The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 133. Trump vs. Europe: Flattery, Pushback, and Powerplays (Congressman Jim Himes)

Episode Date: May 11, 2025

Will Europe ever trust the US again? What is the future of the Democratic party? What does the signal chat leak tell us about the psychology of the Trump administration?  TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics  Twitter: @RestIsPolitics  Email: [e-mail] Social Producer: Harry Balden Assistant Producer: Alice Horrell Producer: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's the restispoletics.com. Welcome to the Restis Politics leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alastair Campbell. And I'm sitting here with Congressman Jim Hines in his home in Greenwich, Connecticut. And for the real aficionados of the podcast, this is a, a really interesting way into Congress, because we have had conversations recently with

Nancy Pelosi, with Richie Torres, with Rosa DeLauro, all of whom are your colleagues in the Democratic Party, in the House of Representatives. And just to introduce Congressman Himes for the broader audience, he has been the representative here in Greenwich, Connecticut, for almost 20 years, 17 years. Before that, he was, I mean, almost sort of central casting pin-up American. He was an oarsman at Harvard. He was a Rhodes Scholar. He went to work in finance. And then he was brought in by President Obama in 2008 to do something very unusual, which is to turn a seat which have been very traditionally Republican and make it into a Democratic seat. Can we start with that? Just tell us a little bit first about that political context, what kind of seat this was and what that tells us

about the way in which American politics has changed and your journey since 2008. Yeah, yeah, thank you, Rory, and thanks for having me. It really is a fascinating thing because it illustrates one of the elements of the transformation of American politics, so the migration of more blue-collar working-class people to the Republican Party. This is an affluent district on average. Now, it's a very diverse district as well. Yes, it's Greenwich and New Canaan and Darien, but we also have the largest city in Connecticut Bridgeport. So it's sometimes people think the streets are paved in gold, but it is nonetheless a very educated and affluent district, which for generations prior to 2008 when I won the seat, was Republican. And as we say here, Rockefeller Republican. And that meant this was emblematic of

the Republican Party when it was socially liberal, environmentally oriented, but pro-business. and maybe even go so far as to say anti-labor. This was a community where business leaders who might commute into New York would live. What has happened, of course, and this happened starting 20 plus years ago, as the Republican Party became more evangelically inclined, more socially conservative, more pro-extraction industries, and now deeply, deeply populist, the Rockefeller Country Club Republican of Fairfield County has maybe not become a Democrat, but is not voting. anymore. And as a result, I've now held the seat for some nine terms, eight and a half terms, and in the latter part of those, in the last six of those terms, really quite comfortably. The initial election on Obama's coattails in 2008 was very narrow. 2010 was very narrow. But now, along with the rest of New England, and in particular, more affluent communities in New England, it's become a deep blue seat. Can I ask you about, go back a bit further? You, Rory's introduction would suggest, well, you know,

this guy is clearly so impressive. Why can't he be? in the running to become one of the guys to come along and save the Democrat Party and become a president, but you will never be president, will you? Because you were born in Peru, and you grew up the first 10 years of your life in Latin America. Now, first of all, what do you think about that rule, which, as I recall, it was actually invented to stop a British king coming over and taking over? And secondly, what did you learn that has helped you in your political career about growing up somewhere very, very different. Yeah, well, first, and let's be super clear that this is a purely academic discussion of a constitutional question around who can be president. The fact is that I was born of North American parents in

Lima, Peru, so I was a citizen at birth. And if you were to ask Ted Cruz, who had a similar situation and was born in Canada and actually did run for president, I think the consensus is, though it's never been tested by the courts, that if you are an American citizen at birth, that qualifies you to run. Purely an academic observation there. But, you know, it's an interesting question, Alistair, that you ask. And by the way, there's all kinds of other reasons why I would not likely be the Democratic candidate for president that we can get into later. But the question you ask is a very interesting one, because in the late 60s, when I was growing up in Latin America, these were countries that were non-democratic, generally, that were subject to coups, that were subject to the government

muscling its way into media, muscling the academies, the universities and whatnot. You know, know, in some cases, going after private associations, which are one of the bulwarks against authoritarian government. So, you know, two things to say about that. When I moved to the United States at age 10, it was a remarkable breath of freedom. I mean, there just weren't National Guardsmen on the corner with assault rifles. And now I see some of the more chilling aspects of perhaps what you might have seen in the Latin America of the 1970s. It is quite striking, isn't it? That Latin America, which you knew very well and grew up in, was a kind of leader in populism, I guess.

I know we saw it, Bolsonaro in Brazil, but we saw it earlier too. And you get a sense that Donald Trump, to some extent, seems to have been learning some of the kind of populist lessons, economic populist, political populist, lessons from Latin America. I mean, does that seem right, that there are elements of what Trump's doing that feels a bit Latin American? Sure. In fact, there's a joke that goes around that's probably only funny to Latin Americanist. but we're here in 2025, and Argentina is libertarian in the United States is Peronist, right? I mean, how did this happen? I think it's probably giving Donald Trump a little too much credit to say that he studied

Peron or other populist movements of the Latin American and learned from them. It's not clear to me that Donald Trump learns from anything. What he does have, though, he's got a few points of genius, and one of those is to really understand the grievance. of people who feel like they have been left behind. And that's, of course, a key element of populism around the world. And he just feels that. And I have no psychoanalytical chops to offer. But, you know, people will tell you that he was always sort of the New York outsider who felt that he needed to try to aspire to high in New York culture and sort of never felt fully accepted. So here's a man who really understands grievance. And he speaks to and morphs the country, by the way. I mean, remember, it was only, uh, 2008 when Obama wins with an aspirational message of hope and change. And it's fascinating to look at American politics because many of those counties in places like Pennsylvania or Ohio or Wisconsin that voted for Obama in a significant way, this message of hope and aspiration and positive change, have now gone hard for Donald Trump. So it's, you know, not only does he play to grievance,

but he can summon grievance and people who otherwise might have been more amenable to a more optimistic message. Jim, we had spoke to Ezra Klein on the podcast recently, and he made the observation. He said you'd have to be historically illiterate not to be pretty scared right now about the direction that America was traveling in under Trump. Is that legitimate? Are you scared that America is on that authoritarian track that you saw in Latin America growing up? Well, there's a couple of reasons to be scared. One of the very depressing aspects of having a front row seat to the federal government right now is the dismantlement of things that were so important and are so important to the United States. Everything from the cutting edge medical research, shockingly innovative things. Most people will be familiar with that because of the development of MRNA vaccines during COVID.

Now, by the way, that is another element that is being dismantled because that was a joint venture in many cases between universities in the UK, companies, UK. U.S. But the dismantlement of our research and development, the dismantlement of our soft power, the elimination of USAID, we have no mechanism for the use of soft power around the world, the destruction of our relationship with our allies, the tradition, I mean, I could go on, but the tradition that the federal government doesn't put too heavy a hand on media outlets, on law firms, on universities. It's an interesting moment, right? Because finally, after the most powerful and wealthy law firms in the country have bent the knee to Donald Trump. Just yesterday, Harvard University said enough. And that is symbolically an interesting moment.

So, Alist, to answer your question, yes, it's a terribly scary and poignant moment. The question, of course, is how far does it go? And here, I'm a congenital optimist. So I do get into arguments with people who say, well, this is clearly Nuremberg in 1939. I don't think that's true. We have very strong institutions. Certain of those institutions actually are standing up, even if too many of them have caved to the president. But no, we're absolutely trending in an authoritarian direction and has been shocking the extent to which these institutions, whether it's, you know, Paul Weiss, Sullivan and Cromwell, or Columbia University have just crumbled in the face of this bullying. And what's very interesting, of course, is, well, the Harvard example will be

interesting to watch. Trump can be forced to retreat by things that he can't control. So the stock market forced him to radically alter, I think, his bizarre dream of universal tariffs. The courts, of course, are pushing back. And now Harvard, which I would argue is probably not the best position because this is an anti-elite moment in the United States. We'll see. When these institutions push back, President Trump often retreats. And that is a source of optimism for people who are concerned about this slide into authoritarianism. Can you sort of illustrate? Can you sort of illustrate a for international listeners, the other things that are going on. I mean, it's so difficult to keep track of, Voice of America, the Wilson Center, the Environmental Protection Agency. I mean, there seem to be

so many elements of federal institutions, civil society, funding mechanisms, national doubt for humanities, which are being dismantled. Can you try to illustrate and summarize some of what's going on here? Yeah, I mean, it really is the dismantlement of the federal government. even the Department of Defense, you know, this sort of macho testosterone driven ethic that would lead you to believe that the Department of Defense is immune from the attacks on Voice of America or the EPA or what have you. Not really. Not really. If you talk to soldiers and sailors and others, they'll tell you that they're very aware of the fact that the Secretary of Defense is sort of doing performance art, saying that the force under Joe Biden was not a lethal force. They know that's not true. And they know that the Secretary of Defense is really like the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, in a reality show. That's not a good change in values in the Pentagon. I mean, one of the things that was most disturbing about the Signal Gate issue, which, let's face it, it was a one-week story. It was absolutely absurd. Is the cultural message that is sent through the millions of people

who are in the Department of Defense that if you do something truly awful, absurd, dangerous even, so long as you're senior enough, if you simply bluster your way through it, there will be no accountability. And that's a terrifying thing inside an institution which handles nuclear weapons and drives aircraft carriers and flies planes. And so even the Department of Defense is, I think, being eroded from within by this administration. Just very quickly before I go to Alistair, you are the ranking member on the past representative's intelligence committee. And so you would have been reading this signals chat quite carefully. What did you pick up about the personalities of the key people around this table, what they were saying, what they weren't saying,

the way in which they were being briefed, the way they were interacting with each other. What did it tell you about the culture of Trump's administration? All you need to do is to read the text to see this. Why does Pete Hegseth tell Mike Walts and Tulsi Gabbard and the Secretary of State, you know, F-18's launching 0600? I mean, it's almost like a Navy recruiting ad. I mean, as you say those things, F-18s, MQ9, Reapers, assaulting target. You feel this rush of testosterone just articulating it. And that's what he's doing. That's what he's doing. I mean, it's just, it's almost like a 12-year-old boy, you know, living out a fantasy. Look, we have all sorts of secure methods of cabinet secretaries communicating information,

which is actually important. You know, it's not terribly important for the director of national intelligence to know precisely what weapons platforms are approaching Yemen at precisely what time. So that's a big part of it. Again, it's part of this reality show of just centering testosterone and aggression. You said there about the signal, though, that it was a one-week story. But is that not partly because the Democrats kind of gave up trying to make it anything else? Is that also a comment on the way that the opposition is not functioning at the moment as well? So that's another institution that's being eroded. Yeah.

Yeah. Having been at the center of the signal story, I'm not sure that it was ever going to be a long story, given that the executive, the president on down, just said nothing to see here. We're moving on. There's a limit to how much you can turn that into a long story. I would contrast that. And there's a lesson for the Democratic Party here, Alistair, because much to the chagrin of my activist, I keep saying that until very recently, with the imposition of tariffs, with the picture being painted about what Medicaid cuts will actually look like. Everything has been abstraction. When the president talks in the abstract about tariffs, it's very different than when the president imposes a set of tariffs that actually caused the stock market to decline 10%. So what I've been saying, again, much to the anger of my Democratic Party activists is that we are remarkably unpopular with the American people right now. We just got crushed in an election by an obviously unfit felon. And we don't have a ton of credibility with the American people right now. So what needs to happen to there's a lot of things that need to happen, but one of the things that need to happen is that America needs to get a very big bite of the dish that it ordered. And I hate to say that because it's going to cause a lot of pain, especially to people who are not in a position to bear that pain. But until Americans come to realize that the Medicaid cuts that the Republicans are talking about are going to close hospitals in rural areas, deep red rural areas, that they are going to force grandma out of the assisted living facility that she lives in.

The tariffs have wreaked havoc, right, already, until an auto dealer says to a guy who is purchasing an automobile, this car is $4,000 more expensive because of the tariffs, this is an academic conversation in which we're simply riling up the people who believe in us anyway. Look, I'm delighted that Bernie Sanders and AOC are running around the country, whipping up activists. But those activists are with us already. And what we haven't had the opportunity to do in any meaningful sense, although you start to see it shifting now, is to start. to bring democratic, skeptical people into the coalition. Just going through some of your political positions, though. I was thinking about this when I was preparing for the interview and just trying to get into your head as somebody who's there as a busy, idealistic, active politician wanting to change

America and the world for the better. You're pro-choice, your pro-unions, you're pro-a-to-state solution, you're pro-more gun controls, you're pro-Medicare, you're pro-the-humane treatment of immigrants, you're pro-congress having more power, including the power to say when Americans should be at war. You must feel right now absolutely powerless to the point of being crushed, seeing this guy every day come out with positions that are a complete anathema to what you believe. Yeah, no, I mean, no doubt about that. What's interesting, Alistair, about what you just said, I think the way you articulated those positions, positions, that's not democratic orthodoxy. Medicare and Social Security are the most popular

federal government programs in the country by a supermajority. So being pro-Medicare is hardly sort of an indicator of being a Democrat. I suspect that the same is true of the two-state solution. Now, we all understand that the two-state solution has suffered quite a blow in the last decade or so, certainly since October 7th. But, you know, pro-two-state solution. Pro-labor would be more complicated. that is a more traditional democratic point of view, although I would point out if you talk to Josh Holly or other Republican populace, they now are becoming pro-labor. So, and so what's the lesson of that, Alistair? I guess I might argue that what you're saying is that the Trump administration is actually very much at odds with majority opinion on a lot of, a lot of issues, not on

immigration, generally, certainly not on inflation. Remember, in my opinion, the number one reason Trump was elected was the discomfiture that people feel around inflation. And what has he done? He's taken a number of steps, which are almost certainly going to increase inflation. So that has interesting political consequences. Can I try to get something that puzzles me? So after 2016, the Democratic Party went into an enormous bouts of introspection. How can we let this guy win? And a lot of the key people around Biden's team wrote earnest papers on foreign policies for the classes and this kind of thing, and Biden comes in. And it seems on the surface as though he's learned quite a lot of lessons. And in particular, I suppose, one of the biggest things is

the Inflation Reduction Act, these huge investments in infrastructure, these huge investments in green technology, a chips act, all of which were about trying to address exactly the people in the Rust Belt who are feeling discomforted and who are voting for Trump. So why didn't that work? What's the story here? Why ultimately was the story? solution proposed not enough to win the election in 2024? I mean, I would set the stage for the answer by saying two things. Number one, this is, the presidential election is one on the margins. It was one on the margins. The popular vote victory that the president won was under two percent. So we're not talking about massive tectonic shifts here. And politics are often more visceral than anything else.

And this is, by the way, something that Democrats often fail to appreciate. There's still an instinct that if you would just understand my 14-point health care plan, certainly you would vote for me. And Trump is a master of the visceral appeal, this sense of grievance. I mean, this is the oldest story in American politics, right? You're unhappy, and here's the scapegoat and the reason why you're unhappy. But the self-reflection, first of all, it's an open question. And I think, to be fair, it's an open question in a world where incumbent parties all

over the world lost badly, whether it was a winnable election. Yes or no, we wildly mishandled people's economic angst. It was a typical democratic answer. It was academic and condescending. We said when people went to the supermarket to buy chicken and it was twice as expensive as it was two years ago, we said, oh, don't worry, it's transitory. You know, Latinate explanations rooted in economics. And, you know, again, politics is visceral. The question people ask in politics is, do you understand me, do you have my values? Do you understand my emotions? And not only did we completely blow that, you know, we became self-righteous around social issues. We became immensely annoying around things like pronouns and, and, you know, we opened the door to Donald Trump saying the ad that

had a real impact on the election. And this is, this is controversial stuff, but the ad that had the impact on the election was she is for they, them, he is for you. We opened the door to that by being annoying and priggish and self-righteous and wrong and unintelligible on the economic anxieties that so many Americans felt. You know, Jim, they opened the door, Trump opened the door to a sense of offending the constitution, supporting violent people who caused deaths in January the 6th and who tried to overthrow an election. And you were there. And those adverse, were pretty powerful as well. So what does it say about the American people that even something as profound as that and then backed now in power by pardoning these thugs, that that wasn't enough

to get over those kind of difficult dividing lines that you'd set for yourself? Yeah, that's a super interesting question. I mean, it's in the category of how did we lose, you know, the pardons of the, you know, people that assaulted 140 police officers on January 6th, that didn't come as a surprise. You know, Trump sort of advertised that he was going to do this. And it's hard for me to reflect on because I thought that we were a better people than that. But I think it's the lesson of millennia, which is that a demagogue can change people. A demagogue can say the 14th Amendment is an abstraction. Your chicken is too expensive because brown people from Mexico are stealing your Medicare. I mean, it's some message like that. And otherwise decent people. And again, things are on the margin. I'm not condemning 25% of the American population on the margin, particularly when the Democratic Party is completely failing to understand the emotions, particularly in places where we're not particularly present in rural areas, in, what we condescending call the rust belt,

Donald Trump can change people to make the preservation of democracy, which was central to our message, sort of an abstraction that on Maslow's hierarchy, compared to the price of chicken, and compared to this lovely university student who was murdered by an illegal alien, it allows for people to set aside those things that are core to our identity.

I think it's sort of interesting sort of dwelling on how this felt for you because I found in Britain very, very difficult processing the election of Boris Johnson, partly because obviously as a elected representative, you can invest an enormous amount of idealism and romance in your country. So I told myself a story. People would never vote for this guy. We're a very moderate country. This guy's obviously not suitable. So when it did happen, and when he then got a pretty good majority in election, I found myself beginning to doubt myself, doubt my judgment about country,

doubt my judgment about my values, doubt what I was standing for. I mean, have you ever felt any of this around Trump? Absolutely. Very much so. Again, if there's a emotionally crushed thing inside of me, it is that 85% of Americans don't reject obvious attacks on the rule of love.

that they don't reject obviously brutal things, like the fact that there is a, you know, man mistakenly jailed in a Kafka as president in El Salvador right now. The government's owned up to the fact that it was a mistake and they're chuckling about it. They're laughing about it. That's a level of indecency that assaults my idea of Americans as good and decent people. But again, it's this visceral thing. You will have known the Boris Johnson phenomenon much better than I did, but he was charming and optimist, charismatic. Everyone loved being in a room with him. And he hit on, I think, a political combination that I'm thinking a lot about how the Democratic Party adopts, because I think it is the answer, universally speaking, which is lefty economics, the whole leveling up thing.

I mean, how in God's name do the conservatives win in Manchester and Birmingham, where Margaret Thatcher is Satan, right? It's a left-wing economic message combined with a slightly righter-leaning, patriotic, cultural and social and national message. I mean, to me, that felt like the formula that allowed this incredibly charismatic guy to win a stomping victory. The one that really brought it home to me, though, just going back briefly to January of the 6th, they all stood up. These people who are now running the FBI, the national security, the Attorney General, Pan Bondi, stood up. and backed Trump pardoning these people. And there's Pam Bondi talking about the death penalty for somebody who damaged a Tesla. Now that says to me a moral compass that's gone so haywire that people are starting to think America is just not the country that they thought it was.

How does America get back to something? If, as you say, the public has kind of lost it with your party, how do you get it back? Yeah, Alistair, you're asking a profound question that I think is even upstream of our politics. We are in a pathological moment in the United States right now in a lot of ways. I sometimes joke that someday we'll be back in a world where the average American thinks about politics, the appropriate 15 minutes a week. Now it has sort of become the secular religion for people. You wake up in the morning, you scroll the Twitter feed, and until you go to bed, you're in this state of a heightened emotion. And another attribute of this secular religion is that we've lost all moral discernment. And when I say we, it's not everybody. And in fact, if you get out of the political arena and, you know, get off of, stop talking to people who, you know, are on X all day long, you know, there's a good common sense, pragmatic America out there. But the political dialogue has lost all of its moral discernment. So Signalgate, which, you know, could have put our pilots at risk. It didn't, thank God. But the answer to Signalgate is, you know,

is now the answer to every moral charge in our politics, which is, what about? So, well, the signal gate, but what about her emails? Or what about, and it just, it infuriates me because there is no crime so severe that it can't be justified by a moral argument that we don't accept from our four-year-old children, which is that what about what my little sister did last week? And yet, that excuses everything. And I really do worry, Alistair, here you get to some deeply seated fears. Again, there is a good, ethical, pragmatic America out there, but it is not hard to imagine a dissent into violence and a dissent into violence that is excused by a good chunk of the electorate. Case in point, healthcare CEO is murdered in cold blood on the streets of America and a bunch of

young people in particular not just justify it, but celebrate it. That is a sign of deep moral rot. that, you know, in addition to the secular religion of politics that we've adopted, the moral sensibility, the discernment has gone away. Okay, let's take a quick break and back for more a minute. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers. The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it begins. After years of work, Cancer Research UK scientists are launching a clinical trial of lung vax, the first vaccine designed to prevent lung cancer. It builds on TracerX, the world's largest cancer evolution study, which tracked lung cancer cells over many years to

uncover the disease's earliest warning signs. Lung Vax is designed to train the immune system to spot these signs early on, destroying 40 cells before cancer develops. So it's not treatment, but preventative, with the potential to stop lung cancer before it starts. The first stage of the trial starts this year, focusing on people at higher risk. It shows what long-term research makes possible. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash the rest is science. Hi, everybody, it's Dominic Samaruk here from The Rest is History.

Now, some of you may have heard me on your story. show, The Rest is Politics when Rory was away and I was filling in and enjoying Alistair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Restis History, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now, we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise. People are arguing about Europe, the government has got a few issues with the trade unions, and we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling

to come to terms with all of these issues, and people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we're looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Fatchel. obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and we'll be talking about one of the grimmest moments in Britain's

economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm David McCloskey, former CIA analyst turned spy novelist. And I'm Golden Carrera, National Security Journalist.

Together we're the hosts of another goalhanger show, the rest is classified, and we bring you brilliant stories from the world of spies. That's right, and this week we're talking about one of the most significant stories of the 21st century, Edward Snowden and how he orchestrated the biggest leak of classified secrets in modern American history. It was 2011 when Snowden shocked the world by revealing that the American government was bulk collecting data on its own citizens and even spying on our allies. And it's a story which really also gets to wider questions about what privacy means in the modern world, how technology has changed our lives and what the government and companies can do with data we might have thought was private. We will take you through the whole story from Snowden's early career in the CIA and the NSA to his life in exile in Russia. If this sounds good, we've left a clip at the end of the episode for you. Your own life and political career has seen you go from a moment I guess.

when you were at university, where there was still a belief in bipartisan procedures and the House representatives and the Senate, it's through a world that began to change quite rapidly so that even by the 1990s, people were beginning to talk about pretty extreme political polarization and the collapse of these bipartisan procedures.

And of course, on the surface, you seem like a pretty reasonable, centrist, bipartisan potential kind of. Tell us about this cultural shift And what she thinks actually happened in Congress over the last 20, 30 years? Yeah, first of all, I think it's overblown. We are a terribly polarized nation. But in terms of actual policy, the notion that we swing from one radical extreme to another is just not accurate, right?

So in my own career, let's look at that moment in time in 2009 when the Democrats owned the House, the Senate, and the presidency. And not only the Senate, but they had 60 votes in the Senate. did we implement an NHS-like policy, nationalization of the health care system? No, we didn't even do single-payer health care, which was hardly radical. I mean, you know, hardly radical at all. We put in place this sort of Rube Goldberg Affordable Care Act, Obama care thing. Did we nationalize the banks after the banks obliterated $18 trillion of household? No, we didn't. In fact, we, you know, bailed them out. And, you know, on the other side, a lot of the extremism, of course, is the rhetoric coming out of the Trump White House. But on the other side, if you look at the signature achievement in Trump's first

term, it was a series of tax cuts that were somewhat radical, but not catastrophically so. You know, the corporate tax rate went from 35% to 21% or whatever it did. And in fact, the men negotiated renegotiated NAFTA and got the Abraham Accords done. So I always object to the notion that there is no bipartisanship and that America swings from a policy standpoint from one extreme to a another. That's just not what's happening. And inside the Congress, by the way, right now, I would tell you, the Republicans, very interesting conference right now, because half of them are appalled, absolutely appalled. I mean, these are Wall Street Journal Republicans who like immigration, who hate state conduct of the economy, industrial policy, but they are so scared of Donald Trump ending them that they have to behave themselves.

So it's actually a much more interesting and complicated group of people than you might otherwise think. Jim, part of your history and expertise, as you always said, is in the intelligence world. And you know how the whole Five Eyes system works where you and us and Australia and Canada and New Zealand work very, very closely together. And yet you've been one of the few voices that has really been clear that Tulsi Gubbard as head of national security. I think you wrote to her about the sacking of this guy, General Tim Haw, on the back of a meeting that Trump had with this kind of far-right online conspiracy theorist. And I mean, if you were a Brit right now, are these people trustworthy when it comes to the sort of intelligence arrangements that have built up over years? Yeah, yeah. It's a fascinating question.

You know, the partnership between the U.S. and the U.K. is so important. And, you know, the United States provides the U.K. and our Five Eyes partners with intelligence that can't be gotten anywhere else. I'm not chest pounding there. You know, I actually happen to think that the Brits are probably, generally speaking, per pound, better at Humant than we are. But SIGAN capabilities are unique. And, of course, everybody treads very carefully. So at no point, you know, is Sir Richard Moore going to say, well, we're dialing back our sharing of intelligence because that would obviously be catastrophic. He's the head of MI6, yeah. Exactly, yeah. And so it's all very polite and careful. But there's no question in my mind that, you know, whether it's Tulsi Gabbard, look, the president himself has

shared classified information on social media platforms in his first term and is loose with the way he talks about it. And, you know, there was this whole thing about how there may have been intelligence shared in the signal chat. So, no, I mean, look, our Five Eyes partners are human beings. Of course, they're going to be more cautious with Tulsi Gabbard's DNI than they were with Avril Haines, you know, lawyer and punctilious and everything else. Did you get a reply to her letter about the sacking? Not yet. Not yet. On this question of European allies, one of the things that I think has been so difficult for people to understand. is how Trump has taken 80 years of developing these relationships with European allies,

which has included, you know, in our career, certainly for Alastair and me, enormous American charm, generosity, work in making allies feel that they're valued, which meant that the only time Article 5 has been invoked, it was about 9-11. And to be honest, European countries, when they said attack on one is attack on the war, didn't mean it literally, right? It wasn't that most of them felt that they were an existential threat in Europe. They came to Afghanistan to support the United States, and they came to Afghanistan to support the United States because the U.S. had been the lynchpin of international security, and it created the World Bank and the IMF and blah, blah, blah, blah, right? It now feels as though he's shattering all of that, that he literally, he, Vance, others, you look at that, Sigmacin-Chet, totally despise Europe, have no idea at all that these alliances matter. which presumably makes a complete nonsense of, you know, what's he trying to do with China?

If he's alienating his European allies, how's he going to get a strategy together? So here's why I tread into dangerous territory of trying to analyze the man. But I think he's very unusual in the sense that his whole being, every thought he has, is about power relationships. I think the idea that anything could be not a zero-sum game is completely foreign to him. And I think that probably extends to his relationships inside his family. Certainly the way he thinks about Europe. Trade, you know, trade is inherently a non-zero-sum game thing or it doesn't happen, but he can't understand that.

He sees trade as the payment of tribute in one direction or the other. And I don't know how he might explain the fact that our allies rallied to our side after September 11th. My guess is he doesn't think too much about it or he's got some conspiracy theory about how it was really about trying to get it, Afghan minerals or something. So everything in his mind is a power play. And it is critical that he always be on top of that power play, which is why, by the way, I'll say this to some British friends, which is why there are these elements of Europe that sort of make him swoon, the royal family. I think at some level he understands that this is a thousand-year-old institution that even if it's a little quaint now, you know, it commanded the seas and the sun never set and all that. I think at some

level he understands that. And that's why he's sort of cowed, I think, by the monarch and the monarchy. It's why he was always a bit cowed by Nancy Pelosi, because I think he understood that that woman had very real power. It's why he stands in Paris, a town that I think he otherwise would despise and loves it and will never forget the military parade because tanks and planes, it's all about power for him. And let's also face it, last point here in my, you know, always trying to be a bit optimistic. You know, he also looks at the fact that, in fact, the NATO relationship for a long time was one in which the U.S. probably overspent on its military at a time when, you know, our NATO allies were underspending, and that just sticks in his craw.

What would you advise to Akir Stahmer and Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Meertz, coming in as Chancellor in Germany? What would you advise the European leaders in terms of their overall strategy, but also in terms of how they deal with him as a human being? I think two things, and really no one should take my advice on it, you know, if you can get Navarro to come speak to you. But I think two things. Number one, look, flattery is everything with him. Every other sentence he says, he's evaluating, you know, like, oh, that was a very, that was a beautiful thing to say about me or that was he was, that was a nasty woman. So flattery is everything. And by the way, this worries me right now about the potential for a war in Iran because I think that the prime minister of Israel probably has his number and will achieve. one of his long-held objectives through flattery. But flattery combined with, again, remember that power relationship. If Macron or Starmor is having a conversation with Donald Trump, flattery, flattery, flattery, but then there is a moment in which there is a bullying statement, I would say, you need to push back on the bullying in a polite and flattering way, but, you know, no, Mr. President, you know, if he doesn't

sense that resistance, he will just keep pushing. You're a wonderful optimist. So how on the most optimistic scenario. Let's say the Democrats come in again, we get a democratic president. How do you rebuild Europe's trust in the United States? Just to illustrate, you know, one small thing. When I was chairman of the Defense Committee, we talked seriously about basically dismantling British defense production, buying all our kit from the U.S. because it was cheaper, turning ourselves into a version of the Marine Corps and just attaching ourselves the American military. And literally nobody, 2015, said one of the risks of that is the United States. could cease to be a reliable ally.

The only reason we didn't do it is we were worried about jobs or people in the Navy were throwing their way around. Once that's broken, once 80 years a trust is broken, once people begin to think, wait a sec, this is a country that could try to take Greenland from us, that we might actually need to have doctrine in NATO defending ourselves in the United States. We can no longer rely on American intelligence,

American defense equipment, because we just had a president who's threatened to turn it off. How do you turn that around? round. So I think the story, again, and maybe I'm being over optimistic, the story begins where we are today, which is that the president's approval ratings continue to go downward. Again, remember that auto dealer who explains why the car is $4,000 more expensive. In the next four weeks, the Republicans will be telling America what it means to cut 25% of Medicaid. All of these things are going to create political heat for a Republican. So you're going to start to see cracks form. So then,

here's the story, in 2026. And by the way, if we can't do this, take the majority in the House, you know, I'm giving up because if we can't, under these conditions, if the Democratic Party can't reassert itself, I'm going to go do something else. You know, a Democratic House now serves as a legitimate check and a balance. We've got subpoena power. You know, we open, you know, dialogues that don't exist today with our allies. And there is some set of political circumstances that mean that for a period of five, it takes us five or six years to get out of this isolationist moment back to a more internationalist view. In the meantime, one thing has happened that is good, and another thing hasn't happened. The thing that has happened that is good is that Europe has sorted out its defense

and come up with a defense industrial base that makes sense for Europe that is hopefully collaborative amongst the NATO countries. I think that's a good thing, not a bad thing. It will be very independent of U.S. defense capability. I mean, if a U.S. defense manufacturer, it's not great use, because increasingly the pressure will. will be sovereign and dependent. We don't want to depend on American kid anymore. Yeah, but that's okay. I mean, I always want there to be a partnership. And I always want, you know, us to use the same gauge of ammunition and that sort of thing. But I actually think it's very healthy for Europe to be less dependent on the U.S. for its security. And in particular

defense manufacturers. So I don't think that's a bad thing. The thing I was going to say that doesn't happen is in this weird moment, whether it's two, three, or four or five years in which I do think we'll reestablish our traditional relationship with the Europeans. Different, though, it may be Russia does not invade. I mean, I just, you know, in Washington, it's a cottage industry saying, well, you know, what happens when they move into Finland? They are not going to do that. They can't move two miles in Ukraine right now.

And so I worry about, especially if Russia comes out of the Ukraine conflict, having won something, I really don't worry about the next two, three, four years. I worry about five or six years when Russia. has had an opportunity to rearm, to learn from its mistakes in Ukraine. So again, maybe I'm being over-optimistic, but I think that more independence in the European defense space is actually a very good thing. Is that not a very optimistic view of the current sort of state of affairs regarding Russia? And surely right now, Putin, even though, as you say, has got economic challenges, military challenges, but he kind of does feel that with Trump in the place,

that he seems to be in. Yet again, blaming Zelensky for the war, yet again pointing the finger at anybody apart from Putin for terrible things that are happening. Putin must be thinking that he just has to sit tight and eventually in his mind he thinks he can take Ukraine. If he takes Ukraine, then these small, you know, the Baltic countries, Moldova, they're easy. I'm surprised you think that that's not a realistic possibility. It's hard to understand the political practice. on Vladimir Putin. And I think it's a mistake to say that there aren't. You can't wipe out 150,000 of your own citizens, though they may come from the provinces and not from St. Petersburg and Moscow, and not face some political upwelling. And in Russia, famously over the centuries,

those political upwellings have come brutally, unexpectedly and violently. So my guess is that he probably feels a bit more constrained than we can appreciate in the West. He's in no position. again, militarily speaking, to move on a NATO ally. It would be insane and suicidal to do that soon. And I do think he certainly understands that Trump has a bizarre affinity for him, as he does for many strong men. But I also think he sees Trump as very unpredictable. And Trump is unpredictable. And so, you know, it was all of what, five days that intelligence sharing and arms were cut off to Ukraine. Had that been permanent, I might be, I might think differently, but he's unpredictable. And I think that probably serves as a check on Putin's thinking.

You're going to win this next election partly on your ability to convince Americans that you're going to be able to produce decent jobs going forward. And a couple of things. Firstly, what went wrong with Biden's economic package? And secondly, what economic vision can you provide and how would you hedge against the risks from AI? Yeah, I felt this very personally. So I can't tell you the number of celebrations and ribbon cuttings and, you know, earth-moving ceremonies I went to to celebrate the bipartisan infrastructure law and the IRA, the biggest investment ever in climate change. You know how many electric charging stations we built in the state of Connecticut now five years after the passage of the IRA? Zero.

Zero. We built nothing. We paved a bunch of roads. Inflation took the biggest investment in our infrastructure in a generation. And the end result because of inflation was that we ended up building less after the bipartisan infrastructure law was passed than we were building pre-COVID. And we talked briefly about this. This is a transformation that is happening and needs to happen inside the Democratic Party

in particular. I know you talked to Ezra Klein. This is this abundance theory. And it has political reverberations for the left, which is our whole premise is that we can, through government action, make your life better. We can build that bridge. we can build out the rural broadband. And guess what? We don't and we didn't. And America felt that. And so we will either figure out how to deliver on the infrastructure that allows for jobs. I object to the notion that government creates jobs. I know that we say it, but it doesn't, right? We put in place the infrastructure, the networks, the training that allows for the private sector to create jobs. And we didn't do that. And I think at some visceral level, Americans felt that. So, There's a very exciting movement now that Ezra Klein is one of the sort of intellectual godfathers of how do we get back to a world where we can actually build things in this country.

AI, my gosh, here's where my optimism runs out. I really am, as you've since now, a temperamental optimist. And I've always been a tech optimist in the sense that, and by the way, easy to say from Connecticut as opposed to Youngstown, Ohio. But changes in technology have historically created more jobs than they have ended. That's been true for centuries. AI seems to me to be different in two respects. Number one, it's not going after the manual labor jobs. It's accountants and radiologists and lawyers. And let's remember, revolutions are led by lawyers and doctors, right? And so I'm very, very concerned about that. And just it's pervasiveness,

right? This isn't, you know, putting automation into silk mills anymore. It's everything. And we don't know how to deal with that. So you've got these forward thinkers talking about things. like universal basic income. And, you know, okay, maybe in theory that makes sense. But, you know, a job is much, much more than a paycheck to people. It's status. It's a sense of meaning, a sense of belonging to a community. And there's a very real risk that AI completely upends all of that. How's that for pessimism? Yeah, well, I'm going to get you back on the optimistic side by asking you this. We've talked a lot about the character of Trump and particularly in your policies, I think,

but in everybody's politics, but particularly I think in yours, the individual who is on the ballot to lead the country is so fundamental. So all the debates we're having now about the future of the Democratic Party, yeah, they're important. But ultimately, you've got to find the person. Now, you've ruled yourself out, partly by being born in the wrong part of the world, but also by the other stuff you said. So is there anybody that we maybe don't know that we should be thinking about looking out for,

Are there people coming up that you think, with all your political experience, do you know what? That might be the guy. She might be the woman who can do this. So, again, let's go back to something that I feel, and this goes back to Boris Johnson and the conservative win. And it's Joe Biden as a person, which is left-leaning economics, centrist to right-leaning culture, religion, patriotism. The name that jumps off the page there is Governor Andy Bashir of Kentucky, who not only gets elected, but gets elected in a deep red state. And I'm not saying that he should be the candidate, but somebody like that, who is also relatable and authentic. There are any number of other governors, a couple of other governors that fall into that category. I think it's going to be hard for legislators to be in the mix right now because there is this sense in the Democratic Party of business as usual is not going to cut it. So, I think there's likely to be a lot of disappointed Democratic senators who find that they lose out to a governor who is less associated with the uncomfortable status quo. The other thing I would say is let me make that statement.

And let's think about this with some humility because transformative Democratic candidates have often come out of, sort of come out of nowhere. I'm thinking of Bill Clinton in the 90s and Barack Obama. Now, Barack Obama was on people's radar screens, but it's also possible that we don't even know who the candidate is. is going to be at this point three years out. Final one from me, and it's pushing back against your optimism, but tell us a little bit about what you've learned about being a politician in the age of social media

and not just the upsides and the wonderful stuff that you'll communicate with your voters, but some of the negative sides that you can be more honest about and some of the stress and some of the pressure of being a contemporary politician. I think it's a version of why it must be brutal to be a teenager today because our predecessors in politics at the end of the day would go home

and they would get no feedback until they opened the paper the following morning. All of us, we're in this business for a reason, right? We need constant feedback. And of course, now we have the tool to provide it. So I can be lying flat on my back in bed at 1230 in the morning, scrolling what some idiot in Cleveland, Ohio thinks of what I had to say about Tulsi Gabbard. And there are very few politicians who are disciplined enough to not at some level absorb that. Again, I think, can you imagine what it's like to be 14 years old today where, you know, just every moment of every day is consumed with the, you know, pecking order and this sort of thing. That, that makes it very, very hard. It also takes away our ability to focus.

I feel this myself. I wish I didn't have to be on social media, but I do, given the job that I do. You don't, you don't, you don't, you don't. Really? You don't. You need to use it, but don't be on it so much. No, you're absolutely right about that, which takes me back to the constant need for affirmation that anybody who gets into this business does. You're right.

And by the way, here's an interesting little anecdote. My staff runs Facebook and Instagram. I do my own Twitter or X or whatever. And by the way, it's become just an absolute cesspool. So I have to get away from it. But it is a vehicle for authenticity. So when I put up a tweet that says, I'm celebrating the return of the astronauts from whatever it is, it is utterly uninteresting. But, you know, I happen to be a beekeeper.

When I put up something about how I've just drawn honey out of my bee, oh my God, the world goes bananas. So it is a scalable opportunity for authenticity. You're probably right, Alistair. I should probably receive a lot less, but we do need to transmit. Yeah, have receipt analysts doing the job for you. Just don't look at it. It's pointless. Thank you very much.

You mean very generous. Thank you so much for very generously having us in your home. It's been a real privilege. And I think it's a real privilege for us to be able to get so close to somebody able to be so frank about the business of politics. Thank you. Well, thank you. Real pleasure to be with you both. Great to see you again, Jim.

Take care. He seems a very nice man. He lets him to his house. He leaves the room so that we could talk about him behind his back. He's a very nice chap. And very kindly he had me to stay last night with Shoshana. I had a kind of fascinating evening with him. I think we're also getting, for people who aren't American,

an amazing cross-section of the House of Representatives, having had Nancy Pelosi, Rosa Deloro, Richie Torres, Jim Hines. I mean, they couldn't be more different people. Rose, absolute classic, traditional, street progressive, right next door to Jim, who I guess is picking up all these kind of Rockefeller conservatives, kind of Goldman Sachs workers who are coming up at the Democratic Party, Richie Torres, didn't go to university, African American, very surprisingly, very firmly pro-Israel and a pro-Palestinian constituency, Nancy Pelosi, machine politician.

What sense are you getting, if you, put those four that we've interviewed together about the Democrats in the House? Well, I think the first thing to say is they're all Democrats, and it's probably good that we do have Kevin McCarthy coming up sometime soon, and we've also got Steve Bannon constantly promising that he's coming on. They are very different, and I'll tell you something I was really interested in that he said, and I don't know how many of his colleagues listened to our podcast, but some of them will have been a bit taken aback when he said, I think that if you're a the senator or a congressman or a congresswoman, you're going to struggle to get on the ticket.

So, friend, we talked about Andy Bashir, didn't we? When we were talking about who the running mate for Kamala Harris might be, it's interesting what he said about this idea of, you know, left economically, centre-right, right, right, on social, cultural things. I think that feels right. However, I just wonder if the scale of change that's needed means actually a, a change of approach in what sort of candidate you need as well. I don't know, but he's a bright guy, very bright guy, I'm very frank as well about his own party's failings. Yeah, he's also, I think,

isn't shining a light on another issue that is clearly going on and that I hear a lot from congressman off the record, which is the unbelievable divisions within the Democratic Party. So hidden within it is the sense that, you know, you're not going to be able to become a senator from Massachusetts unless you endorse quite a left-wing position. There's going to be this whole conversation about we should be moving more towards Joe Biden. Well, that doesn't sound so great if you're more on the AOC side of things. Him blaming the woke agenda, you know, makes sense to you and me and many pollsters because it's about going to the center, but there will be many people in the Democratic Party who will find that very difficult to hear,

particularly colleagues in Congress and other divisions. You know, Rosa Deloiro, who I like so much, who's another Connecticut Congressman, his neighbor, has just come out in favor of tariffs because she's on the kind of left-wing protectionist side of this when he is on. So all that stuff, I think, you know, is beneath the surface. The other thing I guess that I'm less optimistic than him, I find it very difficult to believe that you can rebuild trust and special relationship, trust in the US, however charming the next president is. I mean, at one point he was almost saying, well, where we are right now in the cycle, with Trump in there, so noisy, so dominant, there's not much that we can do. We've kind of got

to wait for the midterms. Now, you do kind of feel that the midterms are sort of a bit last chance saloon for all sorts of things, for the Democrat Party, for the democracy. That spoke to something we've discussed with all of these Democrat politicians and with Ezra Klein and with others like Michael Lewis and what have you, with Moises Naim, with Michael Wolfe. Is this, how do you get the analysis right about what's gone wrong so that you can build something for the future? And I think Ezra Klein misunderstood what I was saying about that. I wasn't saying kind of dig into that. But unless you work out, and I think Jim's on to a lot. all the things that went wrong.

But unless you really have an agreed sense of that, I think it's going to be very, very difficult to rebuild. And look, I agree with that. I think it's great that Bernie and AOC are getting these massive crowds. But when you see them on the stump, they're pretty much saying the same things as they were saying at the election or they were saying the same things that Bernie Sanders was saying to us when we interviewed it.

Got to find a message that adapts to the changes that are happening. Yeah. And Nancy Pelosi seems to be. convincing people that it's dangerous to have policies at the moment, that if the Democrats announce policies, they'll just be shot down and that what they need to do is wait for Trump to immolate himself and taken in the midterms. That's James Carville's view as well. I saw James Carville a couple of weeks ago, and that was his view. You know, there's no point at the moment. Just sit back. Well, maybe, maybe. Okay,

Alison, well, thank you for your time, and I thought that was great. Not at all. Love to see you. See you soon. Bye-bye. I'm David McCloskey, former CIA analyst, turned spy novelist. And I'm Gordon Carrera, National Security Journalist. Together were the hosts of another goalhanger show. The rest is classified, and we bring you brilliant stories from the world of spies. Here is that clip we mentioned earlier on. June 5th, 2013, this first article drops, and it's a massive one.

It is a massive one. The world doesn't yet know that the source for this article is Edward Snowden. All they get is this remarkable story. And I mean, I remember it dropping and thinking, where has this come from? It just felt so kind of unusual as a story. We should explain what it was and why it's so significant. It's a court order to the company Verizon that demands it hands over the details of every phone call in America. And what it was after was what's called the metadata, not the content of the calls. So it's basically saying these two phones connected at this time for so

long, not necessarily what was said in that phone call. But it allows the idea for the NSA and then the FBI to kind of carry out searches on it to look for terrorists or other suspects. The point being, though, that this looks like domestic surveillance by the NSA. And that was stunning, partly because the US Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, just a few months before had been asked in Congress by a senator, almost a question which suggests that the senator knew about this program, because the senator said, does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans, and Clapper's reply was, no. There is a tremendous gap between the understanding of this program, I think, inside

sort of the upper reaches of Congress and the intelligence community in the White House and what the American people think is happening. And that's where this article is such a bombshell, because Americans, prior to this, ordinary people, did not have an understanding that any of this was authorized. Exactly. I think what's interesting, if it had just been that one story, it would have been big, But actually, it's really an American story. It's about the kind of American Constitution and legal protections.

But, and I think you can imagine U.S. officials going, okay, well, you know, that's bad. But then the Guardian tells U.S. officials who they're in contact with that they've got another story coming down the line. And I think that's important because it makes clear that it's not just a single document that's been leaked. But there's more, and it's coming from what looks like inside the NSA. So the next day, there's a little race, but the Guardian publishes a story on something called Prism. Now, this is another biggie in terms of a reveal. And I think for a lot of people, this is perhaps, particularly around the world, this is a more famous one.

This is about the content of emails and communications, which are coming from big US tech firms. So this is about basically the idea that the NSA had access directly to companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple, to things like Gmail, outlook, photos, all the data that people ascending around the world. This is in some ways a more stunning revelation because everyone around the world uses American tech companies. Those were basically the only companies you used for email and for everything else. And suddenly this program is being revealed saying the NSA appears to have access to it and is able to target and get particular accounts and details of it.

But if you go back to that time, I mean, if you then talk to people now, about what it was like in GCHQ, you know, Britain's intelligence agency. I mean, there is blind panic. Ian Lobben, who was then a director later said, when I heard the news, I lay a wait saying to myself, I hope this isn't a Brit. Because, you know, they've realized they've got a leak. Some of it looks like it relates to Britain. He's reported to have gone around colleagues asking, is anyone in your teams at GCHQ taking a, you know, a long holiday? And I think meanwhile, in NSA as well, there's this kind of desperate panic as they realize their secrets are being unfurled. But what's interesting is that they're kind of narrowing it down and they're certainly

kind of heading towards Snowden if they don't know it already at this point. Typically, someone who'd done this would keep themselves secret. But luckily, he's a massive narcissist with a massive ego. And if you want to hear the full episode, listen to The Rest is classified wherever you get your podcasts.