After Party with Emily Jashinsky - “Happy Hour”: Tech Doom Spiral, Trump vs Venezuela, Why Awards Matter, PLUS Christmas Plans: Emily Answers YOUR Questions

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

On the latest edition of “Happy Hour,” Emily answers some serious questions about major events in the news right now.  Among them, her position on military strikes, the war on drugs, Venezuela, and narcoterrorism. She also dives into Time Magazine naming the architects of AI as 2025 “Person of the Year” and the future of the magazine industry. Emily also answers a great question on the importance of ‘prestige’ awards in the age of AI, plus the use of biometrics. She rounds out this episode talking about her plans for Christmas break and what she loves to do.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Well, hello, everyone. We're back with another edition of Happy Hour, which is, of course, itself, another edition of After Party. It's the special edition of the show that we do just on podcast feeds every Friday, launch it around Happy Hour Time, so you can have some weekend listening. And it's where I get to talk to all of you via the messages you send in to me at Emily at Devil Make Hair Media. And of course, over on the after-party, Emily, Instagram, always love looking at all of your messages.

I am also pre-recording a happy hour episode for Christmas week and for New Year's week. So I'm going to be parsing out the batch of emails and Instagram questions that I have to go through today. Normally, I would just do them all in one big happy hour episode, but I'm going to do three episodes here. So we'll have a little bit of a spread. So if you sent in a question this week, you might see it answered a couple of weeks from now. Thank you, though, for sending all these questions in. I answer just about every email. So I really, really am grateful to everybody for listening and to everyone for being in communication with me.

It's so much fun. Let's start with this one from Shannon. Now, as a reminder, I do always read these emails live. I kind of mark them in my inbox as something that's for happy hour. and then don't think about them so that it's a little bit more fun for all of us, because if I was vetting these and screening these,

it might honestly not be quite as fun. Maybe I would have thought about the answer too much or been like, oh, maybe I don't actually want to answer that question. But this way, you get it. It's a little bit like reality TV, and you know I love reality TV. So this is how we're going to do it. Shannon says,

the inane pick by Time Magazine of AI as 2025 person of the year is yet another example of why mainstream media channels are dead slash dying slash increasingly irrelevant. Ooh, this is a good question. Is there a magazine readily available at the airport news stop that you find worth your time? And if so, which ones? I feel like there's a huge market gap in magazines catering to conservative or right-leading women with every fashion mag, beauty mag, even home and gardening publications leaving hard left. I hate giving my hard-earned money to organizations that consider me in the basket of deplorable women, but admittedly, I enjoy

fashion, home decor, and beauty tips. Do you think someone should try to fill this market void, or do you think magazines are overall going the way of dinosaurs? This is a great question for a lot of reasons. First of all, on the point about the direction or the future of the magazine just as a print product, I sort of feel about magazines how I feel about movie theaters, which is that they may be increasingly put out of, let's say, practical mass use by technology, meaning, or by like technology that raises the question of convenience or that confronts the question of convenience. So that is to say, you have really big TV screens in people's homes now with great home theater systems. This is all compared, of course, the little box

that you had in your corner years ago compared with a giant movie screen. And movie theaters, of course, feel so much less glamorous, dare I say, than they used to, although I still think there's something very fun. I think we all do about going to a movie when it's the right movie. And with a magazine, you know, take National Review, for instance, just about everything that National Review needs to disseminate in magazine form. You know, it was always a little different than a newspaper, right? So you had this product that looked like it was almost bound up book style, and it printed a lot of essays. magazines weren't really for breaking news. They were for longer form content, pleasurable reading, beautiful illustrations, things that you just wouldn't do with newspapers. And so you can do much of that on the internet now. Not all of it, but much of that on the internet now. You can get it out quicker. You can get it out cheaper. So yeah, I mean, it's obvious that like movie theaters, magazines have kind of been made redundant in a sense by technology, but ways that they haven't been made redundant. And this is a prediction that I've had for a while.

Like movie theaters, I think there's going to be a market for, not prestige, but kind of niche magazines that are really beautiful. So instead of like magazines of the future cutting costs more and more until, you know, that magazine that you get is still, that you still get is just flimsy and full of ads and borderline useless, I think what's actually going to happen is is the people that are still putting out magazines are. going to have them look more and more beautiful. I still get some magazines. I get, actually, I get New Criterion, I get Jacobin, and honestly, I read a lot of those publications online. But there's something about the hard copies that are so gorgeous. I just can't get rid of these subscriptions. And I think in the future, people who want a certain type of content slowed down, done beautifully. I think there will still be a market for magazines, but they won't be like the magazines that we remember. It bums me out so much about like the New Yorker because

to Shannon's point, it's crazy. I used to have a New Yorker subscription because, you know, as a person who was inundated with screens, I would challenge myself to slow down by reading stuff in the New Yorker. And, you know, it's like just thinly substantiated screeds that are often completely misinformed and completely arrogant at the same time. Like, the arrogance to ignorance ratio is off the charts. And it's such a bummer because they still make it look good, you know? And even then, it doesn't look as good as it could. So I think it'll be, the trend will be fewer print editions, but they will look. look more beautiful and there will be fewer publications in general, but they will be kind of more

niche and they will be aimed at people who are looking for a way to kind of get off their phones of the internet. Crossword puzzle type things and all that good stuff, beautiful illustrations. So just to answer that first question, there are a couple of magazines that have tried to rival the women's magazines over the time, conservative ones, both online and in print. There's, of course, EV. There's a publication called The Conservatoire. So there are people who have tried to do it before. I don't know if the, because I think all of these, probably part of the problem with trying to rival the, let's say, liberal publications, even though they, of course, hilariously

consider themselves neutral publications. One of the reasons it's been hard to rival any of them is just because they've been in the process of dying out and, you know, responding poorly to some of these technical changes, technological changes themselves. and that's where, you know, I wonder, is there a better homes than garden? I've never really read any of these magazines, to be honest, but I can see where, you know, if I had been born 10, 20 years earlier, I would have loved them. The, those types of, those types of things, can someone ever do a kind of conservative version of them?

I think the better future would be for somebody who's doing a better homes and gardens or Cosmo or whatever it is just to do a better version of them, if that makes sense. So, like, not doing something that's polluted by politics or, you know, blinded by class biases because the people who are doing it live in, you know, Manhattan and D.C. and L.A. and are disproportionately marketing their product to people who live outside of those bubbles. You know, if you just have those blind spots, your product's probably not going to be very good. It's probably going to actually be annoying and irrelevant to the people you're trying to. to sell it to. So maybe the answer is not necessarily to do a conservative version of those, but to just do a better version of those, if that makes sense. Here's an interesting question from Aaron. Aaron says, big fan of the show,

Sager said something today. This was about a week ago as I'm recording on Thursday. That really hit with me. Basically, he said Charlie Kirk is the only voice from the right that would resonate and possibly stop this ridiculous theater BS with Venezuela. Not to tie you with Megan, who I'm sure has taken a position on this. What are your thoughts? As a conservative, I'm deeply disappointed in Heggseth and the Trump position on this and the complete lemming behavior by Congress. We need strong voices on this and your opinion is important.

Same with M.K. You are a great voice on BP and I'm not trying to be a jackass, but people listen to you. Where do you stand on this possible war with Venezuela? And did we provoke it with this BS? tanker nonsense. I understand if you can't directly answer, but there's a lot of conservatives who would listen, just saying, and I really respect your opinion and voice. It's a breath of fresh air. Thank you, Aaron. Happy to answer this. No problem at all. I actually probably disagree with Megan on this. I did a sort of long monologue on Wednesday's after party on Venezuela, because I'm obviously

pretty upset about it, too, like Aaron. Aaron and I probably do agree on this. I think that point about Charlie is, it almost gave me chills reading it, because Charlie obviously famously lobbied Trump and the White House against that Iran strike back in June. And listen, my position on the Iran strike, I am so happy to be proven wrong any time. Like I will gladly say, I am happy to be proven wrong and I will be proven wrong. hopefully it happens just rarely. And I'm, you know, right more than I'm wrong. But I always try to make, I always, well, first of all, I don't try to make predictions. But if I do, I try to think about things and speak and frame things in a sense that like this is possible. And my position on the Iran strikes, it's still that the likelihood of escalation outweighed the benefit of the strike. Maybe I am wrong. But it's looking like there's intelligence that already suggests Iran is significantly reconstituting the nuclear program and will be back, not that far in the future. On top of that, there was a real risk. I mean, when you're playing nuclear chicken,

I just think we've gotten way too comfortable with it because of the Cold War. We've gotten way too comfortable with playing nuclear chicken because what like a hundred years of human history not even not even a century of human history it's been okay that is nothing in the scope of human history there's nothing and so i feel like we're a little bit conditioned to be too comfortable with playing nuclear chicken and i always um everyone takes these everyone takes these odds seriously the odds of escalation seriously but i'm in dc and i'm telling you the bravado i was here before the Iran strikes, I found to be not just distasteful, but dangerous. And I think we are lucky and blessed that there wasn't significant retaliation after that strike. And I hope that

continues to be the case. So about Venezuela, again, I did kind of a deep dive on Wednesday into this. So if folks haven't heard that, you can find it on Wednesday's episode. It was the last segment that I did after Tom Bevin, after we relieved Tom Bevin and let him go get some cold medicine because he was coming down with such a cough. The entire buildup is disappointing because they're intentionally invoking the weapons of mass destruction, which is cynical, and I think it's dishonest in the case of cocaine being trafficked from Venezuela. Anyone who's referring to that as a weapon of mass destruction And Trump declared fentanyl to be a weapon of mass destruction. Maybe what he's doing is laying the groundwork for some type of conflict in like Sinaloa or territory in Mexico, which I think is more defensible.

I might still disagree with it, depending on how we have that conversation when it starts looking like. But it's at least more defensible. And so all that is to say, in the case of cocaine coming from Venezuela, there's about 20,000 cocaine deaths. every year according to the CDC. That is a huge number. It's a huge number. Even if it's not as high as the number of fentanyl deaths, it's still a huge number. The estimates say that about five to 10 percent of that comes from Venezuela. So why not a war on Colombia? Why then did Trump just pardon on drug trafficking charges, the former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez? None of it really makes sense.

The logic does not add up. And I do not appreciate being lied to as the pretext for regime change. Susie Wiles and that Vanity Fair article told the journalist that Trump is striking the boats until Maduro cries uncle. We've heard Maria Alvara Salsar and others basically come out and say it's about regime change. I think that's what the president should tell us. I think that's what the president should tell Congress. I think they should show their work on how the intelligence suggests they are sure that these boats are trafficking cocaine to the United States. I think they should try the survivors in court, which has not yet happened.

And that makes me seriously doubt the intelligence. And all of this adds up to an administration that promised to drain the swamp and end forever wars, potentially right now, reusing the Iraq-Afghanistan playbook, particularly the Iraq playbook, where Dick Cheney and others were in the media telling us about the intelligence, trust the intelligence, the intelligence says Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, he's bought those tubes, and all of that. And I think that's a mistake. I think you're, it does the, If, I mean, I just think the idea is laughable on its face that a single American life is worth regime change in Venezuela.

And I think if it was true that the potential sacrifice of American lives in Caracas was worth it, I think the president would have campaigned on that. And he didn't. So that's why I think we're getting these alternate justifications about cocaine and drugs and narco-terrorism. And that makes me really concern, and I do not like it. And this is coming again from someone who, you know, I literally went to northern Mexico during the Biden border crisis. I made a whole documentary with my colleague at the time John Daniel Davidson called

Cartel Country. You know, not like I'm turning a blind eye to drug trafficking and the scourge, the ravages of fentanyl. I just have a queasy feeling about what's happened so far. So thank you so much for the question. Aaron, I think it is a good one. I think it's a great one. And respect everyone who disagrees because this is so emotional.

I mean, we have those horrible stories in our hearts that we carry with us of people who overdose. And I get it. I totally get it. And by the way, the other point that I made on Wednesday's after party is that the real story here, and again, I mean, they should constantly be explaining it like this. and they should be honest with the American people, is that we're seeing Venezuela, much like we saw Cuba, during the Cold War, or, you know, actually much like they saw Chile during the Cold War and any of these kind of proxy countries during the Cold War, which is that we do not want a hostile foreign power bent on as we see it world domination, like the Soviet Union or in this case China, to get a foothold in our hemisphere. China obviously has. Iran has in the case of Venezuela. And so what this is really about is total control, total hemispheric control. And that's a much better argument. I still think it's a difficult argument to make, given our history and how that playbook

has worked out. Again, as I said on Wednesday show, there's a Sandinista in power right now. The trajectory of these proxy battles in the long term has, I mean, you can argue that the entire conflict with Iran, not the entire, but the roots of our conflict. with Iran are because or actually stem from these types of reasons. And, you know, the paranoia has not, I don't think it's served us well. It's not irrational. I don't mean to say that the paranoia at all is irrational. That's, we live in a nuclear world and we have to take nuclear threat seriously and we don't, just as we didn't want the Soviet Union to have a foothold in Cuba.

We don't want China and Iran's power to grow to the point where they have a nuclear foothold in Cuba, for example, or Venezuela, and that allows it to grow throughout the hemisphere. A little domino theory there. Again, it's a better argument. It's still not one that I buy, but I wish that they would be honest about it. Anyway, rant over. Here's a question from Mary, a comment for Mary, actually. On, I think this is about the, yeah, so Mary says, I agree that all these awards have become an absolute joke to most people. However, they do, they do, they do, matter. They matter to the algorithms and Dems know this. They matter when you Google something. If a journalist has won a Pulitzer, they are considered an authoritative source. It matters for what

content gets pushed on us, award-winning author, etc. When the Biden administration was trying to set up their quote misinformation complex, this is how they cited authoritative sources. And it is happening now in the UK and Europe. This is going to matter even more in the age of AI. And Dems know it. Republicans need to have some answer to this. They would completely. lose the information war, Mary. So Mary, again, I just read this email for the first time, and I think, Mary, you just made a point that I hadn't even considered yet, which is the importance of, quote, prestige awards in the age of AI, meaning AI is trained, obviously, to sift to sort, sift the wheat from the chaff

when it's prowling the internet in response to our queries. and we want, of course, they're being programmed to give us what we want, which is the most reliable information possible. So, of course, they're being trained to take things that say Pulitzer or Beard winner, whatever it is, as seriously as possible, Golden Globe winner, which may be what Mary's talking about, because we talked with Maureen Callahan a couple weeks back on, last week, actually, on Megan's decision to not go for the Golden Globe, that she was potentially eligible, she was eligible as a top 25 podcast for a Golden Globe Award. So when AI is spitting out answers, is it going to be less likely to produce Megan

Kelly reporting and commentary if she doesn't have the Golden Globe Award? I think the answer to that is obviously yes, because garbage in garbage out, that's what this AI is. It's trained not to factor in the skepticism of conservatives or even, you know, lefty types of Matt Taibi about Pulitzer's, it's trained to take that seriously. I imagine. I mean, again, these algorithms, even their creators, lose track of what they're actually factoring in, and they're already kind of spinning out of their creator's control, which is horrifying and just happening in real time. Sorry, I sound like such a technology doomer today, but it's my job to be critical. And so that's what I'm supposed to do and skeptical. And that's how I choose to spend my time. And there's a lot of reasons to be skeptical.

Not that there aren't a lot of reasons that, you know, we will, not that there aren't a lot of ways in which we will be benefited by some of this. Now, the great Ryan Grimm and I did a debate a couple of weeks ago with Robbie Suave and Elizabeth Nolan Brown of reason. And it's on YouTube. So if you want to check it out, you can. Ryan and I won, I'm happy to say. But it would have been a great debate, even if we hadn't won, on whether big tech is doing more harm than good. And we had a lot of fun with it. So go ahead and you can find that on YouTube. I think Reason put it up as a podcast, too, if you want to hear us kind of work through this, flesh our thoughts out in real time. It was very interesting. And with AI, one of the things that, you know, puts it in the frightening category for me is that, Not only is the current wealth of information that this AI is being trained on going to be disproportionately culturally left, because that's what the last, like, what, 50 plus years of academia, Hollywood, and journalism have been, but also that they're fully losing control of their own algorithms. So that is a really interesting point, Mary. I genuinely so appreciate you making it because when, and this is another point that Mary makes,

think about the misinformation label being applied left and right during COVID, not left and right in a political sense, but willy-nilly. Think about that. Think about how media matters or whatever is still saying certain things, the SPLC, They're still saying certain things are white nationalism or hateful or whatever. Think about that and how it's going to change the answers, how it's already currently changing the answers.

You know, if it says Megan Kelly said X, Y, and Z during COVID, and she's gotten lumped into one of these disinformation lists or categories by a group that's considered prestigious, well, the AI is trained to say, oh, this is a prestigious group. it has this award, it has this person on its board. I'm going to use its information and not the information of this, you know, goofy conservative website, the Federalist, which of course I don't think is goofy. I worked there for like six years. So, but that's what the AI is going to be trained to recognize from the gatekeepers that it's trained on. So really, really, really good

point, Mary. Super, super interesting. All right. John says, we have lived in a Panopt-Con for decades, who says, I caught one of your segments last night regarding the UK-EU surveillance date. I would ask that you review the Snowden revelations as well as the abuses of FISA laws against Trump. We're already there. And yeah, totally, John. I could not agree more. So this was about the UK pledging to use biometrics.

If you didn't catch this segment, it was last Wednesday. And it was like a press release that I pulled out from the UK where the government was pledging, the home office was pledging, to up its use of biometrics. And if you go and look at how digital ID and biometrics have been pitched during the time of Starmer, really, by labor, I'm sure there's some, my British listeners are going to be like, Tories are doing it too.

I'm sure they are. But the government that's currently, in charge. Like, they are bragging about how they're using biometrics and digital ID and all of that to keep you safe from what literally the illegal migrants that they have lost track of. This is actually how they're pitching it. They're like, this can help with illegal immigration. And that is the craziest thing.

This is the segment that did. It was like, that is the craziest thing in the world. They are, over the last 10-plus years, flooding Western countries with migrants to the point where it's hard to actually know exactly who's in the country here in the U.S. We had a porous, a physically porous border. We had an asylum system that was so backlogged that we literally lost track of children, thousands of children. And on top of that, it's also the same thing in Western Europe. They have smaller countries. It's probably a bit easier to keep track of people. We have the sanctuary city phenomenon in the United States as well. But similarly, in Western Europe, you have people who come in. You're not always able to track it. And that is a scary situation. It would be ridiculous to say that wasn't a scary situation. It is plainly. It's scary. But the people didn't ask for it. Most people did not ask for that. And so you then have a situation where they force this security, versus freedom dynamic.

Now, every law is basically a trade-off. Every security law is basically a trade-off between security and freedom. It's not new. But that's how you end up in the Panopticon. And so, yes, if I said that we will be in a Panopticon, that is certainly me miss speaking, John. Good catch, because we do live in a Panopticon. It's degrees of severity, for sure.

And I think certainly if they are going to increase, not just in the U.K., but say it were to come here to the U.S., if they were going to increase biometric surveillance, I mean, if you live in New York, there's a Microsoft program being used in New York, cameras all over the city that are constantly capturing and analyzing biometrics. There's a lawsuit about it right now. So if that's going to expand, and then you're also going to have to show digital ID, maybe it's your fingerprint everywhere you go. I think that's an even worse panopticon or an even tighter or more restrictive panopticon. But anyway, great point, John. Yes, we have absolutely

lived in one for decades. No question about that. All right. I have been going on rather long today. Let's get to some Instagram questions. And as a reminder, again, if you sent a question in over the last week or so. You may hear it answered actually in the next couple of weeks. This is a question on Venezuela from the Instagram from Axel, it looks like, who said, should we be surprised by regime change in Venezuela after Trump's comments on 61023? 61023. I don't know what Donald Trump said on 61023, but I will say I'm not surprised by the Venezuela regime change. operation at all. You know, I actually have a, I'm predisposed to have very unfavorable opinions of politicians. I think that is the correct place for a journalist to be. I mean, it's one of the

reasons. You know, Ryan Grimm and I did an episode of breaking points, did two episodes of breaking points. We pre-recorded it before the holidays. One where I interviewed Ryan and one where Ryan interviews me. And I talked a little bit about how my first job out of college was in public relations at a a great conservative nonprofit called Young America's Foundation. And when you're in public relations, that means you are wearing the team jersey constantly. And I always wanted to be a writer, wanted to work in media. And one of the reasons that I want to do that, I've always wanted to do that, is that I just can't, I have a really hard time and have so many friends who work in politics and in the nonprofit space, of course. I'm still on the board of Young America's Foundation.

But when you're a spokesperson or public relations person, your job is to wear the jersey publicly all of the time. And I'm not a person that could do that because I'm one of those annoying people that always has questions. There's always some type of question nagging at me about this, that, and the other thing. And so that's why I like going into journalism. And I am, or that's why I like journalism and why I ended up going into journalism. And with Rubio, he is one of the politicians that I think more highly up than others. I think his conversion has been deeply rooted. I shouldn't say conversion. His conservative evolution has been deeply rooted in his Catholic faith. I think it has been very intellectual. I think he's done a lot of reading. He delivered

a speech at Catholic University probably in 2019, somewhere around there, 2018, that I commend it to people. It's worth a read, lest you think Marco Rubio is insincere. And so I think not only has his kind of economic evolution been sincere, I think his foreign policy, his His Cold War foreign policy continues to be sincere. I do not doubt his sincerity. I completely doubt the wisdom of the Cold War proxy war playbook. And so that's where I'm skeptical but not surprised. And I know that there are people in Trump world who are less hawkish and less interventionist who are in the administration.

And I think a lot of people thought that meant, you know, because Trump did. some interesting stuff, obviously, in his first term. And he's been very interesting on Ukraine. And by that, I mean kind of heterodox compared to what your typical, you know, 2014 Republican administration might have been. All that is to say, Trump is different. But the question of this hemisphere, I don't actually. think there has been that much of an evolution or even just a shift is probably a better way to put it more of a neutral term. I don't think there's been that much of a shift on the right when it comes to that. I mean, pretty much everyone is still a sanction hawk. Pretty much everyone

right now, except for, you know, as far as I can tell, like kind of podcasters is not on this bandwagon or is on this bandwagon. I'm sorry. And, you know, I think the way the administration is talking about it unless you go super, super deep, and like spend a lot of time doing your own research, which is like hard for normal people to do. You have to at a certain point. If you're not a journalist, you have to just say, I trust this person or that person. I can't do all of this research myself. I'm not, like I have a life to live. And so I think the Trump administration is presenting it to people in a way that sounds like we're for sure taking fully, like incontroverbally legal steps to blow up boats that we know are intentionally being directed by the government of

Venezuela to come to the United States and hurt Americans by forcing them to, not forcing, but allowing them or coercing them to overdose on drugs. And that is not, I think, an accurate picture. But I think that's the picture that the Trump administration is painting. So with Rubio, I think he has a more coherent argument. It's just one I disagree with, but I'm not surprised at all, honestly, to see it. Here's a question from FVR 07. Plans for Christmas Break.

I will be back in Wisconsin. I'm excited to go back to Wisconsin. We'll go up north. That's where my mom's from. This is my family is. We'll do a little trip up there, I'm sure. I am usually back. in D.C. by New Year's, so that'll probably be the case. I don't know about you. I'm a quiet New Year's

type of person. I really like, so when I was a kid, at a certain point, my parents started going every year to this wonderful New Year's party. It was always a great New Year's party, but I was so shy when I was in like, I don't know, middle school, early high school. I was so shy. I really started going on this party more in college because as a teenager, I was just painfully, introverted and shy. And I would stay home until my parents got home around like 11. I would stay home and just watch cozy movies. I remember Runaway Bride one year. That's one of my favorite movies, if not my absolute favorite movie. And so I would just get to be home alone, which if you're an introvert like me, it sounds amazing. And then I would watch, actually I would watch the Fox News New Year's

coverage, because it was always really, I don't know, I just found it to be very amusing. And in fact, I actually think I remember watching Megan on Fox News New Year's Eve coverage. And I'll just like, I would, you know, have my favorite pizza. I sound like such a loser right now, but I have some really wonderful memories being alone on New Year's Eve with like the snow falling outside and your favorite movies on. then watching all of the, I'll flip back with Dick Clark. I just love pop culture too. So for me, it's a chance to kind of absorb, think about pop culture from the year before. Anyway, it sounds like an absolute insane person. I'll save some of the rest of these questions for the happy hour that's going to go up Christmas week and New Year's Week. But since

this one was looking forward, I wanted to mention that. Just wanted to get to the holiday plans. you all have some fun holiday plans. Again, I just think the best thing, it's, it's, travel can be so stressful. I've never done like a tropical Christmas or ski Christmas. I do not ski. Thank goodness. I would be so bad at it. Grip a little cross-country skiing. I like cross-country skiing, but I haven't bought in a long time. It's, it's, I don't know. I haven't ever really done that. Maybe I would like it. I should probably not knock it until I try it. But there's just something so peaceful, especially when you're from a place where there's usually snow, though I don't think there's going to be snow this year, which it just hits me like a dagger

when there's not snow. Because growing up, there's always snow. Just, I'm sure you all feel the same if you're from one of those places. But yeah, Wisconsin, not looking like a white Christmas down in my part of the state, actually in most parts of the state, unfortunately. Maybe that'll change. Maybe that'll change. But there is something so peaceful about taking refuge from the cold with the simple pleasures of good food and your family. And that's how I like to do the holidays. So maybe you're somebody who does it big, go to Hawaii. And maybe I shouldn't knock that until I try it. But good music too, by the way, which of course is portable. You can have that in Hawaii too. And you can have good food. But I just think there's something so

so peaceful and pleasant at the holidays to be in a familiar place with familiar music, familiar people. familiar food, and in such a kind of simple, simple time. Because of course, if you're, if you're Christian, it's a spiritual time. It's a time when we force ourselves to stop and put Christ at the front of our mind, which of course, that should always be the case. But that's what these holidays are for, is forcing us to slow down, forcing us to read the Christmas story, forcing us to read the story of Jesus' birth, not forcing. You know, you don't have to drag me kicking and screaming. Do it gladly. But these are the times that we spend so much of our energy focused on remembering that. So I hope you all do have wonderful, wonderful Christmas plans, wonderful New Year's

plans, and safe travels. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you for a great second half the year. We launched, of course, after-party in June. So appreciate it. Appreciate all of you and make sure to stay tuned, even during the slow news weeks of Christmas and New Year's for another edition of Happy Hour. We have some special after-party pre-tapes that'll go out as well. But make sure you stay tuned because we will be back next week and the week after with another edition of Happy Hour. See you then, everyone. Thank you.