The Dispatch Podcast - Pivoting to the Far Left | Roundtable

Episode Date: August 9, 2024

Sarah, Jonah, and Megan McArdle break down the Tim Walz vice presidential pick and discuss the state of conservatism at the local level. Plus: an off-the-rails Not Worth Your Time. Steve, close your ears. The Agenda: —The Tim Walz pick —Are the Harris-Walz vibes better? —“Kamabla” —Is conservatism alive at the state level? —Markets aren’t fun anymore —Jonah’s mommy/daddy theory —“America is in a bad marriage” —Tim Walz’s "slanderous" couch joke —Ballerina farm: How’s feminism doing? —NWYT: Doggy perfume Show Notes: —Boiling Frogs on the Walz pick —“Notice how the barrel of Walz’s gun is pointed away from his dog.” —Jonathan Rauch on The Remnant 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

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isgher. And look at that. It's Jonah Goldberg and the ineffable Megan McCartle. All joking aside, we are going to get to some interesting feminist issues to come. But first, Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walts is the pick. Jonah, the good, the bad, the whatever. What do you think? So, full disclosure, this news is it broke Tuesday. And I had Johnson Roush on The Remnant, and we were doing instant punditry, and he was like, I don't know what to make of it. What do you make of it?

And I said, I made the case that I thought this was a missed opportunity, that they should have gone with Shapiro, that all the usual stuff that people were saying prior to, like, like Walt's actual rollout and all that. And then I watched that, um, that rally. I watched Shapiro's performance. And while I get why people think he has star power, he kind of annoyed me. And I thought Waltz was much more effective than I thought he was going to be. So with the, and so expanding on that, with the proviso, the caveat that I can't imagine anyone here will disagree with, but who knows, this is that kind of morning.

if they lose Pennsylvania it was a terrible pick right if you think that there's even a non-trivial chance that if they lose Pennsylvania closely right by like 5,000 10,000 votes

and they didn't pick Shapiro and you think Shapiro could have done it then all the other hand-waving isn't ye great salt to the earth all that kind of crap means nothing and it was a bad pick that said I kind of, I think there's a little bit of cowardice in the, you know,

let's not get Jewie McJewface on the ticket. And, sorry, the technical term of my people. And, and, and, but, so here's the thing, you guys can take it from here. Every single time I get seduced by smart people or facts or history or any of those sort of, you know, siren songs. into getting off of my thesis that this is purely an infuriatingly solely vibes driven election, I'm proven wrong. And so I don't, I think if this was a normal election, his record as a very left-wing governor, very progressive governor would really hurt him.

I think the issues would hurt him. This left-wingness of this ticket would hurt him. The fact that Harris has not given an interview would hurt him. All of those things would hurt if the old earth logic, rules applied. They do not. It's all about vibes. And whatever gives you advantage in vibes, that wins it for you. That's not a science to it. So I think it was a good pick. There you go. Megan, I guess maybe this is just a version of Jonah's point, but it seems to me that both VP picks were vibes based under Jonah's theory. But let me give sort of a different

version of it, which is both parties at this point, they're running base elections, they have no interest in courting or speaking to moderate and independent voters. Are they wrong about that? Because the fact that both parties are doing it would at least lead one to maybe think that they must be on to something if they're both looking at polls, you know, internal polls, different strategists, and they're getting the same advice. I'm not sure that's the advice they're getting. And to the extent that it is the advice that they're getting. I think it is less about this is a really smart strategy and more about something that is called the iron law of institutions, which is that people within institutions care more about

advancing their own power within those institutions than they care about maximizing the institution's power. So true. Welcome to Congress. And it's gotten more true as the parties have gotten weaker. Right? Like 50 years ago, you needed the parties to advance. They gave you money. They gave you airtime and endorsements. And now people have developed all of these ways to do an end run around that through social media, through outside fundraising and super PACs, but also small dollar donors. And because of that, I don't think that this is the smart play.

The whole turnout-based theory of elections has been proven wrong over and over and over again. You do not win a statewide outside of a really deep red or blue state or in a national election. You do not win office by just turning out your base. It doesn't work. You have to get normies because the thing about a normie vote, there aren't that many of them anymore, right? There aren't that many swing voters. Even people who say their independence don't shift as much. And if they do, it's this kind of seismic.

I think you have, seismic is the wrong word, glacial, this glacial. movement towards tectonic is a good thank you is that you see you've seen this with like Hispanic voters right is Republicans are doing a lot better with Hispanic voters

but they're moving like a little bit in each election it's not like you're suddenly getting 20% more of the vote and so those the people in the middle aren't that numerous but the thing is every time you get a true swing vote you don't just get a vote

you take a vote away from the other side And so each of those votes is worth twice what another vote is. And the other thing about the whole idea of the base turnout, and this is especially true for Democrats, is that, you know, those are your high propensity voters already. Those aren't the people that you need to make sure they go to the polls. This is just all, this is self-soothing by progressive activists and MAGA activists who don't want to moderate, who don't want to have to appeal to those people. because again, what enhances their power within the institution is first of all telling everyone else what they want to hear. And second of all, saying, oh, no, we don't need to change. We need to be just more of ourselves. It's like those, you know, the kind of young adventure stories where you discover that the true power is to become even more of who you already were. And that is the hero's journey that they want to make. But it is not a hero's journey that wins elections. It is a loser's journey. What's interesting about that as well in that institutionalist model is winning is actually not particularly helpful. Winning on the margins is better than losing. But losing is fine.

All things considered, you can actually raise more money losing. You can talk about your purity losing. And especially if the team winning wasn't particularly going to help you that much, then yeah, I'll also just note just to emphasize what you said. You know, there's two ways that you win elections, you get people to vote who weren't going to vote, or you get people to vote for you who were going to vote for the other guy. And just to emphasize what you said, Megan,

getting someone to vote who wasn't going to vote is plus one. Getting someone to vote for you who was going to vote for the other guy is plus two. And so while there aren't that many of the persuadable voters, and like you said,

independence is not only misleading, it's also the case that independents aren't necessarily in the middle. A lot of these people who are describing themselves as independence actually have flanked the parties. As the parties become weaker, they simply stop associating with them, but it doesn't mean that they're not to the far right or far left. And you would have to simply be blind to what's going on in the last 20 years

to see these polls that were, for the first time, more people identify as independent than Democrat or Republican. And if you're the opposite of Jonah Goldberg, like a happy, hopeful person, And you would read that and go like, yes, everyone's coming to the middle. They're seeing the flaws of this polarization when, in fact, it's as close to the opposite of that story as possible. They're leaving the parties as they don't think the parties are sufficiently fill in the blank enough.

And so everyone identifies as independent, whether they're in the middle, the extreme, the middle of their parties. It's just that the parties themselves are losing altitude. Jonah, though, like there's something particularly funny to me. Giggle funny about the fact that the Democrats pick Tim Walts as the running mate basically the same week within hours of Corey Bush losing her primary, one of the furthest left people in, you know, Missouri, which I'm not going to argue is a swing state, of course, but it has swing state type people in it, people who look quite a bit like people in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in some important ways. And, you know, Jamal Bowman lost as well.

So it's like the squad is literally losing their seats and losing power at the same time that they're getting their pick on the VP by saying that otherwise you'll lose momentum. Don't mess up this enthusiasm. Walt is a do-no-harm pick, is what I kept hearing from Democratic operatives. Meaning, yeah, Shapiro has upsides,

but he has downsides too. So Walt just keeps the train moving in terms of everyone being happy, enthusiasm, our side is pleased. But what they mean by that is the highly engaged people on their side are pleased, the very people who are losing elections in primaries. I'm going to push back on both of you just a little bit on this. Because look, I mean, I would love to spend the, I'd love to spend the next 40 minutes talking about the Iron Law of Institutions, which I completely subscribe to. And I think that's, it's, it's, you're right. And we're talking about the culture of losing in the GOP for a very long time and all that stuff. That's, I agree with all that.

Running to the base is bad, polarization, fix the parties, yada, yada, yada, stipulate. I think that you're, you're both right, that Waltz and Vance are in effect, base picks or, or confidence picks, right? But I think Waltz is much less of a one than Vance is. and the kind of genius about waltz, I would argue. And then it may not work, right? I mean, I'm not like super high on the dude, right? But, Jamal Bowman does, I don't want to be too disparaging here,

but Jamal Bowman and Cory Bush and some of those squad people do not talk about America as if they actually like it. And they code extremely urban, right, all that kind of stuff. this guy does not come across that way. He comes across, you know, he comes across as like the neighbor in your ex-ervant Starbucks that if he eavesdrop too much,

you'll find out he's a really pink-o-red guy on politics stuff. But other than that, like when you see him at your kid's softball games, you like him, right? And this is what I mean by the vibe thing. The base, they point to a, progressive record and they feel like they've been appeased by not getting Shapiro.

And then Normie voters, they hear the guy shoots and he hunts and he wears flannel and he tells us daughter that Turkey is a vegetable at the state fair. And look, I've been saying for a year and a half now, issues don't matter and issues haven't matter, right? Trump has thrown pro-lifers under the bus. A lot of smart gun rights people think he's unreliable on that. He's completely sort of Heismaned, the Federalist Society. Biden was all over the place on issues, and no one gave a rat's ass. And so, but the vibes, you watch, you do the ails trick, which is not to do gross things

with female AIDS, you know, but I mean, the ails trick by turning the volume on mute and watch the TV, the vibes from the Harris Waltz ticket are much, much better than the vibes from the Trump fan's ticket. Oh, Jonah, but hold on. You just like, so, okay, the vibes of picking waltz is that he is a happy warrior, cuddly guy who keeps the vibes

the way Harris had the vibes, right? Happy, light. You know, you don't say death to democracy is coming. You say, ugh, they're weird. That's the vibes they were going for that they think their base wants right now and is happy with. Vance fits the vibes that the Trump campaign had and that the Trump campaign was going for. You're giving the Harris ticket credit for vibes that you think happen to also just

be more appealing to those other voters, perhaps. I think the Harris vibes are more attractive to normie voters who weren't otherwise going to vote for Biden because Biden's vibe was, oh my gosh, this guy is sunsetting and he's going to have a fall. And like the vibe, Jonah, sundowning. Sundowning. I apologize. Whatever. You got my vibe.

Well, so let me push back on the rank sexism of your position. Yes. My concern about Waltz, sorry, Wals. This is like when Harris was nominated. We all had to do like seminars on how to pronounce her name. But so my concern is that Wals is like maybe an urban person. idea of what white working class voters like in the same way that like John Kerry was like

was a Democrat, an urban Democrat's idea of what white working class voters liked. They were like, hey, look, he was in the military. Like, he threw his medals away. He is married to an heiress. This is not actually. He looks, he talks like he's just about to ask if it's cocktail hour yet and we can go out on the veranda. But Megan, the heiress was a ketchup heiress and you know that those people like ketchup. Fair. And Megan, he too used summer as a verb, I will just point out. So I, you know, my understanding and I cannot really speak with personal authority given that like Jonah, I grew up on the, in the rural precincts of the Upper West side. But, you know, when I talked to people who did grow up in the other America, outside of the

real America. They are like, no, this guy, you're assuming that everyone just looks at him and they're like, oh, yeah, he's just like us. In these communities, there are like often teachers, librarians, et cetera, there are lefties. Oh, sure. And they're aware of that, right? People are not like, they don't just look at him and they're like, oh, well, you know, he's poorly and likes to shoot, therefore and has a nice head of white hair like therefore he must be you know a normie they understand who that character is because they have that was their you know 10th grade english teacher or whatever and they recognize the signs and that if you are someone who does not love especially a bunch of the social stuff that he has done you know he has been he has gone all in on gender affirming care

or if you like youth medical transition or whatever, you know, whatever term you want to use for it, he has gone all in on like kind of maximalist abortion rights. Now, I don't actually think, I think abortion helps the Democrats. I don't think it helps Republicans, even people who are kind of theoretically vaguely uncomfortable with abortions after, say, 15 weeks, 20 weeks, they kind of want the option to. They don't want to actually make it illegal. They just want to, like, trust that women are going to do the right thing. And so I don't think that hurts him in the way that I see a lot of conservatives saying,

well, he's an abortion maximalist. And I'm like, I don't think this is a winning issue for you guys. Just take the L. But I think on the gender stuff, that is not a popular position. You know, there are some questions about his military service. I think they're not entirely fair. But they're out there. They're definitely going to hit him on that.

And so I think that, you know, the assumption that he's just going to co. like normal dad I think that is how he codes for people who are super progressive and wish they had a super progressive dad that they could wave around and be like, look, he's from the Midwest, he taught high school, he knows how to shoot a gun. And I am now

going to use his progressive positions to prove that I am in the majority anecdotally. And I don't think that that necessarily translates to people who have lived in those districts and had that high school teacher. At the end of the day, I just, go ahead. No, yes.

as I was saying Men, am I right? Slay queen You know, Harris had a choice between Shapiro and Walls in the end and Shapiro codes as the kids say

much more as a Batman and Walls codes much more as a Robin and Harris definitely wanted a Robin and to have Shapiro's sort of raw ambition around which is so funny because of course that's exactly what Harris was to Biden,

someone who really, really wanted to be president someday. But I wouldn't want a vice president who was sitting there constantly triangulating how they could not piss me off enough while keeping themselves clear and intact for the next race. You know, I've said this about other... You mean like Harris did? Yeah, exactly.

She knows better than anyone that that's not what you want as a number two. I said this about attorney general that I would never have another attorney general who needs a job again, ever, because the job of attorney general has become such that you really don't want that person thinking, you know, gosh, is Davis Polk going to have me back to the law firm after this if I do X or Y? You know, I need to provide for my family after this, so I shouldn't prosecute that person. It's, they're incompatible things. And VP is turning into that as well. You know, Biden, although he of course ends up running, Biden and Cheney look like much

better VP picks than Gore or Harris do in terms of being good vice presidents. So Megan raises a series of really important ways in which an opponent could attack the Harris-Wald's ticket. That basically they've leaned into the like that Walls' vibes are there for the vibes of the ticket. And so you then, you know, create that caricature. What did they say? They're a perfect team. He sets Minneapolis on fire and she bails out the people who did it. Look, Tim Walts is the governor who let Minneapolis burn during the Black Lives Matter

and Antifa riots. And Kamala Harris is the vice president who contributed to bail funds to bail out the criminals who were burning in Minneapolis. This is one of the worst track records we have ever seen in the United States. United States of America of this governor walls. Tim Walts's record is a joke. He's been one of the most far-left radicals in the entire United States government at any level.

But I think that what Tim Waltz's selection says is that Kamala Harris has bent the need to the far left of her party, which is what she always does. Don't ever shy away from our progressive values. One person's socialism is another person's neighborliness. I think that's going to be running in a continuous loop in attack ads and swing states. And I think it, I think that might actually, that's probably his biggest weakness. So this is then gets to a really important question, Jonah. Who's going to have the discipline to do that?

Because it doesn't seem to be Donald Trump, whose main attack right now, is to keep referring to her as Kamabla. I think it's Kambala. Is it Kamala? It can't be Kambala. It's K-A-B-L-A. And when reporters have asked the campaign, what does that mean? A senior communications advisor responded, comma, blah.

And then they said, yeah, but what does it mean? And they responded, comma, blah. And another one put out a Venn diagram. And in one circle was K-A. And in the other circle was B-L-A. And in the overlap, it spelled, comma, blah. They didn't even put an H on it? No, so that's the question.

We don't know whether it's meant to be like, like blah, blah, blah, or black or Obama, which doesn't make really any sense at all. So, Joan, it's a super effective attack because we're talking about it, but it also doesn't undermine her candidacy whatsoever because we don't know why it's bad. And Nick, our friend, was like, no, see, this is what he does.

He uses nonsense words to attack people like Ron to sanctimonious. And I'm like, but sanctimonious is a word, and it's a negative word. And he's like, yeah, but DeSantis wasn't actually sanctimonious. I'm like, okay, I don't, that's a different point that his attacks aren't good caricatures because they don't hit on something that's true. But they have been words in the past and they have been negative words in the past. Little Marco, things like that. Comma blot isn't a word and we don't know what it's about.

And we've just gone over all of these variety of attacks. You could just pick one and spend 50 million. dollars in Pennsylvania right now just on that one attack and instead we're talking about comma blah yeah so like uh the most interesting thing about the comma blah thing i like megan's misreading of it because i came up with all sorts of other misreadings of it too it's your brain we are pattern recognizing creatures and when we see random or quasi-rand words letters jumbled together we try to impose reason on it and the Kamabla, not only literally, but figuratively, resists the effort to impose reason upon it.

Right, because we want the B after the M. Like, I'm with you, Megan. Yeah, if it's blah, we want an H on it. And like, but the point is, is like, it makes no sense. I was pronouncing it Kambala or Kamabla. Yeah. I thought he was going at first for some sort of play on Nambla, but like, it's just not, it doesn't work. And, but my point is, is like, it's not only does it work that way.

way literally is a jumble of letters. It also works that way politically. It's like you try to like, it's like that covefe thing where some people tried to claim he did it deliberately and it was this whatever and super sophisticated thing. And it was just a butt tweet. I think this is something akin to that that they've now decided to stick with. I just want to say, I agree with you guys entirely that those ads should work. And it would be malpractice for them not to use those ads and use those issues against Walts and Harris, I am just deeply skeptical that even if they did use them, they would work. Because the number of people who are getable as voters in this whole thing

are not getable with accusations that you have to rush to the Washington Post fact checker to find out if they are true or not. And that's why I think it's vibes. I'm not letting go of vibes because it's the only thesis that has not let me down. I've let it down by abandoning it from time to time. And so in a better world, the fact that they set fire to Minneapolis and then Harris raised money to bail out the people who did it should be devastating, right?

It should be just, you know, Eagleton electroshock therapy devastating. Don't think it's going to be? I think big smiles, happy joy, joy, big bounce from the convention, and then the, you know, that's about it. And Trump is going to give a press conference today. This may be all, you know, overtaken by events in so far as maybe the Kamabla thing is, like, I know Megan, I don't know who, Megan, were you living in Washington when Lewis Farrakhan gave the Million Black Man March thing here? No, that was the 90s, wasn't it? It was.

It was, it was the early 90s, too, because I was still a young policy nomad AI. I watched that thing. He did about 15 minutes on numerology that was mesmerizing. And it was like, the number six looks like a pregnant woman. But when you flip it upside down, it is the peering gaze of the albatross. And it was like just total friggin crazy stuff. Maybe he'll do something like that with the Kamabla thing. Then we'll be like, oh, I get it.

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Get up to 7 cents per liter in value every time you fill up at Petro Canada. That's 3 cents per liter in instant savings plus 20% more points when you link an eligible RBC card to your Petro points. Find out more at RBC.com slash Petro-Dash Canada. Conditions apply. Okay, I want to change subjects slightly because on this podcast, we have talked at length about the move away from conservatism and the Republican Party's Association. with conservatism as a political force

into populism and into a new Republican party that has many policies that are at 180 degrees from the old conservative policies and to the extent that there's policies that aren't at 180 degrees, they're just different ones.

And I got an email from a state legislative leader. And he had a point that I wanted you guys to respond to. I'll just read it. You'll talk about GOP populism, but I'd suggest conservatism is still strong at the state level. Since COVID, legislatures have taken control away from governors, with an exception of Florida, and have still focused on conservative principles like fiscal responsibility and small government.

I understand that some will point to social issues, but I would note that the majority of social issues dealt with since 2020, abortion, gun rights, protecting girls sports, stopping minors from harmful sex changes, school choice, education transparency, are largely consistent with conservative principles. Did some go too far? Certainly. But those are the exceptions and not the rule. Please accept this email as a frustrated conservative who is tired of having the entire political discussion be about Trump and the national GOP. I do understand why that is the case. I just think that people can find optimism that conservatism is still alive and well at the state level. And hopefully that will be our next generation of national leaders.

Jonah, I read this and I feel the strange, tingling sensation that one might call hope. Should I feel hope? Or is he totally naive? Somewhere in the middle, I think. Look, I mean, I made this point before about the Republican primary debates, you know, the ones without Trump this year. With the exception of Vivek, they basically all argued within the goal, between the goalposts of Reaganism, right? They took Reaganite positions. They argued about what Reagan would do.

They argued about what the conservative position is. but they had a real policy debate. I think that's where the GOP's muscle memory still is, but Trump just obviates that while he's still around. The cult of personality swamps that stuff. I entirely agree that there's still good things going on in states and that at the local level, if you actually get people in serious people doing policy work on the right,

I'm sure there's a lot of, it's absolutely true there's a lot of conservative stuff. I mean, licensing reform and all the sort of that stuff is great, too. Problem is where the trend lines are going. And I don't think the trend lines are going towards our brilliant and attractive emailers direction. They're going towards more and more politics being driven by social media, by Fox, by nationalizing of politics.

I mean, the, you guys know this data better off the top of your head than I do, but Like, it used to be very common for states to send a Democrat to the Senate and vote for a Republican president and vice versa. That just really doesn't happen anymore. Voting patterns are becoming increasingly like a parliamentary system. So that, but Jonah, you're right on Senate and president. But you're wrong on governor, for instance. Kentucky, Kansas, Louisiana. And these aren't particularly moderate states.

you called me wrong for stating a position I didn't state Oh come on You were implying an overall They're not split ticket states And there are Play queen

Play But Look I think You are misleading our listeners And I will not stand for it With your toxic masculinity Misleadingness Let me explain some things

To you, Sarah No, but I would not, it would not surprise me, however, if the trends of governorships are going the direction I'm talking about, even if they are lagging indicators. I don't know the answer to that. All right, Megan. Is conservatism dead, or is it just dormant like the cicadas? It'll come out in 17 years.

Or the dead parrot in Monty Python. I hate to break with the sisterhood. and Upper West Side Solidarity Yes, that's right Call me later We'll have bagel and a smear At Barney Greengrass

Sturgeon from Murray's, yeah Oh, you're a Barney Greengrass No, no, I'm a Murray's guy I just assumed you didn't know Murray's Yeah, but I'm definitely Murray's over Every Sunday for 15, 20 years The Goldberg's, you know, went to Murray's. Anyway, so I think

that the one issue here and one reason that, by far not the only reason, but one reason that cultural issues are becoming more salient, is that the conservative fiscal stuff is running into two buzz saws and the regulatory stuff. So the regulatory stuff is running into the buzzsaw of tech, which I think made a number of just objectively political missteps in terms of allowing,

it felt kind of like a cheap freebie to their employees, to let them do politics at work. And I looked at this at the time, because it was all left-wing politics. And I was like, what are you doing? Democrats are never going to be kind of a homey place for you because ultimately the antitrust people are going to come in and be like, you're a big corporation, destroy, destroy, destroy. And so why are you allowing your employees to kind of go after Republicans?

But they did allow their employees to go after Republicans. And now they're paying the price, which is they have no friends at all. And so the coding of TAC, of big tech as Republican, is just a buzzsaw for all sorts of regulatory stuff because it has given, it has created an opening on top of the immigration and trade stuff that has led Republicans to start coding corporations as bad as in need of government intervention. And I don't think it's going to be easy to put that genie back in the bottle. On the fiscally conservative side, the problem is the federal government is out of money. We had a fun 15 years when you could just, and we had a fun really like 25 years where you could just do stuff and it was kind of free. We had the tech bubble induced surplus that George Bush got to spend on tax cuts.

And then Donald Trump comes in and is like, who cares about deficits? No one cares. I can do anything I want. I can spend money without paying for it. Democrats obviously got into that act. Biden has spent a lot of money without paying for it. And now our national debt is over 100% of GDP or like slightly under our death. check the numbers right now. Anyway, it is hovering right in 100% of GDP and is forecast to get

bigger because now we're also running into the demographic buzz saw of Social Security and Medicare. And all that stuff's going to have to be paid for. So there's no fun tax cuts coming because markets are done. We had real interest rates that were functionally zero, even slightly negative, which meant you could spend all the free money you want it. And that's not true anymore. And I don't think it's going to be true anymore for a bunch of reasons. It just markets look more normal, more like the 90s, when if you spend a bunch of money in a deficit, the market would be like, yeah, I'm not that enthusiastic about this, the next trillion dollars that you want to borrow. I'm going to need a little higher interest rate to compensate me for the risk. And because of that, it's not going to be fun to spend money anymore.

And Republicans, and we've got to shore up Social Security and Medicare, and Republicans do not want to be the people to say we're cutting Social Security. in Medicare. Paul Ryan tried that. Bad idea. And they do not want to be the people to tell people that they're cutting other spending that people like. And that puts them just in a hard place for fiscal conservatism, a harder place than we've been in a long time. The challenges are bigger. And at the same time, the money to deal with them is more expensive. And so I think Republicans are not going to want to run on fiscal conservatism because it involves telling voters there are hard choices to be made and I'm going to make them. And they're not going to want to run on their deregulatory stuff because voters are like, I hate court.

Even their base is like, I hate corporations, which did not use to be the case. And those two things are just going to make at the federal level extremely challenging to bring the party back to the kind of old conservative issues. The thing you can do when you're in that situation is you take a culture war issue and you just mash that button as hard as you can. I think that that is sadly probably where we're going to be going for quite a while. Megan makes a lot of sense, but there's a little something odd about it, because according to Megan's logic, Republicans never should have been for fiscal conservatism, especially during the period where we could spend all the money and telling people like, so one side wants to give you puppies, everyone gets a puppy. And the Republicans are like, we don't give out puppies. You have to earn that puppy. But that is where they were for a long time. And they were electorally successful doing it. I guess I'm sort of baffled why it was ever the case that that was a good idea. but if it was the case, why couldn't it be again? And to that point, I will quote another part of this email from our state legislative leader. I think in most instances, GOP states are showing the benefits of true conservatism. People have certainly noticed it because it is where they are moving

and wanting to live and move open their businesses. So I think that that's true on things like low level like land use reform and so forth. Making it easy to build is a good way to attract people. But I think on, you know, look, the Cold War made a lot of strange bedfellows. The Cold War just jammed all the people who really, really, really hated communism deep down in their soul into one party. And that was the religious people who hated the godless communists. You know, like my dad grew up praying in church every week for the conversion of the godless communists. And then there were the defense hawks who hated. Which is awkward on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

I can tell you. He was in Boston. And then you end. In fairness, he was also that grew up in Boston Irish Democratic circles, but, and then you have the defense hawks, and then you also have the economic people who hate the economic system. And the weakening of that external force to unifying force has just made it harder for the economic conservatives to get any kind of grip on the party because, like, in fact, when you look at the kind of, well, we're socially liberal, fiscally conservative, that that's a.

smallest quadrant in politics. It's, you know, and I think that it really was, in many ways, kind of an accident of history. And also, I would add, there was another thing, which is that the big spending Democratic, we should unionize everything and regulate it and, you know, until it can't move, it had dramatically, it was seen as having dramatically failed in the 70s. And, you know, with the Iran hostages, the kind of democratic, like, soft power idea of foreign policy had was seen as having dramatically failed. And I don't think that there is that kind of force either that allows people to say, okay, we need some grownups in the room.

All right, Jonah. She's pretty compelling in her depression. So I have a slightly weird take on this that just popped into my head. It's a little fraught. By all means, roll it out here before you've thought it through. Yeah. It's a little fraught given the sisterhood I'm facing. Is this going to be about how women got the right to vote and it destroyed the country?

Because I'm here for it. Tell me more. No. I'll get my wife on to give you that. So in the 1990s, there was this debate. One of the reasons I'm hesitant to bring it up is because I think it was actually Chris Matthews, who coined it, this idea that the Democrats were the Mommy Party and the Republicans were the Daddy Party. And Mommy Party, nurturing, cares about kids, cares about education, cares about health, cares about mommy stuff, right? Daddy Party cares about protection, turning off the lights every night, going around the house, turning all the lights. Security. provisions, paying your bills, yada, yada, yada. Lots of stereotypes built into there, right? But I think there was also some truth. I think one of the way, and like we often forget that institutions, including political parties, are downstream of culture as institutions.

And I think you could make the case, like I've been trying to get my wife to write the book, my husband, the state, for 20 years. Because that life of Julia stuff was very much, um, where the state took the role of father and husband in a traditional family structure throughout Julia's life, right? And we don't need to get into the whole life of Julia, you know, kerfuffle thing again. But I think now you're seeing sort of the Democratic Party

is much more of like a single mom party rather than a mommy party. Working moms have, they think that the state is there to provide for things at civil society. or family can't necessarily provide for. But the real change is that the Republican Party is behaving like divorced dad party. I was going to say angry grandpa party.

Yeah, but it's not quite deadbeat dad party because they want to be around, but they only want to be around like on weekends. They want to only provide like the big gesture, but not do the actual hard work of parenting. And so they give up on the stuff like entitlement reform and all these kinds of things. They'll get beer muscles about security stuff, but they actually won't do like the serious thinking through of these things and put in the effort because they only get to be around on weekends.

And, you know, that's sort of, it's sort of Trump's vibe, right? I mean, his kids were all raised by his wives as well as politically. Yeah, that's what I mean. And, but he comes in for the big gesture with the big gifts and, hey, look, I got you the remote control car that you can drive around in and yada, yada. and then he goes away. And he doesn't want to bring any bad news. And I think that those are sort of the new archetypes rather than Mommy and Daddy who both,

Mommy and Daddy in a normal traditional family, they both recognize each other's role and they understand that they are part of something larger than themselves. Single mom versus divorced dad, it's just a completely different dynamic and they're so hostile to each other, they would rather the kids suffer than actually work constructively with their ex-spouse.

I really like this. Yeah, I think this is absolutely correct. I've been thinking about this in a different way, which is, I don't know, like 10 years ago now, I was, I ended up, I got an upgrade to first class. It was very exciting for me. So I'm sitting there, and I'm sitting next to a very fancy lawyer, who it turns out is a pretty high price divorce.

Is your husband a California divorce attorney? No. He wishes he were sometimes, though. Not yet, I think, is the answer. So I am fascinated, and we are drinking doers on the rocks. Don't judge. And I'm asking him about his job. And then he asked me about my job, and I'm talking about politics.

And he is like, you know what politics reminds me of now? It is my clients with the really bad divorces who have just gotten into like, burn it all down phase is they are willing to hurt themselves if it hurts the other person more. They will be like, no, I want to sell our house at a loss just so she can't have it.

This was after the housing crisis, right? So like values were still down. You know, I want to take his fancy car out and I am going to like, you know, sell it to there was actually a case like this. Someone took her husband's like vintage Porsche or something and she sold it

to like a migrant worker for like $1,000, like, all of these, like, I think got away with it because he'd put in her name for tax reasons. He's like all this, you know, he's telling me all these crazy stories about how people will just incinerate their own lives because they cannot think about a life after the divorce. All they can think about is how can I hurt these people maximally? And I see this all the time, right? Like, all of it. So, I mean, Can I tell you as a side note, I worry that I don't love my husband enough because there's nothing he could do that would make me want to do any of that stuff. And maybe that means, like, maybe that means like they are experiencing a love that I've just

never known. Or they just have worse emotional regulation. But I've also had this conversation with the guy who has done marriage counseling and he has told me the same thing. He's like, America is like people in a really bad marriage in a state. that doesn't allow divorce, right? And this is like, I see this all the time is like this, you know, I think the J.D. Vance couch story is a good example of this.

Of like it is, you know, like, we don't have to go into the couch story. I assume all the listeners know what the couch story is. They do not. They don't Google. No. So, okay, so a joke went viral on Twitter that J.D. Vance's memoir said that he was one of his mother's latex gloves. She was a nurse and put it between the couch kitchens.

And as a teenager, had Colonel had known the couch rather more intimately than most of us get to know our couches. And like, this goes viral on Twitter. And a lot of people believed it, which first of all, do you think anyone writes that in a memoir unless they're like, second of all, do you think someone who wrote that in a memoir just like passes vetting to be vice president? But like people still do believe it. It's amazing. Like I have tweeted about this and people are like, no, it's a true story. You can fact check it. Look at Snopes.

And you go to stilups and it's like, this is totally fake. But Tim Walls made a couch joke at his rally. And like, what are you doing? You were a 60-year-old man, not like a teenager. And then everyone's defending it and talking about how much they enjoyed it. And what is that? It is just pure spite. Yeah.

Right? There is nothing about that. There's nothing about this incident that is telling. There is nothing. It is just a vicious lie that people spread because they enjoyed thinking. And you see things. It's just like, if I can hurt them, I don't care whether I win. You see this on the Republican Party.

The important thing is that I really enjoy watching Donald Trump make the liberals cry. And whether he wins elections is completely secondary to, like, literally cry harder is a meme on social media for a reason. So two quick things. One, not to repeat last week's conversation, but the best example of this might be J.D. Vance's desire to turn one, one of the, the most popular public policies in America, child tax credits, and reframe them as good because they make the childless cat ladies cry. He wants that instead of saying subsidized hardworking families, it's punitive by taxing childless people more, which is like my poor friend Ramesh Pannuru, who's been working on child tax credit stuff for 25 years. I just imagine

like, this is not how you sell this idea. But it was about punishing, presumed. Right. Who cares it if it's helping families? The selling point of it is that it hurts childless people. And that's about how you got to sell it, right? And it's just so stupid on so many levels because, first of all, the policy already exists, right? It's currently law.

And second of all, if you actually think it's a good policy, don't turn it into this vengeance machine against childless people. I mean, it's just so stupid. But the second point is I didn't like, I thought it was the most false note and waltz's thing, the couch line. But the actually outrageous line wasn't if he'll ever get off the couch. It was, you see what I did there? Right?

So like he's, when people started to laugh, he was worried that not enough people were laughing or that only, and so he, there's a, it would have been bad enough if it was just show. But to own it by telling, it's like, because at least if he had just, just said that, he could say, oh, I don't know, I'm not very online. I, I missed this joke. And the

insiders would get it and think it's funny, but he could deny it, you know, instead he wants to own the fact that he made a joke of something that's just a, you know, social media lie. And that's really bad. Or that's worse about it. And to go back to the like the single mom's divorced dad's party, it's like a very mean girl's thing to do, right? And you can just totally, I've felt this actually about J.D. Vance a lot is like they're picking on the kid in the cafeteria and everyone is just saying like nasty things about him, not because they're true, but just like some of the things of the child, like bash him for the childless, the cat lady thing. But the, a lot of the, the stuff like the couch thing, like, you know, he made this perfectly normal kind of charming story

about his son constantly trying to interrupt him to talk about Pokemon while Trump was calling him to ask him to be vice president. And everyone turned this into like, he is a sociopath who abuses his children. Because he said, I'm like, son, for the love of God, for like, can you just stop talking for like 30 seconds? Shut the hell up for 30 seconds so that I can talk to the president,

the former president. And people turn this into like he told his child to shut the hell up, which is not what he is saying, right? If you are pretending you do not understand how the English language works in order to own your opponents, you have lost the plot. Or how parenting works? But you think about his vibe as like high school teacher, nice dad. Would he, if the mean girls were picking on one of the kids in his class, even a kid who he thought wasn't a particularly nice kid, would he jump in and start making jokes at that kid's expense? Like, what are we doing here?

And, you know, this is where I also asked myself, is Tim Wool's nice guy, you know, the dad we always wanted, as I said, you know, the, the Midwestern dad that we wanted instead of the one who got lost to MAGA, as I saw on Twitter. And I'm sort of, it made me question it. Why would you do that? It's just a gratuitously horrible and nasty thing to do to reference it just an obviously slanderous lie like that. Who are you, Tim Wool? walls. You know, where is the Midwestern nice guy I was promised? 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

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biweekly at 3.99% during the Volvo Fall Experience event. Condition supply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. All right, before we go, a little not worth your time. I want to spend just a few moments on something we've never talked about on this podcast and that Jonah probably has never heard of

and that Megan probably has. And that is Ballerina Farm. To the Google Machine! John is literally Googling. Don't worry, Jonah. I'm going to tell you all about it. So if you're a woman in this country, there's a decent chance that you are aware of what ballerina Farms is because there is a woman who was at Juilliard, trained as a ballerina, meets her future husband, and they move out to Montana, I want to say, someplace that looks absolutely gorgeous.

They have eight children. She had the last six of those at home without pain meds. She said they just came right out. 12 days after one of the kids, she's competing in a bikini, in a beauty pageant. And, you know, she's an Instagram person, right? She bakes bread and darns clothing and takes pictures with her chicken, stuff like that. I want to be very clear. I am by no means the world's leading expert on Ballerina Farms. I actually have never been to the Instagram page. I'm basing this off a whole lot of think pieces about Ballerina Farms and how it fits into our culture war. And I don't want to talk about

the culture war stuff at all, Megan. I want to talk big picture where women are in our arc of feminism across the sky of America over the last hundred or so years because I feel like, and maybe it's just this month or something, the summer doldrums as people reflect on their lives and their choices. But I sure feel like a lot of moms I know are really, really struggling with having a career, not a job, a career that is so all-consuming and a spouse who also has a career that's very consuming

and kids who now have to be trotted around to any number of activities and they feel like, like deeply on their bones, that you're not allowed to give any of those things up. You're supposed to be investing constantly in all of them. And I feel like a number of these women would rather be stay-at-home mom,

but they've been told that you can't leave your career or else you can never come back. That would be a huge mistake. You need financial independence, all of the things that became, and I don't mean feminist in any sort of, again, culture-war-coded way.

Feminist meaning you're a woman in the country way, you know, through like the 90s and aughts and that we're seeing this backlash, you know, if the story of America is various cultural movements and then the backlash to those cultural movements, that the trad wife Instagram mom thing is the backlash to the 80s, 90s, women entering the workforce

and not just with jobs, but with careers that they're supposed to protect while also supporting their husband's career while also having kids because that's where you're going to derive meaning from. And that's why you see so many women not having kids, those that do have kids, are talking about how unhappy they

are, thus enters Ballerina Farms and the absolute attacks on this woman who, I don't know, seems to be running a pretty successful business, y'all. Her business, it's sort of like Phyllis Schlafly out there being a political activist about how women shouldn't be involved in politics. That's what Ballerina Farms is. So, Megan, what's your take on the state of women in the United States in 2024? Yeah, I should, I should admit, I also do not go to her Instagram page because I have enough reasons in my life already to feel inadequate. And so I have never actually visited this, but I have read the think pieces too. Look, I think here is the fact about careers in the United States, which is that if you're

going to have a career and not as like a nurse, which is just for a bunch of reasons, including the fact that it's historically mostly been done by women, has a certain amount of flexibility in terms of leave, come back, leave, come back built into it. But here's the problem, and you know this, Sarah as a former lawyer, I know this as a journalist. The kinds of professional jobs that people like us aspire to, they, there's just high returns to experience, right? It's not fake. And this is the thing that, like, I have a lot of these fights with people. They're like, well, I just want to do, I want to get paid half of what, you know, Davis-Poke partner gets paid for doing half the amount of work.

it doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way for a bunch of reasons. So one is that there are transaction costs to dividing work between people because they don't all know the same things anymore. And you have to spend a lot of time telling the other person what you did. You have to. So there's some kinds of work where that just doesn't work. The second thing is the more you do the work, the more experience you get, the more you know other people who do the work, the more you have read about it. The time you're taking off just actually makes you less valuable. sorry. And I would like that not to be true. I would like to be able to say to my boss, you know what, I'm going to go do something else and I will come back more valuable to the

Washington Post. But no, like doing my job every day is what makes me more valuable to the Washington Post. And not all jobs are like that. These are what an economist said, like hungry jobs. They consume, they just, they will take all of the time you can give them plus 10%. And that is the way that you maximize your value to them and therefore their value to you in terms of compensation. And so that just puts women, and I'm going to now say another thing that I think, you know, is just basically true, which is women want to spend more time with their kids than men do on average. But it's really, that's really strong. There are women who don't want to do that, and there are men who do, but they are exceptions, they are not rules, and I don't think that's cultural, right? I cannot tell you, I'm sure we all know, the hard charging women who swore, they couldn't wait to get back to the office and then they have the baby.

I'm like, hell no, not leaving this little munchkin. I just want to spend the next five years staring lovingly into its eyes, although also perhaps finding some time to take a shower. And dads don't do that. I know dads who are like, I wish I'd had, you know, eight weeks or three months rather than eight weeks or whatever. I don't know dads who are just like, I want to, I can't, I can't, I feel, I want to cry every time I think about not being next to the munchkin. and those two things force hard choices

and I will add a third thing though which is that in general the women I knew who did decide to become stay-at-home moms not all of them by any means but a lot of them they didn't like their jobs as much as the women who didn't decide

to become stay-at-home moms and the problem was that these women had been socialized and trained into this like consuming professional culture and so what they did with that was that when they went home. They were like, I can't justify being home with a munchkin unless I treat it like a

professional job. And so they then started trying to like child max in a way that had not been true in previous generations. And that put pressure on the working moms because now you got to be doing all the enrichment. You got to be doing mommy and me. You got to be doing all of these things. And that made working feel less tenable. And so I think you ended up in upper middle class circles and in this weird competitive arms race where like the stay-at-home moms are spending every, you know, my mom stayed home until I was 10.

My mother did not play with me. She did not find small children entertaining. She did not want to build things out of blocks. Like we would bake together. We would do stuff. But she did not spend every waking minute with me. I spent a lot of time like building forts in the living room and like putting records on and going into my fort

and listening to free to be you and me and the Muppet movie. and because I'm old and we had records back then and like the model of parenting now is not that and I grew up in Manhattan where like my mom had to take me to the park there was no like place to go outside to play so it's actually it was a more intensive form of parenting than most parents were doing at that time

and it was still just wildly less intensive than any suburban parent with a vast backyard is doing now And that has created this just terrible burden, both for women who work and want to keep working because, you know, the fact is that also our divorce law shaffed women who step back from their careers. And I've seen it with friends, I'm sure you guys have too, where like, she stepped back and then he decided he wanted out. And now she has, she makes like an eighth of what he does and has no way because she took those years to raise their. children and make sure he could make a lot of money, courts do not care. They will give you half the assets. They will give you child support, but you are not getting like his future earning

power that you made possible. And so all of those things, like there is something that needs to be reformed here, but I'm not sure what it is. Honestly, like I don't know the right to vote. Repeal the 19th Amendment, Megan. That was the crack in the door. I don't know. I think I think maybe it goes back to teaching us to read. I think that might have been a real mistake. Letting them have shoes. That was the problem. Jonah, I've argued that we're experiencing the first generation of women with careers. Again, not jobs.

But when you think about the fact that Carly Fiorina was the first female CEO of, she was a female CEO of, I believe H.P. was a Fortune 11 company at that point. But she was the first female CEO of a Fortune 100 company, I think. and that's in the late 90s, okay? So, like, to say that there were careers for women before that, like, yes, very outlier women, you know, Sally Ride, Sandra Day O'Connor, Carly Fiorena, like, I get it, they exist,

but the fact that I can name them isn't a great sign. So this really, my generation is the first generation of career women, and it's not going well. It's just not going great. And you see it with, I think, plummeting birth rates, as women are trying to figure out how they're supposed to do three things, each one of which is sort of a full-time job. You have a daughter, Jonah?

What do you tell her? Tell her all sorts of things. Yeah, look, I mean, like, my mom had a career. She was kind of one of those outlier ladies, right? But, like, her compromises, she created a home office with employees in our apartment when I was growing up. And so she was always home when I got home. I mean, she made dinner most nights and all that kind of stuff, but, like, you didn't bother her when she was working.

And my wife kind of came to a similar compromise, you know, with the exception of a couple jobs in government where it worked for the age of my daughter, she worked from home and I work from home. And I'm sort of an outlier on all that stuff, too. But so I see all of the stuff that you're talking about, you know, with my experience, my wife's experience, my friends-wise, experiences, other female friends I have, all that. I don't disagree with any of it. I will say that, you know, having had a couple friends go through bad divorces, divorces aren't all the bees' knees for the husband either. Oh, no, to be clear, I am not suggesting, and sometimes she leaves. Women initiate most divorces, so I'm not, like, suggesting that men are just evil and whatever. I'm just saying that, like, that situation of I step back, but that no one.

recognizes that contribution to his earning power that I raised his kids while he was out of earning. The ugliest divorces I know don't fit that pattern, but that doesn't mean that mine aren't just anecdotes, right? So, but the only thing I would just sort of add to this to brought it out rather than get into ballerina farm or, or risk stepping on some frigging landmine you guys are late for me here. Do you wish you had a trad wife, Jonah? There are days. But for the most part, no. With your eight children, gathered around your knee. But again, there is this, going back to the tradwife thing, I mean, there is a broader thing in our culture that pops up over and over again over generations of people saying, oh my gosh, modernity sucks.

everything was so much simpler in the past you know that's why all the men in your life are thinking about Rome all the time and you know I reviewed this book The Reactionary Mind which is you know which was very popular on sort of the new right about how you know who are really happy because they had an integral social order

serfs and and serfs I'll say this for serfdom a lot of trad wives in surfdom and and I and I and I So my point is, is I think that, like, the Tradwife thing is one of the prettier, most photogenic aspects of this larger cultural phenomenon that used to manifest itself mostly with the hippie left, right? Drop out, go to an ashram, go to a commune, all that kind of raw milk kind of thing.

And, you know, we've often talked on here about how parts of the right now look like the radical left of the 1960s. They're transgressive. They hate institutions. They want to burn it all down. blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's a hippie side of that, too. I mean, Rod Drear's book, Crunchycons, was a very early indication of some of this stuff.

And Crunchycons was kind of quaint compared to, like, these people who now say, you know, we should live lives of serfdom. But the Tradwife thing is just arguably the most monetizable version of this impulse. And so I think that, well, it says all sorts of. interesting things about feminism and women and all of those kinds of things.

It also says something about this broader idea that is very seductive to people that isn't necessarily primarily about feminism stuff. Boy, Jonah, that is really persuasive to me, and I feel like you should write that down. All right. Bye. So Adam is probably cutting himself at this point. We're probably cutting himself at this point. We maybe we'll put this. in the skiff or something? I don't know. We'll figure it out.

This just tickled me absolutely fuchsia. It's a picture of Tim Wals in a hunting jacket with his dog and the caption reads, notice how the barrel of Wals' gun is pointed away

from his dog. And I'm dying. I think that's actually just the funniest thing I've ever heard. But that tweet was in response to Christy Nome criticizing Walls. Oh, I thought it was just a veiled reference at Christy Noam. Either way. Non-willed. It's funnier if it's just someone coming up with that bummer.

I know. It's like, see what I did there? Ruins it with the couch thing. It does. Yeah. But Jonah, you are aware of something that may or may not be worth our time when it relates to our canine companions. I'll note that cats don't need this. But tell us about whether doggy high-end perfume is worth our time. So Dolceigabana, whatever you call it, came out with this dog perfume. You should see the commercials. It's just a montage. Are the dogs in their underwear? Are they dancing around in Venice?

That's what I want to see with the, you know, like, or just walking past each other in black and white. And then a head turns and turns to a butt. So, and it's a doggy perfume that's very expensive. and there's a reason why they don't show any big dogs because any self-respecting big dog owner would never dream of such a thing. But there are two big problems with it. Maybe Megan, who's also a dog person.

Sarah, I think previously in life you were a dog person, but you haven't had a dog in a while. I don't think you're an enemy of the dogs. So there are two problems with it. One, I know for a fact. This is not conjecture. This is not theorizing. this is not a hypothesis.

If I were to put dog perfume on either of my two dogs, the very first time they got an opportunity, they would roll around in deer shit to get the smell off, right? So first of all, you have to... It seems really cruel to a creature that has a much, much more interesting and diverse sense of smell. We don't know what that smells like to the dogs. That's me.

Exactly, right? That they claim they got pheromones and blah, blah, all nonsense. And again, it's fine because the kinds of people who go to the Georges Sank Hotel in Paris with their bison frie in a purse aren't going to have avail themselves of opportunities for their dog to roll around and scat the first place, right? But, okay, so that's one part of it.

The second part of it is, if that little purse dog encounters a real dog, an American dog, a dog of substance, and it doesn't smell like a dog, the big dog's going to kill it. Because the only thing that tends to save tiny little dogs lives when like Dobermans and Mastiffs and, well, may not Mastiffs because they're

big and sweet, but certainly American Carolina dingo dogs like mine is when they roll over on their back saying, please don't kill me. And the dog gets to smell them as, oh, you are of my kind. And spares their lives. And if you mask that spell, smell, all they are is a glorified cat. And game on. Megan, dog perfume. Is it worth your time? I am overwhelmed with all sorts of fascinating questions. I mean, first of all, obviously, this is for you, not the dog, right? And second of all, like, I'm never getting this, but because I'm not spending $108. I don't even spend that on perfume for me.

Definitely not spending on it for my dog. But, like, my dog weighs 100 pounds. I would have to get, like, a paint sprayer to apply perfume to it. do are one of those fertilizer garden sprayer things that would be kind of cool yeah but like now I'm thinking like what do you do do you dab behind the ears what does you know like the traditional spots for human are behind your ears on your wrists and in your cleavage I think these are all obvious the reasons for that are obvious and not and like where's the dog's cleavage do you dab it on their wrists and and also like if dogs could make perfume what would it smell like would it be

like, would they be like, owed to, you know, owed to deer shit? I mean, I haven't explained to me, actually. Someone who studies animal behavior told me, he was like, you have to think of it as for them, like, because they, the whole world for them as smells.

You have to think like when you roll around in the deer shit or like, as my dog once did a rotting carcass. He was like, it's kind of like if you could apply somebody yourself and become invisible. Right. Because camera. That's for them. Yeah, it's like invisibility power for them.

So that was cool. But like, what is the purpose? I mean, I know, I have applied like after bath conditioner to my dogs, which kind of has a vaguely nice scent that lasts all of an hour before the natural musk starts to break through. But like, what are we doing here? Who is the market? I don't understand people with purse dogs.

What are you thinking? Like, are you going to be grooming? Is your dog going to be going on a hot date and you want to just give them a little extra boost? Because, like, I've seen the process and you don't need, really. They produce their own smells. Some might say the same thing about women, Megan.

Like, you can walk into a bar and take any of those dudes home if you want because you're a woman. Dudes are the ones who should be wearing perfume. They should be the ones peacocking. We shouldn't be wearing. wearing perfume or wearing heels or any of this nonsense. I get that.

But look, according to the ads, if I wear the perfume, I will be transformed into a stunning, extremely slender, 23-year-old woman in a long-flowing dress. And I will be able to attract a higher quality of male with my... I'll get six-pack abs if I use the cologne. This is another feminism trim that I'm, like, so in favor of, is that women going to clubs or out or to bars, Friday nights, Saturday nights,

they're wearing the little like tube topy crop thing so you can see their middress. And then they're wearing the wide leg pants, which I think are not attractive, but they're trendy, I get it. And none of them are wearing heels. They're all wearing the like platformy white sneakers, but definitely not heels.

This is brilliant. Heels are painful over time. They deform your feet. They hurt your knees. It was a horrible and relatively short-lived trend for women of, I mean, high heels here, not just having a little heel on the end. But you know what? Like 1950 RIP 2020, 2020, high heels.

Cool. Yeah, I think they do make your legs look better, but I have always. They do. But we don't need to do that because, again, the men will sleep with nearly anything. And we can buy perfume to up the grade of, we don't need the. We should have been investing in perfume on high heels. I have a question for the ladies here, because this is one of these things that I struggle with

as a man trying to understand your kind. Your assumption is that women do all of these things to attract men, right? And at some level, that's obviously got some truth to it in certain circumstances and all that kind of stuff. In my experience, the only way I've been able to understand why some women spend what they do on, let's say, shoes. is that it has nothing to do with trying to attract men.

It is competing with other women, either competing with women for the more desirable male or just competing for women the way boys compete over Pokemon cards and baseball cards and comic books because they got the better purse, you know, the static, the Veblen good scarf or handbag or any of that kind of crap. Because I don't know, I grant you that on a subliminal, women in high heels look better to the male gaze, right? I understand why and all that kind of

stuff. But you could have Balsawood shoes on, and as long as you got the effects of the high heels, no man I know gives a rat's ass about like the quality of the shoes, right? That is not something about men. Most men can't tell you what the brand is. They can't describe it. They can't tell you what the label is on a dress or any of these kinds of things. This is chicks competing with chick's stuff, and you're blaming men for it, and I will not stand for it. Yeah, I've never had a man be like, are those Jimmy's shoes? Not once.

I've always had a front relationship with high heels, because I'm six foot two. And so I did wear them. And, like, when I actually first started working, you kind of had to. The uniform for women in the 90s was a, uh, skirt suit and high heels. And if you didn't wear high heels, you were like 70. And so first of all, I am six foot two. So the effect, I used to joke that when I walked into the office,

I should just shout, Fifi, Fofom before I did it. But also, I have tiny, stubby little feet for someone of my height. So I wear a size nine and a half. And women's sizes go up to 10. And, like, normal tens are more like 510, maybe 5.9. And then there's me with my teeny tiny little feet. I mean, they're objectively large feet, but they're objectively extremely small for someone who is like a 4-Sigma height event.

And the pressure that that put on my feet, I would, every night I would come home and I would have hideous foot cramps. And one day, I was at a friend's apartment who's a guy. and he was showing me something in my room and my feet started to hurt so much that I was like screaming, it hurts so I'd like with the foot cramps and so he started rubbing my feet

and then we walked out in his roommate just looks at us so I was like no, no, no just foot cramps but I mean like excruciatingly painful and I did this every day for years so I am broadly in favor of going away from high heels

but I will say ladies like look you know what you young people there's a great nora effron line if you were 25 I want you to go home and put on a bikini and do not take it off until you're 35 and that is definitely true young ladies whatever your insecurities like you're going to look back in 20 years and be like man I was so hot I wish I had appreciated it more to put on your midriff tops wear it all but retailers I wish I were the size that I was when I thought I was fat. Yeah, indeed.

The retailers, there are some of us who still want the other half of the shirt, especially if we are six foot two, and the midriff top turns more into like a shrug. I literally, like some saleswoman suggested that I try on a crop top.

I was like, first of all, I am 51. I'm not wearing a frigging crop top. Second of all, that literally would be like it would not cover my bra. Megan, underboob is also very in right now. No, not for 51-year-old ladies. Finally, I have another woman on the podcast. That's what's happening. Donna, it is not my job to educate you.

This is what it feels like when you guys talk about, I don't know, Pokemon cards. Yeah, right? So finally Oh, by the way, Sarah, just one quick point Because you tried to get some anti-dog Slander across You said earlier something, I want to correct

You ever watch Friends on TV show? Do you remember Phoebe? She sang in the coffee shop, the Central Perk coffee shop? Very famous. What was her most famous song? Stinky Cat It's Smelly Cat. Smelly Cat. You said cats don't need

perfume. Smelly Cat needed perfume. Just I don't want to get it out there. The cats have odor problems too. Yeah, the cat propaganda. No, that you're correctly maintained cat should have no smell. The cat maintains itself. You shouldn't wash the cat. Putting a cat in a bath is...

I washed a cat once because, so our building the cat... We're transitioning from dispatch pod to remnant, and I'm great with it, but we're fully into the remnant now. We're 20 minutes in. Our cat got away. every time you open the door he would dart out and once we didn't notice

and so the cat decided to go the elevator has two doors and decided to go between the doors and like there was a ledge the cat came out had to be lured out with some psychological distress

covered in grease and I cannot even describe to you the process of attempting to get a greased cat into a bathtub and hold it there long enough to soap off, said greased cat.

It's like the other side of the the Dawn commercials. Like it's a cute little duckling that can't go anywhere and like, no, the other side is the greased cat with the dog. Angry, vengeful, greased cat.

My dad knew nothing about pets. He ended up loving our dogs and our cats, but only had box turtles got out of a car of all that lasted two weeks as a kid. And he was completely alien alien to animal life. And there's a story about how Louise,

the cat that we had when I was a baby, my dad was determined to give it a bath and didn't understand that like, it's hard to give a bat, give a cat a bath under best of circumstances. You don't do it like you're giving a toddler a bath where you're like, you're running the water still when you bring the cat in.

So he tries to put the cat into a bathtub with the water gushing in right? Cat's freaking out just from that alone. He's not testing the temper. He's not doing anything

they tell you to do for how to give a cat a bath he's not doing. I like that you know the instructions for giving it. You're familiar with the expert advice. So he drops Louise

into this frothy, too warm water, and Louise does what exactly you would think the cat would do. It jumps out by climbing up the trunk of my dad's body,

claws in, and down to his back and he just had ripped out holes all up at the front of him and down the back of him because that was the root the cat was going to take to really hammer home. This is not how you bathe the cat. Can I just mention, by the way, that if I'm ever found, you know, like, you see those shows about the wife's, the spousal murder stuff. There's any number of ways that I think I could be found dead that people are going to blame Scott for. And I just want to be clear that it's very normal for me to have lots of bloody scratch marks on me because I let Frannie, who's 17 and a half

years old, still do biscuits on me. But she's so old, I don't make her trim her claws anymore. So that's just how that goes. And I don't want anyone to think that like when you find me, you know, on a pile at the bottom of the stairs, I want to be clear. I'm a clutz. It's very easy for me to fall down the stairs. And also the scratch marks are from the cat. Just it's probably not Scott, right? It's probably just me doing unfortunate things. I love both that you have a list of many ways in which your husband might murder you.

Not murder me. They think he murdered. And want to pre-exonerate him. I do. Because you, deep at heart, you are a tried wife, aren't you? I want my sons to have their father, regardless. This audio is going to be played for a jury one day. Is he standing behind

you? Blink. Blank if you need help, Sarah. You know, Megan's here, and she is my ultimate girl crush. So I can't, I have to use every opportunity. Right back at you. This is what it would be like if Megan worked the dispatch every single day. You know, but though, but like dating's different than marriage. You know that.

Work with me, Sarah. Work with me. No, we, like, it's, Megan, we should come up with like one of those penny jars, you know, like where they say, like, put a penny. for all the times you have sex before you get married and then take one out for all the times you have sex after you get married and like you'll never run out of pennies or whatever.

I don't know what the equivalent for us is. But think of all of the deeply satisfying parts of marriage and that's going to be our relationship when you can over. Yeah, it won't have the flash and the screaming with toe cramps. But

thank you, Dispatch Pod listeners. we're sorry or happy or you're welcome whatever you need we're done it's all done