intelligence community is doing. Yeah, that's right, because it's politicized intelligence in a completely new way, I think, for the US system. And at any time anyone wants to explore it, it immediately goes to that question of, are you questioning the legitimacy of the election?

59:02What's your agenda? You almost cannot get into this subject. I hope we've got into it without trying to be too partisan. But the risk is it immediately opens everything up to partisanship rather than an assessment of what the Russians might have been doing and trying to do and how successful they were and what their methods were. So I think it's one of the factors behind that polarization of American politics. But it's also changed the relationship with the intelligence community and with trust. I think it's also seeded that idea that you don't know who you can trust on social media. You don't know who's trying to manipulate you.

59:38You don't know what secret agendas are being pushed, whether it's in social media, whether it's in news stories, whether it's in the latest hack, whether this is a false flag. There's this whole world of mistrust about information and not just intelligence, but information and news, which I think is fed by 2016. There's deeper roots to it as well. People can go back to Iraq and WMD and people feeling like they were fed false information then. But I think 2016, in the questions of whether there was manipulation, just opens up the idea that there is not a neutral news or information space, but it's subject to interference by hostile states and actors who we don't always know about, or people claiming those are actors in order to discredit their opponents.

1:00:25All of that just muddies the water and creates some of the problems we've got these days. Fundamentally, if the goal, and we talked about there are a number of different goals that the Russians layer onto this as time goes on, but if fundamentally the goal is to sow chaos inside your adversary, what better way to do that than to make it impossible to know what's true and to feed that? And I think that that is maybe one of the most lasting impacts of this, is that it has contributed to a general assault on truth and our ability as citizens to understand what's true and what's not, truly. And I think that is perhaps the most profound impact of this Russian active measure from 2016.

1:01:13Yeah, that's right. Peter Pomerantsov wrote that great book about having worked in Russian media in the 1990s called Nothing is True and Everything is Possible. And it was about a kind of world out of which Pregosian came, in which you could just make stuff up and get away with it because everyone had a kind of fragmented and unsteady view of truth. And you feel like that Russian worldview of the 1990s has increasingly been exported into the US and then to the West more broadly, including the UK. and part of that is the result of Russian active measures and part of it is a kind of weird confluence of circumstances which occurred in that 2016 election.

1:01:53So whether or not it swung the election, there were bigger things which it certainly did this Russian active measure. It is extraordinary, I think, to look at it and its legacy, isn't it? It is. And I think there's an interesting postscript, Aldous Gordon, and I think maybe we close with this. Russia in 2024 intervened again in the presidential election. The Russians conducted at least two separate information campaigns, mostly spreading a lot of fabricated videos online. And there was a covert effort organized by the state television network RT and Russian intelligence to funnel at least$10 billion to prominent American political influencers.

1:02:35and influencers, of course, have said since that they had no idea the source of the bunny was Russia. Exactly. And I think the reality is Russian active measures continue. And as that story reveals is they've just changed their methods. They'll keep changing their methods and do different things. They won't do the same thing as last time. Let's not even get onto Alistair Campbell's favorite topic, which is what the Russians might have done or not done in the Brexit referendum. That's like a whole other story. No, the last two minutes of our serious, you bring up Brexit. Brexit. It's time to bring up Brexit.

1:03:07But no, I think that is the point. They've messed with our minds. And I think that is a slightly depressing way to end this series, which has given us a view of a Russian active measure. But a reminder that there's more for club members. We're running our own active measure, Gordon. Our own active measures. Spreading the truth rather than lies. The truth where we're going to dive deep into the trump campaign's relationship with russia through 2016 and telling that story in fascinating detail which is a real counterpart to the story we've been following on this podcast so do sign up uh to the declassified club at the rest is classified.com to listen to that but otherwise david we will hopefully see you next time we'll see you next time

1:03:58hello it's william drimple again from empire here is a clip from our recent six-part series on mazi dong the greatly forward was supposed to be on its face a kind of highly rationalized bureaucratic system of working out what china could produce and then you know working upwards so that you would produce you know enough food for everyone to uh to eat and crops that could then be exported to increase China's GDP and everything would be great. But basically, because all the figures are being fiddled by officials who are too terrified to give the real information in case they get arrested or, you know, kind of fired from their jobs, they pass on statistics upwards saying, yes, it's all going great.

1:04:33And we're kind of producing huge amounts of grain and products and up, you know, in the cities. And then, you know, beyond that to Beijing, the guys at the top are saying, oh, well, this is great. Well, in that case, we can export lots to the Soviet Union. So you have the kind of obscenity of out in the countryside, there isn't enough food for people to eat, while the grain is being seized and exported from the country to bring in money for the state. This is very much a rural phenomenon. And that's significant because, of course, shortly before this, the system which still exists today was started up in China as a Soviet-style internal passport system.

1:05:04It's called the hukou, or household registration scheme. And it basically means that you can't just simply wander around wherever you want in China. You have to have internal permission. So people in the cities were no longer really interacting that much with the countryside. They were kind of almost separated off. And while people in the cities, you know, found there was a certain amount of deprivation, the devastation was really out in the countryside, where essentially it turned into mass starvation. In 1959, 1960, 61, it became clear in the countryside there simply wasn't enough food to go around.

1:05:33But when the news came through to the top leadership, including Mao, he basically chose to ignore it. He didn't exactly deny it, but he basically said, well, you know, we need to keep going. And he said something like, if things are not going so well, then let's just not say anything about it and keep going. And that led to one of the great confrontations of that period, which is the conference, Communist Party top-level conference held at Lushan. We hope you enjoyed that clip. To listen to the full series, search Empire World History wherever you get your podcasts.

1:06:14and you can take the time pursuing your passions. Time once spent sorting and waiting, folding and queuing, now spent challenging and innovating and pushing your way to greatness. So pick up the Irish flute or those calligraphy pens or that daunting Beef Wellington recipe card and leave the laundry to us. Rinse. It's time to be great.