The Dispatch Podcast - Political Implications of Inflation

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) report this week, and our hosts are here to talk through it. What does this all mean for the upcoming midterms and 2024? They will discuss that too. Plus, Sweden and Finland are looking to join NATO. What does this mean for the Western alliance? What should we expect from Russia?   Show Notes: -TMD: “Light at the End of the Inflation Tunnel?” -The Sweep: “Tsunami or Ripple? What a Midterm Wave Might Look Like.” -The Sweep: “To Agenda or Not? That Is the Question for the GOP.” -TMD: “Finland and Sweden Weighing NATO Bids” -New York Times: “Military Memo Deepens Possible Interstellar Meteor Mystery” -WUSA: “Teens among seven people arrested after detectives find dog reportedly taken at gunpoint” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by Jonah Goldberg, David French, and Steve Hayes, which is the clockwise order, no, counterclockwise order that I am looking at them right now. We have plenty to discuss. We'll start with inflation and some of the other big picture trends happening in the country. Move on to the political implications, not just in 2022, but ahead to 2024 as well. And then Sweden and Finland, latest with NATO. And lastly, we'll end with things that weren't important enough to make it into this podcast. Steve, I want to start with you. Will you walk listeners through the difference between the consumer price index inflation numbers that we saw, which were, sky high, worst in 41 years bad, versus core inflation, and why that has a little more hope in it? I mean, no. No, I won't. I don't know those details. I thought this was your issue. I mean, that is like the ultimate ambush question. Okay, so core consumer price index. Core consumer price index excludes volatile prices, like energy and food, the two things that

were, of course, experiencing the most inflation in, which is why the two numbers diverge so much. But as to why that's important and why it has good information in it, yes, the morning dispatch, I thought, had the best write-up and explainer. Yeah, look, I think there's, I think there's a reason that you have some economists saying, look, this is, these numbers are bad. I mean, the top line number is bad. This is bad news, bad political news for Joe Biden. And that sort of is the big story about the inflation numbers this week. But you had some economists, including people like Jason Furman from Harvard, who's been, I think, very intellectually honest. about inflation was, you know, sort of early and off message. He's a former top economist in the Obama White House, but he was talking about inflation in ways that contradicted much of the messaging from the Biden administration early. And I think has earned, you know, it has earned additional credibility for his willingness

to do that. And he says, look, there are reasons that this is not actually, that this report, despite what the sort of top line says that this is not as bad. So basically his explanation, he walks through the differences that Sarah says, but there's this kind of return to normal, the upper bounds of normal was the way that the morning dispatch said. And it was a slowdown in price increases for goods and commodities. So the example that Declan gave in the morning dispatch was the average.

cost of footwear increased 1.3% from January to February, but only 0.1% from February to March. Sporting goods increased 0.5% from January to February, but decreased 0.6% from February to March. And then he goes on and talks about cars and trucks, which has been a car and trucks have been both new and used, but he focuses on used, have been a key driver of inflation over the past year, past year plus. really, and had significant, we're significantly cheaper. So there are two ways to look at these latest numbers. The top line number, anytime you're talking about this is the greatest increase in inflation in 35 years, and we've been talking about that now for every month for a year, that's bad news for Joe Biden. And it's not because of what they're saying, but because of what people are feeling, right? I mean, we all know you go to the grocery store, you buy a

pound of ground beef. It's a lot more expensive than it was before. You go to the gas station to fill up, unless you're lucky like I was yesterday when the super premium was actually mismarked, and it was like a dollar cheaper for some reason. Made mention of that to the clerk, but we got cheaper gas as a result. Those are the reasons. It's what people are feeling that are the reasons I think Joe Biden is in so much trouble, and Democrats are in so much trouble, particularly, as we've noted before here, the Biden administration early when you had people like Larry Summers and Jason Furman and others, again, not conservative economists, sounding the alarm about inflation, talking about the contribution of the Biden stimulus to inflation, you know, the Biden White House response was this is transitory, sort of a shrugger of the shoulders. And that, I think, suggests that they really didn't get it and in many ways still continue not to get it. So, okay, but when I saw these numbers, the first thing I thought of was how this will separate out through the, you know, quintiles, however you want to think about it of income distribution in the country, because if you're at the top two quintiles, if you will, of income, the percentage of your money that is spent, your monthly budget, that is spent on those more volatile things, food and energy, is a lower percentage. You have

more disposable income. You're also more likely to own a home that has appreciated in value. And so there's an argument that, in fact, you've maybe been made better off by all of this, potentially. At least you are not being made substantially worse off. But if you're at that bottom quintile, 50%, 70%, maybe more of your income is going to these things that are off the charts, not in that core inflation of the less volatile, but the more volatile. And so whether the, you know, you point to core inflation are like, look, see, things aren't so bad. The consumer price index inflation is hitting different people quite differently. and it's hitting the poorest people in the country, I think, far worse.

David, what does that mean sort of culturally in the country? Yeah, you know, if you're talking about Democrats increasingly struggling with working class voters, this doesn't help at all. And it also contributes to this sense that, and this is something I think we're going to get to more when we talk about politics, but I do think it contributes to this sense of unease that exists in this country. that things are not quite right. I mean, I just filled up my car on taking, on the way back from taking my youngest daughter to school,

it was $52 in to fill up just a normal, you know, like Honda Accord sedan. That's a lot of money. And it just contributes to this overall sense of unease, that things are not right. Things are not stable. This isn't normal. And, you know, it's, it's for,

when you look at things like Joe Biden's approval rating with multiple demographics just rapidly shrinking, I think it just all comes back to this sense of unease. You have war abroad, you have inflation at home, is there a sense of stability? And I think that that has a,

when you're talking in particular about working class voters who are most impacted by volatility and food and energy prices and also sort of the most tenuous part of the Democratic coalition, it has big cultural impacts in creating that sense

of disquiet and has big political impacts because you're going to start to blame the people who are in charge when you're feeling this instability. And Jonah, speaking of sort of those voters that Democrats have been alienating or making feel uncomfortable, you know, there's an interesting piece in Axios titled Big Labor is Failing to Meet the Moment.

A lack of leadership and too much focus on D.C. politics is holding back momentum and unionization, labor advocates familiar with the internal workings of the AFL, CIO, say the big picture, you know, they have the White House, there's a tight labor market, workers around the country more likely to unionize, and yet big labor isn't actually capitalizing on the moment. And that has been such a huge part of democratic politics, organization, sort of that foundational element. And I'm wondering how you see those dynamics.

Inflation, its effect really down in the lower income brackets, unionization and the tight labor market interacting and, you know, a White House and big labor that haven't been able to get on the same page. Yeah. So you remember that scene in Ghostbusters where everyone's supposed to keep their mind

absolutely clear and not give Zul the form of the destructor and then accidentally Dan Aykroyd thinks of the stay puff marshmallow man I kind of feel like somebody in the White House maybe Joe Biden thought of the 1970s

and sort of like but it's less Ghostbusters and more monkey paw right he got his wish he got he got elected he got to spend, what was the final tally on his watch, $3 trillion, something like that. On all of these off-the-shelf liberal priorities for decades, the Ezra Klein types got what they've been dreaming of

for years and years and years to run the economy hot to help poor people and to create full employment and tighten the labor market. Biden also got the, The vaccines, right? You got all the stuff. I even got to pull out of Afghanistan, and all of it has broken badly for him, every single thing.

It's not entirely his fault, but it is like he's cursed. I think the supply chain stuff is still contributing a lot to inflation. And we now have Shanghai going into what is third week, which is probably the biggest industrial manufacturing supply chain hub in the world where people get beaten up if they try to go to work. And so, like, this is going to have long-tail effects. And you're right about the differences in the socioeconomic stratum. The whole point of, like, the sort of modern monetary theory adjacent fiscal policy

or spending policy of this White House was to create, you know, positive climate for people at the lowest end of the economic ladder. And they're the ones who are getting screwed by all this. Meanwhile, people who have assets, you know, they may not like to spend as much as we're spending at grocery stores and as much as we're spending on gas. But if you own a home, if you own second home, if you own cars, if you own stocks, you'll take a short-term hit in all of this stuff, particularly on the stocks part because the stock market hates inflation. But 10 years from now, if you can afford not to sell any of your assets during all this, the reality is that this is causing a greater device. a bigger chasm of income inequality, which was precisely the fundamental problem

that these guys have been wanting to fix for 20 years. And I don't blame Biden for all of it. And I think that the real reason why the inflation is bad for Biden, other than just people hate inflation, I mean, they hate it, is that the one thing Biden could say, the one truth Biden could tell is the one thing he can't say,

which is that they came into the office, with just the wrong theory about the economy, that their plans were not well suited to fix the problems that we had. They thought we had a demand side problem in this country and that if they just shoveled cash into people's pockets, that would fix everything. And the theory was just wrong.

And presidents can't say that, you know? And so he's stuck saying, oh, it's Vladimir Putin's price hike. And it's, you know, this other thing. And so it just make inflation makes people feel like the system's out of control and Biden's responses to it make it feel like he's not in control. And that is a terrible sort of pod de de dee of anxiety for the average voter. So yeah, why aren't you blaming him more? I mean, let's let's stipulate that a lot of what we're seeing predated Biden's election and the

conditions that are now playing out are things that were beyond his control. I mean, the supply chain stuff, that's not Joe Biden's fault, at least initially. That's not, that's not his fault. But it is his fault that he came in and did, you know, most everything wrong, that they blew off the people who were saying, look, this is going to lead to inflation, that they insisted on pushing levels of spending that they were being told by Democrats in many cases. was beyond what was reasonable and would likely fuel greater inflation, push the economy hotter.

I think he deserves a ton of blame for that. I think, Steve, I think he deserves all the blame that he deserves, which is ample. But, you know, part of the problem is, you know, like, there is truth to the idea that right now the Putin, the war in Ukraine is driving oil prices up, right? And that's largely out of his control. And he's actually doing the right thing by trying to get Europe to wean themselves off of Russian oil, which will drive energy prices even higher. And it's also worth pointing out that Donald Trump and the Republicans, you know, they shoveled enormous piles of cash into the economy when Republicans were in charge. And then Biden did the really dumb thing of saying, look at this giant fire of spending that the Republicans did.

Let's throw gasoline on it. So, like, I'm entirely happy to blame Joe Biden for his portion of it, but this is, there's a lot of systemic stuff going on too, and bipartisan stuff going on too. 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

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You know, in the past, we've seen, it's not unusual to see a 40-seat change. It would happen to see a 60-seat change in one of those wave elections. And her point was, because of a whole lot of trends, both the sort of self-sorting of Americans, what David and others have referred to as the big sort, and gerrymandering that has made as many districts as humanly possible not competitive, a wave election no longer has the possibility really of having a 60-seat margin. You're looking at, according to, again, Amy Walters, 15 to 25 seats would be a big wave election. however there are those who are pushing back on this idea one version of the pushback is that in fact they're just too low on how big this wave will be not that she's wrong about the sort of dynamics that would prevent it from being a 40 to 60 seat wave if we're talking about a 9 point swing but what

if it's a 12 what if it's a 14 point swing well then you're looking at 40 seats okay so that's one version of the pushback but it's not really on the underlying dynamics um but the other version is forget the House for a second. Let's look at the Senate where it's a lot more about the map. And in 2022, Democrats have an incredibly favorable map. And yet we are still talking about a, you know, potentially two to four seat loss. Four seats would be kind of extreme. But again, with like a quote unquote big wave election, you could see New Hampshire, Maggie Hassan falling, depending on the candidate that Republicans pick up there. Nevada. But Steve, what was perhaps most interesting about this analysis was not

2022, but in fact, 2024, where Simon Bazelon, who was filling in on slow boring for Matt Iglesias, he did some back of the envelope math here. I'm just going to read it to you. Democrats have averaged roughly 51% of the two-party vote in presidential elections. If Biden gets this percentage of the vote and the correlation between the Senate and presidential vote stays as close to 0.95 as it was in 2020, as in there aren't ticket splitters, which we've seen fewer and fewer ticket splitters where they'll vote for one party for president and a different party for Senate, then basically every Democratic senator in a state Biden won by less than 2% who is up in 2024 is likely to lose. If you apply that, again, it's very back of the

envelope. It's not taking into account any of the dynamics. You know, Joe Manchin winning in West Virginia. He won by three points in 2018. He's up in 2024. This would have him losing by a lot if you just use that math. That would put six current Democratic seats in the Republican column on top of whatever they win in 2022. Steve, that puts Republicans very close to a filibuster proof majority in January of 2025? Yeah, I mean, I have to say, I read that analysis and I found it awfully persuasive. The first thing we should say, particularly as it relates to 2024, is to remind people that that's a lot of time. A lot can happen and a lot will happen between now and then.

and it will shape and reshape our politics again and again and again. So if we've learned anything over the past, say, seven, eight years, the politics cannot be projected out on a straight line trajectory based on a static snapshot of what's happening at the moment. Having caveat of the heck out of what I'm going to say, I think his analysis is strong. I think the the case for the outlook for Democrats in 2022 right now is close to catastrophic. And I've talked to some Democrats who help run these elections and do some consulting, some polling on this. And catastrophic was the word they used. And this was a month ago, six weeks ago.

before we've gotten the latest round of inflation numbers and before what was happening in Ukraine spiral even further out of control, they were saying that the numbers for Joe Biden and Democrats in 2022 were catastrophic and they have not gotten better. You know, if you, a lot will depend, you know, if you look into 2024,

the one thing Democrats will have if Republicans take the House, which I believe they will, And Amy Walter is about the smartest analyst of this stuff out there. And your sweep will put it in the show notes, not this week, but the one before. I thought provided a very smart analysis of what she was saying. I would bet on the high side of that in a pretty significant way. I think Democrats are going to be in a bad way in the House, which will, obviously,

that environment creates challenges in the Senate. the only thing Democrats can say between 2022 and 24 that looks to be good news right now is that it will be divided government. And then they won't be entirely to blame for what happens. They will then be able to run against a Republican, intransigent Republican Congress that won't let Joe Biden do anything. Given what Joe Biden has done, I'm not sure that argument's going to be very powerful. But that, I think, is the best case scenario for Democrats looking ahead at 2020, 2024. And final point, the internal Republican fighting is likely to get significantly worse than it is today when the stakes are higher after 2022. Jonah, there's many things I thought of when I was reading that 2024 analysis and thinking

about what the country could look like in 2025 if that came true. But one thing really just kept rattling around my head, which is this idea that Republicans constantly feel like they're losing and yet also feel like the elections are rigged against them, which is a little bit contradictory. But Democrats don't have that contradiction in their party. They very much feel like the country is with them, that people, the majority of Americans agree with them. And so when they lose elections, it's due to, you know, gerrymandering, this antiquated notion we have of states. And so the Senate is in fact a product of gerrymandering, things like that. What does it mean? if liberals continue to hold institutional places, academia, media, by which I mean more movies,

things like that, you know, corporate boards. But they then are losing elections at a really big level. I mean, a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate would be kind of a crazy pushback on the liberal project, would that mean anything to anyone? I hope so. You know, I mean, this is the, the fundamental problem with both parties

is that they are unduly influenced by a very thin sliver of activists who have an incorrect theory about what reality is and what the roles of parties are. And we see it more glaringly right now with the Democrats because, you know, David Shore has been running around like that woman at the end of the To Serve Man episode of the Twilight Zone saying it's a cookbook, it's a cookbook, right?

But instead, David Shore is saying, politicians should do popular things. And they look at him like he's got. got six heads um and there's so there's this notion that is very popular among a very unpopular group of influencers um that they can just will into the world the reality they want without the votes to support it and um and i would like to think that's unsustainable i i'd like to think a lot of these things are unsustainable. I am trying to be more optimistic these days. And so one of the things I am constantly looking for, and I have no doubt I'll be disappointed from time to time about

not actually being there, is to think about how America's capacity for self-correction can fix some of these things. So I think Disney, that Disney, you know, not to go too far afield on this, but it's a good illustration of it, that Disney all-hands meeting where they talked about, you know, their not so hidden gay agenda and then getting more trans characters and all that kind of stuff was disastrous for Disney's brand and the good news for people who don't want to see Disney to go too far afield from where its core capital is um uh shareholders aren't going to like that stuff the market's not going to reward that kind of stuff similarly a party that gets hooked on defund the police and and and uh you know modern monetary theory which is just basically magical

thinking with numbers um is going to get punished for it and some ambitious politicians are going to say hey wait a second it turns out that the median black voter is way to the right of all of these pinheads telling me how to like do politics um And maybe a more conservative mainstream approach for the Democratic Party will actually win elections. You know, again, I think Joe Manchin is the most popular politician in America. I'm not a huge Joe Manchin fan,

but he's sort of in the sweet spot. And yet he's a demon figure among Democrats. And so I think a lot of the elites running, you know, what Lenin would call the commanding heights of our culture, they've really immunized themselves and bunkered themselves. from the normal feedback signals that would tell them you're screwing things up and you need to stay in your lane. But those signals still exist and maybe actually witnessing the Republican

party have a filibuster proof majority in the Senate would be a really powerful signal to some of these people to say, hey, look, I may have my own personal desires and I want to signal my virtue and whatever, but at the same time, I got to live in the country we have, not the country we want to a certain extent, and they'll moderate their behavior. Or they won't, and the living will envy the dead. I don't know. We're talking about the future here. David, how do you see this playing out between now and then? There just hasn't been a lot of appetite for the popularism that David Shore has been a proponent of. And yet, there's now more people saying, hey, look, you're heading toward catastrophic losses in 2024. And again,

what I'm hearing is it doesn't matter because that's not a reflection of where the American people are because the Senate is a product of racist gerrymandering because states are racist. Well, so I was in November, I was at a meeting where there were a lot of smart folks who are center-left, almost all living in very blue areas. And I can't even begin to describe the level of gloom that they had about the future of the Democratic Party. That it was essentially like this. We all know what we need to do and we all know we're not going to do it. That the social forces, the social dynamics within the party were so incredibly strong that even when you know it is better to try the popular things and popularism and you abandon sort of completely

abandon the agenda of the far left, which is disproportionately online, that even even if you know that's right, there's not going to be the will to do it. And why is there not going to be the will to do it for a couple of reasons that are super related to just human nature? One of them is that when you live and work and inhabit spaces that are super blue, that's just where you live. And, you know, we need to be clear. The big sort means that an awful lot of us live in super red or super blue spaces. If you live in a place that's super blue, it's going to have an effect on you that makes you think that this that world that you inhabit is reflective of the larger world more than it is so you're just going to imbibe that sort of ethos just as a natural

result of living and then the other thing is the way that discourse works now and and especially online is that if you deviate from the most radical or from the radical position it's not just that you're going to be debated and somebody's going to discuss it with you and you're going to have coffee together and hash out monetary theory. No, you're going to be called a monster. You're going to be viciously attacked. And so the dynamic then is that you, A, you tend to move more left than the average American just because of where you are in the air that you breathe. And then B, when you try to move away from that, you're going to get clawed at and stun gunned and cattle prodded and so the social dynamics are so strong pushing a lot of the leadership of the

party because again the you know in the cultural leadership of the left even more left there are those in the party who are fighting against that that that those dynamics are just overpowering but but I will say there's you know there's signs of pushback I mean we're going to have another San Francisco recall election coming up here. And it's looking like the San Francisco DA is going to get booted out of office after three San Francisco board members are booted out of office. So I do think these electoral checks might be coming with more frequency, which would mean that maybe we'll reach a point where the living are not envying the dead. But there is still this strong dynamic that's causing pessimism. And then the other thing is, to be fair to the liberal

point of view on this, they've won every popular vote since 1988, except for one, except for one. I don't know how I'd feel if I was part of a faction that won every popular vote, but won in a generation, in more than a generation. Well, this is the argument that the only reason then they're losing at the legislative level is due to gerrymandering, which they then tie back to racism, but their gerrymandering point isn't wrong, that states are arbitrary in that sense. They're part of the founding vision for how you govern a country, but they are arbitrary, and that the House at this point has been gerrymandered. Yes, I don't think there's really a particular argument. You can argue about why and the motives behind it. But that is the argument, is that when

there's a national election, we win them, but then when there are these congressional elections, we're losing them. And that's why we shouldn't care about. Congress because clearly that's unfair. And the more people who vote, the better off we do. Although, again, that's just not quite, it's not exactly right. They think that because it's a presidential election, that means the more people that vote, the more Democrats win. It's a little bit of a logical fallacy there because we've seen, in fact, when total voter numbers go up, it is not necessarily better news for Democrats within presidential elections, which is different than pairing.

Yeah. Two things I just want to be on the record about here. First, I think this dynamic, you know, I've been arguing for a very long time, has a lot to do with people wanting or thinking that we live in a parliamentary system. And in a parliamentary system, you vote a party into power and then the party basically gets to do whatever the hell it wants until it's voted out. And you watch Democrats campaign in 2020, they all talked as if they were going to be the prime minister of America and they were going to implement their entire agenda on day one,

even though, like, you have to get things through the Congress in our system to do that. More importantly, I just want to be on record that I do not think states are entirely arbitrary. And all Texans who extrapolate from Sarah's comments that the state of Texas is just simply some arbitrary social construction that has no content to it whatsoever. Jonah? Send your angry letters. Oh, I think most Texans would agree with me because our land mass should be much, much larger. things were taken away from us. It is arbitrary on our western border why we don't also have New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of California. Nice save. Nice save. Thank you. Thank you.

With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Turns and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.com. All right, Steve, let's talk a little bit about NATO. Finland, Sweden, they're making moves. Yeah, they certainly seem to be. I think it's likely that by the middle of the summer, Finland and Sweden will be NATO members, which is precisely the opposite of what Vladimir Putin said publicly that he wanted to happen without specifying those countries as he launched his invasion of Ukraine. As they put it in this morning's morning dispatch, it is a tremendous self-owned by Vladimir Putin. What's really striking to me is the dramatic shift that we've seen in popular opinion in those two countries as the threat from Russia and Vladimir Putin went from being, at least in their

minds, mostly theoretical, to being very real. In December, Finland's Ministry of Defense reported 24% of the population was supported a NATO bid. In Sweden, it went from 41% to 59% in just in March. So you've seen this dramatic shift in at least those Scandinavian attitudes toward Russia. And it's not surprising. Finland has a long, shift along border with Russia. We've seen every single day across the world the footage coming out of Russia and what Vladimir Putin's aggression has meant to Ukraine and what it could mean in a pretty real way to other countries if you were to continue. David, this felt really obvious.

Why in the last six weeks would any other country look at what's going on and not say, hey, you know what, I think I'm going to join NATO. Thanks. Yeah, I mean, it would have been obvious even if Russia had succeeded in its initial plan. In other words, it had... More obvious.

Yeah, absolutely. If it had decapitated the Ukrainian leadership and had seized Kiev in the first few days, and had pulled sort of a, you know, Crimea, the sequel, except bigger and larger, it would have been incredibly obvious. Yeah, you know, I think when historians look back at this move by Putin, you know, we don't yet know the final outcome of the military conflict, although we do know that Russian expectations were, initial expectations were thoroughly defeated, but we're just still a few weeks into what's looking to be a pretty sustained military conflict.

So we don't know the outcome of that. But historians are going to look back at this, and they're going to observe that Vladimir Putin was acting on some of the worst intelligence and worst predictions that we've seen in modern times regarding the ability, his ability to accomplish what he wanted to accomplish. because if there's one thing that we know he's been trying to do for a very long time, it is not only sort of dominate his near abroad, it is also to destabilize NATO. He's had these twin goals. He's wanted to destabilize NATO. He wants to dominate the near abroad. And both of those took, both of those goals and objectives took an enormous, at least temporary

setback. He's not dominating Ukraine like he thought he did. he has definitely not destabilized NATO, and it looks like to the, if we don't know the long-term outcome of the Ukrainian conflict, one long-term outcome that we already are seeing, staring right at us, is a larger NATO and a more solidified NATO, and a more bulked-up German military, which would be the last thing that he would have wanted. So the miscalculations here are just staggering. Jonah? Yeah, so I really don't like the way Joe Biden uses the we will protect every inch of NATO rhetoric for domestic political purposes. It makes it sound like he's doing something incredibly brave and bold

and he wants credit to be a wartime president where he's basically declaring we're not going to get involved, but we're going to protect stuff that's not under attack. That said, I think him saying that is hugely valuable and important for international diplomacy. because the signal it sends is once you're in the club, you'll be fine. And let's put it this way. If our NATO commitments weren't there or Poland weren't part of NATO,

I'm not sure Poland would be willing to take in 10% of its population now is Ukrainian refugees. They would have a really strong and understandable impulse to fortify their border and militarize their border for fear of being next. And but knowing that NATO has got their back, it gives Poland the ability to be much more forward-facing in terms of dealing with the refugee crisis and in arming the Ukrainians and all the rest. And it also sends a signal that in the club, you're great. So Finland and Sweden are like, maybe we should come on board. And so it's one of these things that I think that it's being played badly for domestic political purposes, but for international diplomatic purpose and

strategic purposes, I think it's a really valuable thing to say. And we're seeing the fruit of it right now. Steve, where does Russia go from here? I mean, that's a scary thing to contemplate, right? And we've talked about it before. But it's not unreasonable, as other analysts have pointed out, to believe that the more that Vladimir Putin feels embarrassed and cornered, the more likely he is to strike out in aggressive, in more aggressive ways. I don't see that he has really any other recourse. You've seen in the public rhetoric coming out of the Russian regime that they are now talking about consolidating the Kremlin Peninsula and essentially, you know, making life safe for Russian speakers in that part of what was Ukraine.

That's not why he did this. And, you know, he may be able to save face in Russia by spinning this in part because, you know, the information bubble is hard to penetrate there. But that's not going to work in the international community. And I think, you know, as he gradually comes to accept and appreciate that, I think it does incentivize him to be more aggressive. We've heard reports over the past week that the changes in leadership and military leadership in terms of who's overseeing the campaign portend those kinds of weeks to come.

And that's a grim reality. Well, okay, let's wrap up on some other notes. One, last week I talked about a mother fox who had bitten up. people, and I made, hey, light, whatever you want to say out of the fact that I believed this mother fox was simply defending her three cubs. They had euthanized her to test her for rabies, and I was thankful that they had found the three cubs. Unfortunately, this story has a particularly grim and sad ending. The mother fox was found to have had rabies, which meant that all three kits had to be put down as well, and that all nine of those people then have to go through

rabies treatment, which is not fun and pretty painful. And I blamed them for getting in the way of the mother fox. It seems now that I should not have been so quick to judge them. And I apologize for blaming them for getting bitten by a rabid fox. My bad, but. Victim blaming Sarah. Victim blaming. My goodness. But I have two, two new things to make up for it. One, this week, a puppy, a puppy. A 10-week-old Australian shepherd named Pablo was stolen at gunpoint. In D.C., the city went on a search for the horrible people who would dare to steal a puppy at gunpoint as its owner was holding it, clutching it outside the CVS. Pablo has been bound.

People have been arrested in this crime. Unfortunately, they believe these people also stole another puppy at gunpoint that puppy has not been found, so the search continues for the little Frenchie, and we hope that the Frenchie is found. He's one-year-old. His name is Bruno. He's wearing a black collar, if you see him. And next up, there was this headline, and David, it's really just for you here. New York Times, military memo deepens mystery of possible interstellar visitor to Earth. Say more.

Say more, Sarah. So, David, it's not quite as exciting as it sounds. That's the bummer. So in early 2014, a dishwasher-sized meteor dashed over the shores of Papua New Guinea before sunrises and burned up in the fiery friction of Earth's atmosphere. But two Harvard researchers argued that this wasn't just any space rock, it originated from another star system. They said, making it the first observed meteor of interstellar origin. Now, David, why do I bring this story to you? Because one of those

Harvard researchers is Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who we had on AO as one of our special August guests to talk about interstellar meteor visitors to Earth. And to air his grievances against his critics. There was a lot of hearing of grievances in that interview. So he was dismissed as he was dismissed last time. But last month, the U.S. Space Command released a memo to NASA scientists that stated the data from the missile warning satellite sensors, quote, was sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory for the meteor. I mean, he sounds pretty vindicated to me, David. These aren't aliens, but a meteor, I mean, it counts for something.

We don't invite charlatans on to advisory opinions. That's just the rule. And so he's vindicated here. Let's see what happens with what was the name of the interstellar object that drifted to us? I know. It didn't drift. Yeah.

That was the cool one because that one didn't have the right shape to have been naturally made was his argument. It was too thin. This one, however, it appears was like, just a normal rock. Jonah, on a scale of 1 to 10, how excited are you about this story? 14.

I don't believe you. Oh, I was accounting for inflation using constant excitement dollars. Yes. Four. Core CPI. Core CPI. But I bet you were really excited that they found Pablo the puppy.

I was hugely excited. I never, never DM people. on Twitter and say, hey, can you retweet me? But I did for Pablo because actually the woman who owns Pablo is a friend of a friend of mine. He texted me saying, hey, can you help out? And I was like, stolen puppy? Do you think this is a question?

I do want to say, and now that Steve had to drop out, which always makes things more fun around here, we should stop using the phrase stolen. I know because the law says they're limited for property. blah, blah, abducted because these are... I'm on board with that. Yeah, these are abductions and it's outrageous. And you're not supposed to steal puppies or abduct puppies.

I maybe took this like, I was in like maybe a weird place. I, you know, read the story late at night. I was like watching it unfold on Twitter. And late at night is never a good time to read sort of something that emotionally affects you. It just can hit you kind of weird. Like that meteor bouncing off the atmosphere. And so immediately in my head was like, what would you do?

right like you're you're clutching your new puppy and someone puts a gun to your stomach it's four guys in masks on the one hand whether they shoot you or not they're going to get the puppy because there's four of them and one of you and they could shoot you um but at the same time i don't know jona what would you do i would probably give them a puppy and then i would cry for a week i mean if this were one of your dogs you would hand the leash over to the The thing is, like, you have to... I mean, Zoe can fight for herself, but... Yeah, like, first of all, no one's stealing Zoe.

But, um, um, and the, the, and you know who's really safe is Megan McArdle and Peter Souterman because they have like 300 pounds of, of Mastiff. Um, but, um, uh, you know, you have, like, having grown up where I was mugged quite a few times in my childhood, in my teen years in New York City. Like, you have to sort of think, who am I helping if it's four dudes with guns if I put up a fight, you know? And there's a chance that you can get your dog back

if you're not dead and your family isn't attending your funeral. So I'm sort of, you know, I would like, I would have all sorts of fantasies about, you know, going full ninja and tearing out their throats and showing them their beating hearts and all that kind of stuff. But four dudes with a gun, prudence, I think, should tell you.

David, my question to you is, is this a masculinity test? Is this actually a bigger masculinity test than the Will Smith Chris Rock slap? Four dudes with a gun and your dogs, is that a mask? Do you fight to the death for your dogs? Not fight to the death. I don't know. Do you try to run something? But four dudes with a gun, that's what you're asking.

Yeah, I guess. Do you fight to the death for your dogs? Maybe. You fight to the death for your kids. So that was my next question is, okay, you're holding, like don't make it a puppy, now make it a baby. But Jonah's, in theory,

Jonas doesn't have a limiting principle here because you still have a better chance of getting the baby back alive if you're not dead. Yeah, no, there's a trolley problem brain thing here, but I fight to the death for my kid, I think. Okay, so you let them shoot you for the kid, but not for the dog.

I think so. Yeah, you fight to death for the kid. There's a difference between dogs and humans. There is. I'm not denying that, but Jonah's principle was he is about the chance of what happens next, which is if you're dead, you're dead. And if you live, you have a chance of helping to recover whatever was taken from you. Yeah, but there's also a notion of what kind of horrors they're going to visit upon your child, you know, that you would die to spare them that. They're still,

they're abducting the dog to sell it, right? And what they're going to sell the dog. I mean, they're not going to make like really gross underground films with the, dog. So, I mean, it's just, we're getting a little dark here. But we, we were, yeah, you teased one other thing. Oh, that's right. Last thing. The thing that didn't make the podcast, Jonah.

Yeah. So yesterday on the conference call about this podcast, I said with great resignation and exhaustion. Oh, don't. Hmm. I guess we're going to have to talk about Elon Musk. Literally, we're like, what should we talk about? And Jonah was like, I guess we're going to have to talk about Elon Musk.

It was the first thing that came out of his mouth. This wasn't, I didn't hear any resignation or delay. And I got a, it was like I had walked into like the ninth hole on the green right when the sprinters went off. And everybody started spraying skepticism and invective at me for suggesting such a thing. So, and I will say, both of you guys had already talked about it on advisory opinions. So, like, maybe climb out of the saddle on that very high horse of yours. David, should we or should we not have talked about Elon Musk on this podcast?

I was fine. I was fine talking about it. The person who said no was Steve. Steve was like, no, absolutely not. I was fine talking about it, but I didn't know what I was going to say that I didn't already say on advisory opinions just a few minutes before the call. Jonah was kind enough not to note that when Steve said absolutely not, we're not talking about Elon Musk, that you and I did not mention that we had already covered it on AO.

We were just like, yeah, yeah. I don't think we need to. Good point, Steve. No, of course not. Who would talk about that? Like just hanging all by himself, floating. So, and again, I'm sort of persuaded that we shouldn't talk about it because to me, the only interesting things to talk about it right now are how people are talking about it too much

and people are losing their minds about it, right? I mean, it's just really weird. Yeah, you mean, because nothing has actually happened aside from basically a tweet saying that he wants to buy Twitter with no prospect that that's going to happen? Pretty much, yes. But it did serve to highlight how broken Twitter is. Because there have been plenty of highlights to that real. David. Oh, I know. But it was sort of like a microcosm of just how ridiculous that website is in so many respects. And it would be easy to sneer at or to just sort of say, oh, please, this is what, the 15th ranked social media site in the world. Fourteen other social media sites have more involvement in traffic. But the problem is, every last or, you know, 99.9% of our quote unquote

political elite, aren't just on that site. They're on that site, marinating on that site and imbibing all that brokenness. Okay, so here's what we're going to end on. A question to our member listeners to put in the comment section, your answer, and you who are not a member can become a member for $10 a month and put your own answer to this in the comment section. Would you like a reoccurring segment about what we decided we weren't going to talk about on this podcast called Not Worth Your Time. Let us know whether you'd like to hear more about what wasn't worth your time that we then talk about why it wasn't worth your time.

And with that, we will talk to you again next week. That's right. I got it right this time. I didn't say, see ya again. So booyah, Jonah, in your face. I think the phrase is see you next time. But anyway, a forever. This episode.

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