The Dispatch Podcast - Japan’s Art of the Trade Deal | Roundtable

Episode Date: July 25, 2025

Megan McArdle, John McCormack, and Grayson Logue join Mike Warren to discuss President Donald Trump’s recent trade deal with Japan, the latest in the Jeffrey Epstein story (sigh), Russiagate (another sigh), and the cancellation of shared culture. The Agenda:—A sweetheart deal for Japanese automakers—America’s surprisingly resilient economy—Getting the housing market back in balance—Three weeks into the Epstein drama: “unverified hearsay”—Russiagate is just exhausting—Colbert cancelled 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 weekly livestreams—⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you're with Amex Platinum, you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tapas in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca. www.ca.com. Did you lock the front door?

Check. Close the garage door? Yep. Installed window sensors, smoke sensors, and HD cameras with night vision? No. And you set up credit card transaction alerts at secure VPN for a private connection and continuous monitoring for our personal info on the dark web.

Uh, I'm looking into it. Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit TELUS.com. Total Security to learn more. Conditions apply. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. On this week's roundtable, we'll discuss the latest trade deal between the United States and Japan and the state of the American economy.

We'll also talk about the latest. drama over the Epstein files and the Wall Street Journal's new revelations. Plus, how is Tulsi Gabbard the top intelligence official in the Trump administration trying to dredge up the old Russiagate conspiracy? And of course, a little not worth your time. Should we care about the cancellation of Stephen Colbert's late-night talk show? I'm joined today by my dispatch colleagues, Grayson Logue and John McCormick, plus our friend Megham McArdle from the Washington Post.

All right, let's get started with some sort. substance, some economic and trade and tariff substance. On Tuesday evening, there was a reception at the White House with House Republicans, and Donald Trump made this big announcement that there was a trade deal, the biggest trade deal ever, maybe, who knows, who's fact-checking the size of these trade deals? With Japan, I go to the New York Times for the details on this. the Japanese negotiated with the Americans to create a $550 billion investment fund from the Japanese into the United States with the United States government receiving 90% of the profits. In exchange for this, the American government and the Trump administration is lowering the tariffs that Japanese exports, importers of Japanese exports will have to pay coming into the United States.

down to 15% to that sort of bare minimum, if you will, 15% reciprocal tariff rate. That includes a lot of things, including automobiles and automobile parts. You guys may or may not know that the Japanese export a lot of cars and car stuff to the United States. This is a big deal. I want to talk about all aspects of this. But, Megan, I want to go to you. first, because the idea here that Donald Trump is sort of negotiating with Howard Lutnik and across the table from the Japanese to lower the tariff rates in exchange for an investment

fund, is this, have you ever heard of something like this? It sounds, if I were, if I were a crazy, I might say it sounds like a little bit of extortion going on here. What is this investment fund? The president is in control of it. What do you make of this big trade deal with Japan? Oh, I make so many things of it. For starters, the interesting thing is this will raise America's trade deficit.

Uh-oh. So in trade, right, the current account and the capital account have to balance, which means that if you are importing more stuff, you have to basically, that money gets cycled back into the economy as investment into U.S. assets. They've got to do something with those dollars. but conversely, if someone, you know, puts a lot of money into the economy, you have to actually, that's going to go out into various imports because it has to. These accounts always end up balancing. And so the irony here is that, you know, all the talk about the trade deficit, he's actually increased it. You know, more broadly, I think it is a very weird trade deal and I think it goes back to what the, the fact that the Trump administration doesn't have normal instincts on this stuff. We have spent decades building up a community of people who understand how trade deals work. They have very

specific ideas about how they're supposed to be done. And treating the United States as essentially like a developing country where you lower your trade barriers in exchange for the U.S. doing some kind of investment in your room is very strange. And I think unlikely to generate any particular benefits for the... Look, it's a lot of money. I should go back on that. It's a lot of money. It could be used to build factories and so forth, but it could also be used for nonsense that will not make us better off. That said, look, we got to get some kind of regularity. I've talked to so many people, you know, manufacturing and so forth, who say it would be better if I just, if there were a 15% or a 10% tariff, if I just knew what it was.

because right now the uncertainty is, I can't make decisions. I'm going to buy something and then in the middle of, it's going to be in the middle of the ocean, as John wrote the great piece on, you know, you bought a piece of equipment. In the middle of the ocean, the tariffs go up and suddenly it's costing you like three times as much as you thought it would. People are terrified of that uncertainty. And so in that sense, it's good that we are getting a deal, that we are getting some regularity in what things from Japan will cost.

Let's put a pin on the uncertainty aspect of this, because I want to return to that and talk about how people are perceiving these tariffs now several months into post-liberation Day, if you will. But let's stick with this deal and this investment idea, because Grayson, it's my understanding that, you know, generally, I know we're talking about Donald Trump and he's a different kind of Republican, but Republicans generally like the idea that markets and not. a government decide where best to take investment. Where should money be invested into building those new factories or those new investments across the economy? This deal seems to give Donald Trump something that he likes, which is control and which is the ability to say it's mine. I get to say where it goes.

But is this, I mean, this seems like, as Megan sort of alluded, to suggested this could create a lot of waste to create, you know, all kinds of distortions in the market. But is this the model for other countries, other, you know, trading partners that are trying to get their their tariff rates down? Are we going to, is he just going to sort of be handing out new tariff rates as long as they're bringing in the, sending in the cash to the big boss in Washington? I mean, potentially, like, this could be a good strategy for exactly what you describe of handing Trump the announcement of a very shiny object that sounds great to him, hundreds of billions of dollars that on paper he has the ability to control. I will say we

have basically no details about what this fund will look like or the structure of it, or even if it's, I imagine in Trump's mind, he thinks of it like something akin to a sovereign wealth fund where he gets to control all the cash, but there's also some reporting that Japanese officials think things like their loan guarantees for our debt can be counted towards that $550 billion. It's not just like cash coming in, you could include like already pre-planned investments that add up to the number. There's any very degree of things that could add up to $550 billion that might not be Trump just deciding where all this money flows to. But we also know that he loves to claim wins before they've even really conceptualized as a thing. So maybe that's enough to actually get some

certainty on the tariff front. It is funny just how much of this feels like a different era of economic negotiating. I'm finally watching Shogun and I got to the part of the show where the Japanese Lord is like needs to get out of town. It's negotiating with this Portuguese trading ship and they're just throwing numbers across the table. This feels very much like the 17th century before we learned the lessons of mercantilism, at least at a headline level. But yeah, we'll see how durable this is as a carrot for countries desperately trying to get those tariffs down. I just, I love that reference as long, as long as we're referring to Shogun and not like Tokyo Vice, I feel like if we're at that point, uh, in, in the metaphors for, you know, prestige, uh, Japanese adjacent TV, then, then we're in real trouble. Uh, let's talk a little bit about the car aspect of this, because this deal appears to be kind of a sweetheart deal for Japanese auto makers. And, uh, at least that's how American car makers, and I imagine some, some of the European carmakers as well, view this because that 25% rate dipping down to 15% for Japanese cars and car parts.

I mean, you could just see already bad deal is what the American car makers are saying, even though their stock prices have gone up. I mean, you know, these things are sort of somewhat volatile. But it does raise all of these interesting instances where Donald Trump's approach to trade, John, sort of distorts lots of other things. that might go against some of his stated goals to help the American car industry, for instance, or as, as Megan said earlier, to lower that trade deficit, if this deal is actually, you know, raising, you know, or, you know, bumping up that trade deficit. It sort of goes against

what what the Donald Trump, Peter Navarro viewpoint on trade should be. It does feel a bit as if the economy, however, has figured out a way in the medium term to kind of handle all these tariffs. I mean, we were talking, I think, on this podcast not long ago about what would happen with prices and inflation and because of the uncertainty of the tariffs. The economy's not doing as badly as Trump opponents probably hoped. and a lot of smart analysts thought would happen. I've seen some analysis that, you know, companies have sort of learned from COVID and stockpiled, you know, so they've got supply that they've been sort of running out. What do we think, John, about sort of the economics of where things are going now that these tariff deals are kind of getting a little more certain and people haven't seen prices change the way that maybe a lot of people fear? Yeah, I mean, just looking at stocks, there was that month-long trough, basically, following Liberation Day, where everyone thought Trump was serious. And then there was the pause and prices have basically rebounded. So I think people basically assume we're not going to go fully, you know, maximalist on Trump's tariff policy that he announced on, quote unquote, liberation day. But I don't know. You never know. I mean, you've always got to come back to Scott Lincolme's point that Trump just likes tariffs. And he might

find a way to to sort of go maximalist against different countries that are disfavored. Obviously here, Japan found a way to make Trump the center of the show to appeal to his ego, giving him control of this fund. But, you know, so far it does seem like the economy is humming along and everyone seems to think that, you know, we'll sort of, you know, lurch towards some sort of equilibrium or or not so bad situation and muddle through this. You know, we're one-eighth of the way done with the Trump presidency, as of what last Sunday, you know, July 20th. So, you know, six months down, 42 to go. And I think, as you said,

you know, people are thinking we can just get through this. We can, you know, people stockpile. I did for that piece that Megan mentioned, I did talk to a few different, a few different business people. And one woman who runs a company said, yeah, she had months and months of supply stockpile, but eventually that would run out. And so I think a lot of people think they can somehow muddle through. Yeah. Megan, what do you think about, about this question of the resilience of the economy or the stability, relative stability of prices, not what we expect it. What do you make of it? I mean, look, there's the old joke that economists have predicted, you know, 10 of the last five recessions. And I think it's hard as physicist Niles Bohr has said to have remarked. Predictions

are hard, especially with the future. And I think that the resilience of the American economy has been surprising, gratifying in some ways. But I will say this, that when I was talking to economists before Liberation Day, they were saying, you know, actually, you know, a reasonable tariff, not the crazy like 800 billion percent tariffs that Trump has at times proposed, but that a tariff of 10 or 15 or even 28 percent was not actually going to lower GDP that much. It would hit GDP, but a couple of percent, not in part because the United States, our economy is just not that exposed to trade relative to a lot of other, say, European nations. You know, we produce a lot of what we make domestically. We are a vast country with huge amounts of natural resources. We don't get everything

we need. You know, it is an issue that China is a bottleneck for a lot of strategic things like rare earths, like lithium and so forth. But in general, tariffs are not going to hit us as hard as I think some lay people were expecting where they saw a 25% tariff and thought 25% price hike. And that's not actually how it works. Those price hikes do ripple through a lot of our far-flung supply chains. But ultimately, we do make a lot of what we use here. And so it's not that they're good. They aren't good. They still make our supply chains less efficient, make us less competitive globally, hurt our exports in a lot of ways. But, but, but they are not the economic holocaust that I think you might have expected from some of the earlier commentary. Before we move on from this, I'm wondering if anybody here has any thoughts on some of the other indicators out there. Home sales have been pretty dismal this year so far. You've got high interest rates. Donald Trump is complaining about this.

He's banging the drum potentially about firing Jay Powell from the federal as Federal Reserve Chair. Um, you know, spending has, has gone down even, even as the economy has sort of, uh, has sort of been pretty stable. Um, is there, is, are there anything that you guys are seeing on the horizon economically? Um, that should be concerning, say, to, uh, to the incumbent party as, uh, as we're, you know, what, 16 months away, uh, from, from the midterm election. Um, there was a lot of thought a couple months ago that the economy would be the Republican, the Republican. downfall, like we've been talking about, we haven't seen that yet. Does anybody have any thoughts on what to make of some of these other non-trade-related or non-directly trade-related economic indicators? I think the housing market's a huge problem. And if you think about the story of the United States housing market, it is that we had a lot of structural issues in terms of our ability to build to meet demand. And those structural issues were to some extent mass. by a decades-long decline in interest rates.

And so that enabled people to keep offering higher and higher prices for those houses. Even well, the average age of a first-time home buyer inched up, the average age of a home buyer, like overall homebuyers inched up, we have priced a lot of young people out of the market, and that's bad. And I think really affects people directly in terms of how they perceive the economy, but also in terms of things like family formation. You know, a big part of the story of the baby boom is just the housing as the automobile opened up all these suburbs. Suddenly, a guy who's 24 years old can buy a house and support a family, and that means he can start his family.

That period ended during the pandemic. And I think a lot of people haven't processed that it's probably over for good. We're probably never going back to the interest rates that we saw, or not for a long time going back to the kinds of interest rates that we saw in the 2010s. You know, I refinance my mortgage in 2020 for 1.75%. That is never going to happen again. And the result of that is that the housing market has frozen. You have people who are sitting in their homes. They want the price they could have gotten five years ago. You have people who want to buy homes, but cannot afford to offer that price because the mortgage payment on that, you know, sticker price has doubled. And so, you know, when I look at the housing prices in my neighborhood, it's this amazing. amazing. It's like looking at a snapshot of 2019, except nothing's moving, right? There's just these imaginary listings by people with rich fantasy lives, and no one's buying the houses because they can't afford to put down and down payment and then muster that kind of monthly payment. And I don't know how we get out of this, but this is going to be an increasing

problem for the administration. I don't think that pressuring the Fed to lower rates is going help in part because the Fed controls one interest rate. It does not, it cannot make mortgage rates go down over the long term because people are pricing in things like inflation. They're pricing in the cost of money. You can't get the Fed to ease off the money supply and then just have that directly translate into a 3% mortgage, which is what you would really need to bring the housing market back into some semblance of balance. And some kind of, you know, growth in the housing supply as well. Yes, obviously. Obviously. It does seem like it's an issue that is glaringly obvious to anybody between the ages of 30 and 50. You know, you're, you've not necessarily in a place

where you've paid off your mortgage, but you should be in the market or ought to be in the market. And yet nobody's really talking about it from a political standpoint. You hear a little bits about trying to, you know, reform things, whether it's regulations in California or things like this. But it just seems like something that is happening in the real world. And it's a perfect example of something that the current state of politics is not quite responsive to. Any final thoughts on that? I think Megan's exactly right. And you can't overstate the importance of the cost of housing to people's personal financial outlook. I think it matters much more than the cost of eggs.

you know, since we're breaking about our personal, you know, interest rates. I got to 2.3% in a townhouse back in, you know, the pandemic. And I'm very much like to get into a single family house right now. But as Megan said, prices have literally doubled. I mean, it's just, it's so it's kind of crazy. And then I feel even worse for people who are still renting and aren't even building up equity. So, uh, and when you want to calculate the actual number of people who this directly affects, I mean, you have to consider people who are not only who want to buy this year. You have to consider people who want to buy in the next five to 10 years because that's how That's how they, it affects their financial outlook, how much money you have.

And it's the most one of the, you know, food housing shelter. It's one of the most important things out there. I guess the question I'd ask for Megan is, how does this end? You know, you mentioned these houses sitting on the market. I mean, I don't know much about economics, but shouldn't prices drop at some point? And why haven't they? And will they? What's going on with prices?

Well, I mean, I would say this, right? You and I are the problem. They will carry me out of that house feet first. My husband at one point was like, you know, should we think about moving? I was like, we are, no, honey, we are never leaving our mortgage. I'm sorry. So when I pay that mortgage off in 2035, I can look at moving. But until then, why would I move?

If I bought a house that cost the same as my house, I would double my costs. If I bought a house that cost more than my house, I would be in bankruptcy. And that is the fundamental problem is, yes, prices should adjust downward. But unless you really have to move, you really have to sell because you need the money, you are, you know, trembling on the edge of bankruptcy, you have to move across country. you're just going to sit on that mortgage. And so the normal price adjustment, which should happen, is not happening and is going to take, you are starting to see it on the margins, right?

You are starting to see the people, the distressed buyers who really have to sell are selling. And you did for a while see a lot of new supply coming onto the market in some markets. And that helped ease the problem because those people just cut their losses. They just say, I got to move these houses. I can't sit on them. And so they just sell them. The problem is that the cost of five. financing and the sale price are moving in the wrong direction to get new housing supply,

right? It's now costing you more to finance your project and you're going to get less at the other end. And that means that new housing starts are crashing and making this problem even worse. I will say, too, that just the fact that interest rates have swung so much from what they were just a few years ago, I think creates a special, I guess, newer type of frustration among people who want to be first-time homebuyers, but who can't? There's a broader, like, argument that things were so much better in the 1970s or 1980s, and you can debate about how much cost housing was or college was as a portion of that. But for people closer to my age who could have been able to afford a house in 2019 or 2018, but weren't quite at the stage financially or they weren't

married yet, and who are ready now, but who can't. Like, that's a unique source of frustration because it feels so recent. Like this was, we're not talking about parents holding on a generational well, their grandparents, or how much easier it could have been, like the classic younger millennial criticism, it feels very recent that you could have been able to afford this type of mortgage, and now you can't. And I will say that one thing was better in the 70s, which was that you could sell your mortgage. You could transfer your mortgage to another person. And so basically, if you think about it, if you have one of these low rate mortgages, you have an asset. If you have something that is basically inflation is paying me to hold on to my house

and pay my mortgage every year, right? And in the 70s, you could sell that asset to someone else, which meant you could monetize this below market debt that you owned, or that you owed, rather. And basically, banks didn't like that because in the 70s, and this helped lead to the savings and loan crisis, people who were sitting, rather than refinancing into a higher rate mortgage when they moved, people would sell this mortgage. The bank is stuck with a mortgage that's like less than the rate of inflation. They're losing money every year. And so, they started inserting what are called due-on-sale clauses into housing contracts. So when you do your mortgage, it says, if you sell the house, you have to pay off the mortgage.

Now, there are some mortgages that that isn't true of, VA loans, some FHA loans. And those are a very valuable commodity right now, but most people don't have them, which means that that makes it even harder for people like you to get into the housing market. It feels like this is going to be something and maybe it's wishful thinking. Maybe things will turn around by them, but this is going to be. to be something that we might be hearing a lot about in the 28 presidential election, if only because it feels like it's simmering in a way that other issues have simmered and then exploded out into the end of the public discussion once the presidential election comes around.

All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the dispatch podcast. 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, not months. Ethos keeps it simple. It's 100% online, no medical exam, just a few health question. You can get a quote in as little as 10 minutes, same-day coverage, and policies starting at about two bucks a day, build monthly, with options up to $3 million in coverage. With a 4.8 out of five-star rating on trust pilot and thousands of families already applying through Ethos, it builds trust. Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's ETHOS.com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. It's Mayvery. Maybe It's Mabelene is such an iconic piece of music.

Hit the track. Everyone in the studio that I worked on this jingle with all had, like, childhood stories or memories 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. 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.

Use one of their award-winning templates or try the new Blueprint AI, which tailors a site for you based on your goals and style. It's quick, intuitive, and requires zero coding experience. You can also tap into built-in analytics and see who's engaging with your site and email campaigns to stay connected with subscribers or clients. And Squarespace goes beyond design. You can offer services, book appointments, and receive payments directly through your site. It's a single hub for managing your work and reaching your audience without having to piece together a bunch of different tools. All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch,

to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. We're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's return to the discussion. We've got to move on now to something that I'm loathe to discuss, except we've got to keep discussing it because news and things keep happening. And that's the whole Epstein file saga. Look, I'm on record last week on the on the despot roundtable,

as urging caution about going too far down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole on this, that simply because Donald Trump and his administration seemed uninterested all of a sudden in releasing these files that didn't mean that Donald Trump was somehow engaged or involved directly with Jeffrey Epstein's terrible crimes. And yet Donald Trump continues to, do things, and we keep learning new things that drag this story along. I want to share with listeners if you didn't see it on Wednesday, exclusive reporting from the Wall Street Journal.

Justice Department told Trump in May that his name is among many in the Epstein files. This kind of went off like a low-level nuclear bomb in Washington after this article dropped. I want to be clear that this tells us something that I think a lot of people suspected, but it also doesn't tell us everything that maybe the most anti-Trump, you know, minds might, might want it to say his name showing up the Epstein files does not indicate anything other than his name shows up in the Epstein file. Did somebody ask about Donald Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein in an interview and some part of the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein? There's a lot of photos, a lot of evidence. We know that Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump at one point in their lives were close. Somebody asking about Donald Trump means that his name is in the Epstein file. So we don't have details about exactly the context of why his name was brought up.

And we should point out, this is the Wall Street Journal reporting, many other high-profile figures were also named Trump was told. But this knowledge now sort of definitely colors what happened just a couple of weeks ago when the FBI and the DOJ in an unsigned memo, you know, basically said nothing else to see here. There's really nothing to release here about these Epstein files that Trump administration officials months earlier had been saying they were ready to release. them. They're ready to show this mythical list that I still don't think exists of clients. So this is an entire mess. We can also go into everything that's going on on Capitol Hill. But let's just start there, John, with what we learned from the Wall Street Journal. Donald Trump finds out two months ago that his name is in these files. And then six weeks later, his administration is saying nothing to see here. What should we make of this now three weeks into

the Epstein Files drama. Well, I keep going back to Elon Musk's, you know, bombshell being dropped on Twitter when he was so angry at Trump. He thought this was the bombshell. He was so angry at Trump. They had this huge rift. You know, he spent hundreds of millions of dollars. He had been totally demoralized and humiliated.

And he put out there the big bombshell about to drop his Trump is named in the Epstein files. And a lot of people met that with a shrug because, right, well, his name isn't there. Like his name's in a rolladex. We all kind of knew that. The most interesting words in the wall. journal article that came out. It wasn't that he was named than he knew about it. It was that there is unverified hearsay. So it's not just that Trump is named somehow in a Rolodex. It's that there

are some sort of allegations of something. I don't know about the nature of their friendship or whatever, but it's more than simply that he's being named. And that's very interesting, obviously, hearsay. We're not talking about a legal context here, right? I mean, it's about releasing this in the public, in the court of a public opinion, unverified hearsay, you know, carries weight. So I think that matters. I would assume that somehow, given all the leaks that have happened, that this unverified hearsay will come out one way or another, whether it's through, I don't know, through more leaks in the press, maybe it'll take until Democrats take over the House and somehow subpoena the files. But I think that we will figure out what this is. The other big news,

obviously, is that Trump has sent his deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, to meet with Julane Maxwell, the right-hand woman of Epstein, which is very, very fishy, and strange very unusual we should we should explain maxwell is is is in prison right now in prison right now and todd blanche is trump's deputy attorney general and his former personal attorney and the deputy attorney general is essentially the person who actually runs the department of justice so this is a very high level official um you know going to meet with this woman who i you know so just basically the realm of speculation this point i don't have inside sources into maxwell or todd blanche i would never wildly speculate. But since Nick Cotogio would, let me, you know, cite Nick's brilliant

speculation and he thinks that there is going to be some sort of deal of Maxwell exonerating Trump in some way and saying that, you know, she made up the letter, uh, the poem or whatever it was, you know, to, you know, maybe, maybe we should mention that as well. So this is, this follows on the Wall Street Journal's reporting. Uh, I can't even keep track. Was this last week? Was it just last week that we got this reporting for the journal, uh, that there was this book. that Maxwell had compiled for Jeffrey Epstein's 50th birthday and had letters from all sorts of people, friends, associates, and included a letter signed by Donald Trump that contained a poem that was suggestive and confusing and anyway, that's the context of what you're talking

about. So you're sharing, John, the, uh, Nick Catogeo's suggestion here that, uh, that maybe Maxwell is getting ready to exonerate Trump from, from any wrongdoing, uh, in exchange for something. Yeah, I mean, Nick points out that Trump is the one person who can set her free, you know, the white house has said that a pardon is not being considered, but you wouldn't need to pardon her. You could commute her sentence, uh, the DOJ could, you know, stand down in the appeals. She's bringing an appeals case before the Supreme Court. So there are a lot of ways to do this. And back to that letter, I mean, my, since, you know, I decided to pop up on Twitter to,

to provide some of my own rank speculation. My initial gut reaction was it didn't quite sound like the letter was written by Trump himself. I know that there was some back and forth. Well, did Trump ever used the word enigma? It turns out he did. He used it publicly in a speech about Ben Carson 2015. But just when you listen to it, if you read it out loud, to me, to me it sounded more, more someone like Maxwell herself wrote this.

and she's the one who organized the letter. And also, billionaires don't tend to write their own copy. They tend to have, like, ghostwriters as Trump did for his books. You know, and so it, to me, just makes totally logical sense that Maxwell's organizing this, and maybe she says, hey, Donald, here's a little, here's a little thing I wrote for you to send a Jeffrey, you know, would you sign it? And he, maybe he writes the doodle and he signs his name. But that doesn't exonerate him.

I mean, it's obviously he would have read the thing first, and he would have understood that there is some sort of suggestiveness in the article about it. Every day being another wonderful secret, an enigma's never age. What does that mean? So anyway, this is all very fishy. We're in the realm of rank speculation, but that's what we've got, and I would defer to. Explain to me, Grayson, why is this persisting? I mean, in a way, I already know the answer because it is titillating.

It is the shoe was suddenly on the other foot here where a lot of sort of the MAGA fever swamps were convinced there were high-level. Democrats that were implicated in the Epstein files. And now it looks like Donald Trump may be implicated in something from these files. And so you have sort of resistance Democrats salivating at that. And it's just the very fact that Jeffrey Epstein, the circumstances around his suicide in prison, you know, again, the gross, disgusting aspects of the crimes that he committed. it's all, it's like a car wreck that we can't look away from. I mean, why is this continuing to persist? Why hasn't the White House been able to tamp this down?

Why are we still talking about this? I think it's not so much exactly why, but who is perpetuating this and what are their interests in perpetuating this? And so what's interesting about this, I guess we're on like day 18 since that DOJ FBI memo was dropped and we're still talking about this, is this is from within the mega coalition. coming from President Trump's core supporters, and not so much maybe at a popular level, but really the media figures and, like, elites within the magosphere are the ones who are

split on this. So you have folks who have a very personal interest in continuing to fan the flames of this conspiracy theory and actual individuals who've built a large part of their media career being put in positions of power to actually deliver to their followers, folks like Cash Patel, folks like Dan Bongino. So they really have a direct interest personally in their platform and in their future careers in MAGA world and not getting on the wrong side of this, which I think is interesting. But that's at odds with Trump's position now, which is nothing to see here.

I mean, this is what has made it so maybe exciting for people to watch. It's like, what is this world that you've just described? What are they going to do? They seem to have rallied. around Trump for the most part, but it's, it's, nobody knows what's going to happen, I guess, and that's where a lot of this kind of soap opera drama comes from, right? Yeah, I think that's the intrigue. And you certainly have, as you said, that the Democrats kind of being like, let them fight

from the sidelines and fanning the flames for their own interests. But the other layer here is we are approaching kind of the starting gun of 2028, where Donald Trump, presumably, knock on wood, no third term runs, will not be the British. presumptive nominee of the Republican Party. And I think that's a big question mark of once he actually is not in a position to hold power, like will his mystique over the right broadly fade because of that or will there still be like a lot of enduring loyalty to the president? And that I think is an open question that a lot of people are happening to consider with. Because till now, your pathway to becoming a maga media darling was basically subservience to Trump. And if we're approaching

the end of his kind of peak power and you're a person who's built your brand based off of this conspiracy theory, that becomes more of a harder circle to squares, like subservience to Trump, which has traditionally been the safe port in the storm, or betraying something that a small number of people, but a potent number of people really believe as a conspiracy theory and has supported you personally in your pursuit of that conspiracy theory. And I mean, I don't know how this is going to end on that front. Yeah, Megan, that seems to be, if we're talking about the makeup of the post-Trump MAGA movement, that to me is the big question. I mean, for up to this point, basically, you know, fealty to Trump and a kind of general belief in a fever swamp conspiracy theory, those have not come in conflict with each other.

And that seems to be, that seems to be changing. Maybe it doesn't matter. I mean, we just saw the House of Representatives essentially shut down until September in sort of protest of efforts to sort of get Congress to take action on the Epstein files and releasing them. You've had various members of Congress trying to through the committee process or through the floor process try to do this. And the response from Mike Johnson, the House Speaker, has been essentially shut down. business on the House floor until September? How does this all shake out with regard to the Trump Maga base? Do they care about this anymore? What are your thoughts? So I think that people often

overestimate how much Donald Trump is driving the elephant rather than riding it. You know, he is history's greatest marketer. And he is really good at just throwing stuff out, seeing how his audience reacts. If the audience doesn't like it, he's got something else. But you have seen moments where that came into conflict. The vaccine was one of them where he went out and said, I did this great vaccine and his audience booed him. That said, you know, in earlier things Donald Trump could just give them what they wanted, right? He went out, he tried to promote the vaccine. They booed him. He backed off of that. But now we're at a place where releasing these files, he can't do it. Now, he can't do it for a number of reasons, and we should say there's an appeal going to the Supreme Court right now.

They can't release anything before they go into court with that data, with that information. And so they were never going to release the Epstein files, even if Trump wasn't in them. But, of course, it is more complicated if Trump is mentioned, even if those mentions are hearsay, even if they are telling us something I think we already knew, which is that, like many of Epstein's associations, They understood that he had an affinity for girls who were underage, and they didn't think that was a deal breaker. And I think that should be a deal breaker for the American public. It clearly hasn't been. But he can't let these things out because this is not something he can back off of.

It is something where if he gives his audience what they want, it will make things worse for him in a way that simply has not been true before. So I don't know where this ends. I think that Johnson is hoping that if he can just ride this. this out to the end of the summer, people will lose interest. And that is always a possibility, right? Some big crisis could come up, distract us. We're not talking about Epstein anymore. But I will say that this conspiracy theory has had incredible legs. And that I think that unless some news event intervenes, when they come back, they're going to find themselves in exactly the same

place. This is a conspiracy theory that fits into a larger conspiratorial framework, right, for a certain type of online person. I've talked about this before on the podcast. It is, it is Q and on. I believe Ben Smith at, at Semaphore as described the Epstein conspiracy theory is sort of Q&ON for the college educated set, essentially this idea that the elites in the country are running some kind of illegal child's sex ring thing.

And that the cover-up is the big scandal and whether it's Epstein or whomever, it's the key that unlocks everything. I tend to agree with you, Megan, that it's hard to see why this goes away just because Congress takes a break and we're in the middle of summer. I will say, however, between this, between the Coldplay couple, between a couple of other stories that that we have been sort of talking about over the last couple of weeks. It does have a feeling of the summer is happening. Nothing really important is going on.

There's not much to talk about. God forbid it's a, you know, shark attacks before 9-11 kind of summer. I don't think that that's going to be the case. But it does have that feeling, you know, not to say these issues are not necessarily important of what Epstein did and what he was accused of and what. what he was found guilty of, but there is a, there's a trivial aspect to it that, that gets people interested in talking about it until maybe some more important things happen, or maybe until everybody's gotten back from, from the beach or the lake.

John, did you have a final thought on this? I'll make the case that it is important, that there is, it's, I mean, there's the big picture Epstein conspiracy theory that he unlocks this Q&on conspiracy, but there are specific facts that Donald Trump was friends with Jeffrey Epstein at a time when Jeffrey Epstein. was preying upon underage girls. And we can say that Trump, oh, L.O.L. Nothing matters. Trump is a known lech. He cheated on his pregnant wife with a pornographic actress. You know, so people don't care. But I do think that this is the line that people, like, we have so few moral boundaries left in this country that this is one that people are rightly,

rightly appalled by. And that if there is unverified hearsay, or more than that, regarding this issue in Trump's relationship with Epstein that that is a big deal. That's a huge deal. And maybe it's not. Maybe there's nothing, maybe there's nothing to it. Maybe it's just that Trump, you know, Trump is Trump and he doesn't want his name implicated anything. He's going to control it. So I don't know, but I think that there is the real potential for a real serious scandal. I mean, the back and forth of that letter, you know, enigma's never age. Isn't that clear to you, Jeffrey? Yes, it was quite clear unless I'm not quoting it verbatim. Again, even if Maxwell wrote, like the letter exists. We have ever reason to,

believe the Wall Street Journal is correct, that they would have gone through every legal step possible to make sure this is a real thing. That is Trump's signature. Now, whether or not he wrote that letter, he would have read it. I think he would have understood, even Trump, you know, I think he would have understood that it meant something. So I think this is a real story. I don't, I think that it's an important story. It's a real story. And to, and to that point, you know, it strikes me that, and then we'll, and then we'll move on here, but it strikes me that there is a parallel to another old friend of Jeffrey Hepstein who occupied the Oval Office, Bill Clinton.

There was a lot of talk, a lot of things being discussed in the run-up to the 1992 election and throughout his first term and he was re-elected about his, about his electureous behavior with women. That was out there. That was discussed. We remember Hillary Clinton's standby, your man, kind of. those moments. And it, of course, it wasn't until the second term that the Monica Lewinsky scandal really kind of, in some ways, affirmed what we already knew about Bill Clinton, but in a way that sort of went beyond the pale for a lot of people and damaged Clinton's reputation, certainly at the end of his term.

I'm not saying that's going to happen to Donald Trump. It does, it does underscore for me, however, that more information, to your point, John, that we can learn about this if there is something scandal. to listen here. If it does arise that we learn something actually new, why couldn't it be damaging to Donald Trump's reputation, despite what we already know? But let's move on to something that I think the Trump administration is trying to move on from, move on to, I should say, from the Epstein saga. And we've been seeing this over the last week or so from Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, somebody that, who is really kind of been in the doghouse in the Trump administration for the last several weeks and months even.

She is sort of the top intelligence official in the United States government. She's a cabinet official. Been at odds with Donald Trump on a lot of his recent foreign policy decisions, particularly the strike on Iran. What's the best way to get back in Trump's good graces? It's to bring up some scandal that he's upset about, that, uh, that, uh, that he feels under attack for. And so what better one than that than RussiaGate? So we've been talking about RussiaGate now for the past several days because

Tulsi Gabbard has released a series of, I wouldn't even call them reports or analyses. They're essentially press releases and new declassified, unclassified documents that had been classified that she says prove that there was a, there was, these are her words. treasonous behavior by Obama administration officials in the period after Donald Trump's election in 2016 to his inauguration in order to sort of cook up intelligence directed by President Obama as the accusation to suggest something that wasn't true, which was that Vladimir Putin preferred Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. We've been through all of this. We've covered all of all of. the idea of Rushgate here, but it's sort of out in the open again. Donald Trump is talking about it because Tulsi Gabbard is talking about it.

And now alleging that that may be a criminal investigation is afoot, that things have been referred to the Department of Justice. Grayson, let me start with you. What should we make, if anything, of this new information and evidence? I'm a little skeptical. We're learning anything that we didn't already know. about the faults of the intelligence on on Donald Trump's relationship or lack thereof with the Russian government in the 2016 election.

How do you interpret this? Is this just all an attempt to distract Americans from Epstein and Donald Trump from the fact that he's been pissed at Tulsi Gabbard? Or is there something to this? We can start with the giant caveat that like Russia data is just exhausting at this point. Like I you guys were doing the actual tours of duties when this was live, but I had to write the morning dispatch about the John Durham report back in 2023 and felt like I was in the twilight zone, just trying to sort through all of the twists in terms of which element was this is accurate or not accurate. And suffice it to say. And John Durham, we should say, was the special counsel. Yes. One of like a thousand special counsels appointed regarding, you know, throughout the last five or six years to investigate the investigative. into Russia's interference in the 2016 election. The investigation to investigate that

investigation. That's right. And if you actually examine this at a broad level, it frustrates everyone's partisan priors as to how all the different actors handled different pieces of the Russian investigation. Like the FBI and intelligence community bungled a lot of this. Was it enough such that they should be prosecuted for crimes? No. So Democrats took that as a win. Was there still strong evidence that Russia was trying to influence our election broadly. Yes. Was there evidence that it would have turned the outcome of the election? No. So, like, there's all of these different things that can be said about this. I think for what Tulsi Gabbard is trying to do, I think it's pretty transparently part as a, like, a deflecting strategy of, like, go look at this new thing.

Let's let's create a new scandal. And to your point, I'm pretty skeptical of there being any new crazy revelations in the declassified documents or the House Republican Majority Intelligence Committee report, which seems to be the main thrust of this. I will say, even though it is exhausting, it's worth it to actually read some of the specific claims. And I just looked at the press release that their office put out on Friday. And the first bullet point is this bullet point, and I'll just read. In the months leading up to the November 2016 election, the intelligence community consistently assess that Russia is, quote, probably not trying to influence the election by using cyber means. Seems innocuous enough. If you actually read the

email that that's quoting from, which was a intelligence correspondence between intelligence officials in September 2016, this is the full email that it's quoting from. Russia is probably not trying to influence the election by using cyber means to manipulate computer-enabled election infrastructure. Russia is probably using cyber means primarily to influence the election by stealing campaign party data, leaking select items, and using public propaganda. And it goes on to detail Russia's historic use of these tactics. So that press release is trying to get you to say Russia did not use cyber means. And the actual source material is saying it didn't use a specific strategy to attack election infrastructure, but it also was using cyber means in other areas.

So that just goes to show that I don't think this is anywhere near a good faith effort at shining light as to like real lessons or takeaways from the whole Russia gate affair. Yeah, this reminds me of the way that you'll see movie posters use negative reviews, but clip out something that was intended to be a criticism, but clip out the positive words and put it on the poster. Megan, let's talk about this latest revelation, which is what is maddening and what Grayson is getting to here, maddening about Russia Gap is essentially you've got two narratives about what Russia was doing in 2016.

you've got the Democratic narrative and you've got the Republican narrative. They're both incomplete and sort of miss the point of all of this. I wrote about this on Tuesday at the dispatch that the specific claim that Russia was trying to influence or actually sort of manipulate the results of the 2016 election, as Grayson just pointed out, by going after either election machines, hacking election machines. how would that even happen or or doing any of those any of those manipulations to the results themselves nobody seems to have believed that and and nobody has claimed otherwise the question of course was the propaganda or the or the the all these sort of bot farms that the Russians were backing that were sort of putting out putting out anti-Hillary or even pro-Trump stuff online to try to influence Americans again whether or not that

actually had an influence on the outcome of the election. There's no real evidence of that. But the Republicans who, what Tulsi Gabbard has released is essentially what the Republican Committee back in 2019, the Republicans on that committee released in sort of defense of their narrative about this, that this was all cooked up. Again, it just feels like a rehash of these arguments that we've been having were both Sattuck really kind of yelling past each other and not really interested in finding out any kind of truth about this.

Are you as exhausted as Grayson and I are about this whole thing? I could use a nap right now. Look, it is, these are two conspiracy theories that didn't happen. Or didn't happen, I shouldn't say. They're two like slight conspiracy theories that have been blown way out of importance. Right. So on the one hand in 2016, Democrats who are absolutely reeling from their lost to a guy that they had initially kind of hoped would win the nomination because he'd be

so easy for Hillary Clinton to beat. And then he destroys the blue wall and walks into the Oval office, right? They looked around. They're like, well, there has to be some explanation and it can't be that no one likes us. So instead, they settle, a lot of people settled on, Russia did it. Russia stole the election. And Rachel Maddow was out there every night promising that any day now, we were going to get the smoking gun document that was going to prove that Trump was a Manchurian candidate who had been placed in. The walls are closing in, Megan. Exactly. And this was lunatic. If you looked at the actual evidence, people were looking at, they were like, well, Russia bought all these Facebook ads. I mean, we're talking about a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of Facebook ads.

And if a couple hundred thousand dollars can win a United States election, then campaigns need to really rethink what they're doing. I mean, you can't even sell like. towels with a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of Facebook ads. And then Republicans looked at this and looked at what the intelligence community had said and looked at all of these media people. And they decided that this was a giant conspiracy by the deep state. In fact, what it was was a handful of people who were freaked out by the fact that someone they thought was totally unpresidential correctly had gotten this close to the Oval Office. And they are just looking for an explanation. And they are talking themselves into believing this idiotic story about how Russia

had placed its secret mole in the Oval Office. And Republicans interpreted that as some kind of like everyone's meeting up at Starbucks at five in the morning to coordinate the next day's message. And that's not what happened. And so both sides are now really invested in their huge conspiracy busy theory. I think that the left has kind of mostly come around to realizing that it just what they thought was true was not true. Republicans, we can only hope. But because enough people on both sides believe it, there is, you know, it's a kind of bootleggers and Baptist situation where the bootleggers and the Baptists are often in league because, you know, when the when the Baptist win and make the county dry, the bootleggers get more business. Both sides have an incentive

to inflate this far beyond its actual importance. And I just wish they would cut it out, out, like knock it off. Stop. Well, from your mouth to their ears, Megan, I think I think this podcast will hopefully get to them. And they'll finally listen to us. John, Barack Obama is not going to be tried for treason here. Is it safe to say that that's almost certainly 100% true? I mean, Unless we've learned something that nobody has ever been able to prove. But that's the claim that Tulsi Gabbard is making. That's, of course, what Donald Trump is saying, right? He's referring to what Barack Obama and the intelligence apparatus, I mean, just throughout the names, there's DNI, James Clapper, Brennan at CIA.

He's calling it criminal. On the one hand, it's absurd. on the other hand, it's Donald Trump's DOJ. This is something that Donald Trump himself cares a lot about and that he is convinced of or he is somehow convinced himself of that these people work out to get him and that it's criminal. Maybe I should be so dismissive and maybe we're going to see something that actually comes out of this from Trump's DOJ. Any predictions? Well, one, I would commend listeners who want more on this topic to read.

read your great piece of the dispatch.com and to read Andy McCarthy. I follow Andy. I mean, Andy was skeptical of the maximalist claims, but he's also- This is National Reviews, uh, Andrew McCarthy. Andy McCarthy saying that there's nothing new here that what we knew that there was, there were efforts to influence the election, not only as Megan said, Facebook ads, you know, the WikiLeaks, you know, the DNC emails hacked, which were used. It was, I don't think it was decisive as well, right? I don't think it was decisive for sure. It was not decisive, but I mean, this was what was you being used to bracket the Access Hollywood tape where these, you know, WikiLeaks, you know, things that had originally been hacked by Russian operatives.

Anyway, to answer Mike's question, I have faith in our courts. I do not have faith in the Trump Justice Department. So, I mean, I don't know exactly how far they will go in bringing charges against their political opponents, but we know that Trump campaigned on revenge, and I assume that he wants revenge, a few things more than he wants over Russiagate. So I don't know exactly where the Trump DOJ will go on this. I do have faith in the court, the legal system to ultimately do the right thing. But as it's been true, whether there's been politicized prosecutions or legal cases or whatever brought by either party, you know, the process is its own punishment. So I'm not saying

I have necessarily total sympathy for anyone involved here. But I would just wait and see. We're going to take a break, but we'll be back shortly. We're back with the Dispatch podcast, but before we return to the roundtable, I want to let you know what's going on elsewhere at the dispatch. This week on advisory opinions, Sarah and David take on the legal chaos behind Alina Haba's removal and what it reveals about presidential power. Search for advisory opinions in your podcast app and make sure you hit that follow button. Now, let's get back into the conversation. All right. Let's talk a little not worth your time. There's been a lot of talk about Stephen Colbert and the late show with Stephen Colbert being canceled. This is CBS's late night program. It's a show that Colbert inherited over 10 years ago from the great David Letterman, who started the show in 1993 on CBS. It's now being canceled. He's got roughly, what, 11, 13 months left in the show. This is all against the backdrop. of Skydance, the media company attempted merger with Paramount,

the big media company that needs the government to approve this merger. And a real kind of bit of classic kind of mob-like extortion, Donald Trump is essentially holding Paramount's feet to the fire when it comes to CBS's 60 Minutes program. There's been a big shakeup at that program. This was perceived. This cancellation of Colbert's show was perceived as another part of that story. I think the facts suggest otherwise that Colbert's show was losing a lot of money.

It's a late night comedy program, which it's kind of amazing that they still exist at this point when nobody's watching network TV anymore. The average age of Colbert's show was something like well over 70. years old. 68. Was it 68? Okay. I thought it was 70. And it was 60 when Letterman, when he took over from Letterman.

Yeah, no, exactly. His average age has got, of his audience has gone up. Megan, let me start with you. Is it even worth our time to be wringing our hands? All the, all the liberals out there are saying that this is a blow against democracy because the clown who win after Donald Trump, if you can't make fun of Donald Trump and you can't make fun of the presidency, we don't. live in a democracy. The conservatives are

dancing on Colbert's grave here. They're saying, finally, we're going to get some, some, some, some of the non, you know, some of these anti-Trump comics out of here. It's a great victory, cultural victory for our dear leader, Donald Trump. You wrote an excellent

column about all of this. That what I've just described is, like, not really what is this cancellation should be about and should be considered. Is this worth our time to worry about Colbert in the late show? I think it is worth our time to worry about. And I will say that, look, it's not crazy to worry that CBS did this to kind of placate the Trump administration. They are trying to close a merger. They did pay the Trump administration on a totally meritless lawsuit in order to facilitate that merger it looks like. I can't think of any other reason you would settle that lawsuit. And so, like, I think it is not crazy that liberals are worried about this. That said, as Matt Bologna wrote in his excellent puck news, letter, these shows have been on Death Watch for a while. And I think what we should really worry

about is that it is a further sign, you know, I think when I came grew up in the 90s, it is a further sign of not having the common stuff that we used to talk about. And I think you see this everywhere. I think you see this in the wars over the history curriculum, right? Where, you know, the left decided it was terrible to have this narrative, this heroic narrative of America. And what we needed was a narrative about America that was like it was a terrible, terrible country founded on oppression and brutality. And the only thing that's good about America is the times we decided that we were going to suck a little less. And then it goes through to our civic institutions are collapsing. All of the things my grandfather was an avid rotarian. No one in my

generation seems to belong. And certainly millennials and zoomers are not joining. All of the scouting is coming. We are spending more time in our houses. We are spending more time in our houses with our custom curated media feeds. We're no longer doing what when I was growing up in the 90s. I didn't even watch the late show because my father monopolized the television. I lived at home right when I got out of college because I grew up in Manhattan and there was like your parents definitely better than five roommates. But I always knew it was on it because I would walk into the office the next day and people would be talking about what they'd seen. Well, a lot of us aren't going to offices every day. And when we are, no one has watched the same.

television shows, right? One conversation I have now a lot is, what are you watching? And the interesting thing is, none of us are watching the same shows. We're all trading news about shows that no one else has ever heard of. All of that has created a gap in America. We need some kind of common sense of who we are. We need things that we do together, whatever those things are. It doesn't have to be a late show. But the issue is that we are losing those things one by one. And this really, the show was losing a lot of money. It was economically rational for CBS to cancel it sooner rather than later, but nothing's replacing it. Nothing is coming forward to being the thing that Americans jointly know about, whether it's music or TV or religion or anything else or even our own history. It's all collapsing

into these kind of niches. And I think that, you know, a nation to hold together needs a national story that they tell themselves, and we are not telling ourselves those stories anymore. John, I know you were devastated by the cancellation of the Colbert show. You were a regular watcher, right? I mean, this is, I think Megan's absolutely right. There is no shared culture anymore. I do think a big problem as well is that this stuff, like, these shows are not as funny as they used to be. Maybe that's just my, you know, as I grow up, the stuff that's on TV now is not as fun as what I remember when I was younger and enjoying it, right? Everybody says everybody's favorite era of Saturday Night Live, another late-night comedy show

is when they were in middle school because that's when they started watching it. But it also does seem that the comedy part of late-night TV has kind of gone by the wayside in favor of something that really Stephen Colbert's old colleague John Stewart began, which is using late-night comedy as like a political platform. and a particularly liberal political platform, a progressive political platform. Isn't that the problem with the cancellation of Colbert or maybe the solution? It's getting rid of this kind of like overtly political comedy. And I use, I mean, there's not like a lot of funny stuff I could see from Colbert's late night show.

Well, yeah, I mean, Megan's comments about, you know, the common culture we had in the 90s with late night really, really resonated with me. I mean, going back and I was a kid, my sister, older sister, I was 30 to four kids, you know, I got to start watching Saturday Night Live when I was eight years old or something in the Sandler and Farley era, which is obviously the best era. And then my older sister, she, yeah, she watched Leno every night. My brother and I would probably, you know, a central time zone kids. We have a much better sense of humor because we got to watch Conan in his heyday. I like woke up my brother when Andy Richter, Conan O'Brien's sidekick left the show. That's how important. That's how worth my time Conan was back in the 90s of them and have been the early 2000s. But yeah, there's just a

A total loss of that. Even us elder millennials, I mean, Colbert and Stewart, they were part of the common culture back in the late odds and early tens. And Colbert was very funny, I thought, as the, you know, doing the schick as his version of Bill O'Reilly. Sort of a Bill O'Reilly character, yeah. But I've never seen a single episode of The Late Show. I maybe watched one Conan O'Brien show when it was on Network TV. And there's nothing that's going to bring really anybody back to Network TV. I don't think. I mean, you could get, you know, the kids these days. you could get Mr. Beast blowing up some cruise liners with like Sidney Sweeney announcing it on CBS at 11 p.m. And the kids these days, they wouldn't get off their slack chats and their snap shots or whatever they're called. I'm not that dumb.

I know it. They're Venmoes and their hip-hopity pants. Get off bylaw, John says. But, uh, but yeah, it's, so it's, it's, it's worth, it's worth my time as a moment to, to sit back and, and reflect on the bygone era that will, that was great and that we will, we will probably never return to. Grayson, you have, you have gotten off your TikTok. You're the young end in this, in this crew.

You've gotten off your TikTok and your, in your Instagram in order to join us for this, for this podcast. Like, young people are sharing stuff. I mean, let's take the, the, the, the, the Coldplay concert event. Like, that's, you want to talk about water cooler talk? That's what people are talking about. It's something that kind of happened. That was real and went.

viral on the internet. I mean, that's how, that's how comedy happens, you know, all of the different memes regarding this, this pseudo, not really event. That's what people are laughing about and talking about. Do you, like, do you have any sense yourself of like, where does late night comedy talk show fit in? Is it, is it as old as like, it seems to me when I see like old clips of like the Steve Allen Tonight Show, which feels like from, you know, might as well have been from 300 years ago in terms of. of what it looks like. Does this make any blip on your radar, the cancellation of Colbert? Me, personally, yes. I don't think I'm representative of the use as much. But I do think, going back to your earlier point, there is like a structural media piece of this when it comes to what is the format of comedy and what is the format of a late night show because you have two very contrasting trends among younger media consumers.

is one is like it's ever shorter video content, ever increasing numbers of cuts in said video content. And now we have to put like close captioning over the video. So you have to even pay less attention to what people actually saying. You can like read it quicker than what's going on in the TikTok video. But at the same time, you have the proliferation of like three hour plus podcast and YouTube content creators that people will spend hours. People will spend hours and hours watching and listening to. And I'm curious as to whether the structure of like late night comedy in general, if you have writers, it's, if it's delivered well, it doesn't come across as can, but it's clearly prepared. And contrasting that with the comedy that comes up more

organically and gives up a more authentic presentation in the middle of these podcasts, if you're like two hours into a Theo Vaughn podcast that maybe like Vance is on or maybe Buddha judge is on, And there's something appealing, I think, to younger people of having a genuinely comedic moment come from conversations that aren't jokes written by a late night hosts per se. So I don't think we're still going to have the vulcanization of our culture. Like, you're still going to have the nicheification of who's actually listening to that podcast versus this podcast. And I very much relate to Macon's point. Whenever I asked anybody what they're watching, it's always shows that I've never heard of and they've never heard of for the ones that I'm watching. But I think that's, to swing it around back to politics, like that's a key point, too.

It's a key problem, particularly for Democrats, is an authenticity gap when it comes to communicating. And I don't think the structures both of late night, but also the structures of how we've trained politicians to communicate, which is short, polished clips and statements. I don't think that's connecting very well on the social front or on the political front with younger folks. Yeah, I think to put a point on that and to sort of wrap things up here, we should care and we should talk about Colbert and just to mark the end of an era here, the end of this idea that network shows should be doing these kind of programs. But I think to your point, Grayson, about the structure of these long-form podcasts, you know, whether it's comedy podcasts or just even talk. There's sort of a lot of stand-up comics do really well on these podcasts, I think, because they're able to riff, they're able to come up with funny lines that break out and that they can share on social media. But it's interesting to note how similar, if not structurally, kind of how similar service that these shows offer for the people who go on them. If you'll notice, if you listen to lots of these different podcasts, you'll notice a lot of the same people are popping up around the same time as guests.

What are they doing? They're there to promote whatever new stand-up special or movie they're in or what have you. That was the kind of point of a lot of those late-night shows was to be used as promotional vehicles. The comedy was kind of how you kept people paying attention and appealed to and kept that audience. So I do think, yes, we're seeing a big shift in the structure of these kinds. of programs, but I don't know if necessarily that much is changing. Maybe everything that's new, everything that's old is new again. But I certainly won't be missing the Colbert show. I will be missing the old Colbert show, the old one on Comedy Central where we played

a character, pitch perfect. It was better than John Stewart even when he was at his peak. But that is all the time we're giving to this episode. Thanks for joining us, Megan and Grayson and John. Thanks for listening. Have a thought or want to share a comment or question about what you heard today. Email us at Roundtable at the dispatch.com. Thank you.