The Dispatch Podcast - Abundance About-Face | Roundtable

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

Sarah Isgur is joined by Megan McArdle, Jonah Goldberg, and Steve Hayes to discuss the rise of “Abundance Democrats” and Donald Trump's attack on judicial independence. The Agenda: —Chuck Schumer falls into the John Boehner trap —What are “Abundance Democrats”? —Libs discover supply-side matters —People don’t care about procedure —Did Vladimir Putin laugh at Trump? —Gaza ceasefire breakdown —NWYT: Sad beige homes The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and regular livestreams—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Jonah Goldberg, and Megan McArdle. Oh, and by the way, announcing new contributors at the dispatch, including the most famous mom writer ever in the history of the world. I like the household name and economics professor, Emily Oster. That's right.

It's crib sheet Emily Oster writing for The Dispatch. Journalist and blocked and reported host Jesse Single. If you haven't been following Jesse on Twitter, I don't know what rock you've been living under. City Journal's senior editor, Charles Fane, Lehman, and many more to be announced in the coming days.

All right, plenty to talk about. We are going to look at Maga World. calling to impeach judges who blocked Trump's agenda and Chief Justice Roberts responds. We've also got that call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. I think it lasted like two hours. But first, shutdown politics. Chuck Schumer is losing his base, Steve Hayes. They avoided the shutdown.

Democrats blinked in this game of chicken. Some Democrats are saying that was the only way it was going to work out anyway. Other Democrats are mad. It was worth standing and fighting. It reminds me a whole lot of the post-2012, Republican Party out in the wilderness. And what's so interesting to me about remembering the 2012 to 2015 era of the Republican Party, which is really the era that I spent like the most of my time in true Republican.

I was at the Republican National Committee for the autopsy, stuff like that. It was really when the seeds of populism were planted where you could get attention for promising the base stuff that you couldn't possibly deliver on. think repealing Obamacare, obviously, is the number one example. And Ted Cruz, you know, taking over the floor and shutting everything down. But everyone knew there was no way to repeal Obamacare. And you had the adults in the room saying, what, there's no end game here. Like, you know, step one, talk about repealing Obamacare.

Step 2, dot, dot, dot, step three, Obamacare gets repealed. And so the base, though, was promised and promised and promised stuff. It wasn't delivered. They got frustrated. They blamed the very people who were telling them that it wasn't possible. And even then when you look at who the potential and probable nominees for the Republican nomination for 2016 were back in 2013, so this time in the cycle, it was the Marco Rubio idea, right? The Jeb Bush idea, they were going to be moderating for all the reasons that were mentioned in the autopsy, immigration, of course, being number one. And then Donald Trump swoops in in 2015 and really halfway through 2015.

So I wonder how much Chuck Schumer is falling into what we can call the Bainer trap, the Eric Cantor trap, if you will. And that any thoughts we have of like an adult Democratic party, it feels that way in a 2013 Republican Party too. First on the Republicans, then on Schumer and the Democrats. There was an argument back in those days. I mean, I think you could look at what Ted Cruz did, and you could look at the filibuster, and you could look at the challenges to Obamacare and say, look, this was something that was largely in service of Ted Cruz's presidential ambitions or his attention-seeking needs. And it really wasn't much more than this. This was a way to please the base, to get people ginned up for political ends for Ted Cruz. And I think, you know, if you look at everything that's happened, sense, there's a lot of reason to believe that those were the dynamics at play. Having said that, I remember, I did a lot of reporting on this at the time, talking to Mike Lee and talking to others who were supportive of Cruz. And they would make a different argument about why it was

worth taking on what everybody understood as this quixotic effort to block Obamacare that wasn't going to happen while Barack Obama was. And they would say, look, it's really important for Republicans to just make this stand, to make very clear that Republicans as a party oppose this bad idea. Because bad things are going to happen. And when bad things happen, it'll be really important that voters understand Republicans did everything they could to fight this. I suspect that's where these for base Democrats, the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Bernie Sanders types, the others who are critical of Chuck Schumer are today, which is they look at Donald Trump and they say, Look, bad stuff is happening.

We oppose almost everything that this guy's doing. We've tried to make that clear. We tried to make that clear during the election. We're trying to make it clear now, but we really have no power. So the only power that we have, the little leverage that we have, we have to use it. I think the problem with that is there really wasn't much leverage. I mean, what were they actually, what concessions were they actually going to win? You know, they'll talk about sort of things on the margin, but it's unclear that anything was actually going to happen.

And in order to make the stand that they say they wanted to make, I think they would have had to have something to show for it. So I'm actually pretty sympathetic to what Chuck Schumer eventually did, but I think he did a crummy job of getting there. He didn't really help guide particularly House Democrats, but also Democrats in the Senate, by letting them know sort of this is where he was headed and in fact did the opposite. At several times over the course of the sort of internal quiet wrangling behind the scenes in Democratic circles suggested that there were other alternatives, that they might end up in a different place, which led, you know, for instance, House Democrats in non-safe districts to take votes they might not have otherwise taken. So I think he did a lot of damage getting to the place that I think everybody expected him to get to. Megan, can you talk about some of these new factions emerging from the ashes of the Democratic Party? What are abundance Democrats? They are people who think that the supply side matters.

I think if you look at, I don't want to say kind of ground-level democratic politics, which is much less ideological and much more like people scrambling, get elected. But if you look at what the factions in the party were, they were all arguing about how to redistribute what the economy makes. That's what they're fundamentally interested in. They take the production for granted, and then we're just arguing about who gets what. And they would make gestures towards, well, this is going to help the economy. So, you know, for example, during Obamacare, people would argue that giving people, health insurance would enable people to start new businesses because they wouldn't be afraid to leave their job for loss of their health insurance. I always thought that this was not very convincing and indeed I don't think that

there's been any evidence that that happened because the people who start businesses tend to be in their 40s who worry about health insurance, right? Like the people who are really like, I have to have health insurance. Those people tend to be in their 40s and 50s and like they do indeed worry about their health insurance. They also worry about their mortgage and paying for their kids college education. And so, you know, that didn't materialize, but they would, they would recast what they were doing as its stimulus were taking the slack out of the economy. But that's all demand side stuff fundamentally, right? Stimulus is the idea that we're going to goose consumer demand, and then that's going to goose demand for labor, and that's going to bring us back to full employment.

And what the abundance Democrats are saying now is that they have looked at New York and California and other places and said, wait a minute, we can't even make stuff to redistribute. Right. And they're mostly looking at government stuff, right? Stuff like infrastructure, but they're also looking at things like housing, which are provided by the private market mostly. And the fact that it's now functionally impossible to build anything but luxury housing in blue states, because the projects take so long. The only projects that are going to pencil out are high-end housing where you, if you have a three-year delay

for which you are employing people to run around working on your project, you are maybe starting financing and so forth, you can afford to sort of rack that into the margins on your luxury housing. And so their idea is, no, wait a minute, we've got to look at the supply side. We've got to, instead of thinking

in this scarcity mindset of we have a fixed amount of stuff, how do we distribute it, we need to think about how do we grow the pie, to use a phrase, very popular on the right. Although in their new book, Abundance Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson specifically say that they think that that's a bad metaphor. They want to make more stuff before they start redistributing it,

which is a welcome corrective to, you know, what is blocking this in so many places is decades of Democratic politics, and especially Democratic politics catering to groups like the environmentalists, we really didn't want anything to be built and thought that was a bad idea and wanted us to just all like huddle in our little apartments that already existed and eat our vegan cheese and bean casserole. And this is the faction that is trying to push back on that.

All right, Jonah, can you put us in like a historical context here? Abundance Democrats. Is the Republican Party from 2012, a lesson? You know, as I think about the names that I'm hearing most often for the 28 Democratic presidential nomination, it's Wes Moore, Governor of Maryland, Gretchen Whitmer, Governor of Michigan, Andy Bashir, Governor of Kentucky, Josh Apiro, Governor of Pennsylvania. But all of these guys, quite moderate. And I don't think they'd ever describe themselves as Abundance Democrats. I don't even think that's a thing. right now outside of, you know, intelligentsia think tank circles. But this is how it trickles down, right? Eventually it trickles into some wing of a party. Is what's old new again? Is this new? Tell me, Jonah, tell me. So it's funny. When you first brought up the autopsy period, the Ted Cruz and Mike Lee fights and, you know, there's a certain, we all know there are these people in Washington, they're a little bit older than us or in some cases a lot older than us, where if you bring up, I know, some obscure thing from Watergate,

they perk up and they're like, wait a second, let me tell you about Haldeman, right? And they get deep in the weeds really friggin fast, right? Or like the Vietnam vet at the bar where, you know, you just briefly mentioned some battle. And they're like, look, you don't understand it was raining that day. And, you know, and that's how I feel when you guys talk about some of this stuff. because I have so many, like, old fights that feel like, you know, like they're just loaded guns on my desk that I would really like to play with. But they matter not at all to the, I mean, they're interesting.

And I think the parallels are, or have some validity. But the Democrats have a different problem today, I think. Basically, and I think this is what ties all this together. Because I agree with you entirely, Sarah. The abundance Democrats are, they are not even, if you want a historical parallel. they have not even reached Atari Democrat level awareness. At least Atari Democrats, I can still name it like Gary Hart, a couple politicians at presidential level associated with it.

I mean, I don't know who an actual abundance Democrat is outside of the authors of a few books that come out lately. The reason those books exist now, right? I just had Yoni Applebaum on my podcast. It's got a great book called Stuck. I just had Mark Dunkelman on his book, Why Nothing Works. I told you guys before we started rolling, I was high. So, I'd be like your brain doesn't work.

That's sort of what I mean, but for external reasons. Anyway, although now they're internal. Anyway, my point is that the problem that the Democratic Party has is that the Democratic Party is the party of government, but it's actually, but a whole reason a party of government exists, and they exist in every modern industrialized country. In fact, there are lots of countries

where they only have parties of government. But the whole pitch for the party of government is to help the voter, not the vast coalition of rent seekers, constituencies that are dependent on the government sector and the extended sort of network of institutions outside of it. The way the Democratic Party has become, you know, there's this whole fight among the dem among liberal intellectuals, about the role of the groups, which is just a super clever way of shorthanding interest groups, I know, because that was the real problem facing the Democrats is they took too much time saying the full phrase interest group. And if they just say

the groups, now people will like efficiently argue about these things. But the point is is that there are, they've lost the plot. And they don't, the Democrats have lost the ability to actually talk to the median voter. Instead, they basically talk to the median voter who is dependent in some way on government. That whole political situation is one of the reasons why the abundance Democrat crowd is emerging is because they're realizing that that's a losing proposition, because as much as we have people dependent on government in one way or another, there's still a fraction of the total population. And that makes Democrats seem,

it makes the Democratic Party itself seem like a special interest. And that's why a big reason why Trump won was that he was able to actually speak to that median voter. You know, that whole she's for they, them, he's for you thing was speaking directly to that. is that the Democratic Party is now seen as captive. And I think they're casting about for some sort of way out. And the problem is that they've got this guy running the Senate Democrats.

To paraphrase Seinfeld, sounds like he should be trying to send back soup at a deli. Right? He is just this cranky old guy from New York from Queens. And I saw him on Morning Joe yesterday. And let me tell you, I think the rise of anti-Semitism in America is terrible and dismaying. and it proves horseshoe theory in all sorts of ways. We are not going to beat back this sinister tide with Chuck Schumer as the spokesman against it.

I'm just going to put it out there right now. Anyway, so like I just think the problem is the Democratic Party, they don't have a theory of the case about why they should be in power beyond one that appeals to trial lawyers and teachers unions and university presidents and deans of, you know, diversity deans and the like. And they're so deep in the bubble,

they don't know how to tell a story that appeals to the normal vote. voter. Shapiro, among that group that you mentioned, I think, is the only one who comes close to an abundance Democrat because when a big chunk of road caught fire in his state, he said, yeah, we're going to suspend all the rules that all you morons set up that would make it take 18 months to get this done, and he got it done in like two weeks or 10 days or something like that. Yeah, nine days. Nine days, yeah. Because he was actually interested in the median voter, not the median public sector, you know, public sector union worker. I actually think it's even worse than that. Like, sorry, sorry to interrupt, but like, the groups were not even interest groups in the way that they've been traditionally understood, right?

The AARP is an interest group. It's really powerful because it has a ton of members, and if you do anything to any old age entitlement, the AARP will send up the bat signal and a horde of angry seniors waving their canes will descend on your office to pummel you. Wait, you realize Jonah is AARP eligible right now. I am also AARP eligible, and it was the worst day of my life. I was like, I am suing for liable AARP. In fairness to us, they do keep lowering the age requirement.

Yeah, the age is now 50 when they send you out the end of the special envelope. So, Steve, you're eligible to you. Oh, I thought it was 55. No, it's 50. Oh, shit. I got it on my 50th birthday, and thank you. Happy birthday. Hey, look who on this podcast is not AARP eligible.

Hi. Sarah's got 22 years until she's eligible. Yeah. My four and a half year old asked if I was going to die on my next birthday because I was getting so old. So that's, you know. But the groups that the Democrats were increasingly, and like I will say public sector unions are a valid interest group in this sense, right? They are really interested in these issues. They are membership groups.

But a lot of the groups they were listening to were not, they didn't, like, Black Lives Matter is an example. No one, like, black people did not get together and elect Black Lives Matter to represent them. Right. But Democrats completely acted like they had. Similarly, on immigration, right? The most shocking thing in the last election is that immigrants swung by some crazy, like, 25 point margin towards Trump. And by who was doing exactly the opposite of what the people, that Democrats thought represented immigrants were demanding.

And like that problem in the Democratic Party that it was actually this kind of interlocking collection of foundation-funded professional class people who got listened to because they had gone to school with the professional class Democratic staffers and everyone kind of nurtured this collective delusion that a really small number of elites kind of could represent

huge classes of voters who were not themselves making $100,000 a year doing X, Y, or Z had not gone to Harvard. And, you know, no one would have said that if you take, like, white men, if some dude from Harvard walks up to you

and says, I represent white men, you would be like, there are many white men, and most of them did not go to Harvard. But somehow, when it was immigrants, then, you know, people's brains dropped out of their head. and they said, oh yeah, I understand you represent immigrants. And like to some extent

they do, right? They have shared experiences with immigrants that people who aren't immigrants don't. But those shared experience, they also have a lot of shared experiences with other professional class elites and that tended to dominate democratic politics. And I don't know how the Democratic Party walks back from that

in part because one of their real groups is the public sector unions and those guys don't want stuff to change. They're really invested in the status quo. What they want to do is be paid more and work less, which is, I mean, to be clear, that's what everyone wants and is a noble goal. But it is a problem if you are the party of government, and one of your major constituencies, and you are like, and I'm an abundance Democrat, I want government to work,

and then one of your major coalition groups is like, well, but if it worked, that would be bad for me, so no. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy to protect your family's future in minutes,

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Hit the track. Everyone in the studio that I worked on this jingle with all had like childhood stories or memories. Yeah, we're around either watching these commercials on TV or sitting with our moms while they were doing their makeup and it became really personal for us. Maybe it's Maple Lane. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, your writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one.

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And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Steve, this is going to be a very simple point. When you look at polling around the Democratic Party, and there was this very pretty simplistic cross-tab. And it was white men, no college degree, white men college degree, white women, no degree, white women, college degree. And the point of this was that basically white women with a college degree were just total outliers on the far, left of everything they asked about, your opinion of Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Elon Musk. It was, you know, negative 40s across the board. Republican Party, negative 35. Vladimir Zelensky, plus 53. D.E.I. Plus 31. Just nothing like that in any of those other groups. And then you get to the Democratic Party.

White men, no college degree. Negative 58. That's their net opinion of the Democratic Party. White men college degree, negative 38. White women, no. degree, negative 36. So all of those pretty much in line with each other. White women, oh, still negative four. It's the only one that all four of those groups agree on. The problem, I think, is that when you're the party out of power and when you just lost, everyone's mad. Nobody approves of the party. And then everyone can argue over why. And so you see that, and I think it's very easy for abundance Democrats to say, yeah, it's because everyone's sick of the government, not having any common sense, not being able to get stuff done. The road takes

18 months to rebuild. And it's because the Democratic Party didn't fight enough. It's because they weren't far left enough. It's because they weren't willing to stand up and actually believe in DEI the way they told us that they did. And all of those things are true at once when you're out of power. And I think it's just so important for people to realize because we have such weak political parties, because of campaign finance reform, according to me, that has gutted the money and the infrastructure of the political parties in the name of low dollar, small dollar donor, so no more political parties are left, which bizarrely actually increases partisan polarization,

it also, though, means that the winning presidential nominee of a party redefines the party each time, totally, can do it from scratch, right? Donald Trump recreates the Republican Party in his image in 2017 because he won, not because the party nominated him. If he had lost, he would have had no control over the Republican Party. And so when we talk about the future of the Democratic Party, And again, this is where I want to make. I know this is a really obvious point.

I don't think we have any clue what's going to happen to the Democratic Party until a presidential candidate wins the presidency from the Democratic Party. And that person tells us what the Democratic Party is. Yeah, and the inverse is true, right? I mean, I think if Trump had lost to Kamala Harris this time, there would have been this massive movement among Republicans and conservatives to say, boy, everything Donald Trump believed about the Republican Party and the changing nature of our politics was wrong, and therefore, you know, Republicans and

conservatives should do this. So I have not yet read the abundance Democrats books. I've seen sort of some interviews and things. But I wonder, since Jonah and Megan have looked at it more carefully, would you say that part of their argument is sort of less reliance on government than, say, Barack Obama-era Democrats offered, or is it more, hey, government is great? It should be at the center of our lives in the same way the, you know, the Life of Julia Video had it back, you know, under Barack Obama. It just should be more efficient. What's a right way to understand the role of government in this new argument?

I would say, look, and I should disclose, I have both Dunkleman and abundance. Dunkleman's book, why nothing works, and abundance. And I've started abundance, but I've not finished it. So there may be stuff in there that I haven't gotten to yet. But that said, I would say just like from listening to interviews, which I've now listened to like 90. They're the best podcast. Like bookers, they have podcasts, Ezra and Derek. And they're everywhere. And I know in like both of them, I was actually Derek Thompson's first boss at the Atlantic. and his description of that was that I was, I ran my boss, I ran, I was a boss, like, my bossdom followed my politics, which was totally laissez-faire, but in his case it worked. And so I would hope that that

experience would have given him a greater appreciation for, look, I think both, like Ezra, who I've known, you know, since he was like 21 and who is now in his 40s and has kids, which just makes me sad because it means that I'm even older. They're both, I think Ezra especially has moved towards more respect for the need for the market to supply stuff. But I also think if you listen to his podcast with Tyler Cowen, who says to him, you know, like, why, you know, for example, pharmaceutical price controls is a good example of something that Ezra favors. And that's a distributional problem for him. And for me, that's a huge supply side problem. Why would you do that? And his argument is, well, the government could, you know, step in and make the regulations that make it

expensive to bring new drugs to market easier and that that would offset that. And look, that's an argument we can have, but I would sure like to see the regulatory piece happen first before we start doing a pharmaceutical price controls. Let's run the experiment. It's similar. There are people who propose prizes for pharmaceutical development from the government in order to offset pharmaceutical price controls. And again, I'm actually, I am interested in running this experiment, but do that first. And here's, so this is another thing that worries me about the abundance Democrats, right? Is that this stuff like pharmaceutical price controls, super popular. Because I mean, we should think of abundance Democrats. It's, it's like never

Trump republicanism. It is an elite phenomenon. This is like upper middle class people who have, who are vested in the establishment, who have, like, who think the economy works. pretty well, who think the system works pretty well. That's who this movement is for. And so the problem is that the stuff that's easy to do is the pharmaceutical price controls. The stuff that's hard to do is to do an Operation Warp Speed level commitment to bringing drugs to market. And look, I think Operation Warp Speed was one of the greatest government successes of the past 50 years. And I supported the interventions they did, which were both removing bottlenecks from distribution and production, and throwing money at the problem.

But, like, that's also kind of a wartime spending thing. You can't run an economy and or normal government that way. We cannot constantly be throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at random into the pharmaceutical industry, in part because voters would hate it. The great irony of Operation Warp Speed and this, as you say, probably the biggest governmental success in 100 years. And it's Republicans who are complaining that the vaccine didn't go through enough regulatory steps and it turns out wasn't safe or shouldn't have gone to the market so quickly or

needed more warnings. I mean, huh? Yeah, so I think the challenge for the abundance Democrats is a going to be doing the stuff that makes the abundance before you do the other stuff that your coalition is really interested in on the redistribution side. And then the other challenge is that they have a lot of factions who are going to, who have personal vested interests and also ideological opposition to this, and that this stuff is actually not going to poll that well. I think it's actually right, but it's not going to excite voters. It's going to excite people like us. And as the never-Trump Republicans discovered, that was not necessarily a winning political coalition, even if it is an absolutely victorious moral coalition. I see it a little differently. I mean,

Virginia Postrell was the one who made the argument to me that, that, because there's this movement on the right, the cornucopians, the roots of progress. project, the cornucopians is a terrible name. That's just going to be difficult to say, spell anything else. Libertarians proved by what they call themselves that they're bad at coming up with names for things. Even Friedrich Hayek was like, I can't call myself that. That's such, that's such a look, Hayek was like, it's so unenphonious. I can't even call myself a libertarian, right? So Virginia Postrell, who's, you know, one of the chief proponents of dynamism, right? Like, wants a really productive economy, all of these kinds of things, liberating the economy,

liberating human ingenuity. She says the sort of the Ezra Klein project is to get rid of red tape for government to be more efficient. And the sort of libertarian pro-growth crowd is for getting rid of the red tape that prohibits the private sector from being more productive. And obviously there's going to be some overlap there. Right. But like, again, I think everything bagel liberalism is like a really terrible term. So it proves that libertarians aren't the only ones with bad at labeling. The idea is that like you can't get anything done if every stakeholder, every ideological stakeholder gets a sign off, right?

You need somebody ultimately, you know, like Dunkleman's argument is like the left got so terrified of repeating the horror that was Robert Moses that they basically empowered all of these people from the ground up to be able to stop projects. And I was talking to Duncan Binvis on this on the remnant. Like, I'm pretty sure Steve will remember. Sarah might have still been in grade school. But Rachel Maddow, about 15 years ago, we used to run these ads on MSNBC.

It was during this weird phase where MSNBC was constantly running commercials that were basically commercials for Obama. And she's standing in front of the Hoover Dam. And she's like, America used to do big things like this. That's what government is there for. We can, that's what liberalism is for is doing the big things, blah, blah, blah. And I probably wrote five columns about this over the years because like the idea that

if someone tried to build the Hoover Dam, Rachel Maddow would be out there chaining herself to old growth trees right away, right? The environmentalists stop everything. The racial people stop everything, all that kind of stuff. And so the point behind everything bagel... You would definitely have a land acknowledgement on the Hoover Dam for Shurzies. And then we'd argue a lot over the language for the land acknowledgement. And so like the forces against progress on the left want to just prevent big things from happening.

And Ezra wants the government to do big things again. That's a different argument than what you'd get on the right. It doesn't mean they're wrong, right? I mean, it is, it's a scandal that it took 22 years to do the big dig, right? We built the Pentagon in what, like 16 months. We built the Empire State Building in like 13 months. It takes 13 months prior to get the paperwork together to like talk about tearing down the building that you would want to tear down before you even talk about the permitting for getting something like the Empire State Building. And so I actually think that that argument has some appeal to the median voter if you can do it right.

but it's got to be done by a good politician and not some pointy head at eggheads who's just like, look, government is here to help you. We lost our way. The Republicans are here to help themselves. We want government to be able to do the important things that we all agree need to be done. And I think as much as I disagree with that

on some philosophical level at some, you know, some places, I think that's actually a party of a winning argument. I just don't think any of these people in Washington have much credibility selling it. Yeah, it's at least a new argument. argument, right? I mean, I think that's part of the problem Democrats face is they've been making the same old argument and the contrast between what you're describing getting from these abundance Democrats and what we saw from Chuck Schumer both in the negotiations or non-negotiations last week. And the appearances, you know, Chuck Schumer's now been out doing public appearances in support of, well, it's sort of in support of his new book on anti-Semitism, even though he apparently canceled some of the book tour. But I caught a clip of Chuck Schumer on the view this week, making this, I mean, it's just sort of this sad, but, you know, very energetic Schumer-esque argument that was like a recapitulation of the Obama argument. You didn't build this argument. And it just felt, I mean, I didn't like that argument with Barack Obama made it. But at least I guess Barack Obama had sort of this. There was a. coolness factor to Barack Obama. And so you could oppose the argument on its substance,

but you knew it would have some purchase because people wanted to like Barack Obama and he could make unpopular things popular. But watching Chuck Schumer make that argument this week, you know, you didn't build that. You think you built your company, but, you know, you had to drive on roads or, you know, he said something sort of like that. It was just so pathetic. And, you're watching that thinking if this is the guy that Democrats put forward and if these are the arguments that they're making, they really might be out of power for a long time. All right. I want to make sure we get to these other two topics first on a little podcast called advisory opinions. We talked about these threats of judicial impeachment when judges are not

ruling the way that Donald Trump and his supporters like. Obviously, there's the history. There's one time where a president tried to impeach a justice for not ruling the way that he liked. That was Samuel Chase and Thomas Jefferson in a famous showdown. Thomas Jefferson wanted to start with Samuel Chase, but his goal was to remove John Marshall after that and get rid of the federalist judges that Adams had put on the court and Washington, too, for that matter. And the impeachment of Samuel Chase failed. And from that point forward, like let the word ring out that we don't remove judges for voting a way we don't like

or even the wrong way. And yet, here we are, there's some irony as well to all of the conversation about, you know, there's 700 of these judges and they weren't elected by anyone. And yet here they are stopping a president who was duly elected by the people. But these were the same people who were suing President Biden and going to these same judges and asking them to stop exactly what an elected president had done, the eviction moratorium, the vaccine mandate, student loan, debt forgiveness, and the list goes on and on and on, they were thrilled. And in fact, if judges didn't do that, they were screaming about judges in the pocket of Joe Biden. So look, this is why I put this not first. Because I don't know what else there is to say other than like, yep, people are

hypocrites these days. This is horseshoe politics. People just want outcomes. They don't care about process. And I'm a process girl in an outcome world. It's all things I've said before. So, I guess I'm just going to go to each of you and ask, do you have anything new or interesting to say about this topic, Steve? Yep. People are hypocrites. This is a horseshoe world. No, I mean, unfortunately, I largely agree with you. I mean, I think there's been so, so much analysis of all of this. And there's this attempt to intellectualize what we're seeing. And you know, in some ways you can understand that because I think if you're making the argument on behalf of the Trump administration or in favor of what Trump is doing, you need to find a way

to justify or rationalize what you're doing when the reality is Donald Trump likes judges who agree with him and doesn't like judges who don't agree with him. And that's basically it. He wants judges to bless the things that he's doing, whether constitutional or not, if he believes that they should be done, and he opposes judges who oppose him. I mean, it wasn't, what, a week ago that in his, maybe it was a little more than a week ago, in his speech from the Justice Department, he suggested that criticism of, you know, a Trump favored judge, judge can't. might be illegal. And now he and his supporters are arguing that we should impeach judges who have come to a different legal conclusion than the president and his team. So, no, unfortunately, I think this is largely just a matter of hypocrisy and picking sides. Now, having said that, let me introduce a couple of quick sort of caveats.

There was an interesting short post from our friend Shannon Coffin over at National Review who walks through some potential problems with what Justice Roberts did this week. Justice Roberts came out, put out a statement in effect saying, hey, impeaching judges is not the proper remedy here. You can challenge and go through the appeals process, but impeaching judges is not the right solution. And Shannon takes some exception to that and points to the possibility that if, you know, House Democrats take the House in 2026 and try to impeach the president, this could create problems for Justice Roberts down the line. Our friend Tim Sandifer was written for the dispatch before from the Goldwater Institute had an interesting post arguing that, in fact, impeaching judges is part of what you do if you think that judges.

consistently come to the wrong legal conclusions and therefore these arguments are actually solid and people should be making them. I feel like this is where I need to put on my Jama Glockland hat. Wrong!

Look, I was ultimately not, I would say I was ultimately not persuaded by either of their arguments. But these are people who... Can I just take a second on the like, if judges are getting it consistently wrong, we should impeach them? That's what the appeals process is for.

In fact, we have two layers of appeals in case you draw a bad first judge and you draw a bad appellate panel with three more judges. You can have four bad judges in a row and you still get another shot to win. So that's why we don't impeach judges for getting it wrong even if they keep getting it wrong because it sort of builds into this independence to the system

that we're okay with a little bit of wrong because it will get corrected. And if you can't win with one district judge, three circuit judges, and at least five Supreme Court Justice, says, I don't know what to tell you. Maybe they're not the ones who are wrong. Rant over. This is the conversation that Donald Trump and crew want us to have about whether it's right or wrong to impeach judges. The simple fact is we're not going to impeach this judge. Correct. There's

not even enough Republicans in the House. Then to convict, it takes two-thirds of the Senate. Yeah. Right. So I don't know that you would get two-thirds of Republicans voting to convict. No. So never mind two-thirds of, you know, all Republicans and then a solid half of the Democrats, It's never going to happen, right? I did, like, Elon Musk saying that it took 60, though, just like his constitutional ignorance he's so proud of. It bothers me a lot. Didn't he have to take a citizenship test?

What happened here? Elon Musk is an asbury but yet human form of Chesterton's fence. But the reason I think they're doing this is they're trying to get the back of the frontline prosecutors who are bringing these cases to not chicken out in front of judges who are pissed. at them for shenanigans and to also change the subject from whether or not Trump did anything wrong to whether or not judges have any right to say so, right? And it's a very cynical move. It's a very effective move. I got, I kind of got a little dark on some congressman last night on Twitter. I shouldn't have done it. It was late. But he was like, I don't remember voting for

this judge on the presidential ballot or something like that. And it's like, you're a frigging congressman. You swore to uphold the Constitution. Don't ever let me catch you hearing, this is a republic, not a democracy again. I mean, like, if you don't know that you never vote for the judges, right? If you don't know that judges are actually supposed to like second guess, you know, the executive and the legislative branch from time to time, why the hell are you a congressman? And, but it's, it's a desire to whip everybody up as it for an issue so that it gives Trump more maneuvering room the next time he does something that pushes the envelope. And he's going to do them, he's been doing them constantly, you know, like when he frog marches people like out of the U.S. Institute for Peace, you know, and if some judge says you shouldn't do this, he said, ah, there goes another rogue judge, right? rather than like paying attention to the judge's actual arguments or, you know, or anything else.

And it's effective so far. It's very demographic, but it's very effective. All right, Megan. What about you? Say something new about this issue. Oh, look, I think that I agree, right, that he wants this fight. And he wants this fight because what happened at the border is super unpopular and getting into a high profile fight with a Democratic judge. There are no Republican and Democratic judges.

Democratic appointed judge, Sarah. I flog and abase myself. Oh, can I get a fact check on this real quick? I don't want to interrupt Megan, but Sarah, I watch the NBC news piece about this judge. I don't know why you emphasize the word news, but okay. Well, because it was like it wasn't MSNBC. It was like a news, like NBC News. NBC but like NBC News.

I don't know. Whatever. It wasn't it wasn't a rerun of colloquium. He didn't just. see this on a rerun of Colombo, he actually saw it on news podcast. Wasn't part of the NBC entertainment. The judge whose name I can never like stick to my head. Yeah. Bozger. Yeah. Who apparently was a roommate with Kavanaugh in law school. The

reporter said was appointed to the U.S. District Court by Bush and then promoted to the federal bench by Obama. Well, is it, if Bush is appointing him to a district court, isn't that a federal bench to or is there usage of federal bench for only higher courts. You see my point? So, Jonah, thank you so much for asking. They are both federal, but only in the very technical sense, because one is to the superior court of the District of Columbia.

So it's the quote unquote, what would be the state court for D.C., but because D.C. is an estate, it's still appointed by the president. I'm glad I asked. So, like, it's only federal in that sense that D.C. is federal. And I think it is more helpful. to say, like, treat that as a municipal position that is appointed by the president, and the federal bench refers to the district court. Right. My only way, okay, but the broader point is he's not a wakadoo left-wing judge. He was like a point for us to put on the bench by Bush, that kind of

thing. That's all. Sure. No, I'm making a different point, which is not that he's a wackadoo left-wing judge. I'm broadly on his side. We left your point so long ago, Megan. I don't even. Yeah, fair enough. But, like, look, the public thinks of the rule. First of all, the public's just not interested in procedural things. And I think that 30 years of history, right, Republicans were convinced they were going to get Bill Clinton on perjury. And it turns out no one frigging cares because it's procedural. And Democrats were so, I mean, like, the thrill in their voice, the little tremulous vibration, as they said, the words 37 felony convictions. And no one cared because these were procedural crimes.

And no one, and it's the same with the documents case. And I'm not saying, by the way, that these aren't necessarily good procedures. There are good reasons for the rules against perjury. There are good reasons for the rules about classified documents. The public just doesn't care that much. You are never going to get them interested in procedural problems. What they do care about is that Democrats, by, in some cases, kind of dubiously rewriting the rules, functionally we're like,

what if we didn't really have much border enforcement? I mean, so my favorite example of this is the Obama administration liked to tout its record number of deportations, which it did by changing the definition of deportation. Right? So, like, anyone it encountered at the border and was like, no, you can't come in. They treated that as a deportation, and then, of course, deportation skyrocketed. And so, like, but the fundamental thing was that, no, Democrats did not want to enforce

the border. Their groups didn't want it. They didn't want to make the groups. and so they didn't. The public is mad about that. And so by picking this fight where some pointy-headed Democratic appointed judge is like, no, no, no, there's procedure.

And he's like, I would like to get these gang. I'm not saying they're gang members, but he says they're gang members. I would like to get these violent gang members out of here. That's a fight that he wants to have because that is a fight that he is winning politically. I think it's incredibly dangerous because I think, as we all agree on this podcast,

the procedures are really important. But I think of them as kind of like, them and the norms as kind of like an elite truce. It's like we're going to have some rules because we're in a repeat game and we know how out of hand this can get. But the average voter just doesn't care that much. It's really important.

I am not, like I am, because I think we're all agreed. This is bad, right? But I want to yell at you anyway, Megan. Okay, go ahead. so this is the nationwide injunction problem uh neither side both sides decry nationwide injunctions this idea that one judge can stop a president uh president's policies from going into effect across the whole nation so you can sue in 300 districts and all 300 judges can say no but if that 301st judge says yes then you get a nationwide injunction and it's a huge problem and it is a huge problem but when

they're the party out of power. They're so excited to get a nationwide injunction. So I will just say, I was very proud when, husband of the pod, when he wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal supporting nationwide injunctions before, I think it was before the 2020 election. Anyway, the point was, he was like, this is something that you want if the bad guys win. So don't get rid of it just because you're in the seat right now. And the short-sightedness, this is the common good constitutional idea, right? We want the government to do things for the common good and process is not in and of itself a moral thing. Yes, but why do you think that the government is always going to be geared towards the common good? And who defines the common good if you're not the one running the government and we still have elections? The only way this works is if we get rid of elections and you just become a dictator. And when you say that, they just kind of like move on to some other point. It's really confusing to me. And I needed to yell at you about that, Megan. That's the funny thing is that the trad Catholics who like this common good stuff

do not like Pope Francis. Yes, also true. Although Adrian Vermeel kind of does. Like, he is like gone full horseshoe and is like, he is the Holy Father. God has anointed him. I did hear about a clerkship applicant who was asked, you know, I don't know, how you read something. And he's like, well, however the Pope says it, it's like, oh, that's not the right answer

for this clerkship. Okay, Steve, this is the Steve Hayes podcast in case you haven't picked up on that yet. President Trump and Vladimir Putin had a phone call this week. It lasted a really long time. Nothing really got solved. Why do I care? I think there are a bunch of reasons to care, in part because nothing really got solved, but also because of the way that the phone call itself unfolded.

Speaking of process, there are a couple things that I'll highlight. One, there was this controversy sort of leading up to the call as the call was set to begin about whether it was starting on time or not. And this played out over social media. It had been reported before the call that the window for the call was March, I think it was March 18th, between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. And the call didn't start at 9 a.m. So you had some people who were following this in real time on social media say, hey, this is late. This is late. this is late. And Vladimir Putin, who was at the time holding a meeting with some Russian industrialists

was interrupted as he was on stage by an aide saying, hey, isn't your call with Donald Trump supposed to be happening now? You need to kind of go. And Putin kind of shrugs this off with a laugh and dismisses his aid and says, you know, we don't need to listen to him kind of thing. And then continues the meeting, keeps going with the meeting, leading some people to conclude that Putin was making Donald Trump wait for this meeting, just as he had made Steve Whitkoff, Trump's emissary who had visited Putin a few days earlier, wait eight hours for their meeting. Whether or not, Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, later said, no, no, the meeting started on time. Whether or not the meetings started on time, it seems clear that Vladimir Putin

was happy to let the impression live that he was making Donald Trump wait. And you just think about all of the drama at the Zelensky Trump meeting and perceived slights. And they didn't like Zelensky's body language and they hated that he didn't wear a suit and all of these things. And yet in this instance, when Putin is doing this, the White House doesn't push back. They don't correct him. They don't challenge it. They don't complain that President Trump has been insulted in any of these things. What I think provides further evidence that what they did with the Zelensky meeting was just to make an issue where there really wasn't one. But more substantively, there were strong disagreements, I think substantive disagreements between what the Russians said about the call

in the post-call readout and what the White House said about the call in the post-call read-out. Russia claimed that Vladimir Putin, in the call with Donald Trump, insisted on a suspension of all-aid to Ukraine. Donald Trump, when he was speaking about this, after that Russian readout came out, said that that issue didn't come up at all. The Russians then put out another statement insisting that it did in fact come up. National Security Advisor Mike Walts tells CBS News after those first three statements that it did not come up. And, you know, on the one hand, you could say, well, it's just a misunderstanding of what was discussed in the call. But that seems to be a pretty fundamental point. Did they or did they not talk about suspension of aid?

Somebody's right there. Somebody's wrong. And undoubtedly, They have at least very detailed notes about the call, I suspect a recording of the call. This is checkable and knowable, and it seems interesting to me that we haven't gotten this kind of clarity. One possible contribution, I mean, one possible explanation for this is that the White House knows it's going to end all aid and doesn't want to look like it was doing so at the insistence of Russia. And that Putin is insisting that he raised this and said he wanted this so that when it happens, he can show that he's pushing Donald Trump around. At the very least, I think it's unhelpful to have that lack of clarity around what seems to be a pretty

central element to this proposed ceasefire on both sides. And then the final point of disagreement was that Russians said that they would agree to it. I mean, basically, Vladimir Putin didn't agree to the kind of ceasefire that Voldemir Zelensky had agreed to and that Donald Trump was pushing. So in that sense, the Russians rebuffed this effort from the Americans and to a certain extent from the Ukrainians. But in another point of confusion in the analysis of what had happened after the call, the United States said that the ceasefire would involve no attacks on energy and infrastructure, so power grids and, say, bridges. The Russians insisted that it was a ceasefire only in attacks on energy infrastructure.

So just the buildings that house the power grids or the facilities that house the power grids. And within an hour of the end of the call, Russia attacked the energy infrastructure in a city called Sloviansk, which suggests, I mean, there hadn't been anything agreed to, so Russia wasn't violating any formally signed. ceasefire, but in terms of a show of force, it probably wasn't a mistake that this had happened right after the end of the call. I think the bottom line for all of this is Donald Trump continues to, I think, do the bidding, more or less of Vladimir Putin. Putin knows that he's in the catbird seat that he can insist on all of these new concessions, and we have to label them new concessions because the White House and the Trump administration has preemptively offered so many other concessions before we even got to the point where there were negotiations about the negotiations

over a ceasefire. But Putin still seems to be in the cap bird seat. The president seems much more sympathetic to Putin, and it's hard to imagine that this ends up in anything good for the Ukrainians. Jonah, at the same time, the ceasefire broke down in Gaza. Is Donald Trump going to do a like, hey, look over here to try to move away from foreign policy right now? I don't think so. I think he is totally fine. with Israel breaking the deal, breaking the ceasefire. And I shouldn't say Israel broke the deal because, like, you can find all sorts of areas where Hamas broke the terms of this arrangement. But at the same time, it was, you know, Israel that started the shooting. I think

that, to me, the sort of, I think we're going to see a lot of talk about foreign policy for the classic reason that the economy is not doing what the president wants it to do. And so we're going to come up with talk about impeaching judges and making Canada a state. You know, who's supporting, you know, who's a supporter of drug cartel terrorists or Middle Eastern terrorists this week has a way to not talk about the fact that, you know, he said day one, grocery prices are going to go down when he got elected. And meanwhile, all the forecasts are they, the economy is, is going lower.

That's, you know, one of the problems that we have in this business is that this business that we're in normally rewards really sharp and insightful and clever and intelligent analysis. And you don't, sometimes that sort of mode of operation can distract you from how better

to understand Donald Trump, which is that he's, his motivations are really simple. His operations are really simple. and when subject A is bad for him, he talks about subject B, subject B is bad for him. He makes subject C into an issue when it's not one. That happens in politics a lot where people like, presidents turn to foreign policy when domestic policy is problematic.

But I think we're seeing it in earnest very quickly now because Trump has always rhetorically considered himself a wartime president. He likes talking like a wartime president. He just likes to talk about how the enemy or other Americans. And now he has the ability to do that both domestically and abroad, including not just about Hamas and Mexican drug cartels, but about those perfidious, sinister Canadians. And I think we're going to get a lot of that. Man, last word on foreign policy today.

You know, I think that the Trump administration's first term, did better on foreign policies, certainly than I expected. I was not, let us say, super sanguine about the prospect of Jared Kushner going out and fixing the Middle East. But like the Abraham Accords worked. And I think that the problem for the Trump administration is the lesson they learned from that

is that if you just pick a winner, you can move conflicts that have seen frozen for a long time. And the problem is like playing against the Palestinians and just picking a winner and saying, well, Israel, like, we're just on Israel's side now and you guys, like, look on my works, you mighty and despair. That didn't work so well when it came to Russia, which has a lot more power, right?

We can't just kick Russia around. They're a nuclear-armed state. And so what this looks like is him just trying to find a way to supinely give Putin everything he wants because the strategy of the United States going in and saying, like, we've decided what's going to happen, isn't going to work here, and he does not seem to have another play in the book.

And I think that is, you know, that's what I'm seeing, but I'm no foreign policy expert. I got the Iraq war wrong and then decided that, like, I should concentrate on my strengths. So I am looking at this from the outside. I think the Ukrainians are the good guys, the Russians are the bad guys. But I don't see any way that this is going to end well

for the Ukrainians with Trump and power. All right. A very short, not worth your time. I remember several years ago when they started making fun of sad beige children stuff, sad beige children clothes, sad beige children toys. And it was very funny. But now they're talking about sad beige house. And I feel like that's kind of just a misunderstanding of economics. Right? Because like what you'll hear from home builders is that like, well, I could put in a lot of fun. colors, but then one person is like, well, I don't like the color yellow, and then they're not going to buy your house. Whereas, like, no one's really offended by white, gray, beige colors. So you make it all of that when you're selling the house. And then when someone buys the house, it's really expensive to paint rooms in your house. And if you do choose nice colors, those colors go out of fashion at some point, relatively quickly, a lot quicker than the color white. And so then you've got to repaint your house, which is also really expensive.

That being said, Steve, the room you're in, has a beautiful, like, bronzy color on the walls. Jonah, the room you're in is like a crimson red, which is like really bright and fun. Megan, you're in a hotel room. So yours is really sad, very, very sad beige hotel room. It is. That's right. It's actually a nice hotel, but the decor is definitely sad beige. So.

Because they don't want to offend anyone. That's right. So is sad beige house worth our time to complain about, or is it okay? And I'm not going to start with you, Steve. I'm going to start with Megan, because you seem like a person who would not have a sad beige house. I do not have a sad beige house. It is true. I'm very against the sad beige house.

But my main ire is actually reserved for the open floor plan, which was foisted on us by the home and garden television. network. And the thing is what people don't understand is they see all these open kitchens. And what they don't realize is that the reason that everything is always an open kitchen is not that that's the best way to have a kitchen. It's that that's the easiest thing to film.

Because if you try to film a galley kitchen, it looks like you are filming the inside of a prison cell. And so they rip the walls out to make it easier to film. And then everyone's like, oh, that's what's glamorous. I want that. And in fact, they they end up with houses that are designed to look at rather than to live in.

And I think that that's a little bit of a variation of the Sad Bej house, is that it is designed to show rather than to please the occupants. And I think in general, when you are making renovation decisions, when you are making paint decisions and all the rest of it,

don't think about the house resale value unless you were planning to move in a few years. Think about the house you want to live in. You're only on this planet for so long and trying to maintain your home like a little showroom so that when the buyers walk in they can see the perfectly matched furniture

is a mistake. You are not living in an apartment store don't act like it. Okay, but Jonah, I'm speaking from a little PTSD right now because I tried to repaint my dining room, the color. I even bought the little samples.

I painted it on the walls. I picked a color. I was wrong, but I didn't know that until the whole room had already been painted that color. And then I was like, this is very, very wrong. And then I painted it a new color.

It's better than the last color, but it's still not great. And now I'm just going to have to live with it because at some point, I've spent all the money that I possibly had to allocate toward painting my dining room. And I should have just left it beige. This is why you start with an accent wall. I did. That's what I did, Megan. I loved my accent wall. It has beautiful wallpaper on it. And then I was like, oh, but I think the rest of the room needs some color to, like, pick up on that wallpaper.

And that was a mistake. It did not. Okay. So I have so many points of view, and none of them are really. responsive to your question, Sarah, because I could not care less about paint color. But I have been reading and following and friends with or acquaintances with it at various points, Megan McArdle for a quarter century or almost now. I have never disagreed with her more about anything until her absolutely preposterous dismissal of big open floor plan kitchens, which I have and I love.

And I spend, I would say, 60% of my time in the giant comfortable care with my dingo watching TV in the kitchen. And we, my wife and I, we like to cook. And when she does not want me involved in the process, I like to be with her and hang out with her while she's cooking. And so this is like, this is the center of, we bought our house precisely so we could hang out in a kitchen. I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, as did you, you know, like the classic West Side kitchen is where you basically store the Irish woman who does your cooking for you because you never actually go into the kitchen yourself. And that is a cramped and uncomfortable way to cook. It is not open to family and excitement and friends and people getting together. Every time we

have a party at this house, which is not often, whenever we do, everyone congregates in the kitchen and we kind of like it that way. So you're wrong. Sit there in your wrongness. But the thing that distracted me was that I was going to, you were talking about sad beige. I mean, the word sad is a problem, right? Don't ever adopt happy beige fashion. Exciting page. But like when you were describing sad beige, which I had to Google because I was not aware of said sad beige trend while you were talking. You know what I want?

I want sad beige politics. That's the only thing that appeals to me about ranked. choice voting is it produces, it's likely to produce, doesn't guarantee more vanilla candidates that are the least objectionable candidates. That's what I want in politics. I think it's a great idea for a column. I might run with it. But Megan McArdle, you're dead to me. I mean, that's all I have to say about this whole kitchen thing. You're completely wrong. Oh, no, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I have to defend myself. First of all, if you like open floor plans, have one. but think about what you're using it for.

What I object to you is the house with no walls. You want a giant kitchen. You want to put a television, a sofa, a garage. I'm all for that. I wish I could have one of those kitchens. I live in a row house. It's not feasible. And in fact, I have a pass-through to my kitchen,

but what I don't like is these kitchens where there's functionally almost no storage space because you have your giant beautiful waterfall island and then like a teeny tiny area for the stove and a sink but nothing's happening in the kitchen and there's no privacy all of your cooking grease

is spreading all over your house but also like look everyone should follow their bliss my objection is that I think a lot of people during the pandemic discovered they didn't they liked having walls in their house and that they had ripped them all out

at the behest of our HGTV overlords and I think people like I like having a dining room too I like having a kitchen where people like hang out with me while I cook and then having the dining room where we sit down and eat and are all joyous. I miss my efficiency apartment sometimes, but also that would mean I just, to be clear, I also don't want any other people in my efficiency apartment. I just miss. When Scott is gone, when like the boys aren't here and Scott's gone, like I, Scott calls it my apartment. I move into our bedroom.

I move my food into our bedroom. Like everything then is in our bedroom. I just watch stuff on my laptop. I never leave. That's what I want in life. Steve, sad beige house. So it'll probably surprise you that I have a lot to say on this, actually. It surprises me, but not necessarily about Sad Bege House.

I have a lot to say about what both Megan and Jonah said. I'm sorry that I pivoted us to a different conversation. No, it's great. I mostly agree with you, but I also strongly disagree with you in the same way Jonah did. But at first, I have to say, I love just, I love just, being on a podcast, having co-founded a company with a guy who can talk about having an Irish woman who comes in and does the cooking for you, as everybody on the Upper West Side knows. We did not have an Irish woman cooking for us, but that's when the apartments were built.

They had Irish women doing it. Jonah, man of the people. No, this is, he's right. I spent years of my life sleeping in our maids room, which. did not have a maid in it because no one on the Upper West Side in the 70s had a maid but originally these apartments

were designed for families we lived in what's called a classic six so it had two bedrooms a dining room a foyer a kitchen a living room and then off the kitchen this steamy tiny little room that was the maid's room

and they were in yeah in all of these apartments and it is really anachronistic we did not have an Irish woman And we actually, that's not true. We did have an Irish woman who cooked for us every night. Her name was Joan Farrell-Macartle. I do want to emphasize to Jonah and Megan

how little anyone outside of a two-mile radius cares what it's like to grow up in Manhattan. Like, just not even a little. Like, it just doesn't, y'all don't, I never think about you. But you were not the elites who had the Irish women. No. You were. No.

No, we were living in the ruin. Why are you asking more questions, Steve? And they weren't because, I mean, I wanted to clarify. I mean, if I'm if I'm mocking Jonah and I'm wrong to mock Jonah, that's not good. There's plenty to mock Jonah where I'm right about where I'm right about. Yes, exactly. Second point is that it's incredible to be speaking of mocking Jonah. It's incredible to me that we took a discussion about Sad Bage and Jonah turned it to politics.

Really like rank. Jonah goes from sad-based houses to rank-choice politics. I mean, come on. Guilty as charged. Now, Jonah is, well, Megan is right about our HGTV overlords being the reason. I mean, there's a little bit of a chicken and egg element here, I think. But I think that Megan is substantially right that HGTV drove this move, this shift towards open concept kitchens.

I mean, if you ever watched House Hunters International or just House Hunters or anything, it was the case. I mean, we used to say it along with the people. Like, they would come into the houses and we would be watching these shows. And you, you know, they would say, what do you want? And the very first thing they would say is, well, we're looking for like an open source or an open concept kitchen. And you could say it along with them because every single person said the same thing. And so I do think it was encouraged by the filming of HG TV shows in much the way that Megan suggests. But I agree with Jonah entirely open concept kitchens are good anyway.

They are great. It's a great place to gather your family. It is the case. Yeah, we don't really throw many parties either. But we always have clusters of people in our home. And everybody always ends up hanging out in the kitchen or when we can, when it's nice out, when the kitchen spills out to the outdoors. So those are great. Having said all that on sad beige, I don't have an opinion.

And Sarah, it's the case that if you hadn't told me, like, if you had started this by asking me to close my eyes and tell you what color the walls were in the room I'm currently sitting in, I would not have been able to tell you. And it could have been, like, it could have been navy, it could have been pink, it could have been green. I would have no idea. I actually think it's grasscloth, isn't it? It's not paint.

I don't know if it's grass cloth. What do you mean? It's not a word. It's like texture. Yeah, it's grasscloth. I can see it's grasscloth because you see behind his head, Megan, you can see the seam. And that's a grass cloth seam. Yeah. Oh, okay.

Yeah, so that's beautiful. Also fancy, though, to be clear. Thank you. I chose it myself. I can tell. No, the other day I was out talking to my sister-in-law and she, they were doing some renovation of their kitchen, and she was asking me if I like black countertops. And I said, well, you know, the black countertops out by my grill get really hot. So on the one hand, they're great because

you can't see dirt as much and everything. On the other hand, they get really hot in the summer. And she said, what about the black countertops in your kitchen? And I said, we don't have black countertops in our kitchen. And she said, yes, you do. Your island is some white, marbly thing, and the rest of your countertops are black. So I had literally no idea what the color of our countertops were in our kitchen. And I'm not, I'm okay with that. All right. Listeners, I don't even know what this segment was about.

I don't know, frankly, maybe the whole podcast. So apologies or something. I look forward to the fight in the comment section over whose house is sad beige house. basically I bought a sad beige house and I'm trying to unsad beige it and I'm fighting a losing battle on some days and I just really feel that right now in my life Is it I'm going to call this a sad beige podcast?

Is that going to be the title? That's what it feels like to me. All right, we'll talk to you next time. You know,