The Dispatch Podcast - Populists of the World, Unite | Roundtable

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

Sarah is joined by Steve and Jonah to discuss the developments in Syria and South Korea, President Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son, and what the “Deep State” really is. The Agenda: —Syrian Civil War —South Korea —The populism moment —The Hunter pardon —Preemptive pardons —Sarah and Steve’s Air Force Two stories —What is the “Deep State”? —NWYT: Real or fake Christmas trees? 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 Isger. Oh, look, it's Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg. Hey, guys. Morning. Hey there. I want to start on the world stage because some things have been going on. Obviously, we have.

have France having the shortest tenured prime minister in their history, something that we've been seeing more and more of across the world stage. And even when we've talked about Donald Trump's victory over Harris, we've mentioned that internationally, these sort of change-fueled elections where the party in power has lost confidence seem to be picking up pace. Also, South Korea declaring martial law, then undeclaring martial law, Steve, you're going to have to explain that one to me. But I want to start in Syria, and I want to read here from foreign policy article. After nearly five years of being written off as a frozen conflict, a new and unprecedented chapter was written over the weekend in Syria's 13-year civil war.

On Wednesday, rebels in the north of the country launched a lightning round ground offensive against regime forces and managed within 72 hours to take over the major metropolis of Aleppo. A day later, rebels captured Talrafat, the last major strong in northwest Syria that had been held by a third group, the Kurdish-dominated and U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic forces. The significance and speed of the rebel victory in Aleppo cannot be overstated. From 2012 to 2016, thousands of rebel and regime soldiers died in the city, then divided between government and opposition enclaves in grueling house-to-house battles with fighters from both sides dying in droves to capture individual streets and move the front line forward meters at a time.

Steve, I'll start with you, but this conflict... is not really about Syria, if it ever was. It certainly isn't anymore. You have questions about whether Russia, which has largely propped up the Assad regime intentionally withdrew to force Assad to do more of the things that they wanted, sort of showing him what the world would look like if he didn't have the entire Russian political and military force behind him. You have, obviously the U.S. backed rebels losing ground. You have Turkey as a major player against Assad. You have Israel. And that war moving Hezbollah and some of the main Syrian fighters off the board to go fight in that conflict, perhaps allowing the rebels to move more quickly. And for our

own purposes, of course, you have Trump perhaps already now facing a pressing foreign policy conflict for when he comes into office because this is now going to be the breeding ground for ISIS 3.0, if we want to call it that, at a time when Trump has promised not to have wars to remove soldiers from these international battlefields. And yet, that's one of the foreign policy accomplishments he touts from his time in office is defeating ISIS. So can he allow them to come back to power? Well, it's complicated, as you suggest. I mean, I think everything that you say has Samaritan, it probably would be worth spending a lot of time

on each one of your specific points. But we don't have that time. So I'll take sort of a couple big points away. I think this is in many ways primarily about Iran. I mean, of course it's about Syria. Of course it's about Bashar al-Assad. To a certain extent, it's about U.S. and ripple effects from the elections here and from our policies there

over the past four years. But I think this is an opportunistic move because of a weakened Iran. And we're seeing this kind of all over the region. Iran has lost one of its main proxies in Hezbollah. Hamas is dramatically neutered. There's very little political support for Iran, even the kind of diplomatic make-nice,

non-support support that we saw for Iran in the days before October 7th has disappeared. And if you talk to people in the region, they will tell you that Iran is at its weakest point, you know, come up with the day since 1979. Pick, pick the time. Bashar al-Assad is the puppet of the mullahs, is a puppet of the mullahs in Iran. he has been weak for a long time, but I think has appeared strong because people haven't been paying attention to this, because the rebel groups have been relatively quiet

because the U.S. support for U.S. aligned pro-democracy groups, pro-democracy groups, some of them in quotes, hasn't been a topic of much conversation. So this is, I think, first and foremost, an opportunistic move by, the rebel groups who see Bashar al-Assad as weak and see Iran as incapable or unwilling to lend the kind of support it would need to lend to stop these things.

And there have been, there's another city that fell this morning. I mean, the speed that Aleppo fell is incredible, and we are likely to see this continue to happen. Government forces are withdrawing from cities and announcing that they're withdrawing from cities, defense ministry saying we don't want more civilian casualties, so we're pulling out. And the rebels are just sort of rolling one city after another.

I think a bunch of implications for the U.S. I do think some of this can be attributed to a Trump effect. I think the points that you raise with respect to Trump and ISIS and the possibility of a sort of flourishing Islamist breeding ground in Syria in a post-Assad world has to be a real concern. Many of these rebel groups are Islamist. They are, you know,

there's bad guys fighting the bad guys, fighting the bad guys, fighting the bad guys, in many cases, with a few good guys on the side. So I think there has to be a concern as you look at what would happen in a post-Assad Syria. But we also shouldn't lose sight of the fact

that the main bad guy is Bashar al-Assad. He slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Syrians in order to keep power. He did so with the eager and enthusiastic backing of Iran. of Russia and of others. And very little, I mean, the contrast between the sort of street outcry of what's happened in Israel and Gaza over the past 14 months versus the slaughter that Bashar al-Assad perpetrated over years, I think is notable. and the international NGO groups that are the most outspoken,

the most outraged right now as Israel tries to defeat the terrorist groups that attacked it on October 7th, they were silent by and large for much of the time that Bashar al-Assad was slaughtering his own people. One sort of final footnote, it sounds, we'll learn more about this in the coming days and weeks. It sounds like this not only caught Assad and his cronies off guard and caught regional actors off guard,

it sounds like it caught U.S. intelligence off guard, which if you're worried about a post-Assad world in which the bad guys can build and grow, the fact that we were blind to something like this, apparently, should give us real concern about the state of our probably particularly human intelligence in that part of the world, and in particular in Syria.

Jonah, do you want to reach out to the larger world stage here in what seems to be just a lot of instability and what we're learning about this century? For example, in France, there's all sorts of domestic politics, just like we can look at domestic politics and spend entire weeks of podcasts on them. But if you step out, it seems like some of France's problem here and their instability is being caused by the thing that, you know, Brexit was kind of about. and the international community elites, if you will, like Brexit's a huge mistake. This is a disaster. I don't know. Does this make Brexit look pretty good?

I think the through line I would say, and maybe it's just because, you know, I was in India not too recently and I just did another podcast about India. Everywhere you look, you know, we've been saying here for a long time, we've been citing the social science on this, that since 2007, 2008,

we've seen just this roiling wave of populism run through a lot of countries. That explains the politics to a large extent of India. It explains what's going on in big chunks of Europe. It explains a big chunks of what's going on in the United States. Brazil, to a certain extent, Mexico. Even Canada has bits and pieces of it.

When you talk about it at a really high level of generality, it gets really easy to make the case, but then when you actually start looking at every, individual country, it gets complicated, right? But Brexit, all of these things, the, what do we call the yellow vest people in France, you know? My favorite moment of those protests was when two rival gangs of yellow vested protesters attacked each other. You know, there was the ultimate Judean people's front versus the people's front of Judea moment in populist politics. The equivalent would be two different gangs of Maga Hat wear as attacking each other, right? And I think the problem is

an enormous number of elites across a whole bunch of different societies have proven themselves incapable of dealing with these kinds of forces in a coherent and appealing way. I think that one of the things that does worry me is sort of the demonstration effect stuff. When you look at what happened in South Korea,

it really looks like an incredibly boneheaded move by the president of South Korea. But if you're sort of, and I want to be very clear, I have no idea if what is it, him, you know, is a very online guy. I have no idea, right? I don't know if he's MAGA adjacent.

I think he was a better president for the United States than the person is going to end up replacing him because the opposition party is less on board for what we need them to be on board for. You do get the sense that when the signal is constantly being sent that democracy and liberal democratic institutions are fragile and that there is this moment, this inflection point, a phrase I despise so much,

for sort of an urbanist moment in the West, you can kind of feel people in power looking for the opportunities to make that self-fulfilling prophecy. And it's a little bit what the South Korea stuff feels like to me In France, I mean, I don't know, you know, this stuff I haven't very quickly before we were recorded, but I don't know where that's going to play out, but just the fact that the Le Pen crowd has gotten more and more mainstream and more popular there, supports this, you know, my point about the role of populist upheaval and distrust of institutions, and you can certainly find an enormous amount of evidence to support that thesis in the United States, right? I mean, right now we're talking about, apparently people in the administration are talking about providing preemptive pardons to people like, you know, Anthony Fauci because they want to protect them from populist backlashes and whatnot. And so I think it's sort of the theme of the moment, and it affects foreign policy in big ways. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of truth to that.

I mean, I think it's worth noting that this stuff swings sort of wild and fast. And sort of as we've seen in the United States, each side has its moments. We saw Joe Biden win in 2020, January 6 happens, and there's almost universal agreement that Donald Trump is done, right? And then he's not. Then he's resurrected. And then there are these predictions of a red wave in 2022 that fails to materialize. And it becomes a good moment for Joe Biden who decides to, depending on who you believe,

which version of the story you believe, run for reelection on the strength. of this repudiation of Trump and Trumpism and the kind of populism that Jonah's describing around the world. It's worth pointing out that Marine Le Pen was thought to be on the upswing in just as recently as this summer

and then was handed a pretty significant defeat in early mid-summer and looked to be on the outs before now these other parties are having their own problems. So I think this stuff you know, can really swing quickly. The through line, it seems to me,

I mean, there's so many reasons that Jonah's right. These things are different everywhere around the world. It seems to me one of the real through lines is the speed of information and the management and use of information. I think one of the things the populists have been able to do is take information and the global skepticism of authority

and turn it to its advantage. in many of these different places. Obviously, here in the United States, you've seen Trump and sort of the MAGA hoards turn what I think is a well-earned skepticism of the U.S. media earned for decades, turn it and use it as a weapon. And we've talked about this many times

on this podcast, whether it's Steve Bannon's flood zone with shit, whether it's Donald Trump telling Leslie Stahl, he wants to discredit the media. So when they say bad things about him, nobody will believe them. This is a purposeful, deliberate, intentional strategy to use sort of information confusion to its political advantage. I think Trump has done this masterfully. I think you've seen other movements, some of them very consciously imitating what Trump has done.

I mean, this was true of the Vox movement in Spain, for instance, in the two, three years after Trump was first elected here in the United States, looked to the United States, looked to Trump's victory and said, we're going to do this and usher in this popular revolt here in Spain. It didn't happen, didn't happen the way that they wanted to. But I think that is going to be one of the interesting things to continue to really look at is the democratization of information, the ability of populace to use information to their own advantage in all of these different scenarios.

Yeah, just very quickly, I agree with entirely that. I've written a lot about the social media part of it. I agree, you know, there's sort of the world has been shoved and exposed into what I once called the intellectual wet market where you can just get the creepiest ideas intermixed with like normal stuff and it poisons the food chain and all sorts of things and I agree with that entirely

but on your point about the pendulum swinging I agree I think most Americans most French people most Brits most Germans and Germany is having some issues these days too you know which you know guys named Goldberg are never too about um but uh the i think most people don't want to live in a unstable populist outsized rhetoric you know politics of retribution kind of time i think most most most normal voters want to live

normal lives and sort of bourgeois societies and all that my point was that that's one of the reasons why you get the pendulum swing is that you vote in the populace and then the populace by design don't know how to govern. And so that creates a demand for the quote unquote normals, the responsible people to come in and take over. The problem is they don't know how to govern either, right? Biden could have been the return to normalcy guy. If we took out all the times we had this conversation

about how Biden blew the return to normalcy stuff, the 10,000 hours of our podcast would be shortened to 6,000 hours, right? I mean, we've talked about this a lot. The point is, is that I think a lot of these international elites, the people who are supposed to be entrusted with institutions from higher education to the foundations to government bureaucracies, they have lost their mojo when it comes to sort of actually dealing with Democratic politics, small D democratic politics. And they've lost their small R Republican virtue. And so when they fail, at least the people who are speaking in a way that feels like they understand people's frustrations, they get another shot. And that's why that pendulum keeps swinging back and forth. I mean, you look at what's happening in British politics right now.

Kier Stommer was supposed to be the politics of, you know, he's basically the return to normalcy guy, right? You know, because the Boris Johnson party and the head of cabbage got whatever, Liz Trust, right? And then all that, they just, they burnt out their trust. And so they're, okay, let's give these guys a chance to govern sanely. And people are like, this is not what we meant. And so now it looks like conservatives might get another shot down the road. I mean, that's the wobbliness of this dynamic. Yes.

Competence and normalcy. And yet nobody will run on that. I mean, this goes back to bring it back to domestic politics. This is David Shore, that Obama data guy who got railed by his own team. This was his point about popularism, right? And this was like a whole thing among some left, center left. Even, I don't even think they're center left, really. Like real left wing guys.

They're like, why do we do things that are popular? And they were shunned by the left. That was an insane and unhelpful oppressor-type notion to suggest that a political party should do popular things. It's a little baffling. Or even just talk about popular things. I mean, that was the, that was what they actually were talking about. That was the humblest thesis in American political life that politicians who want to get

elected should talk about popular things. And they were like, how dare you, sir? Anyway. It was a weird moment. I want to return to Syria. for a moment before we dive into domestic politics, such as it is. And some of the semantics around this, because I see a lot of sort of, they're not even trying to be clickbait headlines, but they are clickbait headlines.

Steve, I know how much you love clickbait. Is World War III already started? Is World War III happening in Syria or in Israel or in Iran or whatever else? This like tossing around the narrative of World War III in order to get people, to pay attention to what's going on in foreign policy, which is hard to get people to do. And as we opened this conversation, and we talked about Syria involving and not just tangentially, I mean, boots on the ground level involving Russia, Iran, to some extent Israel, because it's pulling boots on the ground away, the U.S., Turkey.

How are we defining what World War III would mean? Because to me, at least, I sort of roll my eyes at the World War III comparison because almost every major conflict in the world right now is going to involve multiple superpowers. Again, look at Ukraine, look at Taiwan. It doesn't mean it's not scary or even scarier, maybe, but the World War, blah, blah, blah,

seems to miss the point to me. Yeah, so I'm completely with you and I'm glad that you framed this part of the discussion on World War III in journalistic terms. because I think that's sort of the question, right? I think you could probably make an intellectual argument that given, you know, the reaches of these various conflicts and the interrelatedness, you know, we could make a theoretical case,

yes, this is World War III or this is World War III in the same way that World War II is World War II. That's not my view. But I think in a journalistic context, it's irresponsible to say this. And it further diminishes the already low credibility that media institutions have when they use when they use descriptors

that don't, I mean, I hate to say as a, you have to be careful making this argument. What I was going to say is when they use descriptors that don't resonate with their audience. I mean, you know,

you use the world, the term World War III to newspaper readers in Kansas and they will look at the institutions that are proper. propagating this sort of case and think, like, what are you talking about? Like, I'm going to the grocery. My kids go to soccer.

It's not World War III. And that's true of, you know, Germany. And it's true of so many places around the world where it doesn't look or feel anything like World War III. And I think you have to be really careful because you can further diminish your credibility that you have earned by doing this. You know, that said, I think if something is true. true, you shouldn't not say it because your audience won't like it. That's my caveat. But I think there's a middle ground here.

It's definitely the case that world events are much more interconnected, interrelated, sort of geopolitical butterfly effect than I think a lot of the people on the realist camps in on both the right and the left would have us believe. The idea, as argued by some very smart, conservative intellectuals, that we could sort of walk away from the Middle East so that we could focus on China was always a fool's interest. It was never going to happen. And the idea that walking away from our commitments in one part of the world

wouldn't dictate sort of the responses, the behavior of leaders in another part of the world, is silly to the point of being dangerous. And it's why, I think, the people who have argued that, you know, for the United States to undermine NATO, for the United States to shrug its shoulders at Vladimir Putin's aggressive moves in Ukraine and, you know, rhetoric, potentially promising additional moves elsewhere, and think that, you know, we could instead say,

like, yeah, it doesn't really matter. or we've got to focus on G. It's, as I say, foolish to the point of being dangerous. Jonah, World War III, are you for it? You know, tell me what our war aims are, and I'll tell you if I'm for it. I find, so I agree with the last bit of what Steve had to say, and I agree with Steve on the sort of policy implications of a lot of this and the journalism point, but I look at it a completely different way, basically.

Which is not to say his way is wrong, just I come. I'm at it from a completely different angle. I heard Steve is wrong and stupid. Well, fair. Eyes and the beholder kind of thing. So like, I have, this is a longstanding gripe of mine. I'm not alone in this. For 20 years, not Steve's stupidity,

but the fact that like for years after Vietnam, I mean, George H.W. Bush called it, Vietnam Syndrome. Any military conflict, the media would immediately go to saying, is this another Vietnam? You'd start the clock for our, you know, for Johnny Apple at the New York Times or one of those guys, you know, for when they're going to use the word quagmire. And what my problem with this is that that was just one facet of basically the goldfish memory of American elites and And journalistic elites, policymaker elites, activists, pro-war, anti-war, they basically only have the vocabulary of like three wars and the Cold War, right?

So everyone wants to talk about, are we in a new Cold War? And you can talk about what Cold War means to you and all that kind of stuff. And a lot of smart people are using it vis-à-vis China and all that kind of stuff. But whatever this Cold War looks like, it's going to look nothing like the actual Cold War between, you know, the Soviet Union and the West. and there are so many better analogies for what's going on now. I mean, just sort of off the, you know, I have a, I wrote a very brief list here, right? So in the last 200 years, we have the Napoleonic Wars, the Seven Years War, the War of Austrian Succession, the 30 years war, the War, the War of Spanish Succession, the Second Coalition War, and the First Coalition War. And those are just some, right?

Don't forget the U.S. Civil War that also had foreign actors involved. That's by no means an exhaustive list, right? How dare you leave out the one I thought of? There's also like the great game, all that stuff, you know, between the British and the Russians in India and Asia and all that kind of stuff. Like, this is sort of in some ways the returning to history that we had at the end of the Cold War where various coalitions of powers form to vie for their interests against one another. And so to me, like, simply because you're in a situation,

where that's going on doesn't mean we're on the brink of a Third World War. And one of the most important reasons why the Third World War talk is dangerous or misleading is that the things that distinguished for the American experience, the First World War and the Second World War, and the Civil War, which was considered the first of them, was total war where the home society, where the domestic society and economy, was completely rejiggered to fight a complete war, where the home front was considered part of the battlefront. We are not going to, if we have a World War III that doesn't involve nuclear weapons,

or even if it does involve nuclear weapons, it's not going to look like that, and that may be good or that may be bad, but to tell people that, like, if we get into a conflict that involves Russia, that the contours of what that would look like are utterly familiar to people is just not true. And so I just find it like you have people who don't understand,

don't have any other vocabulary than World War II. And so their analogies always go to it. Is it like World War II and the Cold War are basically the only thing that policymakers know how to talk about. 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

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All right. As promised, let's move on to some domestic policy. Steve, you referenced the anonymous Biden officials floating the idea of issuing blanket pre-eastern. peremptive pardons, this follows, of course. That was actually me, by the way. It was a good point, so she assumed it was me. All are interchangeable. I mean, you look the same, you sound the same.

It really makes no difference to me who says what. I'm taller. Are you? Oh, yeah. Definitely. I think of Steve as being quite tall. Huh. How tall are you, Steve?

Six feet even. How tall are you, Jonah? That tall. Six-three? It's got to be six-three. Yeah. To think I thought of you was so diminutive. Pocket-sized, really.

I could probably still out-rebound you, but. Possible. I think I'd probably take you in basketball. We would both die. But when we both keel-over, the score would be me up by, like, three. I think I could actually beat you in basketball. I don't think you could beat you. You do know I played college basketball.

For what school? For an old. women's college, but it was college basketball. At the girls' team. No, it wasn't the girls' team. It was the first men's team. Okay. Anyway, this followed on the heels of President Biden issuing the most blanket pardon since

Richard Nixon for his son, Hunter Biden. I, for one, am having an exploding head moment, both about the Hunter Biden pardon, which sort of no matter what reason you can give me for why this is justified, for example, he's concerned about the incoming administration and their promises on retribution, then why did he pardon him for the convictions that were gained from his own Department of Justice that has nothing to do with future concerns? Or he thinks Hunter was selectively prosecuted, again, by his own Department of Justice, despite multiple judges disagreeing with that assessment.

And the false facts that Biden himself put into his pardon statement about Hunter Biden's, the evidence against him, you know, for instance, he said the Department of Justice doesn't prosecute and go to trial against people who have failed to pay their taxes while they're addicted, except Hunter Biden, in his own filings in court, acknowledged that he continued to not pay his taxes after he was no longer an addict because he wanted to maintain his lifestyle. Well, DOJ brings those charges pretty frequently. And I've talked about the gun charges as well, but worth noting nobody brought charges against him for these gun violations until he wrote a book for profit in which he described crimeing. So I don't know

what to tell you, man. But Steve, I've gotten to have my say on the flagship podcast advisory opinions. I think you differ with me on some of this and I want to yell at you about it. But please, let's have you say some stuff out loud that I won't listen to first. I don't differ with you as much as you probably hope. I do, because I'm itching for a fight. I can tell. And my concern is if we don't have one here, you'll pick one on something else. That's right.

I think what Joe Biden did is outrageous. And it's outrageous for all of the reasons you just laid out here. And while I hate to admit it, I did listen to this other niche minor podcast. Pretty good arguments there, too. I think what Joe Biden did here is totally outrageous. You know, Jonah's written about this. there's sort of reasons to be outraged on a number of different levels. One, because of what Joe Biden did.

Two, because of how he did it and the arguments he used. Three, because he promised that he was not going to do this and then went ahead and did it anyway. When most of us, I think, suspected he was going to do this all along. Some of us, Jonah included, you said all along, he's going to do this thing and were mocked and criticized for it. And then four, the number of people in the media, and Jonah's got an entire G-file on this, we should put it in the show notes, it's actually a G-file worth reading, the number of people in the media who not only reported that Joe Biden had said, and the White House press secretary had said repeatedly that Joe Biden would not pardon Hunter Biden, but then turned

to character witness. And this was true not only of sort of democratic partisans in the media, but of mainstream media reporter types. How dare you question whether Joe Biden actually means what he says here? Of course he does because he's saying it. And some held him up to be sort of paragon's virtue for these arguments. So there are all sorts of reasons to be frustrated by what Joe Biden did here. And I think the widespread condemnation that he's gotten for it is much deserved.

the only area and I can there's no substantive point where I can say like here's where I disagree with you Sarah the only area where I would say I can understand the thought processes that go into the the the pardons generally the blanket pardons that were now that are now apparently being contemplated discussed, is when you take time to listen to the kinds of things that people like Cash Patel are saying, who is, you know, as we have this conversation, getting generally favorable reviews from Republicans in the Senate, the prospect of Cash Patel as FBI director, when he has spent literally years talking about getting retribution on his political enemies and has used conspiracies to make his accusations

makes you understand why people in Biden world would say, well, geez, we ought to protect these people. I think it's a bad reason to do that. It undermines the rule of law and all the ways that we've argued about. No, I'm going to get it in front of him because I don't want to just tee you up on that.

Okay, go, Sarah. Where is that? But to be very clear, I am not just, Custifying, defending, excusing, or advocating for that approach. It's just that when you, as I have spent hours and hours and hours listening to podcasts with cash petal saying these kinds of things, reading the things that he said, you can understand why there are the concerns that led to this bad decision or bad contemplation of a bad decision.

Ah, I'm so excited. It's my turn now. look, these were the same people who were screaming at the top of their lungs about how dangerous it would be if the Supreme Court granted Donald Trump any immunity. And when they were told, yeah, but what if, you know, a future administration decides to bring these sort of tit for tat politically retributive charges? And they said that was an insane notion. In fact, in the oral argument, they said that was a crazy idea that the Supreme Court should not consider. in its constitutional determination of whether the president has any immunity from criminal charges after leaving office. That was from this crowd. And the Supreme Court, in fact, very much agreed with them in a lot of ways. It was trying to balance, you know, on the one hand, preventing that sort

of politically retributive criminal process against former presidents while wanting them to be able to bring charges against actual crimes. So what the Supreme Court did was it said for unofficial acts, you know, you punch someone in the face, you can bring criminal charges, even if he was president at the time. For core official acts, you know, Congress can't pass a law saying it's a crime to pardon someone. So, nope, you can't bring charges against a president for that. And for official acts that aren't those core official acts, I don't know, we're just going to have to see, we're going to have to basically balance the government's interest against the president's interest to be able to do his job. Then, fast forward,

they then scream about the Supreme Court, how it's an institution protecting Trump, how it can't be delegitimized enough. They're delegitimizing themselves with their partisan decision-making. How dare they immunize Trump? And now they're talking about immunizing tons of executive branch officials from politically retributive criminal process with no regard for what conversation we were having six months ago. I find it mind-blowing.

I would also like to take this moment to mention the fact because we'll now, you know, move to Cash Patel as well and I guess Jonah's still here. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Hey. Cash Patel, this, you know, person they're all worried about, had a Appendix B in his book that was released. Title of the book was, government gangsters. I had not read this book.

I'm not even sure I was aware of this book. But anyway, Tim Miller and others brought to my attention that I am actually in Appendix B mentioned as one of these deep state government gangsters. He of course says the list is not complete. He says it leaves out members of Congress and members of the media. The list has 60 people in it ranging from Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton to Pat Cipollone, White House Counsel under Trump, Bill Barr, Attorney General under Trump, Rod Rosenstein, Deputy Attorney Under Trump, me.

And then it has people who you are even less likely to have heard of who were, for instance, FBI agents or in the national security apparatus as actual civil servant employees. I, my first argument, of course, being I don't know that that could have any shared definition of deep state. How is Joe Biden deep state? He's pretty at the top of the state. He's literally. He's the head of the government. He's the head of state. Right? Not very deep. I would argue that senior level political appointees to Donald Trump are not deep state either. In fact, I wrote a whole op-ed in the Washington Post after I left government service describing it as shallow state, the people who said to Trump's face, either I won't do that or you shouldn't do that, sir. That's not deep state. That's just persuading the president not to do things. I don't know why I'm in Cash's list. I've never met him. I've never been in a meeting with him. So, Adam, I've never actually.

heard Cash Patel's voice. But Steve Hayes has, and he's picked out a clip for us from some of Cash Patel's podcast interviews. Could you play one of those for us? Here's a simple mathematics about Air Force 2 and Air Force 1. Air Force 2 can't get off the ground unless the president authorizes that trip. So, of course, he knew where Vice President Joe Biden was going. He was sending him there. And it's not like President Obama is an idiot. He's a really smart guy. If Hunter Biden's on that trip, which he was scores of times, you bet President Obama knew Hunter Biden was with Joe Biden in China and elsewhere. And so there's another connection with President Obama and the Biden corruption syndicate. Steve, why is that clip interesting to you?

So the context for that, I think, is really important. This was Cash Patel on a podcast hosted by Devin Nunes, former member of Congress, former chairman. of the House Intelligence Committee, former boss for Cash Patel, who's now the head of truth, social Donald Trump's social media company. And what Cash Patel was arguing was that Barack Obama was essentially the puppet master behind Joe Biden

and Hunter Biden and all of the string pulling that was going on to allow the Bidens to steal the 2020 election was in fact being orchestrated by Barack Obama. But I think that, which I think that entire argument is spurious. But the narrow point, I think, is the important one there. What he argued in that clip was that the president of the United States, the leader of the free world, signs off on the passenger manifests for Air Force 2. Do you know how preposterous it is to believe that Barack Obama was,

deciding who travels with his vice president, it's totally insane. If you've ever been on Air Force True, if you've ever done it in this kind of government travel, there's no, Brock Obama has nothing to do with that. I have a actually relevant story about this. So when I was traveling with the Attorney General, sometimes, you know, there's basically a bunch of government planes around and some are sort of belonged to or designated to the Department of Justice, several FBI, small private planes. But if they're all in use for actual, you know, criminal law enforcement stuff, sometimes we would need to borrow the plane that would be

Air Force 2 if the vice president were flying on it. If he's not on it, it's not actually Air Force 2, but it's literally the same plane. So we're down in Houston. The other planes are all in use, and so we need to borrow Air Force 2. But also, I have... have found a stray cat. And I decide the best plan of action is to try to smuggle the stray cat on the plane to bring it back to D.C. where I have found it a home. The cat is so young that basically no vet will take it. I can't fly it on a commercial plane because they don't take kittens under a certain age. So this is this cat's only help. Otherwise, it's going to be euthanized, right? This is literally life and death, Steve. So we are in the motorcade. It's like a four-car motorcade heading

from downtown Houston over to the airfield where the plane is waiting for us and I get busted with the cat I mean I don't this plan wasn't very well thought out I had a scarf and I thought if I covered it with a scarf they maybe wouldn't notice the meowing I was wrong about that I acknowledge that

so the head of our FBI detail security detail very kindly calls over to the Pentagon to get permission to have a cat on the plane and this actually does not go to some lower-level flunky, Steve, as you might have suspected. We actually end up needing clearance from a two-star Air Force general to bring this cat on the plane. It is only the second animal that's ever been brought on the plane after Marlon Bundo was flown from Indiana to the vice president's residence.

And this two-star says, I'm sorry, I actually need to speak with the attorney general to have him make this request. So the AG takes the phone, makes the request. This is all quite ridiculous. I am feeling very sheepish at this point in the waste of government resources. And then the head of legislative affairs, Stephen Boyd, whose name I mentioned because he's on Cash's list as well. Again, there's only 60 people on this list. Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton.

And then me and Steve Boyd. Anyway, Steve Boyd turns to AG Sessions and says, sir, why did you do that? and he says in his Alabama accent that I won't do very well, Stephen, I got a lot of problems and saying no to Sarah ain't going to be one of them. That might be the most Sarah story

I've ever heard. I will offer a smaller, less hilarious one of those of my own and let me be clear this is not an attempt at one of them because you can't do better than that. But my point is, by the way, the president of the United States did not sign off on who was traveling on the

cat, correct, right. So I was, we had, I was traveling with Vice President Cheney on Air Force 2 because it was Air Force 2 at the time because he was on it. And we had a stop coming back from the Middle East at Shannon Airport in Ireland. And one of my colleagues, we had about 45 minutes, it was a refueling stop. One of my colleagues, I'll go ahead and name him, Olivia Knox, who was a great travel companion, a wonderful reporter, a really good guy, and somebody who once brought Woodford Reserve into Iraq and Kuwait, taking great risks to do this.

We stopped at the bar at Shannon Airport to have a couple beers in the 45-minute layover that we did. So we had a couple beers, a great conversation with the bartender, gave him a big tip, and he let us walk off with, two pines of Guinness to try to get back on Air Force 2. So we walked back to Air Force 2 and tried this kind of subtly. I mean, we didn't hide them like you did the cat, but I was holding

it low, you know, trying not to be like. On the other side of your body, like against your leg. Yes, exactly. I've done that before. You know, we weren't showing the beer off, but we weren't really like hiding it in a deceptive kind of way. And we got busted. I can't remember who saw it or who stopped us probably one of the members of the vice president's secret service detail and you know we felt a little stupid like why are we bringing a beer on i mean they serve beer you can get a beer on air force too it was like that wouldn't have been a problem to just get a beer on air force too anyway as it happened the vice president was right behind us when we got busted which at first i was horrified by the fact that he had just seen us like sneaking these beers on

to Air Force true, until the point when Vice President Cheney said to the Secret Service, oh, come on, let him on with the beers. So we got authority from the vice president. I'm not sure it was required, but we didn't call the president. You didn't call the president. And if you're building a conspiracy, as Cash Patel was doing in this instance, you can't build it on a foundation that is totally at odds with reality, the way that he is done here. It's not the case that Barack Obama would know who's traveling with Joe Biden on his various flights over.

Obama's not looking at the flight manifest. It's so preposterous, but it speaks to it. I mean, the other point, and then I'll finally shut up and Jonah, you can get back in here. Is Jonah still here? Unless you don't want him to, Sarah. This is like that Matt Damon bit on Jimmy Kimmel. Sorry, we've run out of time. Think about how warped your sense of,

reality has to be if you include Bill Barr on a list of deep state functionaries. And this is the same Bill Barr who sought to actively undermine the Mueller report, the Mueller investigation, I would say, who appointed John Durham to do his own investigation that would have the effect of ultimately undermining certain aspects of that. and I think uncovering some important details related to it too. But the idea that Bill Barr, who served as Trump's Attorney General, is like a deep state functionary, suggests a worldview so at odds with reality and so warped that if it were me, if I were a Republican senator, I would see, just take those two discreet facts,

set aside the things he said about going at, you know, prosecute targeting journals, journalists criminally set aside some of the other outrageous things that have been listed since he's been nominated that people have been reported on. And just focus on those two things. If you're a Republican senator, do you vote for somebody who sees the world this way? Okay, what I really took from that story is that in, what was that, 1972, we have boys on the bus doing Coke in the back of the plane and Steve's having trouble getting a beer on the plane. So how's that for social concerns? Servitism winning over the long haul. Jonah, it's been a while, friend.

Feel free to talk about it. Do you remember what my voice sounds like? Not really. You know, we've done some pardons. We've done some planes. We've done nominations. Pick your poison. Okay.

So, in short order, one, on this deep state stuff, I'm reminded of one of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite movies, Barcelona, the Whit Stillman movie, where one of the characters, and I'll keep it short, says, people keep talking about this thing called subtext, which I gather means an implied or somewhat buried or hidden message in the text.

But if that's the subtext, what's on top of that? And the other guy says, that's the text. And that, when I hear this deep state stuff, you know, Bill Barr, who's the attorney general, being part of the deep state this is now the logic of the cancer cell where basically anything I dislike

becomes the deep state and they're using it very much the way the very adjacent crowd used to use the word neocon it's just the people who have an agenda that I'm going to paint as sinister I don't think it has a lot of explanatory value I got into a back and forth with Eli Lake

about this on the remnant earlier this week I kind of like Philip Hamburger style deep state stuff, like administrative law stuff, Charles Murray's book, By the People, which gets into the sort of the two-tier system of justice for the deep bureaucracy in America.

But like the deep state stuff makes it sound like Sarah and all you guys were going to meetings and had cells where you were getting your agenda and your marching orders for how to undermine the Trump presidency. And that's just a conspiracy theory.

It's just a dumb conspiracy theory. that masquerades is this sort of sophisticated point of view, which gets me to Cash Patel. I agree with everything Steve says about Cash Patel. At the same time, I think, you know, this gangsters in government book is not the relevant text. The relevant text are his children's books. Oh, my God, I'm so offended by these.

So in the children's book, he talks about King Trump, or I forget the names. It's like King Trump and Queen Hillary and whatever. Forget the plot line, which has its own absurdities. we don't have a king. It's very offensive to make a book about American government for small children

that talks about royalty and presumably bloodline and hereditary leadership. Like, I'm deeply, deeply, scornful and concerned that that's how you think we should teach children about American government.

Well, I agree with that. I also just think any books that try to tap into Fox News addicted senior citizens' desire to indoctrinate their grandkids is gross, right? Just any political sort of partisan stuff turned into children's books has always disgusted me. But the point is not the text to get back to subtext versus text.

The text of those books, it's the subtext. And the subtext is Cash Patel was signaling that he is a, head past the sphincter ass-kisser of Donald Trump and will do whatever the guy wants and whatever appeases and panders to his superfans. And that on the surface makes him a terrible pick to be the director of the FBI. We don't have to talk about like, I mean, I agree with you, Sarah.

I listen to advisory opinions fairly religiously, as you know. Talk about sphincter pleasing of the ruler. Easy, easy, killer. Easy. Geez. Well, I have a last point, which will not please, Sarah, but... Yeah, you've really run out of time here, Jonah. Quit.

No, I agree with you. All I was going to say is, I think Cash Patel is, in terms of his resume, meets the minimal requirements to be an attorney general, I mean, to be an FBI director. But in terms of his temperament and his political reputation and profile and all the other reasons, he is just wildly unfit for the appointment. The last point, since you got, I wasn't going to get into this. I know we're all sick of this.

really now dead joke about flagship podcast stuff, right? It's one of these gags, like my dear reader gag and some of these other things that I wish we could get rid of, but it keeps coming back. Sarah, you're a text history and tradition person, right? To one extent or another. Yes. Okay. So the original text history and tradition of the term flagship simply refers to whatever ship, sort of like whatever plane the vice president is on is Air Force 2, whatever plane the president of on as Air Force One, whatever ship the admiral is on becomes the flagship.

And so therefore, this show, because we have a co-admiralty at the dispatch, this show is definitionally when we are both on it, the flagship podcast. Oh, wait, you're talking about you two? Sorry, I definitely thought you were talking about someone else heading this ship. No, when we are on it, that's all it takes. And the admiral doesn't necessarily captain the ship, right? There's a subordinate captain who, like, make sure the sales go up and all that kind of stuff. But the fact that we are simply on this podcast makes it the flagship podcast.

And then if you want to get the more metaphorical uses of the word flagship, obviously the remnant is the flagship. Okay. Hey, listeners, let's see who you think the admiral on this ship is. No, no, no. It's not the admiral of the ship. It's the admiral of the fleet. Steve's the CEO, we're co-fired.

I'm saying, who's the Admiral on this ship? No, you're the captain of the ship. You've made your case, and I'm just asking listeners for their opinion. Uh-huh. Who pays the Admiral's paycheck, by the way? Like, as in everyone's getting a paycheck in that government service as well. I don't think the paycheck point is doing what you say. You're scrambling here because you've just been overpowered by the force of my argument.

But anyway, we can... We can get back to the substance if you like. I don't know. It's fine. I do want to say that I promise, because I've been sitting here day drinking because it took me so long to come back on the podcast, I do promise that if I am confirmed for Secretary of Defense,

I too will stop drinking. I do want to have your take, though, quickly on the preemptive pardon idea. Like, is Steve right that, like, it's understandable? Or am I right that it's an outrage, hypocritical, and exactly the thing they claimed to be against, once again, similar to Joe Biden, after his son was convicted in a trial saying he believed in the justice system and he would not pardon his son, nothing has changed between then and now for him to say that he was selectively prosecuted and nobody would have brought these charges, these preemptive pardons, right?

It will then, I think, start the tradition of presidents preemptively pardoning their staff, like the people they like, basically. If people know that preemptive pardon's coming, whether they committed real crimes or not, certainly the incentive sure change about whether you think real hard about the criminal implications of what you're doing, thoughts, Jonah.

I think Steve's entirely wrong. And you're entirely right. No, no, wait, I wasn't going to jump in, but let me just clarify. I said the thought process was understandable given what we've seen. Fair, fair, fair. I agree entirely with all of Sarah's points,

and it was wrong to do. but I understand why they're in a panic when you have somebody like Cass Patel who's going to be about like we're talking about preemptive partners for like Liz Cheney and Adam Schiff right right which which is well I mean they were talking specifically about executive branch people but like even the blanket ones I think are wrong but I understand if you're looking at a potential Cass Patel as FBI director why people might want to get in front of that given his expressed yeah I don't I agree just by that undermines rule all that stuff That's fair. One of the things you could do in that case, since I still think the courts are in pretty good shape, just launch a giant legal defense fund for all these people.

Which, by the way, is what their argument was for why the Supreme Court was absolutely insane for granting presidents any immunity. We trust the court system. The court system can take care of this. We trust juries. Oh, they don't trust juries anymore? Again, all the things that they said against the other side, they're now unwilling to apply to their side.

Oh, well, you know, depending on where you bring the case, that jury could be pretty biased against Anthony Fauci. What? You literally said the exact same case against Donald Trump having a case in D.C. or New York City was insane. I really hate most or reject most efforts to say, you know, we should amend the Constitution. I'm just generally not a big amend the Constitution guy.

You know, there are some exceptions. I am increasingly in favor of getting rid of the pardon power if this is the course that we're heading on. Because, you know, I'm a norms guy, right? I think we should have norms. And I think Trump did great violence, the norms about pardons, Biden, through gasoline on that and made it worse. But the idea, so like one of the norms that I used to think was kind of important was admitting guilt, right? That you got pardoned either after you paid your debts of society or at the very least either there was some recognition that you were in the wrong and deserving of a pardon.

The idea that you're going to give these people blanket pardons in advance for crimes that they don't claim to. to have committed is such a bad precedent going forward that if that's what becomes the norm, I want to get rid of the constitutional authority for that norm. I get really tired of the bagats and all this, you know, like who started what. The point is where we're at is really bad and everybody has a certain share of blame and why we're at where we're at. But this is crazy talk and it's wildly hypocritical and it's going lead to nowhere good. I have a proposal. I think every time we talk about norms, we should play the audio of the people around the bar that cheers. Norm! Norm! When Norm walks in, like, every time you

say norms, that's what I hear in my head. Norms! A very quick worth your time. This has been a debate raging throughout my adult life. Fake Christmas trees, or real Christmas trees. Do you feel strongly about this distinction, Steve? Yeah, I have to. This is where I sort of acknowledge what a dork I am. I love real Christmas trees. I love the smell of them.

I love everything about them. I love the sticky stuff. The whole thing, the process of getting them, decorating them, setting them up, the whole thing. That would be sap, Jonah. God, can't. It's like childish. All right, listen, yes, Jonah and I were giggling.

I mean, God. I'm pointing at each other and laughing. A fur tree. Oh, my God. This is like unbelievable. Please continue. So anyway, the, now I'm so distracted by this silliness. But I can't have a, I can't have a real tree.

Because like if we have, you know, even if you have these, you know, a wreath inside the house or my wife used to put the, you know, the, I don't even know what you call them, boughs. Are they the boughs? Yes. Garlands. The garlands, whatever. Bows of Holly? It just just miserable within like two minutes because I'm so allergic. Fine.

Steve is claiming disability. Yeah, we have a problem. I'm always tempted to do it and just say like I'm going to suck it up through December because it's so much preferable, more preferable, preferable. Better. Poppy. Wow. Did Steve just make a wicked reference? Yeah. Or Steve having a stroke. Did your daughter? Yeah. I've got girls. Did you go see

the movie in theaters? I did. I mean, to be to accurate, I saw half the movie in theaters because I slept the first 40 minutes. Yeah, there we go. Woke up for the middle and slept for the end. Oh my God. Okay. Yeah. Saw some of it. Did you actually see popular the song? Were you awake for that part? I did. I actually knew it because our girls have been listening to that soundtrack for years and years. So I'm, well, I can probably sing some of them. I won't. Please. Please not. Please do. Okay. Jonah, fake or real? Oh, real. I find. Are fake Christmas trees just not preferable? Are they an abomination? I'm closer to an abomination. I've never heard arguments in favor of them that don't boil down to a health excuse like Steve has or some

form of rank, morally, aesthetically sterile pragmatism. Oh, I have to clean up the needles. You have a real one and they have spiders in them. All that kind of stuff. I got no use for any of those arguments. What about cutting down trees? These were trees that were grown.

They are fulfilling their destiny. They were grown to be cut down. It's actually, and if you care about climate change, young, fast-growing trees absorb more carbon from the atmosphere than mature ones. And so you are actually doing, it's a carbon offset if that's the kind of ridiculous excuse you need to have a proper Christmas tree.

Huh. Okay. Where do you come down? So I lived a very deprived childhood. My mother fell into your needles category. We didn't even have a fake tree, though. We didn't have anything. We had a garland only. Wow. Wow.

So when I came of age, I swung the pendulum, and maybe a little too far the other direction where it's like, I go out the very first day the Christmas trees are available and go get one. I'm so into them. I will never deprive my children of this. But also, we have a fake one in the house

just in case they're not selling the Christmas trees early enough or I can't find one or I don't know. There could be some Christmas tree apocalypse. So my kids get two Christmas trees every year to make up for never having a Christmas tree growing up. And since I think my dad's probably listening in this podcast. Dad, you're only partially to blame. So you know it's a fun and your kids are just coming to be old enough that they could partake in it is in in Virginia. I mean, I'm sure in every

state, but like there are places where you who, there are Christmas tree farms where you cut them down. You cut down your own. And we've done that a few times and it's it's great. It's a lot of fun. Yeah. No, for sure. So can I just give a warning to listeners that if you've got your kids in the car that are below a certain Christmas age, you know what I mean? Turn off the podcast. So once again, if your kids are in the car and they're below a certain Christmas age, please turn off this podcast. Okay. So we had this party at our house and so I was putting away all this stuff and one of the Christmas presents got put in this closet that nobody ever goes into on like a top shelf and my son yesterday found it and we don't do Christmas presents

from other people. Christmas presents only come from Santa. And he was like, what's that up there? and I was like, I don't know, you need to go put your shoes away and do this other thing and go upstairs. And with that time, then, it was Legos. And it's like just the, you know, bucket of Legos. So I took the Yellow Box and realized I couldn't hold all the Legos. So I ran with the Yellow Box into Scott's office, dumped the Legos onto his desk, ran back with the yellow box, put it back on the shelf. And it was like, oh, Nate, did you want to check and see what that yellow box was? And he was like, yeah, yeah, definitely. I want to see if there's toys in it. And so I took the yellow box down.

I was like, oh, no, this is just a container for cleaning up, you know, for the basement. Do you want to take it down to the basement to, like, clean up your toys? And he was like, no, that's lame. Then I go off to, like, cook dinner. He does something he never does. He wanders into Scott's office. And it's like, mommy, I found Legos in Daddy's office. And I was like, oh, no.

So then I was like, hey, I need you to go downstairs and do this other thing. So he goes to the basement. And in that time, I get a bag. stuff all those Legos in the bag, find a different smaller set of Legos that make Lego ornaments that I had also gotten, dump those onto the office desk, and then I'm like, oh, Nate,

did you want to check out the Legos in Daddy's office? It was the most absurd night of hiding, of failed hiding of Christmas presents in history, and I don't even know, he's four and a half. Like, do you think I can now get away with Santa giving him these Legos? No, I would be, I would level with him and introduce gifts from parents

in addition to Santa this Christmas. Oh, that's a pretty good idea. Yeah. Okay. He probably won't. You make the distinction. I'm not sure he'll even remember. He won't,

like he'll get a gift from mom and dad and it won't be like, hey, wait a second, I've never gotten gifts from mom and dad on Christmas. He'll just be thrilled at the thing. Okay. Okay, that makes sense to me. It was like the Rube Goldberg of Christmas disasters.

Pretty good. And, of course, Scott's at a work dinner if you're wondering why he wasn't helping with any of this. So, like, I'm single parenting. There's a 15-month-old who's constantly trying to murder himself. And then, you know, presents being found. I mean, you could have just told him that this is what Scott does when he goes into his office. That's what he does for. Daddy goes and pretends he's working.

And he's actually just doing Legos. And in case you think I'm one of those people who, like, got all my Christmas presents and all my, you know, decorations are up and all that. That is false. It's literally the only thing that I got in advance because we were at Target. and I saw it and I was like, oh, I'll just go ahead and grab this. So we had a similar issue with, like, with Lou when she was really little going to preschool, which was like just around the corner from our house, basically, is since Jess and I both work

from home, like, we would, I would, you know, I would take her to school and usher her out. And sometimes we wouldn't turn off the TV before we went, right? Because it's just on and like this morning chaos going on. Yeah. And Lucy became, our daughter became pretty convinced that we just kept. watching Elmo all day when she went off to preschool and she was like, why can't I mean, it's what you guys do. Why can't I stick around and watch, you know, wonder pets or whatever it was. And that's why it was good for me to go back to an office. So we both work from home.

So Scott, I mean, so Nate has created his own office and he tells us sometimes that he has to go to work. And then we're like, oh, sad, we wanted to play. And he's like, oh, well, I've got to go to work and he goes to his office and then we'll come back up and be like my call got canceled do you want to play now that's awesome that's like a friend of mine uh his his nephew would dress up in a blazer in tie to go to kindergarten like no one else did it wasn't a dress code school and he would carry in a briefcase one of those aluminum briefcases and people would ask him what's in there and he was like my documents and then they they opened it up and it was just an x-ray of his right arm that was it those were his documents it's important to have well listeners this podcast went

off the rail at several points we're just glad that Jonah was able to join us after all it's good to have flag officers on the boat yeah it's true I will have a come back to that next week Sarah's you know the amount of research Sarah is now going to do to try to come up with the counter event. It's so rare to see Sarah this nonpluss, and now she's going to go build a case. There's going to be entire AOs dedicated to this. We're going to have JAG officers.

She's going to be like the Esquire guy who asked Chat GPT to write the case about Neil Bush's pardon. It didn't happen. You know what? No, we have JAG officers who listen to this podcast. Dear JAG officers, I would like a brief on this. Three pages is fine. 10 pages

is preferable, explaining why Jota's wrong. With that, I hope everyone is enjoying. May you find many a squirrel in your real Christmas tree. Uh-oh. Yeah, he disappeared a second ago. He was so offended by my response.

Well, it was offensive. We will wait for him to come back. I'll text him. Do you think he doesn't know? There he is. This is the greatest. This is the greatest. I mean, it's like such a,

this so encapsulates my entire life right now. So what just happened was we have Starlink, but I haven't had the time to put it in permanently. So it's just sort of sitting on top of our roof. And it's very windy today. It's very, very windy. And so it went out, and I just assumed maybe it got flipped over. So I go, so I run.

I'm trying to do this so that I can get back and be connected during Jonah's answer. Like, Jonah's just going to keep talking. I'm going to get back. Everything will. So I have to climb out this window in our bathroom from. We're lucky we ever saw you again. No, for real. So here's the problem.

In order to do that, I have to sort of hoist myself up with my arms. Like I'm doing, you know, like a push-up or like a pommel horse move where I swing my legs out. And I think I totally, totally ripped my peck. So I'm in so much pain right now. Oh, geez. I've done that. It hurts like hell. This is like the podcast version of Lampoon, you know, Christmas.

It's like people who get And I speak this with loads Like people who get video game injuries They jump up and pull a muscle or whatever It's like if I had a really bad podcast injury I had a really bad podcast injury