The Dispatch Podcast - Texas Showdown | Roundtable

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

Jonah Goldberg grabs the host’s chair and steers Megan McArdle, Chris Stirewalt, and Kevin Williamson through a lively discussion into the political turbulence in Texas. The Agenda:—How upset should we be about redistricting in Texas?—Collin Allred versus Ken Paxton—Megan McArdle is mad about the BLS firing—Nielsen ratings are fake, but they are reliably fake—'It's a race to the bottom and everyone loses.'—The impact of postmodernism on politics—NWYT: Rule followers are suckers The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Dispatch⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and weekly livestreams—⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

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

Uh, I'm looking into it. Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit TELUS.com. Total Security to learn more. Conditions apply. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Jonah Goldberg.

On this week's roundtable, we'll discuss Texas Democrats fleeing the state to avoid a hard vote on redistricting and gerrymandering that could put the House of Representatives in play. And Trump's firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for delivering a report he didn't like. We'll ask whether or not this is part of some larger war on the truth besetting American politics and society. And then for not worth your time, we address the thorny eternal question that has divided households for millennia. How early should you get to the airport? I'm joined today by my friends and colleagues, Kevin Williamson, Chris Starrwalt, and Megan McArdle from the

Washington Post. Let's get to it. So, Kevin, I think you're the one who's actually writing right now about the redistricting stuff. The gistice is Donald Trump wants to gain five seats. They think they can gain five seats by doing a midterm, mid-decade redistricting in Texas. And this is spreading out across the country where Democrats are claiming that they will do the same thing, but there are problems with that. So I guess I'll start with this, Kevin. Is this thing actually going to work in Texas? I mean, are they going to do it? Probably. Um, you know, It's a fairly doable thing. One of my first real kind of political experiences, I must still been a teenager.

I was probably writing for my college newspaper, and Texas was doing a redistricting thing, and there was a big fight over it. And I talked to someone in the state senate there, I think it was state senator, about the process. And I was, you know, young and stupid and idealistic and talked about, isn't there a non-political way to do this? And it was the most, I got the most epic scoffing at that I still remember 30 years later. And the point was, of course, that redistricting is the most. political thing a legislature does. There is no way to depoliticize it. And it's always going to be

that way. People overestimate, I think, the importance of it. And they underestimate some of the downsides of it, which you're going to see in Texas, where some very, very Republican districts are now just going to be slightly Republican districts, or still fairly Republican districts, but not as safe as they were before if they go through with it. This one's unusual and that they're doing it in the middle of the cycle and using some errors in the census as an excuse for that. the census era is real. That's not why this is being done, of course. The thing I like to point about you in the case of Texas particularly is that redistricting doesn't save you. And the Democrats ran Texas forever and ever and ever, and they gerrymandered the crap out of the state. They had some crazy-looking

districts. And when Texans decided they didn't want to be a Democratic state anymore, they weren't. And Democrats haven't won a state-light election since the 1990s, I guess. They kind of liked Dan Richards more in theory than in practice, I think. And you've seen this in other states. You know, California had 40 years of Republican control at one point, and that went away quickly. It went away in the matter of a couple of years when the electorate changed. The Great Depression will do that to a political party, as it turns out. So the other states will, you know, California and probably Illinois and other states will try to retaliate somewhat and squeeze a couple of extra Democratic seats out. But of course, there's gerrymandering in every

state. So there's not a lot of juice in California or Illinois probably to do this, although if I were a blue state Republican, I would be maybe freshening up my resume because there's a good chance that you're going to be knocked out of office over this. It's just, it's one of those things that the importance of which is exaggerated. But when you've got really very close control of the House and they're expecting it to be a close election, maybe it makes a difference. Maybe Starwalt will speak to that more authoritatively than I can. Yeah, so let's go to Starwold. Brother Starwold, how upset Should we be about this? Is it that it's a norm violation?

Is it the prospect that because the House is so close, and given the fears of Trump being an authoritarian, it has more authoritarian-y vibes to it? Or is this just another example of Trump breaking a norm and then Dems breaking a norm to protest the breaking of a norm and on and on we go? The underlying problem, the problem underneath all of this is that we haven't added any members to the House of Representatives for more than 100 years. And when you have congressional districts that are the size of the Senate, so, you know, Kevin alluded to the politicization of redistricting or how it is inherently, and it is inherently a political endeavor, prior to.

1917. That was how they chose senators too. And there were good things and there were bad things. But this is sort of the making the progressive case for what happened when you chose senators not by direct election, but had the state legislatures do it and all the stuff that comes into it. So this is a power that state legislature still have. There is no constitutional restriction. There's a constitutional requirement. You must redistrict after the census. But there is no prohibition. You could do it every year. And by the way, states because of court decisions are redistricting all the time. Ohio has a map due. Florida just finished its map. North Carolina is a warrant of constant redistricting and constant legal fights. As for the

particulars of this case, this strikes me as dumb because if Texas, and I expect Texas, Well, go through with this. They'll, John Cornyn will send the FBI to dragoon the Democratic members back for a quorum so that they can manacle everybody to their desk and make them vote. And the Republicans will say, we gain five seats. But as Kevin points out, it will make it harder for, the whole experience will make it harder for Texas Republicans, not just in those three or four seats that are going to move into the d into the r plus 10 zone instead of being in the r plus 20 zone it's not just going to make it

harder for them because the districts will change it's going to make it harder for them because the brand is going to smell pretty b o like it's going to put the stink on a lot of this stuff and it won't help texas republicans and it won't by the way help texas republicans hold that senate seat because they have managed to fire up the democrats california gavin newsom says that he is sincere about putting a ballot measure to undo the ballot measure. So it sounds like in November, California voters will have the chance to undo their previous, isn't direct democracy of the Republican progressive kind from the previous century that makes California such a basket case. The voters will be asked to reverse what they did. I expect they will, and I expect

California will totally wipe out. There are five seats to be had in California. If California did the same thing that Texas did, there are five seats there. So that wipes out the perceived benefit. But I'll shut up by saying the number one thing this has done politically, Democrats had no, had nothing. They didn't, they were literally, as Joe Biden, well, Joe Biden would say figuratively. But they were debating who was to blame for their terrible, terrible 2024 election. And they were talking about Zoran Mamdani. Now they get to talk about this.

This is much, much better. This is the happy place for Democrats. Yeah, just to explain for listeners who might have missed the reference, Senator John Cornyn typically seen as the more mature, serious, less Trumpy, less trolley, senator from Texas, who is in the race for his life against Ken Paxton, trotted out the idea that the FBI should do a hard time. search every outhouse hen house in the state of Illinois and elsewhere to dragoon back these Democrats, which I, it's, we don't have Sarah David here to talk about what authority

the FBI would have to do such a thing. But that sort of gets to my point about how this feels different than just the crude politics of this. I think they sent the Texas Rangers to Oklahoma when the Democrats ran there many years ago to break up a quorum. And sending the Rangers is just cooler, by the way. Yes, totally. Maybe Illinois is just too far for them. And I like the idea that even if they're not, even if they're driving pickup trucks, they should all wear spurs when they enter the room, just to have that sound when the boots hit the floor. But my favorite moment of all this so far as the Massachusetts governor saying that the Republicans are forcing her hands and there's going to have to be retaliation. And the awkward fact is there's nothing

Massachusetts could do because Massachusetts has no Republican congressmen because they're so gerrymandered. And in fact, once you get north of New York, there are no Republican congressman in any state on the East Coast. Probably worth adding the Massachusetts is home of the original Jerry Manor. Oh, G. And goes all the way, all the way back there. Back when it had a hard G. Good old Elburn, Gary. I do like to point out that this guy was a signer at the Declaration of Independence. This is not a new thing. You know, this is a problem that's been around for a while. So, Megan, we're going to get into some of the other vibey and more than vibey problems of the last week in a second. But is the reaction to this by Democratic,

and also by the media, is it commensurate to what the Republicans are actually doing, or is there a reason why it is seen as something more ominous than a fairly old story of craven power politics? No, I mean, this is, look, I don't like gerrymandering. I think it is. I'm here for it. I think that voters should choose their representatives and not the other way around. And I do want to say, Kevin, that when you said that every state does this, this is Iowa erasure.

Iowa has compact geographically contiguous districts that are just drawn by a nonpartisan redistricting. Indiana also good. I guess Wyoming doesn't do it either. Yes. Yes. There was actually, I think it was North Dakota. The governor said that, you know, she's been trying to get North Dakota to get rid of its gerrymender for years. Of course, they have one district.

Well, they're South Dakota, and so we claim North Dakota is the gerrymandered Dakota of South Dakota, right? Fair enough. But look, this has been an issue for Democrats because they feel like they don't get enough representation in Congress compared to their vast numbers of Democratic voters. And this was from 2010, 2020, has been an enormous, like, you know, basic. gooseer, donor, loosener on the left. And the thing is, it's not, it was never true to the extent they believed it was. First of all, a lot of what they were angry about was just that there are many rural states where Republicans do better. And those are not in any sense, gerrymandered. They just exist. Can we just explain your point a little bit? A lot of Democrats, but they're

concentrated in California in a couple other states. Yeah, the Democrats tend to be concentrated in college towns along the coast and heavily black counties in the south. And their voters are inefficiently distributed, right? It does not help them that they have a bunch of D plus 32 districts in New York City. They would much rather those districts, those voters, be spread out upstate so that they could have more Democratic districts. But that's not possible. Those people do not actually want to move to, you know, Lake Cayuga.

And so this was always somewhat overblown in terms of gerrymander, right? Like, you can argue that it's sort of the states being all sorts of random different sizes is maybe weird. Like, the fact that each of those states gets two senators, maybe unfair. We can have that argument, but it's not gerrymanned. But also, of course, Democrats gerrymandered within an inch of their life. I mean, the hilarious thing of Representative Press. complaining about gerrymandering. If you look at her district, this is not a natural district.

It looks like a snake on acid. And I grew up in New York City in representative Gerald Nadler's district, which famously had a narrow strip running along the West Side Highway, connecting it to somewhere south in order to protect, you know, various incumbents. This is incredibly normal in both Democratic and Republican states. The difference was that, first of all, Republicans had a lot of states where there's only one district. And if you are, there are a lot of Republicans in your state, you're going to win that district. And also that their voters tended to be somewhat better distributed if you wanted to gerrymander.

But that's not even true anymore. Trump won the popular vote. He is not benefiting from some sort of, well, he got a plurality of popular vote. This was just an election that he won. Republicans are actually slightly underrepresented in the House compared to the number of people who voted for Republican representatives. And that is the nature of single member districts. We can argue about whether we should have proportional representation. We're not going to, but we can argue about it if it makes, you know, follow your bliss.

But the thing is that there is a kind of a cultural lag where progressives get, and Democrats more generally, get super invested in this issue because for 10 years it looked like if you fixed gerrymandering, if you fixed that the proportional representative, that you could get, you could just win it. And that Republicans would be deprived of power. And that is no longer true, but the corpse of this argument lives on. And that is why, even though there's no, look, there's no constitutional bar on redistricting now. Texas can do it if they want. And the real problem for Democrats is they don't have a lot of great gerrymenders left to do.

They can threaten to retaliate, and yes, they might get some seats out of California. But after that, it is pretty slim pickings. And so, like, you know, the fact is they don't just don't have a lot of room to retaliate. This is, you know, maybe we can argue that America should just be divided into a checkerboard, and each of those checker boards should have, you know, a representative. But that's not how it works. There is no bar on doing this. There is no norm against gerrymandering, and there's no norm against redistricting.

you know, mid-decade, it's just that people don't normally bother. And I think that this whole thing is, look, it's good for them because it does get their base energized because the base is not paying close attention to how American electoral politics have shifted. So I agree with all that. I do think since no one's going to, no one wanted to take the bait I was dangling, I'll swallow the hook myself. And to simply say, I think, one of the reasons why people are freaked out about this is that they think Trump is getting away with an enormous number of things that they do not like. The they in question here are Democrats, media, the usual suspects. And because the only way you get any visibility into

all sorts of things and get, you know, a hearing on the Katari plane or Bitcoin weird crypto stuff, is if Democrats take back the House. And I think there are a lot of Democrats, whether it's impeachment or just simply a lot of hearings, they are in a mode of thinking that if Trump has a full four years of unified government control, things are going to go off the rails. And so Trump's move here with the redistricting feels scarier than it would be in Norman times. Norma times, I think this would play more as a run-of-the-mill partisan outrage, rather than the sort of the sort of the key ingredient for whatever term we want to use for

Trump's transformation of the government. And I think that's why it fills a lot of people with a lot more angst than it otherwise would. Does anyone disagree with that? Trump makes everything worse, of course. I mean, no Democrat cared about gerrymandering until the late 90s in the early 2000s when Republicans suddenly got good at it. And Republicans did a really un-Republican thing. They figured out how to use a computer. And they got a little bit ahead. They got off AOL for five minutes and figured out how to make this work.

And it's sort of like, you know, how the Federalist Society became such a hate project for Democrats, where Democrats were all. about judicial activism and having, you know, their people in the courts making the kind of decisions they wanted to, Republicans thought, well, we have a philosophy about how the law should work. Maybe we should build this organization, get our people in the course, and they did really well at it. They got good at it, and suddenly that became a thing that you can't do anymore. I'm against what I call procedural maximalism. You know, I'm in favor of the filibuster, but I don't think you should use it all the time. I think that gerrymandering is a pretty normal part of politics. you should probably be a little bit sparing about it, both as a matter of just trying to be a good citizen and a decent representative and also because these things do tend to backfire because you load up the gun and you hand it to the other party from the next time they win an election.

But I often think about in this particular issue, you know, Barack Obama lecturing the Republicans after the health care debate, well, you guys should try winning some elections. And it's great that he was enormously popular, but his party just got decimated at the state and local level and also. in some of the federal elections. And if Democrats want to change this, they should try winning some elections. I'm not saying they're going to flip Texas and make it a Democratic state, but they could do better than they do down there.

The Democratic Party in Texas is like the Republican Party in California. It's dysfunctional. They nominate just idiotic people or people who are just not credible candidates. If you look at their last several candidates for governor of Texas, they haven't run anyone who stood a chance

of doing anything. They get excited about, you know, a Beto or Wendy, what was her last name, the lady with the sneakers. I'm blanking. Davis? Yeah. They probably could beat Ted Cruz in a Senate election. Probably. Ted Cruz is not a very popular guy in Texas in a lot of ways, but they would have to, you know, field a real candidate to do that.

They'll probably could beat Ken Paxton in the Senate election if he ends up being the nominee. But they're going to have to field a different kind of candidate to do that. Oh, I bet Colin Allred could beat Ken Paxton. You think so? Yeah. Well, I mean, look, Ken Paxton is, he's got a Roy Moore problem, can't lose the primary, can't win the general. Ken Paxton is a lot, right? He is a lot, a lot.

And the problem, of course, like Roy Moore or like Donald Trump, the worse it gets seems to get for Ken Paxton as a general election candidate, the more determined core base voters are to nominate him. and it's proof his the um paxton agonistis becomes proof of the the concept right they're coming for him because he fights only too hard for us and uh ken paxton i think colin all red is the right kind of candidate for texas football star moderate democrat his his former district is the right in the right kind of place. And I don't think he could, well, we'll see what happens with John Corny. I don't think he could probably be John Corny. But I think he could, it wouldn't be a gimmy.

But if you look at how close Beto O'Rourke got to Ted Cruz, one thing, a boring thing that I always have to point out in these discussions, the biennial midterm electorate is a third smaller than the quadrenial election. And for the 20th century and the first part of the 21st century, Democrats had the low propensity voters, the people who only came out in quadrenial elections. And the wipeout for Democrats that you were talking about in 2010 was sort of the fullest fruit, but the last fruit of that tendency, which is those working class, blue collar kind of voters who don't come out for midterm elections,

stayed home and left Obama's Democrats to their devices. Republicans are now on, have the other, they're getting it now. And Texas has a lot of rich people. Texas has a lot of affluent, college educated. I call them Alamo Heights Republicans who, they're not going to go vote for Ken Paxton. This, it's how Georgia,

inexplicably has two Democrats. There is no reason if you look at the underlying data why Georgia should have, I will shut up by saying, the best news for Democrats in a lot of ways about midterms, other than the enthusiasm boost that they're going to get out of this Texas stuff, other than the fundraising boost, other than all that, the best news is that it is evidence that Donald Trump thinks about midterms a lot. he is really engaged on midterms. And that's great news for Democrats. It's great news for Democrats if he's going to fight with Brian Kemp about who they should nominate for Senate in Georgia. It's great news if he wants to beat John Cornyn. It's great news for Democrats if Trump is going to play a very active role in the midterms. Because this, I look, I think this is just politically a mistake. I don't think the juice is worth the squeeze. But it is also evidence that Trump is is deeply engaged on this question because I assume he just does. he would like to have the free hand that he has now to continue, but also he doesn't want to be impeached a third time.

All right. So making you get a last word on this topic before we move on to something else, but I just want to point out, I was listening to a piece about the 10-year anniversary of Hamilton, and I was reminded that Alexander Hamilton has a friend, Hercules Mulligan, right, who was a big spy in the Revolutionary War. I got to tell you, Paxton Agonistis could have been part of that crew, too. That's just a great name. Megan, do you have anything else you want to say on redistricting?

Look, I think it is true that Trump makes everything fraught. But I think that if you were worried about Donald Trump, this is the least of your problems. And in fact, like, it shows that he is thinking about Congress, about actually wanting to have representatives in Congress who might vote for things he wants to do. You know, like the Constitution says the government is supposed to work, I would be much more concerned about what he's doing with the courts, what he is doing with executive orders, what he is doing. with his staff and creating facts on the ground that are hard for courts to check, even when he is a thwart the law, as he often is, getting a few more representatives in Texas and then having them counterbalanced by California is just not that big a deal. All right.

We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the dispatch podcast. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy to protect your family's future in minutes, not months. Ethos keeps it simple. It's 100% online, no medical exam, just a few health

question. You can get a quote in as little as 10 minutes, same-day coverage, and policies starting at about two bucks a day, build monthly, with options up to $3 million in coverage. With a 4.8 out of five-star rating on trust pilot and thousands of families already applying through Ethos, it builds trust. Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's ETHOS.com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. may vary. What a run! This champ is picking up speed, but they found a lane. Phenomenal launches into the air! Absolutely incredible! Air Transit! Fly the seven-time world's best leisure airline champions, Air Transat. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.

SquareSpace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, you're writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one. Use one of their award-winning templates or try the new Blueprint AI, which tailors a site for you based on your goals and style. It's quick, intuitive, and requires zero coding experience. You can also tap into built-in analytics and see who's engaging with your site and email campaigns to stay connected with subscribers or clients. And Squarespace goes beyond design. You can offer services, book appointments, and receive payments directly through your

site. It's a single hub for managing your work and reaching your audience without having to piece together a bunch of different tools. All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And we're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. If I was going to think of a story that would offend Megan McArdle more, I would be hard-pressed than this BLS thing. Not since Napoleon used Christian monasteries as stables. Has there been something so offensive to the Megan McArdle type that I know and love?

Megan, what do you think about the firing of the head of the BLS, the way it was done, and what it means? going forward and if you want to remove shoelaces and cutting implements before you get into this, that's fine. Yes, I wrote a column on this and a white hot rage. It happened. I filed that column like two hours later.

Look, I think this is not merely outrageous. It is a slander on an agency that does its best in a hard situation. It is not merely destructive because this data feeds into a huge amount of

market activity as well as government policy. And if those numbers cannot be trusted, then you cannot do good policy, something that Donald Trump has let us acknowledge, not historically have been hugely interested in, but which does play into his political fortunes and the fortunes of his political party. It also won't work. The thing he is trying to do, right, he was doubting the job numbers when they look good. So it's not like this is his longstanding obsession with the BLS. what he is trying to do is

create a distraction from the fact that the jobs numbers are. And now first of all, the jobs numbers are weak in part because of all the deportations. Mechanically, if you remove people from the economy, the economy will not be able to employ as many people. Second of all, you cannot distract people from that. Joe Biden tried this. He gaslighted. He called inflation transitory.

He pointed to all the reasons you shouldn't care about inflation. And voters were like, what are you on? What sort of drugs are you taking? Can I get some? And also, you're fired. And that is exactly what will happen to Donald Trump. If he ignores, if he creates a situation

where if he doesn't have good economic data, it's trying to get the voters to, you know, ignore that with funny economic data from some ham-picked lackey. It's not going to distract them from the fact that in their real lives, you cannot tell people that employment is doing well if their brother-in-law is out of work, if their company is announcing layoffs, and if their kid who just got out of college can't find a job, they will not believe you. That is what most voters look at, and particularly the low-information voters who tend to vote for Trump. So if I can just say, Megan, as one follow-up on this, I don't want to steal man this. the way that Sarah Isger might. But I will, I just want to get your take.

The argument, the bait and switch, the goalpost moving, the Motten Bailey, whatever you want to call it, argument that instantaneously erupted from White House economic advisors, from Capitol Hill, from the orc army of Twitter replies that I would get, is that it's not that Trump fired her because she was a partisan hack it's because she's bad at her job and that the revision's biggest revision in 30 years

something is broken this was the argument that Kevin Hassett made and I think it's all bad faith I want to be really clear because you have to disregard the expressed and repeated explanation from the president of himself about why he did it

and the story about how in the prior in the last days of the 2024 election, the claim was the head of the BLS and the BLS in general came to the rescue of Kamala Harris by giving out great, beautiful numbers. They did not. They did not. It came out with horrible numbers. So I don't, we don't need to get into the weeds

on how the cover story or the pretext stuff is, is offensive. But just quickly before I move to these guys, what is your take on why BLS seems to be struggling so much to get this data right? A couple of reasons. First of all, they've published survey data. Surveys have gotten harder and harder to do because response rates have fallen. We all, anyone who follows political polling knows that this is a problem, that the numbers

have gotten less accurate over time. I'm going to get a fact check on that from Chris Starwall. Response rates are stone cold buns. Yeah. Now, the problem is not quite as bad with the BLS, but it's bad. They're just having fewer response rates, which, and they're having, more delayed responses, which means that you're going to get bigger corrections because you get numbers in that you didn't have before. It is hard to capture firms that are entering that are being

created or destroyed because the ones that die don't respond to your survey and the ones that are created you don't know about yet. The other thing is that since the pandemic, especially, but also even a little before the pandemic, the economy has just gotten more volatile in a lot of ways. You know, you can think that this is good. It's creative destruction. You can think it's bad because it's, you know, it means that there's more uncertainty. But it just, you can see that modeling the economy, I shouldn't say the economy itself where jobs and GDP growth have been pretty good and not bouncing around hugely. But the economy's gotten weirder is another way to put this. It is harder to model what's going on in the economy because we kind of don't know what

an economy looks like after the biggest pandemic in 100 years. And so that has created a lot of corrections. But if you look at the corrections, they were also happening during the Biden administration. You're just having to do updates that are bigger updates than they were before. And the third thing is just like as the population grows, as you get more people, any update that you make is going to be bigger. Any revision is going to be bigger just because there's more people in the job market.

there will be more jobs in that revision, but, like, as a percentage of the available jobs, it's not necessarily that high. And while these are certainly big revisions, I would say that that, even that kind of depends on how you look at it. Are you looking at the number of jobs in the revision? Are you looking at the total number of jobs that they estimated? Because the revisions to the total number of jobs are, in fact, like a fraction of a percentage point.

And since that's actually what they're supposed to model, you know, They're not doing badly in a very difficult situation, and they are not doing badly because she's bad at her job. They're doing badly because it's just harder to do that job than it was 10 years ago. Brother Starwold, can we get a fact check on this survey rumor? Obviously, everything that the great Megyn McArdle just said is exactly right from a data perspective response rates are down for polling. And I've made the comparison to Nielsen ratings.

Nielsen ratings have always kind of been fake, but it's a standard fakeness that we agree upon. What did they say about roots? A lie we can live with. And a bad poll is still useful if it is bad in a consistent way. If you know what the problem with the poll is, but they do it the same way every time, I still can use the poll because I can say, how does it compare to the previous one? So there's utility in the numbers. And could the numbers be improved? Yes. And of course, we know that the administration killed the effort. This is, this is the, there was a working group that was trying to, a bipartisan working group that was trying to figure out, what do we do about the response rate problem? How can we improve these numbers? What should we do? Cut. You got doged,

brother. You got doged. And for at a cost, which was by the way costing the government like a thousand bucks. It was travel costs basically for volunteer participants. In the piece I wrote for Tuesday for the Hill, I quoted Orwell's recollections on the Spanish Civil War. I know it is fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I'm willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased. But what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. And the thing that alarms me about this is there's one version in which Donald Trump wanted to, wanted to fire this person to distract, whatever, the sort of near-term idea.

Then there's the other idea, which is he doesn't really believe that there is anything such as a fair or true jobs report, and he would like a fair or true, he thinks that a good jobs report, is one that says what he wants it to say. And the idea that Mike Pence's reading of the Constitution was sincere or that Jerome Powell's read of the economy is what he believes it is, that anybody is on the level. It is possible that Donald Trump doesn't think that anyone or almost anyone, whoever disagrees with him is on the level that could point to the problem of he doesn't

really believe in data, period, and that he doesn't think that data are useful. This is very alarming to me. not just because of what's going on in our society, but we've got an election to hold in 2028. We have a presidential election to hold in 2028. We have a midterm election to hold next year. I'm getting nervous. And I think back to the Democrats who had this absolutely cockamamie piece of legislation, went by a couple names. It was like voting is awesome or for the people or whatever they called it. And it was a terrible piece of legislation.

And I said at the time, why would you give the federal government more control over how elections go? We want the federal government to have as limited a role in elections as possible because you could have bad people. You need it. You need to decentralize that authority. Democrats are like, no, we need anti-jerrymandering laws. And it passed the House, died in the Senate.

you imagine if they would put if they had passed that law and donald trump's justice department department of homeland security and republican congress had those tools at their disposal trump is already trying to get a new census done that excludes illegal immigrants i don't know that that that will actually work i don't know that he would he was defeated in that effort in 2020 but like i am i am profoundly concerned about our abilities to have uh reliable elections that people have confidence in as we see that everything to me always points to elections I look at his attack on those numbers and I see echoes of what he tried to do in 2020 and what he might do in 26 and 28 okay so Chris has jumped the gun on where I wanted to take this conversation I didn't

know um I know I it's my what I did not realize is the amount of of planning and prep work that comes into this role where I'm supposed to like hold your hands and let you know where we're going go. I just figured we could sort of like the Brady's. We could just have, we could, we could do the show right here. I've ruined Christmas. Jonah, for all of us, I would just like to say that I feel that we rest in your warm embrace. And it is comforting. So before we move on to, because there are other data points to back up what Chris is talking about, but let's just stay on the BLS for part of it for one more second. Kevin, are you normally of the practice that when you get a bad EKG, you just the machine or when the scale tells you something that you don't like, you throw it out the

window. If you're flying a plane and the altimeter says you're too low, you say, smash it with a hammer and say, shut up, stupid machine. Because that's the vibe I get from this. And the way in which so many people obviously know this is a bad idea, but switch the argument almost instantaneously to something else doesn't speak well of the health of the Republic, I would argue. You know, it's funny

you mentioned the scale thing because that was the example I thought of, you know, because of the new prominence of like tracking apps, there are a lot of bathrooms like mine

that have more than one scale in them because different people are using them. And I have on at least one occasion got on a different one when I didn't like the reading on the first one, certainly. So it is a, it is a human problem.

You just want to, you want to have a little point a comparison there and see what's going on. Now, you know, if you go back and you read like the new criterion from the 1990s or National Review, there'll be all these essays from pointy-headed right-wingers talking about the prominence of kind of, you know, fucalty and post-modernist relativism on college campuses and how they're waging war on the very idea of truth and facts. And everyone was making jokes about feminist math and those sorts of things. Who knew that post-modernism was going to be so right-wing? But it's going to look like Donald

Trump. But it would actually be the Republican Party that's coming out with a brand of politics that is really based on the assumption that there are no facts, there are no honest brokers, there are no true stories. There's only this, you know, Nietzschean contest of power in which facts and history and data and the BLS of all things are pawns on the chessboard. I agree with Chris that I think this is ultimately a more dangerous thing than people realize. and that it's not limited to the current political moment. When you start having this kind of, you know, cultural corruption, it brings along with its sets of assumptions that are hard to shake. You know, if you look at something like, you know, petty bribery in India,

which has been a problem forever and probably will be a problem forever, one of the reasons that people don't really try to address it there is that it's just seen as normal and inevitable and something you can't do anything about. So once these things work their way into your national assumptions, it's really hard to get rid of. You know, German-speaking people

who speak to you in English will sometimes say, is not possible. And they don't mean that the thing is not possible. They mean this thing isn't how it's done. I remember being on a train out of Shipgard one time and the lady asking me for my ticket and I said it hadn't been punched even though I was on the thing earlier

and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And she just fell into a fit and said, is not possible. And it was possible. was the thing that had happened. But that speaks to their assumptions about how the world actually works. And these sort of deeply embedded assumptions about what public life looks like are enormously important in ways that are really hard to fix, that are really hard to analyze, and really hard to improve once they've gone sour.

So that reminds you, there's a wonderful book. It's probably pretty out of date by now by a former New York Times correspondent called The Africans. And it's just about the continents of Africa what it was like to be a reporter there. And he tells the story. It's one of several different anecdotes about how like understandings of cause and effect and this kind of thing that you're talking about with the Germans play out in his experience.

And so I think it was, I don't remember which country was. A former Francophone colony. The only reason I assume that is because they had Mirage jets and they had an Air Force and there were two pilots who've been trained, knew how to fly, whatever, and they were coming in to land,

and the tower, because the airport was socked in with fog, said, you can't land. And the pilots took this as a declaration of all future opportunities to land and bailed out, ejected from the planes rather than circled the airport for 20 minutes or whatever. So it's a universal problem. Anyway, I think,

there's another aspect to this that's how I want to broaden it out which touches on some of the stuff that Chris was talking about is that in a climate like this when you do things like this people are going to connect the dots sometimes when a dot isn't there right so like the Smithsonian story last week about how they had allegedly erased Donald Trump's impeachments turned out not to be true or it turned out to be more complicated at the very least than the way. people were reacting to it in real time. But you can't blame anybody for thinking that's something that Donald Trump would do. Yesterday, some folks got their dresses over their heads about the fact that the National

Archives had their website had somehow cut off on the Bill of Rights before it got to things like habeas corpus. And so the announcement was that Trump has ordered the National Archives. to erase, you know, the Fifth Amendment or whatever it was. And no, it was a coding error, at least according to the National Archives. At the same time, you have things like Emil Bove, or is there Beauvais? Yeah, I care not, being confirmed by the Republicans to be a judge. And this is a guy who was just a pure loyalist hatchet man for Donald Trump.

You have Gene Piro made the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., these people who supported January 6th. You have outrage over Democrats' violation of norms from people who say January 6 was no problem. And everywhere you can see the sort of, let me put it this way. I was talking to Sam Harris on his podcast yesterday. And I was trying to make the point that there was a lot of high-minded rhetoric about how government worked prior to the age of Trump. And a lot of it was a bunch of lies. but at least that hypocrisy upheld the idea that these standards are the right standards, right? I mean, everyone falls short of ideals.

That's why we call them ideals. Hypocrisy illuminates what everyone is supposed to agree is supposed to be the ideal. And it seems like in the Trump era, what we're getting is sort of as Kevin was talking about it, an unapologetic embrace of power for its own sake and the justification for it is power for its own sake. And you see that in the BLS stuff. You see that in Trump's explanation, right? I mean, there's no explanation for the gerrymandering in Texas other than the fact that he

wants to pick up five seats, right? If George Bush tried to do this, he would at least try to comment. up with some cover story that appealed to a higher standard than raw naked political ambition. And that's the thing that's sort of being normalized in all of this. And I think that's one of the reasons why it's unsteadying and for a lot of people. And it plays into all of these stories. Am I going full bulwark here or, you know? No, I think that's, I think that's really.

smart, but I would also add that there is, that part of this, by no means all of it, right? Hypocry is a constant in politics. If there were a physics of politics, there would be some kind of, like, Greek variable that would just show you the constant level of hypocrisy. But I will say that the kind of complete liberal takeover of the institutions that were in charge of deeming which hypocritical arguments counted. created a real problem that I think is part of the Republican backlash. By no means all of it, I don't think Trump would behave any differently because he has always been exactly like this.

But I think that there are other Republicans that I see who are behaving differently. And I think that their sense is this is, look, you have control over the media, you have control over the expert class, you have control over all of these institutions. And when you make an argument, it gets taken seriously. And when we make an argument, you deem that out of bounds. That's racist. I mean, the place where I saw people really get radicalized the most. Never Trump voters get radicalized was Brett Kavanaugh because they felt like here you have these completely unfalsifiable accusations that are from someone who is in some ways,

they felt not credible. They come out of nowhere. There's no possible defense against them. And the Democratic argument is that you can't have your nominee. And also, let's remember that you're going to wreck someone's life. Brett Kavanaugh's life was wrecked by having those allegations aired in Congress. Yes, he is on the Supreme Court, but the social costs of this have been enormous. There is nowhere he can go to get his reputation back.

And they saw that and they saw people basically advancing these arguments that there was no check on it. Or something like the Covington Catholic. case where this kid who was basically just standing there and smiling weirdly because he had braces um is suddenly the next satan and that that has left kind of people in the center less ability to argue that no there actually are norms that exist for a good reason and that sometimes you don't do things that are good for your party because they are bad for the system and the system ultimately benefits your party and the voters in it. And I think that's a situation we're now in.

I don't want to in any way absolve Trump of what he's doing. But I do think that the breakdown has been a complicated dynamic. It has not simply been that Trump has rampaged over the innocent and norm-loving members of the American expert class. It is that they violated their own norms. And I think the place you see this most clearly is, during the pandemic with the George Floyd protests where suddenly you can't go to church, you can't go to a motorcycle rally, you can't go to see your dying father, you can't attend a funeral, you can't have a wedding. But if you're protesting racism, and I think that the people

in those institutions, you know, I understand the dynamic that happened. A lot of people who signed those open letters from the public health community probably understood this was a bad idea, but thought the harm was small and that the potential damage to their personal reputation was large if they didn't sign, right? And they might have been right about that. But they did enormous damage to America in attempting to advance their own personal interests. And I think that everyone should think a lot more about that. Kevin, you want to go full bulwark on me? No, I'm not going to go full bulwark on you. A related point. A related point. that I think is important is that we do need better ways to measure things socially. I think we

fit on this with our talking about polling and gathering economic data and other things. We do live in a period in which things move more quickly than they used to. If you look at the companies, there were like the 100 biggest companies in the country 100 years ago. They had an average corporate life expectancy of like 88 years or something like that. I think the last time I looked in on that number was 18 years. You know, companies like Facebook, as hard as it is to believe, It is a very old company now by modern standards in some ways. So it's harder to get data. It's harder to get data that's consistent across industries or social groupings or municipalities and things like that over time.

It's because things do move more quickly now for various kinds of reasons, having to do with globalization and the rise of digital life. I just don't think we've caught up with that yet. and there is a sense that people feel, people feel unmoored, people feel disconnected, people feel like their old yardsticks for understanding things are no longer operative. And so their grasp of the truth and of the importance of facts is maybe lessened by that. There are some class issues related to that, I think. A lot of this is resentment about, you know, people saying, well, our betters have been lecturing us about what is scientific or what all the experts, believe now for 50 or 60 or 100 years, and they always get it wrong. You know, they didn't see

the financial crisis coming. They didn't see this coming. They projected the election wrong this year or that year. And so there's been a lot of, you know, credibility, self-immolation among a lot of institutions and among American elites in general. And these are just not easy problems to fix. It would be better if there were responsible people in political parties saying, well, we might not like what the numbers say, but we have this consistent. way of doing things. So even if the numbers maybe aren't absolutely reliable as a final count. Directionally, they tell us something over time, and this is how we should go about understanding these things. COVID was a great example of that, where you had, you know,

the experts out there saying, well, we absolutely have to do X, Y, and Z, and this absolutely is the case. And then two weeks later, it's a different story. And we understand why that stuff changes, because, you know, their understanding of the situation changes over time. But it wasn't presented with the kind of humiliation that would, the humility, rather, that would Or humiliation. Well, humiliation came later, right? Right. That's at the end of the process.

Humility is how you save yourself from that humiliation, right? That, you know, they said, this is what we know right now, and this may be different tomorrow, and we're making decisions by the seat of our pants as best as we can with the information we have in front of us. Nobody wants to come out and say that because we do live in a time in which expectations are irrational about this sort of thing. If you actually are someone who comes out and says, well, you know, we had this very difficult problem in front of us, and there are a couple things we can do that might improve it,

but it probably won't really fix it in the long run, and we're probably going to be wrong about some of this stuff, but this is the best that we can do. You know, you don't get a lot of, you know, cable news hits over that sort of thing. You don't get a lot of votes. You don't get a lot of small dollar fundraising, that kind of stuff. The incentives are all toward absolutism and hysteria, and we absolutely know, and if we do this one thing, it'll fix this problem, and that'll be done. It's just not the case.

My forearm tattoo will be the Roche-Foucault, quote, hypocrisy is the tribute. that vice pays to virtue. And I am, hypocrisy is essential and important. It is the fence that we, it is, it is a necessary part of maintaining the fence around a functioning society. For sure. We have a accountability crisis, basically. In politics, the accountability is supposed to come from voters. So a lot of the things that people said they believed, or didn't do or didn't say, you can't do that. That's a third rail. You can't say this.

You can't go there. And when the supposed consequences that had been dreamed of for 100 years, all of these truths, so many of them were defeated, right? And they were proved to be untrue. And many people will go back to the moment of Donald Trump saying, I like my war heroes who didn't get captured, John McCain. And it was like, oh, he's done. And then it didn't happen.

And we could talk about all the ways in which it didn't happen, why it didn't happen, but it did not happen. And so it has empowered the worst of people who say, well, if the rules don't apply anymore, I should just do what I want. But the core problem here about why we don't have accountability, the underlying reason is that we are tribal morons. and this is the human condition. It has ever been thus, but we have, Megan very astutely points out, lost the institutions

that are supposed to mediate and the institutions that are supposed to be shock absorbers in a republic have failed and have not done their work. And we are left with a disorganized governing third of the country, the people who exist somewhere between the crazy people to one degree or another. So what we have is just a back and forth constant missile exchange between the radical right and the radical left, and we don't have a functioning center because, and they're not taking care of those institutions that are supposed to mediate this. And the answer all too often, right, is I heard Democrats using to go back.

and close talking about the Texas redistricting. And I asked the chairman of the Democratic National Committee about this. He said it was rigged. He said if it'll rigging the house. Well, it's not rigged, right? It's not, it's not a rigged vote. You don't like what they did, but it will be the vote. The result of congressional elections in Texas next year will be the result of the congressional elections in Texas. But what you have Democrats doing is how many Democrats really think that Jeffrey Epstein was killed or there's a deep cover-up? I think they probably mostly believe the findings of the Inspector General during the Biden administration about this stuff and mostly believe when Merrick Garland's Justice Department said grace over the whole, it was like,

all right, we're done. But they're stoking it because it's in their political interest. And that's the thing. It's the race to the bottom. It is a race to the bottom that everybody can lose. We're going to take a break, but we'll be back shortly. We're back with the dispatch podcast, but before we return to the roundtable, I want to let you know what's going on elsewhere at the dispatch, specifically what's going on with my podcast, The Remnant.

I was very excited to have Russ Roberts, host of Econ Talk, return to The Remnant. I'm a super fan of Russes. We covered the waterfront from trade and economics to the moment. meaning of life to what's going on in Israel. Check it out. Search for the Remnant in your podcast app and make sure you hit the follow button. It helps a lot. Now, let's jump back into the conversation. When I was given the ball and scepter to run this podcast, they told me that I would have to come up with my own not worth your time subject. So I was talking about it with my wife and this

morning about what we should talk about. And as tempted as I am to make it something invidious about Steve Hayes. I figured I'll save that for another time. I often tell people I have a mixed marriage. I'm not talking about religion. I'm talking about a divide that borders on the metaphysical in terms of our differing outlook. I am a get to the airport early guy. My wife thinks she planned things perfectly if as she approaches the gate, they're saying last call for boarding and she walks right on having efficiently minimized her time at the airport. This drives me crazy. I drive her crazy.

We have arguments about when to leave for the airport all the time. And so I put it to you guys, A, what is your philosophy about getting to the airport earlier or just on time shipping? And B, is this an equally large source of domestic discord in your. your lives. I will go to you first, Christopher Starwell. My Jessica, the pony, is in the opposite role of your Jessica. She is, she reserves the parking space days in advance. She arrives at the airport hours early. I am not the worst about this. I'm not a, I want to be walking down the concourse when they say final boarding. I want to be there before boarding starts always.

But I, as a, I fly in and out of Reagan National, I don't, you know, 50 times a year or whatever. And I love it. It's easy. You walk up where I screw up. And I think she lovingly accepts and feels superior to me. And since she never screws it up, she's happy to laugh at my efforts. But Where I screw up is when I go to something like the atrocity that is dullest, my goodness, when you go to. Why would you do that, Chris? Well, sometimes it's the only way to go. It's the only way to fly sometimes. When you find self-harm is a cry for help.

Exactly. When you find yourself in some awful airport and you haven't done it, I hate the nervous feeling that I put my, I give myself as I'm waiting for the shuttle that takes you to the tram, that takes you to the people mover, that takes you to the drone that carries you to the wand. that will eventually get you to your plane. Well, and then there's the blind ferryman with the barge who comes across the river. And if you don't have your gold coin. I was going to say, do I have a drachma? I don't know. I'm not ready.

So it does not cause strife because she is superior to me and she knows it. But it is definitely, there are two modalities. I know Kevin's answer. So I can save his for last. Megan, do you and Peter have a, I am in a semi- mixed marriage. Peter would definitely get to the airport before me any time wait.

You know, like I'll say I'm going and he will say yeah, you should definitely leave at least three hours beforehand. But this is complicated by the fact that, you know, we spend our summers in Boston and the traffic between our house and Logan is, let us say, highly variable.

And I used to be a white knuckler on the advice of a professor in business school who taught decision science. So a certified white expert, who said, if you've never missed a flight, you are spending too much time sitting in airports. And then I missed a flight to a interview that I had to do at the last minute and had to eat a $1,400 emergency plane ticket at peak time. And I have never white knuckled yet. And I've never missed a flight sense. But I do tend, look, I travel a lot, as I think all of us do on this

podcast. And I'm now pretty optimized. I have a good sense of how long it's going to take me. I got my lounge access. I got my clear. I have my bags packed. I literally like I take the clothes out of the suitcase. I wash them. They go back into the suitcase. My travel wardrobe is pretty set. And I make sure there's nothing in there that's going to trigger the TSA. Which allows me to like fairly comfortably, comfortably walk on with 45 minutes to spare. But I do have lounge access. So I don't try to push it. Right. And the lounge, the food is not good. But the chairs are comfortable. The bathrooms are a lot nicer than the ones downstairs. It's free with my credit card. And I have my status. So I get on. And I think if you are not those things, if you're inexperienced traveler, don't know the airport that well, don't have all of the things that make it faster to go through, don't have a good sense of the traffic. You know, now I am old and no longer such a freewheeling, risk-loving spirit. I would say, I think it is. is rational to set out for the airport a few hours in advance to make sure that you actually get to your gate on time and get on. Because buying a last minute plane ticket or changing your flight last minute, I was actually just changing my flight. I had to pay the fair difference is just way unfun. So the reason why I think your decision expert is wrong is that we basically all do the same thing with various variations. Most of what we can do, we can do from an airport, right? Whether it's news consumption or even writing, like, we've got that

set of scale. Eating wings. Also, that was told to me in 19 and probably 2000 when airports were a lot less nice. Yeah. And so I actually can be more productive knowing that I've eliminated the worry about not getting on the plane, getting to the plane on time. If I'm already at the airport, I find it easier to concentrate on the other things I can do from the airport than I would. saying, oh, gosh, I have another 20 minutes. Let me, let me stay here. I don't see the maximizing of time. Anyway, I've had this argument many times.

Kevin, are you in a similarly mixed marriage? How have you cut this Gordian knot? Yeah, you and I did have this conversation a few days ago, actually. Yeah. So if I'm ever murdered by my wife, it'll be over this issue. She is very much a cruise in at the last second kind of expect to be accommodated kind of person. She's had a very happy life. She's just being treated nicely by people.

And she's very pretty and charming. She does put a vibe into the universe that comes back at her in ways that none of us do. She's a warm and lovely person, which I think helps. Yeah. Which is the real source of your midst marriage. Yeah, I'm not. And so I better get to the airport three hours ahead of time. There are a couple of ways to deal with this, though.

I could do a whole Jonah Goldberg hour-long solo podcast on this subject, but I promise not to do that there. So I'm very much, we've got to leave early, got to be there on time, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. She is not. And I can be very annoying about these things. So you know the trick with kids in dividing a cookie where you let one of them cut it and the other one pick which piece? My thing is she gets to pick what time we leave for the airport. But we have to actually leave at that time.

So if you say 10 minutes after 9, fine. You pick the time, but be ready 10 minutes after 9. Not 11, not 12. That sets off my neuroses a lot worse if we actually leave on schedule. And this is an every Sunday going to church thing for us where we can start loading the kids up at a certain time. And as you know, loading our kids up is a circus. But also, it depends on the airport for me, too. So, you know, I used to live in Las Vegas.

And Vegas is a great place to live if you fly a lot because it's, super convenient airport, but also if you're a writer, just hanging out in the Las Vegas airport is just gold because there's, you know, humanity at both extremes. Really happy people hitting the slot machines, people coming back, broke, having just spent their, you know, life savings, and people who just got married who didn't know each other before they got to Vegas, landing in Las Vegas after 8 o'clock is always fun because no matter where you're flying in from, everybody's drunk and singing, and don't stop believing. And if you're the sole business traveler on that flight, you have to get used to that. You know, Palm Springs Airport is quite nice to hang out

at because the terminals are outside. So you can sit out in the sun. Tony Bono Airport, 10 out of 10. That's right. It is a good, good airport. And usually if you're in Palm Springs, that means something's been good in your life. You know, you're going on a vacation or something. You don't go to a lot of funerals in Palm Springs or like, although I did have to go there for a court hearing one time. That's a long story. And surely, they do have funerals there. I mean, it is a wonderful place, but not so It's not why most people go. It's not actually haven't. Fair enough.

People do die there, but they have their funerals in Los Angeles, right? No one gets buried out there. There's too much sand. You can't keep a corpse in the ground out there. It's hard to do. Got to drop them in concrete or something. So, but here's the thing. I've lost control of this podcast.

You will. That happened an hour ago, Jonah. If you're the person who follows the rules where they say, you know, do X, Y, and Z and show up three hours before boarding and all that stuff, you will spend a lot of your life feeling like a sucker, though. because no one else follows the rules. And the source of anarchy at airports is partly, you know, TSA incompetence and partly airport, you know, authorities, which are run by bad, incompetent, corrupt municipal governments. But mostly it's just the flyers, right? Most people only fly an average of once a year or less.

They discriminate entirely on price when they're buying their ticket, and they don't know where they're going when they get to the airport. And they don't know what to do. And they don't know, for example, that you should not play video. on your phone would the sound loud so that everyone else in the lounge can enjoy it? I've got my doubts about the death penalty, but not for that one. I'm full death penalty. It's a good thing that allow guns in airports. It's a real good thing that these things happen on the other side of security for the most part. Those people should definitely be hit with a cattle prod or something. But that's true of a lot of areas in life. If you're a very rule-following

person, a very rule-oriented person, you will often spend a lot of time feeling like a sucker when having to deal with the people who just refuse to comply with the rules. You couldn't follow them if they wrote them themselves. All right. So I feel a little bit like a sucker on here in terms of following the rules of this podcast. So thank you, Chris, thank you, Megan. Thank you, Kevin. Thank you for doing this.

And thank you listeners. And no need to mount your letter writing campaign about how I should not normally be in this role. I don't want to be in this role. And hopefully when Steve gets back from his Spanish wine tasting, whatever cheese curd stuffing thing that he's doing this week, um he'll be back in here or maybe mike warren will be but lord knows it won't be me so with that thanks everybody for listening and we'll uh see you next week thanks for listening have a thought or want to share a comment or question about what you heard today just email us at roundtable at the dispatch dot com

Calling all Book Lovers. The Toronto International Festival of Authors brings you a world of stories all in one place. Discover five days of readings, talks, workshops and more with over 100 authors from around the world, including Rachel Maddow, Ketouru Isaku and Kieran Desai. The Toronto International Festival of Authors, October 29th to November 2nd. Details and Tickets at Festival of Authors.ca.