The Dispatch Podcast - Struggle in the Pacific

Episode Date: May 6, 2020

Sarah and the guys take a deep dive into China from coronavirus to the battle for missile supremacy, reopening businesses around the country, the new culture war over wearing a mask, and the political fallout of a second wave of the pandemic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined as always by Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French. This podcast is brought to you by The Dispatch. Visit The Dispatch.com to see our full slate of newsletters, podcasts, and make sure you subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. Thursday, May 7th, we're offering a special live happy hour with the team for dispatch members to answer your questions. Become a member today at the dispatch.com. All right, today we'll do a deep dive on China, efforts and frustrations around reopening businesses around the country, the newest addition to the culture wars, wearing a mask in public, and the political ramifications of a second wave of the pandemic in the fall. And, of course, we'll end with murder hornets. Let's dive right in.

I want to spend some time on China today. We've touched on it in weeks past, but I think today is deep dive on China. This Sunday, Secretary of State Pompeo asserted that there was, quote, a significant amount of evidence that the coronavirus had emerged from a government-run site in Wuhan. The president declared it a horrible mistake in China. that sparked our current situation. China, a spokesperson, said, Mr. Pompeo cannot present any evidence because he does not have any.

This matter should be handled by scientists and professionals instead of politicians out of their domestic political needs. The ambassador in the Washington Post, it is time to end the blame game. It is time to focus on the disease and rebuild trust between our two countries. And, of course, no China topic would be complete without the Kremlin weighing in from their spokesperson, we consider it not a proper time

being somewhere in the middle of a severe crisis, an unprecedented crisis, to try to blame everything on the International Health Organization, they mean the WHO, or the next day on China. Steve, coming to you, China, where are we on this? Well, I think there are two basic issues. There's the domestic political issue, and then there's the broader geopolitical issue. The broader geopolitical issue, you know, predates the domestic political squabbling by a good bit of information. I think you can argue that the Trump administration deserves credit for focusing our attention on the kinds of things that China has been doing for a long time to extend and expand its influence around the world. I mean,

this is not an accident. You have Xi Jinping talking like he's chair. Miao, you have the Belt and Road Initiative, which seeks to expand their foothold and grow it around the world. You have a pretty dramatic military buildup by China going back a couple decades. And, of course, you have the plundering of U.S. intellectual property that has happened and I would say largely with our frustration but without an aggressive response or without the aggressive response that we probably should have had. So I think the Trump administration deserves credit for refocusing public attention on this. I don't think the way they're doing it now is terribly coherent. And it feels, I mean, other people have made this point, Jonah, in his very good

column this week, that it's sort of an ad hoc process, as so much of the policymaking is with the Trump administration, where the president is looking to scapegoat China because, you know, casting blame on China, and China deserves some blame to be sure, helps him deflect the blame that people are giving to him. The administration's public statements have been all over the place on China in particular. You've had big speeches going back. Mike Pence gave one at the Hudson Institute. There have been other places where the administration has tried to lay out a broad policy approach to China. But it was always the case that, you know, what the president says in a given interview or tweets at a given moment upends months of careful policy planning

by his administration and leads to some broader incoherence. On this particular, on the pandemic in particular, you had administration officials make any of a number of claims, aggressively blaming China for not shutting down the virus earlier, for not providing better notification to the world, for misleading the WHO, potentially for allowing the escape of this virus from the Wuhan lab, even have had senior administration officials suggest that this was in fact man-made in the lab and released on purpose, which there's no evidence. for that. But at every turn, you have the president wanting to be tough and aggressive on China as sort of a theoretical abstract, but not at all tough on Xi Jinping, the leader of China and what

he's doing. And even lately, after a spate of leaks about the intelligence that the U.S. intelligence community has about the likelihood that China deliberately withheld this information, the president then was asked about this in the last couple of days and said, I don't think that this was on purpose. And he has defended Xi Jinping sort of all along, which leads to this very chaotic public sense of what the approach to China is, other than the broad takeaway from the administration that China is a bad actor. So Jonah, I think Steve has laid this out pretty well in terms of all of the buckets we could discuss.

But domestically, it sounds like Pompeo and. and the president are saying they believe they have seen evidence, a significant amount of evidence, Pompeo said, that this was accidentally at least released from a lab. Does it matter whether we see that evidence when we see it on the domestic front? I would like to see the evidence, whether it matters or not politically, is a good question.

I think if it was persuasive, never mind, dispositive that this was from a lab, I think that would have a huge impact domestically on how we think about China. But let me just backpedal for just two seconds. As Steve mentioned, I wrote about this in my column today or this week. There is this weird symbiotic thing between a lot of the mainstream media,

as well as a lot of conservative media, and the Trump administration and hawks like Tom Cotton and others to be almost deliberately vague on this point about whether it, whether originated means man-made. And it can be extremely frustrating. If you listen to Tom Cotton, he will talk at great length.

Tom Cotton is a smart guy. And I think he deserves a lot of credit for being right early on a lot of this. stuff. But he will say over and over and over again that there's a lot of evidence, not proof, we don't know for sure, but there's a lot of evidence pointing to this virus originating in a lab in Wuhan. And you'll have a lot of people who interview him refusing to clarify when you say originated, you don't mean made in a lab in Wuhan. You mean that it was accidentally released. That's very rarely asked. And I think it's this weird thing where a lot of people in the mainstream media really

like the idea of keeping it ambiguous so they can claim the Trump administration and people like Cotton are spreading cockamamie conspiracy theories that this is a man-made virus, which no serious person believes. And at the same time, I think there are a lot of sort of China Hawks who want to leave the impossible impression that that's in fact what happened. And so when you saw Pompeo on Sunday literally say, I believe the best experts in the world believe this was manmade. And then Martha Radditz says, wait a second, all the experts in the world say the opposite. And he says, right, that's what I believe. It was like a, it was like a yogi bearer bit, you know,

like when I came to a fork in a road, I took it. And he may have just misspoke, but this larger point, I think it's a real problem. There is Mike Gallagher and I, when we were, did our congressman, we did our podcast last week and, or two weeks ago or 500 years ago, time gets really weird. You know, he makes this distinction or we were making this distinction between smart hawks and dumb hawks or smart hawkishness and dumb hawkishness. And I think that, as Steve was sort of pointing out, it's baked into the cake. We are going to be hawkish on China for a very long time. The question is whether they're going to be smart about it or dumb about it.

And there's a lot of sort of boo-babe for Bubba's populism stuff about China that I think is really, really dangerous. And I think there's a lot of credible reasons to be very skeptical of China and think about rethinking our supply chains and all of the rest. My problem with a lot of the messaging from China Hawks is they want it both ways. They want to be both. They want all of the passion from the dumb hawkery. But when pressed, it's like a Motten Bailey argument, they retreat to very smart, hawkish points. And it's going to be difficult in the years to come, because this is going to be a defining thing of our politics for a while to make these careful distinctions. And it's very much like the Cold War between dumb anti-communism and smart anti-communism.

David, let's pick up right where Jonah left off. Okay, let's say that tomorrow I show you convincing evidence that China, through. what amounts to gross negligence released a virus that was not manmade, but was in their lab. Let's say that everything that the president of Pompeo have been saying is accurate and backed up by evidence. What is the administration supposed to do the next day? What is the appropriate proportionate or disproportionate smart hawk response to take Jonah's term to China?

Well, I mean, I think at this point, I almost feel like the, was it negligently released from a lab question is less important than what some of the things that we already know, which is these guys deceived much of the rest of the world for a long period of time about the nature of this virus when whether it was the result of a bat snack or the result of a negligent release from a lab, had they been telling the truth and very forthcoming from day one, I'm not saying all of this could have been avoided, but we would have had a better chance to mitigate what ended up happening. And so there's already enough evidence of Chinese misconduct to reaffirm what we already should have known and what, you know, smart China Hawks

have been saying for a long time, which is, as of right now, the hypercapitalism of the Chinese economy is not resulting in a liberalizing of the Chinese regime, and it is still opposed. to the interests of the United States of America. And what I'm concerned about is I think we have a lot of, and this goes back to Jonah's point, we have a lot of impulses that say we should do something about China. And they're often paired to sort of existing domestic policy squabbles. There's a we should do something about China, which is filtered through, and that's the way we're going to rebuild manufacturing in the United States.

which is, I think, probably wrong. There's the, but there's a lot of gut impulses we've got to do something, and yet we don't have a strategy for what that is, and we haven't thought through the implications of what the various strategic moves. What are the implications of the various strategic moves? So, for example, just to take one, if we're going to take a more oppositional position towards China, it's not like China will say, oh, well, we've learned our lesson. They have cards to play as well. And, you know, one of the aspects of

sort of modern populism, while it's hawkish on China, is very much more reluctant to be involved in entangling alliances overseas. Well, I've got news for folks. If things get more oppositional to China, we're going to have to double down on some of these alliances in Asia that perhaps, you know, the populist movement has been less enthusiastic about. For example, our alliance with South Korea, our alliances in Japan, our alliance with Taiwan. And what does that mean for American defense spending? What does that mean for Americans deployed overseas? I mean, these are very complicated strategic considerations that just sort of saying, I'm a China Hawk, doesn't even begin to answer. Steve, taking one small example of that, we have the World Health

Organization, certainly currently in the middle of some of these fights. there's been a Pompeo has called for the World Health Organization to invite Taiwan to attend the next meeting, which will happen May 18th and 19th. That has to be voted on by the 194 members, and of course, China is opposing it. Is this sort of the first war games the wrong word, but strategic move to try to, as David pointed out, like some of these allies, Taiwan, build up a voice over there to try to start pushing back. Yeah, I think that's actually a smart play. You go back and you look at where the debate was about China and the WHO two weeks ago

when the president used his task force press conference to announce that he was suspending aid and that the U.S. was going to be looking very carefully at possibly withdrawing from the WHO altogether. There are, I mean, certainly the WHO has behaved badly in this context in a couple of different respects. I don't think it's probably the answer to withdraw entirely from the WHO. The smarter path, it seems to me, is to do everything that we can to have the fight in the WHO and a number of other international organizations where the same dynamics are at play and try to win and try to make sure that these organizations reflect, know, the U.S. position, U.S. interests as well as sort of broader Western interests. The way to do that

is to challenge China in these contexts. In almost every case, I think you could make exceptions in certain international organizations. But part of doing that will be to push things like the Taiwan issue and to make China sort of confront that, to make the WHO confront that. So I think this is a better path than it looked like the one that we were going to be on just a couple weeks ago. Jonah, on the WHO, there's been some push to have the WHO start investigating what happened and to go into Wuhan and begin looking at evidence. A Chinese diplomat this week expressed backing for the WHO, but said that an invitation for the agencies, experts to visit Wuhan to look into the origins of the virus must wait until the pandemic is beaten. Now is not the time, they said.

Yeah, I mean, they still have whistleblowers to murder. You know, there's a lot of cleanup work that has to be done before you can let international investigators in. Yeah, look, I mean, at this point, it matters a lot less except for sort of the politics and the historical records setting and well does it matter for the credibility of the WHO like is this one of the proxy fights that we should have to try to if you will like reassert

some authority within the WHO sure yeah I think so but I mean at the end of the day the I mean the damage that was done was the sort of international globalist

political correctness that got us into this mess. You know, the Chinese government didn't want it out there that this was human, there was human to human transmission, at least not on a responsible timeline. And WHO was quick to sort of jump on board. When there was criticism, WHO and the UN in general were all on board with saying, you know, let's not stigmatize, let's not be racist, let's not be xenophobic,

blah, blah, blah, blah. There was sort of a whole marshalling to the, you know, defend China, which China is getting better and better at playing that sort of woke PC game with Westerners about saying that any criticism of them is racist or anti-Asian. And I don't think it is entirely for Western consumption. The, you know, Chinese nationalism is a real thing. and nationalist movements in countries in the kind of situation that China are in, are looking for grievances. They're looking for reasons around the world to feel disrespected, that their honor has been questioned, and this has been a particular problem with China for, give or take, 5,000 years.

So it should be taken somewhat seriously. But anyway, so the World Health Organization screwed that up. The pandemic, point of phrase, is out of the barn at this point. And the origins of it, while still important, I think, to scientists, and also in terms of preventing from a screw-up of this magnitude from happening again are all worth figuring out. But the stuff that they could have told us early on could have actually helped us prevent this. And I don't think that there's anything we can learn from them now that will actually mitigate the scope of this thing.

So Jonas sides with China. Okay. I'm pro-China here. David, you've highlighted some of the tension between the cold warrior China Hawks and the new right, as I think you've called them China Hawks, especially around alliances, forward projected military strength. I want to read you some Reuters reporting from this morning. The United States is rolling out new weapons and strategy to close the missile gap with China. the U.S. moves are aimed at countering China's overwhelming advantage in land-based crews and ballistic missiles. The Pentagon also intends to dial back China's lead in what strategist referred to as the range war. The Marines will now join forces with the U.S. Navy

and attacking an enemy's warships. Small and mobile units of U.S. Marines armed with anti-ship missiles will become ship killers. And China has responded by urging Washington to, quote, cautious and word indeed to stop moving chess pieces around the region and to stop flexing its military muscles around China. When we talk about forward projected military strength in the region, this seems like exactly the proxy war and perhaps not proxy that you're referring to. Yeah, well, you know, China has been wargaming and considering taking on the United States for a very, very, very long time and has built a.

military capability that's really pretty darn formidable. And it's also pretty darn formidable in one very important goal. And that is the understanding that if they can sink one or more of our supercarriers, then they're going to have regional dominance, at least for a time. And that an enormous amount of their military thinking has been oriented around that, swarming American defenses, hypersonic carrier-killing missiles. And this is something that has alarmed a lot of our military planners for some time. They have truly ramped up this capability. And it's one of the reasons why, while China hawkery is, for a time now popular with the American public, it has to be sober.

It has to be sober. because this is a situation where you're dealing with an adversary that is not only more economically powerful, arguably, than the Soviet Union was, it's not as militarily powerful as the Soviet Union was, but it's more economically powerful. It is extremely technologically advanced and has been working very hard in a specific way to defeat the United States in that specific region and to do so very quickly. quickly, almost like a Pearl Harbor style overwhelming immediate attack. And so, you know, we're not in a situation where we used to be. And I think a lot of Americans have sort of spent the last

two decades, three decades, thinking we can just sort of flick aside any enemy with the, you know, with the wave of our super dominant military hand. And that's just not the way it is anymore. It's not that way with Russia and it's near abroad. It's not that way with China close to its borders. And so that's why, again, I say, we have to think this through. And look, I am all for being more supportive of Taiwan. I'm all for bringing Taiwan more fully into the family of nations, so to speak. But we also have to realize that's a red line for China for the people's Republic. That is a, that is a move that is not without risk. And we have to be prepared for that risk. And that's why I talk about hello alliances. And the other, the other wildcard here is North

Korea. One of the reasons why North Korea, except for its nuclear weapons and its, you know, whatever chemical arsenal it has, is not that much of an offensive military threat anymore, is that China has decided to sort of let North Korea's military stagnate. If you look at the inventory of North Korea military, it is old gear, old. And when I mean, when I say old, I mean 60 years old kind of gear. China doesn't have to continue to let North Korea's military stagnate. China can modernize North Korea. And so, you know, these are cards that China has to play.

And so we have to be extremely sober-minded going into this. and put together a comprehensive strategy for engaging China. Adhackery is not going to do it. And with that, let's move more to the domestic side and look at some of the reopening debates. Steve, I'm going to start with you on this. Look, on the one hand, we have 20 million people dropped from the payroll in April. The previous highest was 800,000 in the wake of the 2008 crash. 51% of Americans say they have been spending less money in recent months.

That's more or less across demographics, age, income, et cetera. At the same time, frustration seems to be building. There's certainly been a drop in people who, in a swing state poll that I found in particular that I found interesting, about 68% of likely voters in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, say they have very or somewhat serious concerns about COVID-19. That's about a 10-point drop from two to three weeks ago in that same poll. And then we have the Shelley Luther case. And this has been quickly the poster child for the reopen crowd.

So I want to tell you a little bit about Shelley Luther's story here. So she's a salon owner. she's a salon owner in North Dallas, you know, Republican governor, Governor Abbott in Texas. She was forced to close on March 22nd. And despite the stay-at-home order from the governor, she reopened her salon on April 24th. She was sent a cease-in-ass-letter.

She tore that up at a demonstration. She was then sent a temporary restraining order signed by a state judge. and ignored the TRO. The judge has sentenced her to seven days in jail with a $7,000 fine. He said that she did not have to go to jail if she would apologize and simply agree not to reopen her store. She gave a very impassioned speech about not being able to put food on her kids' plates and that her hairstylists were starving and that she would continue operating her business even if she had to sit in jail to do it. In the meantime, the governor said that salons could reopen on Friday. And so I guess some of the conversations being had around the country is, well, if you could open on Friday, why not today?

And if, you know, today would have been fine, why not two days ago when we have people having these issues and poll number sliding about how seriously people are taking this? So from a, before we get to the political Washington side of this, in the country, are we feeling a shift in what people are willing to tolerate? when it comes to stay-at-home orders and reopening? The short answer to your question is, yes, we are feeling that shift. I do think it's important to point out that there are other polls, notably Monmouth and the Washington Post, the University of Maryland poll, which continue to show that the majority of Americans remain concerned almost two to one about the progress of the disease more than the economic impact of it.

and I'm paraphrasing the findings of those polls. But in fairness, 68% may be down 10 points from three weeks ago, but 68% being very or somewhat concerned is still pretty high. Right, right, exactly. The, look, I think what's happened in some ways is a sort of a huge misunderstanding in what the objectives of these lockdowns were from the outset. And we had a good piece on the website from Dachlan Garvey about this week. What was the objective of flattening the curve?

And early on, if you go back and you look at the rhetoric from the White House, from the coronavirus task force, from Governor Cuomo, from most epidemiologists, the flattening of the curve was laid out as a thing that we needed to do, wasn't a choice in the matter, to avoid catastrophic overwhelming of hospitals. in certain hotspots and potentially around the country. We flattened the curve. We've succeeded in that goal. And I think there's sort of a sense across the country that once we did that,

then it would be time to go back and to reopen maybe gradually, maybe regionally, what have you. The problem is the conditions that, again, the White House Coronavirus Task Force set out as guidelines for reopening in many cases have not yet been met. And I think you risk sort of undoing some of the good that we've done if we continue to see this kind of reopening because there's a sense that we should be reopening. I do think you have to go back and look at what's likely to happen with the virus as you make these decisions. We can't just be kind of tired of lockdown and we're all tired of lockdown and then go reopen because we're tired of lockdown. Now, having said all that, it's certainly understandable that people are frustrated

with this. If you run a business and you can't make money like Shelley Luther and many, many others across the country, people are desperate at this moment. People, it really is the case that that people can't put food on their table. Americans that didn't have, you know, four weeks of savings, six weeks of savings, have no way to make money, are looking for ways literally to feed their kids. So you can understand the sense of desperation. And I think it's, you know, it's a good idea to look at ways that we can do this incrementally, that we can do this gradually.

But I think it would be a huge mistake. And I worry that we're headed down this path to have this kind of, of reopening by momentum take place in a way that reintroduces the virus to places that it's been contained or mitigated. David, I like reopening by momentum as I think what it can feel like in particular some of these states. Is Shelley Luther the right poster child for reopening by momentum? I don't know that she's the right poster child.

I will say that I think sending her to jail is absurd. I mean, I'm also coming at this from somebody who really is not super enthralled with a prison for nonviolent offenses in general. But I think sending someone to jail in the packed confines of incarceration, which in many states and many localities have become breeding grounds for coronavirus, I don't think we need to be sending people there unless it's absolutely necessary where you have violent offenders. So as a general rule, should she be going to jail? I don't think so. One side note on that, by the way, the county jail that she is in has had 248 inmates test positive for the coronavirus. Yeah, so it's seven days. It's a sentence to seven days in jail and possible coronavirus. So I say no to that. But so the, I think there. On the other hand, though, David, and you and I can do an advisory opinion on this, perhaps.

Plug, plug, plug. You can't just ignore a TRO from a judge. There have to be some consequences. Correct. I mean, you can do things like. Just to ask a quick question, isn't there a lot of legal precedent going back a long way about exiling people among lepers and whatnot? I mean, this is not a new punishment. Leave it to Jonah to reach back into common law. Nor should we. I'll say this. So let me just be very clear. She shouldn't be in jail and she should not be treated like a leper.

That's where. But there is, it is a lawful order to close the business at this time. That is a lawful order. And so there are options you can have like padlocking the business and closing the business, physically closing the business, so that you can do short of sending someone to jail. But let me back up a bit on this. The simple fact of the matter is these mass closure orders were always going to be primarily a matter of voluntary compliance. Sure, you could go to a business here, a group of people who are hanging out too close there, bust this house party over here. but keeping an entire population hunkered down is beyond the capacity of American law enforcement.

It just is that what you had was closure orders accompanied by massive amounts of voluntary compliance, that people were already moving towards before the closure orders. All the data indicates that foot traffic to restaurants was dropping off a cliff, travel dropping off a cliff. So you had a huge amount of voluntary hunkering down to show. shout back to one of Jonah's podcasts, plug, plug, Jonas podcast, not that it needs any plugging, where information is critical. And so I think what you see is that there was a huge momentum towards hunkering down, and we're starting to see a momentum towards opening back up

again. And government is going to ride that tide. And the responsibility of government is going to be to ride the tide responsibly and control its excesses. We're not going to have an ability, I think, because voluntary compliance is key here, we're not going to have an ability to maintain an involuntary shutdown in some jurisdictions, especially in those jurisdictions that have not been affected very much. And here's something that I think people, where you stand is often based on where you sit. In other words, your basic personal experience dictates an awful lot about what we think about things. And if you're from a place like one county south of me where my parents live, I go down and I visit my parents regularly throughout this, make sure

everything's okay, all social distancing customs observe. But the further south I go and the further I get away from Nashville, even at the height of the shelter and place order here, the traffic was almost normal in some of these rural counties. It's just they didn't experience the coronavirus. And when you don't experience the coronavirus, it doesn't take very long for sort of this nagging fear of it to wear off if you've not seen any of the effects of it. And so I think that, you know, there is a momentum here that will continue to grow. And the responsibility of government will be to channel the momentum in the, in the

way most prudently, government cannot halt that momentum. It cannot. And Jonah, there's momentum even within the task force at the White House. They're now going to shift from their current sort of public health focus, the president has said, and Mike Pence has said, to more of a reopening task force. They're going to switch out some of the people on the task force. It's going to be about safety and the economy, they've said. There's also, though, some other messages, the president not wearing a mask at Honeywell in Arizona yesterday. Jonah, how does the messaging from Washington, the task force, the president affect the momentum from, I guess what Steve has sort of said, which is, yeah, a lot of people want to go from

this three phases. Oh, we've sort of met phase one. Let's just go. Push, push. And sort of skip two and three to just reopen now and frustrated. Yeah, my friend Dan Foster, I think, had a pretty pithy summation of all this on Twitter the other day. He said, great. So we decided to follow a policy of a lockdown based upon the worst hit area in the country, New York. And now we are going to time the reopening of the economy based upon the least hit regions of the country. Right? So it's like, it gets it almost exactly backwards. And there was a quote, I think, in the New York Times story from, might have been the post, from someone at HHS who is, or formerly at HHS, who was privy to a lot of the conversations about the closing of the coronavirus taskworth. And it was so on the nose, at least for the stuff I'm obsessed about, about how we're treating politics as a sort of a form of entertainment and that Marshall McLuhan. you know, got it right and all these people got it right. And, you know, he said, there's a general

feeling, and I'm paraphrasing, there's a general feeling that this is like a TV show. And we've lingered too long on the pandemic part. And people want to see a plot change. And so, which is just too on the nose, you know, and, but I, you do get the sense that that's what's going on is that Trump is uncomfortable talking about the pandemic on its own terms. He's under a lot of pressure, asymmetric pressure, I would say, because the polls really aren't supportive of the positions that he's taking in a lot of these cases. But the key influencers within the sort of Republican coalition and as well as his much tighter coalition of advisors are way out over their skis on the, and the lockdowns

liberate the states, all of this stuff, and he's always listened to a kind of echo chamber anyway, that this idea of just, hey, this is a ratings killer, let's move on to something else, I think is driving a lot of things. And, you know, and it's kind of amazing to me, if you had told me this would happen, you know, hypothetically, I'd be astounded. If you watch Fox where, you know, I'm a contributor, they have a lot of truly excellent in many cases. medical experts and public health experts, but there seems to have been a fatwa that go forth that says, let's find the ones who say it's time to open up the economy.

And at MSNBC, they have a lot of great epidemiologists and public health experts, but the fatwa seemed to have gone out, let's find the one who should be wearing the grim reaper's cloak. And it is this weird sort of, if you want to feel like everything they, you know, that we've got to restart the economy right away, here are the people to give you the permission structure on this channel. If you hear the people who are going to give you the permission structure to stay in your bunker eating cat food, and it's just amazing how the sort of red versus blue thing is reasserting itself.

I do have one question for you, Sarah, if you don't mind me stealing the mic. You mentioned this trip to Honeywell, what was it, in Arizona? Yes. And you are our most experienced person in the world of actual kids. campaigns. I don't know how much advance work you did, but you certainly bossed around people who did advance work and yelled at them when they got stuff wrong. So I am just kind of curious what, I don't know what the actual facts are other than what I saw on TV and on Twitter, which I thought at first on Twitter was fake. But when the President of the United States,

during a pandemic, is inspecting PPE, protective equipment on the front lines that's supposed to help save American lives, amidst a larger conversation. about opening up the economy and blaring over the speakers is the song, Live and Let Die. Now, I don't know if a worker had just his boombox going or what, but it seems to me that a good advance person would have said, I don't know, this isn't the best song to be playing in this scene. So I just want your take.

How do you adjudicate all of it? You know, we actually had our fun question for later, but one fun question that we didn't consider was, can you think of a less appropriate song? Because you were trying to come up with a song to not play at that moment. Can you beat Live and Let Die? Because I've honestly, I don't think I can come up with a better one. Hey, I got it.

The other songs I can think of are better songs, too, you know. I mean, like, oh, when the saints go marching in, that's a great song. I mean, what was sort of incredible about that is that the advanced team clearly was there because they played his normal campaign rally song at the end. Correct. So the songs, there was an audio track for this. I don't understand live and let die

except that it, I mean, it's funny. It is a perfect example of one of these things that under a normal presidency, this would be the story of the day. This is the tan suit. This is Obama's tan suit. Yeah, this would be a tan suit thing. And it's just like, I just, I'm fascinated by it.

I'm just like, I would like to think if I were an advanced guy and I heard them blaring. So you couldn't even hear the president have his conversation, live and let die, that I would race over and grab, like, break the glass with a fire axe and smash the speaker rather than have that go out. But I'm not the pro that you want that. Then that would be the story, right? Fair enough. Just Jonah with a boombox, just smashing it on the ground over and over again. All right, Jonah, thank you for that wonderful mic-taking moment about advance work in Arizona. To all of you, there's been culture war discussions at this point amongst us, amongst others, Washington Post, around mask wearing.

Steve, thoughts on the performative aspect of mask wearing in public. Are you wearing a mask in public? I think that's a big part of it. And it's very interesting to see what's happened. I use this by looking at the trips that I've taken to my local grocery store or my local butcher shop. I mean, early on, nobody was wearing a mask at all. The first couple weeks of this, there were no masks. we had guidance from the Surgeon General and the CDC and others suggesting that masks not only weren't necessary, they might not be a good thing because usage by normal Americans would be keeping important PPE from getting the people who need it most hospital workers, medical folks on the front lines.

You know, a couple weeks later, there was a, in my own experience, a dramatic spike in the use of masks. I went to a grocery store, the beginning of April, the first week of April, and everybody in the entire place was wearing a mask. This was before Maryland had a mandatory mask in public places order. I went not wearing a mask, not because I was trying to be a tough guy, but just because I didn't have a mask with me. And, you know, of the 30 people in the store, I think I was one of two who didn't have one on. And you're walking around, I felt bad because the masks, of course, are to keep you from infecting other people. Went back, same store a couple weeks later and much, much more mixed. I mean, the store itself was trying to enforce what Maryland Governor Larry Hogan had then implemented,

which was to require people to wear masks. But you had people, I think, sort of out of this culture war sensitive. of defiance saying, in effect, I'm not wearing a mask. I don't need to wear a mask. So you'd have people who, you know, had one around their neck and weren't wearing it or had, you had to have one to get into the store, but people who had it down sort of below their nose and mouth. And I do think, you know, as with so much of what we see on the national scene these days, this has devolved into a sort of culture war issue where if you want to show that you're tough, you declare that you're not wearing a mask or you say that you're not going to take the vaccine.

And, you know, it's a way of showing that you're not going to be sort of bullied and cowed by conventional wisdom and experts. And it's a fascinating phenomenon to watch, polarization in everything these days. Well, luckily, we have a culture war expert, a piece, Ph.D. in culture wars, David French? Yes. And you'll all have to defer to my expertise since I have a Ph.D. and culture warrior. But if you have a Ph.D. in culture, we don't like experts anymore, right? Oh, that's true. That's true. Ignore me. Ignore me.

So I just have to say that, so we didn't have any, it's not like we were stocked with PPE. When my son came home from college and he had a, um, a, um, a, um, I just have to say that. So we didn't have any, it's not like we were stocked with PPE. medical mask because he'd had the flu and they gave it to him when he was at UT and they gave it to him in the UT Medical Center. So that was the only thing was his flu-ridden medical mask that I would not use. So all I had when I went out the first time was a fishing buff, one of these black you know buffs that you could pull over your nose and mouth. So I walk into a liquor store with a black mask on. And I felt very awkward. So, but everyone was, you know, good humor about it. I would say that you have very variable masking here. I have masked many times when I feel very confident of the social

distancing of the situation. I have not worn a mask when I'm not confident about the social distancing. I have. And it's odd. I mean, it takes something getting used to. no question about that. But I've also noticed, and I've seen with my own eyes, this sort of performative recklessness. I was in a store, and I'm wearing the black buff, the black mask, and another guy comes in. And not only does he not even, not only is he not wearing a mask, he very performatively makes the store clerk shake hands with him and says, I'm, you know, I'm not afraid of this virus. and he sticks out his hand, and you've got a poor store clerk who's wearing a mask, and this guy's trying to shake hands with him, and the store clerk shook hands with him,

and then immediately, you know, sanitize his hands. But that's, it was kind of a microcosm of where we are with this sort of performative notion that says, whatever you tell me to do, I'm not going to do because I'm not scared. But that's not the point. the point of the personal that of the mask or of not shaking hands or whatever is yes not shaking hands can protect you but why don't you be courteous to other people and we're getting into this point where for a segment of the online right in particular you've got the following when we need to we need to shut down and shelter in place to stop the spread of the disease well you can't tell me

You can't tell me to shut down and shelter in place. I'm an American. Okay. Well, we're going to start opening up again. And to avoid a second wave, here are some things we need to do responsibly to avoid infecting others. Wear a mask. I'm an American. You can't tell me to wear them. At some point, it's like, what are you willing to do? What are you willing to do to help prevent a deadly disease from killing more people? Can you tell me what you're willing to do, American citizen? part of this American family, aside from performatively asserting fictional rights, by the way, because you do not have a right to not wear a mask in a pandemic? What are you willing to do, tough guy? And that's the thing that's so annoying about this, is it's just performative bravado.

It's part of the cultural mark of parts of the new right is whatever it is. So what's next? No shirt, no shoes, no service? Watch this. Bare chested, barefooted. Here I go. You know, it's, it's at some point it gets ludicrous. It's, and it's not just ludicrous. It's also dangerous. And if we think for one second that this is somehow un-American to have a government response to a pandemic, this goes back to colonial times, y'all. I mean, 1824 case that's close to founding generation post-colonial. Quarantine laws, the Supreme Court, Gibbons v. Ogden, quarantine laws are the province.

of the state, enacting public health laws of every description. That's part of the role of the state. So, come on, y'all, you know, Mr. I'm defending the vision of the founder. Founders. The vision of the founders is to try to band together to stop the control of an infectious disease. At some point, it's just, it's annoying, it's not brave, it's incredibly selfish. So, Jonah, you took the mic from me and David took the soapbox from you. Last thoughts on the Sure. So a couple quick points. First, it kind of reminds me there's an old trope. I was looking to find it while these guys were talking for a concrete example. I know there was a happy days that did this. And I think there was an odd couple that did this. It was an old trope in 70s TV shows to have two characters who kind of didn't get along stuck in a safe with a limited supply of oxygen. And there's always one character who says, one character who says, we have to conserve our air, right? We're going to die of suffocation if we aren't careful. And then the other character starts like doing jumping jacks

and saying, I'll do what I want with my half. You do what you want with your half, right? It kind of reminds me of that in all of this. Or like the character on the lifeboat who just like drinks all of the water because you're not the boss of me. And more, but more seriously, it's, there is a, the thing that drives me crazy. Look, I wrote a book called liberal fascism.

So, I mean, I'm very familiar with these kinds of arguments. And the motives matter a lot. What the motives of the state government or the federal government are matter a lot. We are not asking people to wear masks to turn them into new Soviet man. Or, you know, we are asking them to wear masks so we can save people's lives. This morning, I went on Wikipedia. and I looked up the biggest disasters in American history, not just natural disasters,

just biggest disasters. And admittedly, it doesn't cover things like the 1918 flu, which now everybody is supposed to call the 1917 flu for some reason. And I got tired of doing the math because, one, I have trouble adding even the small numbers of small number, digit number of thingies.

But I added up the death tolls from the first 41 disasters in American history. And it didn't come close to adding up to the number of people who've already died from this pandemic. But the problem is this pandemic is kind of invisible. I mean, Trump's right about that. The people who are dying are hidden away from cameras. If we were going through the kind of disaster in real time, say a chemical factory blew up, and some cop yelled at people, hey, man, cover your mouth, you don't want to breathe this stuff, or anything like that.

Everyone would immediately understand that that's totally right for the state to do. I'm an American, Jonah. Yeah, but it's this slow-moving thing. And so there's this woman writing in the op-ed editor of the Washington Times has this piece about how

these are the face-mask, you know, Nazis or whatever. And it's just, it's appalling. And you have to wonder, the smart thing to do would be to start talking about how the federal government has facial recognition software.

And if you want to hide from them the only way to do it like they do in in in hongong is to wear your mask so make it like sticking it to the man to wear a mask and not like helping old ladies stop dying um because apparently that doesn't move these jack wads uh along the mask wearing lines perhaps i want to verge a little bit into the personal slash political looking far ahead into the future the fall uh we have operation warp speed is looking for a vaccine on the one side. And on the other side, I think there's a growing discussion about what happens if there's a second wave of this virus, including an LA Times piece on mutations in the virus that was a pretty interesting piece. Y'all are all parents.

So let's take something really concrete. How do you think about sending your kids back to school in the fall and the risks of a second wave and what you will be looking for in determining how to put your kid in a classroom or keep them home for Zoom classes, which I think everyone universally pretty much hates agreement. Steve, you have the most school-age kids at home. Yeah, my wife and I have talked about this a bit. I mean, I think we tend to be sort of on the cautious side of things in part because we know people who have a lot of the underlying conditions that would make them particularly

vulnerable to this, both, you know, locally and, you know, family outside of our local area. So we want to be in a position where we can continue to see them. I think that, you know, a lot will be determined on what the schools choose. We live in Maryland, about half hour, 45 minutes outside of D.C. Governor Larry Hogan has been pretty aggressive in dealing with this. And local leaders have, for the most part, look to Hogan and taken his advice, including school districts around the state. So I would imagine that Governor Hogan will continue to err on the side of caution and that

the schools, if there's any question about a second surge or if there's evidence of a coming second surge, will remain closed. um i think if we saw that evidence um and the schools were open and kids were being encouraged to go to school i mean i certainly wouldn't hesitate to keep our kids home um and look in part i'm i have some of those underlying conditions um i'm not in the greatest of shape you might have noticed and technically by the government body mass index uh i am obese so uh if you yeah look Don't, it, Brett Favre, you know, who is 6.3 and a strapping 240 pounds, is also considered obese if you look at the government body mass index. So it's not that telling. But yeah, no, I think, you know, we wouldn't want to put people at risk. So we'd probably err on the side of caution, even if the local, um, decision makers don't. I've gained so much weight that smaller pundits circle around me in elliptical orbit. Jonah, your daughter's actually old enough to make some of these decisions herself.

How is she thinking about it? Hey, hey, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wow. There will be no individual agency for my daughter in any of this for quite a while. No, look, we had a, when we were trying to spitball topics for this, this is one of the reasons why I suggested something about parents and schools and stuff, because my wife and I had a pretty intense conversation about this last night. She's going into her senior year of high school, and, you know, we just started thinking about the options.

It would be just heartbreaking for her now that she's kind of hit her stride and she knows who she is and she's this, you know, really, you know, she's starting to live up to her potential and her grades and her social life and all these kinds of things to see her entire senior year spent in front of some freaking screens. and doing Zoom classes and all of the rest. And so we started talking about, you know, what have we just told her, you know, we think you should skip your senior year or delay your senior year until this thing is over? I think this stuff is going to hit parents. And this is going to be a huge political issue in the fall.

If there is a second surge and they close schools again in September, the political consequences in suburbs for parents looking at another year of homeschooling is going to be just enormous. And, but it's just, it's this huge question mark about what do you do? And I, you know, people like in Steve's situation with, with lots of kids and, you know, it's really problematic. It makes you get really angry about the federal government's response to all this,

personally at least, because if we had had in the beginning, if we hadn't squandered February, If we had a serious regime of testing, right, if these schools could have, even if the testing, a lot of bad decisions were made, we would have known so much more by now. And having a robust system where we test kids on the way into school, on the way out of school, you do the kind of South Korean looking for temperatures, you know, as they come in and as they come out, follow some of the stuff they do in Hong Kong. you could actually see the schools get back up and running, and you would have to figure out what you do with the vulnerable populations when they get home. But erasing another year of school is just, it's just a daunting thing to think about it,

and it's really problematic on all sorts of ways. David, so some quick polling here, but in the latest Reuters poll, Trump now has a 13-point advantage over Biden in terms of job creation, who's better suited to create jobs. Trump has a small advantage over Biden when it comes to who's better suited to leading the country's coronavirus response.

They're basically tied. What's interesting is that their poll two weeks ago had Biden with a slight edge, though also basically tied, but some movement there. It seems to me, maybe just listening to you guys as parents, that for Trump voters in particular, if there were a second wave, because things reopened too quickly or even for no, you know, discernible reason at all. There's a second wave and schools have to shut again. For Trump voters, this could almost arguably be more catastrophic to his base support than even the economic effects, the pure economic effects.

Oh, I agree with that. And in particular, Jonah used to key word suburbs. he's got to be competitive in the suburbs or he's just done. I mean, he's just done if he's not competitive in the suburbs. And, you know, look, as the emergency feeling begins to wear off and there's sort of a sense that there's a new normal here and that new normal is incredibly marked by the burdens of responding the coronavirus and the tragedy of responding to coronavirus, it's just hard for me to see politically how that's going to. to be beneficial in any way, shape, or form to Donald Trump. And I'm with Jonah. I get more angry the more I think about the lost weeks in February and early March. And it's not just the lost weeks of inaction. It's the weeks of misinformation that really put me over the edge. The inaction

was bad enough, which you combine inaction with misinformation. But, you know, so I have two college kids, one middle school kid, and a college son-in-law who's graduate doesn't actually have a graduation this year, but graduating from college, but who is going to be interning for a campus ministry this next semester? And is it okay in this day and age to utter the following sentence? When it comes to the opening question, I actually trust the institutions involved. Can you say that? That you actually trust an institution? I trust. I trust my daughter's school to make a decision about whether it's going to be about the safety of running operations in that school. And I actually believe that the University of Tennessee is working

in good faith and diligently to figure out how to open the university safely. But I also think right now on May 6th, 2020, we really don't have a great idea of what the world's going to look like on August 6th or August 15th or August 25th or whenever, you know, people start going back to school, if we're still looking at, and I'm looking at the number from yesterday, 2,350 people died yesterday to coronavirus. If we're maintaining anything like that pace, the toll of human suffering in this country, and Jonah was, you know, that, what Jonah just said about disasters was sobering. But right now we're looking at, as of this moment, 72,695 people dead. And that's more than 60,000 in one month.

If this toll of suffering continues, it's difficult to project exactly what we'll be like by August, exactly what the political situation will be like by August. And I just, I don't know. It's hard to imagine it being beneficial to the president politically. It's easy to imagine it being deeply wounding to the psyche of the nation. Yeah. So that's a huge point. And I had Steve Kornacki on The Remnant, a podcast that needs no plugging.

And, you know, his standard answer is when you ask him, you know, what is the election going to look like, you know, Biden v. Trump, yada, yada, yada. His first response is, tell me how the pandemic is going to play out. And, you know, it's only been recently in the polls that we've come close to getting saturation where pretty much everybody knows somebody. who got, who's gotten the virus. And if we get to a point by August where everybody actually knows somebody who's died from the virus, or knows somebody who knows somebody

who's died from the virus, or has a loved one who's died from the virus, or has been on a ventilator, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's just really different. And, you know, I think one of the interesting things, Chris Starwald pointed this out the other day that Trump did is when he starts talking about a vaccine in January now. He's setting the sort of, we're going to really get out of this

and be fixed after the election thing is sort of giving people a sense that you got to reelect to get to the happy ending kind of thing. But the politics, if they come up with, I don't think a vaccine is going to happen before the election, you know, even or even in January. But if they came up with a vaccine or if they came up simply with treatments that made this not a death sentence, then you could see the politics getting very angry at the shutdown, very angry at the shutdown. If they don't do that, and we top off, you know, we start getting close to a half a million dead people, then people are going to get very angry about the missed opportunities in February. Yeah. I think, you know, and I just, it's very hard to predict how this is all going

to play out because we've never been here before. Can I add a quick post script to that picking up on that? So at the beginning of all of this, I think like so many of us, I dove into the medical literature. I did everything I could to learn as much as I possibly could about the virus, about pandemics, about how this stuff works. And as somebody who was not an excellent or standout biology student, that I'm announcing my limitations up front. But I spent a ton of time reading about it. And then I took a couple weeks of a break where I focused more on other stuff. And then over the past 10 days, two weeks, I sort of re-engaged on a lot of those questions. And here's what is so striking about the different conversations that we're having nationally.

There is sort of a certainty or a feigned certainty that we're getting from a lot of our political leaders about when this is going to end, about the time for reopening, about how this is going to work, about the number of deaths. and it's so at odds with what you're hearing and reading from infectious disease experts and virologists and epidemiologists. They are amazed on a daily basis at what they're seeing and learning from the virus. It was a terrific story in the Washington Post maybe a week ago about what the virus is doing to blood and what it's doing to clotting. And it was an interview with, I believe it was a hematologist who was talking about looking at the brain as he was trying to take out a clot and said he saw something he's never seen before, which was when he removed the clot, he immediately in real time could see new clots developing. It's never happened before. You've other people who were diagnosed with having some kind of bacterial pneumonia, but in the autopsy, you go in and find thousands and thousands of mini clots in their lungs that were not detected before.

So the virus, for the people who have been studying pandemics and studying these kinds of viruses, in some cases, literally for decades, for 50 years, is presenting these new challenges and everyday surprises. in a way that they're sort of struggling to keep up with it, to learn as much as they can. And they talk with this implicit uncertainty, sometimes explicit uncertainty, announcing. Like, we are learning about this. We're trying to figure out where this goes and what happens next. And the political debate, there's just much more certainty about every aspect of this in a way that I think we could look back on those two discussions on those two different levels and really regret the way that the political debate has unfolded.

We're going to shift dramatically and talk about murder hornets for a moment. Yes. So murder hornets have come into the news, and nobody's super pumped about the name. I think that the name really explains why you maybe don't want to hang out with murder hornets. But Japanese honeybees have come up with a solution. they surround the murder hornet when it invades their space and they vibrate their little bodies together,

raising the temperature in the center of the ball because they can withstand two degrees more than the murder hornet can and they cook him to death. Here's the problem. One bee has to be attacked by the murder hornet to keep the murder hornet still while the other bees surround the murder hornet.

So a sacrificial, B to the Murder Hornet, and that's a pretty terrible job, because when you read about the mandibles of the Murder Hornet, it sounds like something out of a horror movie. So my question to each of you at the end of this pod is, when have you been the B and the Murder Hornet's mandibles? What is the worst job that you've ever had? That's a fantastic setup. David, tell us about your Japanese Honeybee Murder Hornet job. Well, so there is a key point in my life when I regressed down the career prestige ladder in a pretty dramatic way.

My first job, summer job, was selling guns at Walmart in Georgetown, in Georgetown, Kentucky, which it doesn't get much more hashtag Merica than that. But so I loved that job, loved that job. I sold rifles, handguns, shotguns all summer. awesome. So then I go back after the school year and I try to get rehired at Walmart and they're not hiring. They're not hiring. Walmart paid over minimum wage. So it was a coveted job. So I had to go from sort of the major leagues to double A ball and became a janitor at a Big Lots in Lexington, Kentucky. And I don't know if you know what Big Lots is. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Big Lots wasn't even as

prestigious as it is now back in. And to make matters worse, they had not had a janitor for a full week. And so my sacrificial bee moment was walking into public restrooms that had not been cleaned in a week with a mop, a bucket, and disinfectant. And that is when I was the sacrificial bee. Jonah? Okay, so first of all, there was someone on Twitter had a great line where they said, you know, murder hornets, but if you get them a good lawyer, they're negligent homicide bees. And second, I'd seen the stuff about the heatballing, the murder hornets, but until I didn't realize the part about the sacrificial bee. which is just a great entomological, was that he say for study people who study insects?

Entomological update of the Belling the Cat problem. Ah, it is, yes. Yes. So I watched the video of this, and it was graphic. I felt like it should have come with a warning. But yeah, one bee, the murder hornet grabs the bee, and then all the other bees are like, now's the time. And you're right, it's exactly the Belling the Cat.

And they couldn't say no bees were harmed in the making of this video. They could not. All right, so. Bees were harmed. One of the reasons why, and one murder hornet, one of reasons why I wanted to throw up that chaff is I don't have as good, a horrible job story as David does. And I wanted to distract, put a little air between us. I worked for, I had a lot of different summer jobs. One summer job I had where I was literally not a bike messenger, but a foot messenger and just had to walk.

all around New York City in July and August, inhaling bus fumes and dripping with sweat because, as I've said on a previous episode of this, I am descended from a desert people, but I like a dry heat. And we, that was pretty terrible. But the funniest bad job I had, which I only had for one week because I quit and switched, was, for two summers, I was a mobile food vendor in New York City in the 1980s. And, And when I got my license, and I still have my license, I signed up for a new ice cream company called, I defecate you not, love bites. And I had to wear, and again, this is a much, much skinnier, Jonah.

I had to wear, I was 17-year-old, they wanted me to wear these very short brown shorts and a tight-fitting red t-shirt with a cupid over the heart and a straw hat. and a straw hat and cane like from a barbershop kind of thing and work the East Village, one of the gayest neighborhoods in America, yelling at people on a Saturday night, hey, Mr. You want a love bite. And I quit.

And this is not homophobia, just like not what I wanted to be doing. So then I worked selling frozen ices. And that was much better. But I do want to say, you know, all, this is an important lesson for, like, young people, all crappy jobs when you look back on them, you're glad you did them. Yeah. Like, I'm sure, David, you're glad you did it.

You don't want to do it again. But work is good, even, even humiliating work to a certain extent because it teaches you something about life and yourself and all the rest. So completely. But, hey, mister, you want a love bite. I just took a pass on. Steve. Well, that, I mean, Jonah's ending there feels like the perfect set of me because I feel like. I feel like I've been pretty lucky with my jobs over the years. I've washed dishes in college.

The hardest job I had, without a doubt, was doing landscaping from Milwaukee County for a couple summers. It was hard work and it was hot. But probably the worst job I had was I was the front desk guy at a supercutts for three years. Yes. Three years is a long. long time to be the front desk guy. It was good money. It was good money and I was saving hard. So the responsibilities not only included greeting the guests and, you know, saying hello and putting their ticket in sort of order, the order that they came in on. Not all the guests were really great. I remember distinctly one guy walking in. They treat you like you're a

moron and one guy walked in and, you know, considering you never got promoted above front door guys. Well, where's the promotion? Like, where do you go? I mean, I wasn't going to beauty school. The one guy walked in and said, yeah, hi, my name's Ed, E.D. Like you had to spell it for me. But the other part of that job that was a little less appealing was I was the hair sweeper. So I spent a good chunk of every day or every night sweeping up hair.

putting it in the trash. The sort of sacrificial B element of the job was all of the hair cutters, all the stylists, wanted to experiment with either new tools or new haircuts on me. And I had a lot of hair at the time. And we got into some weird sort of like Brian Bosworth, you know, lines in the side in my head and almost the full buzz. So I looked odd for a long time. Now, the benefit of that, of course, is that I feel like I'm really good with clippers now. So, you know, nobody in my household has yet allowed me to take the clippers to them. But I may do it to my son when he's asleep one of these nights, just go in and take it down, make it more manageable. And if I were close to Jonah, I would definitely try to help is the right word.

That's a good segue for me because I have some of my fondest memories in childhood are going on the weekends with my dad to supercuts while he got his haircut and sitting there and like, you know, it's basically all men at supercuts. And like I'm this like little girl hanging out at the supercuts and feeling pretty cool about myself at the barbershop. My sacrificial B job, and Jonah, you were exactly right about learning things from even the worst jobs. So my first job out of college, I was a press secretary on the hill, and I was fired roughly

six weeks later for basically being difficult. This will shock. What? You? I know. Come on. So I went to the Washington Post classified ads and found like this temp position. And I, you know, wasn't a big office or anything. And my job was, you know, something not quite as bad as being a telemarketer, but like thereabouts. And that was miserable. All of it was miserable. But the part that was like searing was that it was all men in the office. Again, a small office. That was fine. But the office temperature was around 63 or 64 degrees because it was the summer. I just graduated college. And so I wore every, you know, every day. And so I wore every.

piece of clothing that I owned into this office every day. I was not a coffee drinker. I tried to become a coffee drinker and failed and instead would just make hot water and hold it in my hands. I would take every break that I had to go out onto the pavement and sit on the pavement to try to warm parts of myself. And I swore, first of all, I swore I was going to find another job as quickly as possible. And second, that we would know that women had reached equality when the ambient temperature in most offices with 72 degrees, and also unrelated, when I walk through first class and there's an equal number of men and women in first class. The brain functions best at 67 degrees, and that's what all internal air conditioning should

be setting. So since Steve raised the issue of names with the complex name Ed, have we settled on the pronunciation of Elon Musk's new child's name yet? I can't. I don't even know what that middle letter is. It's Elvin spelling. I'm still trying to catch up on Grimes. What's the mom's name? Is she just have one name? Is she a singer or something or a spoken word poet? What am I missing? She's a musical artist, Jonah, and that's her. Is she? Yes, that's her stage name. I thought that was fake. When I first saw this on social media yesterday, I didn't think it was a real thing. But that's, you're saying that's really what they've named their child. Apparently. That's what they say.

Now, the coolest thing about it is that, so it's X and the Elven Rune A-E, that looks like an A-N-E, and A-12. Well, the coolest thing about it is that the interpretation of A-12 is that's the precursor to the SR-71 Blackbird. So literally. Sure, that's what they were going for. No, actually it is. He said it is, yeah. Really? It's his favorite plane because, what, it has no attack mode, but it's fast and defensive or something?

I was like, okay. Yeah, it's the precursor. to the Blackbird, which is the coolest plane ever built. So to say, if someone asks your name and you say, I was actually partially named after the coolest spy plane ever created, that's okay.

That's all right. But then they're like, what's your name? And you're like, it doesn't have a pronunciation. Well, yeah, no, the hilarious thing is that when this kid grows up and he goes to Starbucks and he gets his cup, it's going to say on the cup, Fred. Yeah. Right. Um, um, um, uh,

just for the record, I am partially named after a black jazz trumpeter named Jonah Jones, but we'll just have to save that one for another day. Oh, nice. Wow. Wow. Okay. As someone who's dealing with naming right now, that's, that is interesting to me. Although I found out that my due date would be my baby's great-grandfather's 95th birthday, will be his birthday, hopefully. And so five weeks to go, and I think I'm the only pregnant lady who's like, hold. We can do this. We can make it To the birthday. I highly written names with like lots of glottal stops.

That kind of thing? Scott wants like Xenon or I don't know. Like he's going through some old Greek right now. Love it. Oh, I thought you meant like the inert gas. Zenon would be great. Yeah, that'd be great. Zarathustra, God only knows.

You know, like I'm they're going to, I'm going to be in recovery and he's going to end up signing the birth certificate and it won't matter what we agreed to. Well, thank you listeners for joining us on what, you know, we sort of meandered there for a little bit at the end. If you've made it this far, please subscribe at Apple Podcasts or anywhere you're getting your podcast. We so appreciate your feedback. Become a member of the dispatch at the dispatch.com. We are also starting to do live events as well for members. And you can see all of our newsletters. And we've plugged two other podcasts that we have that you You can check out on our website or also on your podcast app of choice.

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