A (2:21)

Hi, John.

B (2:22)

We don't know what to talk about, which is why I'm vamping. We could have a whole session on whether or not the firing of a CDC director after a couple of weeks in office and then walk out of senior officials at the CDC is worth believing that the country is falling apart and that we're, you know, marching headlong into, you know, crystal knocked. I think officials quitting administrations that have policies that they don't agree with is a historical fact. We don't do it enough in the United States. In fact, people in Britain do it all the time, and other parliamentary democracies do it all the time. And here people, like, cling to their fingernails to jobs and things like that.

A (3:09)

She was not in the job that long. She was appointed by.

B (3:12)

She was fired. She was fired. But there is this group of five people, senior officials, who have left. And as I say, like, that's good. I actually think that that's how our system should work, that people, when they say, I, I cannot support the policies of the administration that I serve, should leave and go find another job. If, if we want to have conversations, which I'm happy to have, about the policies of the administration that they are leaving that they don't support, then that's a secondary matter. But the fact that people are leaving when an admittedly radical regime is now in place at the Department of Health and Human Services, that is upending the consensus of the institution of the Centers for Disease Control and the things that it believes that's sort of as it should be. There's probably less of that in the science areas of government where it's assumed that that's all. They don't have politics and they're just, you know, using data and, you know, using and counting things. And they were saying they have test tubes and they're made. They're putting in, you know, they're. They're litmus tests with test tubes. And. And so you can't possibly imagine that they would have any political problems with anything. But as Matt said the other day, obviously the CDC was an epicenter of the. The political excesses of the COVID era, in which it assumed authority and powers over things that it had no business even remotely assuming authority and powers over, like evictions and the actual rent paid by people in the United States.

A (4:59)

Run, we should add, I would say, if you want to hear more in depth, particularly about the COVID years, about what the CD was CDC was doing, not just in wading into the political aspects, but into not acknowledging how it didn't. What it didn't know and why it didn't know what was going on to the public and even to government officials who were trying to set policies, particularly with masking and social distancing. David Zweig's book, An Abundance of Caution dives deeply into some of the back and forth that the CDC heads of the CDC had with the first Trump administration and then with Biden and they're getting in bed with teachers unions when it came to setting restrictions for schools. I mean, the whole thing is really fascinating because I still have some sympathy for public health officials who tried to resist any sort of political decision making. But it became impossible when the pandemic itself became politicized, namely when Donald Trump said let's get kids back in schools and get a vaccine, suddenly, boom. Everyone who worked in the CDC who was not a pro Trumper found themselves a member of the resistance. So it's worth, Zweig's book is worth reading.

E (6:03)

I mean, there is this whole element of, of criticism of Trump overhauling agencies and things where the media and the left establishment, of course, but generally there's this idea that he's now politicizing things that weren't politicized before, and that's just not true. I mean, that's not, you know, that's a sort of across the board framing that people like to use against him. But that's not true. He's changing the political coloration of places where there have long been politics.

B (6:45)

Right. Well, look, in the New York Times, the former director of the CDC center for HIV and Sexually Transmitted Infections. This is the problem with, as I say, this attitude toward the permanent bureaucracy that is involved in, in public health. He said, seeing these walkouts he described as thus. These colleagues are the X men of public health. Courageous, thoughtful and dedicated to using the best research and policies to answer life saving questions. So he's been on administrative leave since April. This is Dr. Jonathan Merman. The X Men don't exist. The X Men, they're also mutants about.

A (7:29)

What you want in public health.

B (7:30)

But anyway, but they're, they're, they're comic book characters. And this, this thing that happens where we, where people are elevated, they're, they're public employees. They make a pretty good living. They probably could make a slightly better living if they went to work for Big Pharma or if they, you know, like, I don't know, whatever. But they actually, as we know from Fauci and others, like if you stay in that bureaucracy for decades, you make three, $400,000 a year. I mean, you can, it's your, your, so the totals inch up. So they make a good living and maybe they do a good job and maybe they don't do a good job. How do I know? Mo half the people in the world do it are, are mediocre at what they do. I don't think that there's a lot of competition for these positions. Like once you're in, you're in. And, and, and comparing them if they leave because they don't like what's happening to superhero cartoon comic book characters is an example of why they lost, they lost all sense of control over themselves when they had, when the power was suddenly placed in their hands to do extra constitutional things because we were in an emergency. And if this is the kind of general attitude at these institutions toward the people who are running them or who are in senior positions, they need to be taken down a peg. This is not how public officials in the United States are supposed to think of themselves. As we're superheroes and so therefore we are beyond your reach and we are beyond, you can't question us because we have powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. And as we know Anthony Fauci, the ultimate of the ultimate. One of these officials was saying things during the COVID period like well, maybe I will require 90% compliance with the, with a shot. You know, I need 90% of people to get the shot before I'll say that the emergency is over. Having said it was 75% or having, well, I'll say herd immunity is at 82% or 85%. It was like, oh, so there is no number. So you're just making it up out of your own head. And every decision you make has colossal real world consequences for how people live their live their lives on a day to day basis in a way that was never true in the United States ever before. And you just because you're on covers of magazines and people are selling bobblehead dolls of you, you think that you are beyond criticism or beyond the reach of, of you know, sort of public opprobrium. And that simply is not true.

A (10:07)

I wonder how much of this is a sort of hangover effect from the we are the heroes sa a temperament that did dominate a lot of people in public health during the pandemic. But there's another thread here too, which is that public health in general is a sort of left of center field because they are, you know, they're looking at communities, identity, identity politics has thoroughly infused public health for decades. And so the people coming out of that field and starting careers already probably are more left of center than middle of the road in a way that's their training encourages them to be because it's far different approaches that they're taking than, say, someone who's just a straightforward biology student or a medical professional in other ways. So I do think the hangover effect of COVID is hitting some of these people a little late. But the problem is, I think that, again, I said this the other day, but the Trump administration is not making clear itself stance on why it is cleaning house in this way. At least with Doge, you had Elon Musk standing on a stage with a chainsaw going, tear it all down. It's unclear to me whether they have given this amount of power to RFK Jr. As the Secretary, saying, you do what you clean house however you see fit. If that's the case, then we should be very concerned. And the more people who speak up about this, as the recently fired director of the CDC did, she said, I told them I would take this job under two conditions. I will not do anything illegal and I will not endorse anything that's clearly unscientific. And obviously one of those things happened if she's, you know, being forced out. And it does, I think more, there's more to that story in terms of why she ended up getting forced out. So I, I will continue to criticize the Trump administration for not seeming to have any focus at all in terms of communicating what it's trying to do at the CDC or at Health and Human Services in general.

D (11:58)

Well, that's the thing that the communication. Right. I mean, the problem they're running into is that the guy making these choices is RFK Jr and not, you know, they. The Trump administration has hired, you know, what we might call Covid dissidents, but, you know, scientists, people with, you know, pedigree and people with, you know, years and years of experience under their belt and, you know, at prominent institutions and all that. There are such people who are critical of the COVID protocols who are in the administration today. But the guy running HHS is the guy who says, you know, I, you know, don't eat Froot Loops and whatever. And, but it's also that he doesn't try to explain anything. He just, they quit and say Kennedy, Secretary Kennedy was undermining vaccines. And RFK treats this like a purely, not just political, but a campaign issue, which is he knows that his supporters, his base, so to speak, which he shouldn't have as a secretary of, you know, as a cabinet secretary, but does his base, so to speak, they don't need an explanation from him because people leaving the government saying RFK was undermining vaccinations, these are the people who are hearing what they want to hear. They're happy, they hear that, and they go, he must be doing something good. Right? And people who are, who are on his side about the. Into the extent of the vaccine criticism, not, you know, whether we should require a COVID vaccine, but, you know, whether, you know, autism comes from, you know, regular, you know, scheduled vaccines and stuff like that and booster shots. These people don't need to hear from him, and he knows that. And so they don't. And so there's no argument from him. He just lets people walk out saying he was undermining vaccines, and everybody interprets it the way that they are primed to interpret it.

E (14:07)

Also, can I say this is, I think, an issue that we're not really going to hear much from Trump on, because I think Trump thinks it's all nonsense. I mean, Trump. Trump was behind warp speed. Trump eats junk food all, you know, day and night. Like, he's not. He's not at all Maha, you know, so he can't be, in this case, the spokesperson. It would be ridiculous, you know, with his, you know, McDonald's sitting in front of him.

D (14:36)

Right there was that picture. Didn't they try to get RFK in that picture to take a bite of a Big Mac or something?

B (14:43)

Yeah, yeah.

D (14:44)

It looked like a frat. Frat initiation.

B (14:47)

I don't think the problem is communications. I think it's perfectly clear that RFK is as radical a figure running a major American cabinet department as we have ever seen. And that.

D (15:00)

Right. I just mean, for Trump, the reason backlash comes is because nobody's trying to spin it in a different direction, is what I'm saying. RFK is just saying, yeah, you can't spin it.

B (15:10)

He is anti vaccine. He is using whatever powers he has to enforce or put in place blocks and resistances to settled science on the question of whether or not the vaccines cause disease. He is, as you know, we made fun of the other day, he is saying he can see that children are sick when he walks through airports of cellular disease. He can see it on their faces. He is. He is A, crazy and B, evil. And it's horrible that he is running a cabinet department and people. It is understandable why people will walk out if they have to work for him, if he is undermining what they know to be true and that continuing to be there as a form of silent compliance with his demented approach. Now, Trump believes that he is serving his base in some fashion or he made promises and there's a bunch of people who believe this stuff. And so he is going to let it, let it go forward. We're back now to the problem of the hyper polarization and in effect inefficacy of our Congress because the people who are there to hold HHS to account for its behavior and the cabinet secretary who is supposedly enforcing laws that were passed by Congress, is Congress. And because of the incredibly narrow majorities both in the Senate and the House and, and Trump's enforcement system and the nature of the populist surge in favor of Trump and, and against anybody who might seem to be siding with the mainstream, they're too chicken to take on not.

A (17:07)

But that's changing because the senators, the Republican senators after this, the forcing out of the CDC head have said, I think, I think RFK has to come before the Senate to talk about vaccination policy maybe next week. They've said if we're going to, they've, I think Senator Kennedy said we're going to take a pause on some of the oversight that we usually do to some of these programs because this chain, because this person's been forced out and says that they're trying to change the science on vaccines. So I think this might have actually stirred at least the Senate to some more aggressive oversight action. And that is a good thing. That's exactly how our system is supposed to work. And the fact that these are Republicans who are raising these public criticisms and suspicions about what's going on over there, that's how that we should see more of that. I would like to see a lot more of that actually going on over at Defense, but you know.

E (17:57)

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C (19:21)

I'm Matt Ebert, CEO and founder of Crash Champions. Welcome to Pod Crash. On Pod Crash, we'll dive deep with industry leaders and game changers because we want to uncover their secrets to success. We're going to explore everything from building trust, building a rock solid team to champion blue collar work. And we also want to talk about creating explosive growth in your business. You'll hear actionable advice, real leadership and business lessons along with what's worked for these incredible people throughout their career. We're even going to go in depth into what I call a champions mindset. This is the very philosophy that I use to champion people and take Crash Champions from a single shop to over 650 locations today. And now I want to share that information with you. You watch or listen to pod crash on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

B (20:15)

Okay, we'll see whether that happens. I mean, it hasn't happened in the sense that people didn't go on Fox and say, this is terrible what's going on at the cdc. I'm a Republican, but this is making me sick. And this guy shouldn't be secretary of HSS anymore because he's saying he can spot mitochondrial disease in the face of a kid. He's walking, who is, who's walking past him in the airport like that is. He needs like ECT therapy for having ideas like that. Not, you know, being in a huge office running the single largest bureaucracy in the federal government or not the large, the agency that through which the most dollars in the federal government pass is hhs. Now most of that is pat is passes through passively without political interference because it's Social Security and Medicare, but. And Medicaid or the federal part of Medicaid, but it's still the largest department. I mean, the Pentagon is, has more people, but HHS is the largest department and he shouldn't be there. And everybody who isn't a lunatic knows he shouldn't be there. I'm sorry, everybody. And if you like the other appointments, like J. Bhattacharya and others, their appointments are being stained by the fact that they are adjacent to this demented madman who has the levers of power and is using them. Now again, he's using them. That's the policy. These officials quit in response to the policy. That's A proper, just so conservatives understand that is, to my mind, the way things should go in government. If you're working at the Pentagon and the policies on X, Y or Z change, you should not continue to work there. And you are perfectly free to leave and then leave and say, I am criticizing the government's actions. I can no longer in good conscience support them. And that creates a proper kind of political conversation in the United States.

E (22:25)

There is the argument in these cases that you should stay to try to steer things to the course that you see reasonable or to try to hold up the works if something that you see as damaging is happening. I mean, this was a big discussion in the first Trump term in terms of traditional Republicans.

B (22:52)

But that is, that is, that is a matter of individual choice, like whether or not your purpose, what you have to do, is stay there and fight internally or whether what you're being asked to do is impose or administer policies that you find are like life denying. Then, you know, that's a. You could do it either way. Either way could be relatively noble or whatever. But I think this is a pretty striking moment that Trump didn't get his first choice, Dave Weldon, because the Senate would not confirm Dave Weld, and I don't even remember why. And so the Senate got it. Trump put up a more conventional choice to get through the Senate, which was this doctor, which was this Martinez. And then, as Christine says, she said, I can't break the law. And I, and I, and I can't, I can't deny science. And they said, you're time to deny science. And she said, I'm not going to do that. Now, again, I find the whole notion of public officials saying we are this, we are the science offensive, but I don't think that's. That does not appear to be what happened.

A (24:07)

No, she's not an Anthony Fauci.

B (24:09)

Yeah. Or Barbara Ferrer, the public health, you know, coordinator in Los Angeles, or people like that who were, who were asserting that if they made X, Y or Z decision about something, that they were doing so because they were speaking in the voice of science rather than in the voice of liberal authoritarianism.

A (24:30)

Well, you know, one of the things, we were framing this partly as a matter of political polarization, but I think it's actually a broader challenge right now, and it will, it will bedevil our politics, I think, for another 10 years, if not more. And our friend Mark Halpern, in his wonderful newsletter, sort of laid it out well this morning when he talked about the question about, and we talked about this the other day about norms and the violation of norms and when norms are, are undermined and can you restore them. And in this sense, I think a lot of these skirmishes are little battles in this larger war because you do have a rather large contingent of people on the right, not all of whom are maga. I mean we are sympathetic to some of these arguments that well, the Democrats have been undermining these norms and principles for years and now it's our turn to not to restore in every case, but to do it our own way. And I think that getting caught in that mindset is very difficult to get out of that mindset. When you, when you've had, particularly with culture war issues, you've been battling them for decades and decades and now you have power and you can do things your way. And I think there are a lot of people, people in not just in the Trump administration but in the larger right wing orbit and I would include myself in some of these arguments. It's very intoxicating to say yeah, now we get to set the rules, it's our rules. And you can, you know, it's even worse than saying cry lib tears. It's more like now you see how power works. But this is a very seductive but dangerous back and forth. And I think we're going to continue to see that because norms are very difficult to restore. And I don't. That's where I push back and say it's not communication, it's actually tell us what your principles are here. What is your principle? Why is RFK there? Why is he doing what he's doing? What principle does that pursue in MAGA world? It's not a concern. He's not a conservative. So what is he doing to pursue your world vision? And I don't, I'm not sure they even know. It's just we are in charge now is the message I keep hearing over and over. And I'm not sure how sustainable that is even over the course of a four year term.

D (26:25)

And also he's not doing anything to like he, this is not actually going after Covid people like he's not actually, he's not saying let's clean, let's clean house but it's not accountability power for the past four years. You know, it's like even Trump made tried to make that argument at the FBI. You know with Cash Patel and everybody. I got to get rid of people I don't trust. You know, he Tulsi Gabbard, even you could say at intelligence was is similar pick Somebody from the outside who holds the suspicions that I do of the people in power, who believes that things have been manipulated, you know, and can watch over that and stuff like that. This is not a, this is not a Covid purge. This is, this is just, you know, he's just a, you know, a bull in a china shop. And so he's not able to actually make the case, hey, you're losing people who are authoritarians. There's no argument that the people who are leaving are the power abusers or were the power abusers in the last administration.

A (27:24)

I think partially Gallup. Oh, go ahead.

E (27:26)

I should say, I think it's. Well, make your Gallup point. I want to hear.

A (27:31)

I was going to say this. This was prompted in part because of this Gallup poll that's been circulating over the last 24 hours, which shows whether you, whether people, you know, Democrats, Republicans, independents, is the country actually going in the right direction? It was something like zero Democrats, somehow.

B (27:44)

They got zero percent.

A (27:47)

That's not the most shocking thing. It's the index. The independents who are very low as well. It's like. And those are the people who, who put Trump back in the White House. Those people who moved from D to R and or state independent but voted Trump. They're not happy. It's like 24, it's, it's low, the number is low. Who think that country is moving in the right direction. So it just got me thinking that if they, they've got a couple more years here, they need to somehow keep those people on the side of the GOP if they want to win the next. If, you know, if J.D. vance or whoever runs wants to hold the White House.

E (28:20)

So I was going to say that I think part of what's going on with RFK and in other aspects of the Trump administration is it's kind of an extension of this thing on the right where that happened socially, where the idea is, okay, it's. We have, we have thrown off the chains of political correctness. It's not illegal to offend. So we're going to be jerks. That's how, that's how you exercise your. We're going to exercise our right to be jerks, and you can't stop us. And there's a sort of institutionalization of that, I think, happening at, in the administration. And that's like, you know, that, that's what, as I was writing yesterday, that's where the, the performative idiocracy is seeping into the politics, the actual policy.

B (29:10)

I mean, I just Wish the problem with RFK Jr is that he was a jerk.

E (29:15)

No, no, no, he's a, he's right. No, he's something else entirely.

B (29:17)

Like I wish, I wish he were just like a clown and a jerk. But it turns out that he is a radical using classic levers of power to, to, to push, to push this agenda. And this is where we get to the other norm breaking, because this is where my head starts to explode. And again, this is something we've Talked about for 15 years in different ways, which is the glass breaking moment was Barack Obama deciding to use executive orders and his phone and his pen because he could not get his agenda after 18 months in which he got his major agenda through Congress. Republicans were able to block that after 2010. And he didn't like that. And so he wanted to make policy across the United States and he decided to do so with executive orders. And he fundamentally changed the balance of power in the United States. Other presidents had done bits and pieces of this, but the executive order as a constitutional object exists because the executive. It is written to manage the executive branch. An executive order applies as the chief executive to the executive branch, not to the country. That. So you could write an executive order saying we will no longer do this or this will not happen. As a matter of policy here. That will be. We're changing policy on this. There's in part because the minute there was a change, as I describe on the last page of my first book, which is about the decline and fall of the first Bush administration, George H.W. bush passed 100 and there were 158 or something like that, executive orders that the Bush administration, the first Bush administration had had enacted. And the first act of the Clinton administration upon Bill Clinton setting foot into the Oval Office was to void every single Bush executive order and then put some of them back, by the way, because some of them were continuations of other ones that you would want because they were for good working order of things. So the executive order by definition is temporary. It's not a piece of legislation which is permanent. Right. The piece of legislation, you pass it until you over, over either until the Supreme Court says it unconstitutional or until you supersede it with another piece of legislation. So Barack Obama changed the way the American political dynamic worked by saying, I have legislative powers as president, United States, I am legalizing the dreamers. Can't do that. Court said he couldn't do it over and over and over again that he couldn't do it. But once, once you give somebody a taste of that you say, okay, I've opened that door. Now we're in this door. Of course, if you're Trump in 2016 or in 2025, 2017, or Biden, you're going to use it because it's like a shortcut. It's like getting a get out of jail free card. And if you're in the position that Biden was and that Trump is now, where you have this legislative majority that is fearful of, that just wants the things to happen and doesn't care, as members of Congress and leaders of Congress did in previous generations, doesn't care how it's done because you want to have the deliverables to your coalition. You want to say, you know, we are. We. You know, we're doing X, Y and Z to combat Covid. Or Trump is issuing the executive orders to do whatever he's doing. And the only way this can stop is through a combination of courts saying the executive orders are overreaches and Congress doing its job. And until there is a healthy majority for one party or the other in Congress, Congress will not reassert its authority. And rfk, so that's Trump. But other cabinet departments are clearly kind of following along at the cabinet level in doing stuff like this that they don't have. RFK Jr is not allowed to say that, you know, you shouldn't have a vaccine. I mean, he can say whatever he wants to say. It's not clear that he has the statutory authority to limit vaccine distribution or mandates or anything like that. I don't know where he. They're just asserting it and then saying, come at, come at us, bro. Come on. Like, let's see what you have. Because this is, this is what, this.

A (34:16)

Is where the congressional oversight plays a role, because Congress actually does oversee some of what they do in terms of national vaccination policy. The other part of this that goes hand in glove with the executive order abuse is the perpetual state of emergency that's declared whenever the president wants to assert authority that should constitutionally be legislative, but he wants to do it from the executive branch. I mean, we're having these arguments over the tariffs, but in each cabinet level position, you see people who, who get a gleam in their eye as soon as they are offered the opportunity to invoke an emergency and do something about it. Now, I happen to think that our border situation at the end of the Biden administration was indeed an emergency. That was something that I felt perfectly comfortable having a new guy come in and say, I'm going to fix this problem, because this has not been working. But all of the other uses of emergency powers, we saw this again with COVID We had a real emergency and the people who were supposed to be in charge couldn't figure out how to do things correctly or communicate policy well. And now we're in this perpetual emergency mode. And I think that is also dangerous because the American public needs to have at least a four to eight year span of time where there isn't some emergency about housing or, you know, pandemic or tariff policy. I mean these, these things are all made up, but it is damaging to a system because states of perpetual emergency do not allow our system to function as it should.

B (35:39)

You wanted to talk before we got on the air, you wanted to talk about this general approach that speaking of border security and ICE and the like, that there is a, that the attitude of the anti Trump resistance, obviously the default position now is that, is that we are on the road to or halfway down the road to fascism. And that fascism has many faces. Some of it is these assertions of emergency powers and the imposition of tariffs without congressional authorization and various other things that I have sympathy for the idea that this is all wild overreach. But in the last couple of weeks, because of what's happened with the federalization of law enforcement in, in D.C. we now have a new iteration of this, which is that displays of order and authority in the form of uniformed personnel, meaning not just cops but National Guardsmen and, and, and other, and ICE agents and others, is no different, is, is no different in degree or kind from the black shirts becoming the shock troops that would end up becoming the SS and the Waffen SS and all that in Germany. And this is so insanely offensive that I'm almost convinced that a lot of the people who are making these arguments are so, have been so deranged by their fear of Trump or whatever that they don't think for two seconds about what the meta meaning here is, which is that they are saying that a, a person in, you know, basically in a gray uniform of the National Guard or something like that is a shock trooper is a symbol of fascism. And once again, who are these people? They are volunteer people who have gone into our military to serve their country in a specific way. They are deployed by legitimate authority to do what they're doing. And I've been living in New York for a quarter century with various displays of force on the part of people who are not just in the police department when things go, go sour or when there are terror enhanced terrorist threats and everybody in D.C. has seen this after 9 11. And you mentioned that you heard a conversation between Barack Obama and Ezra Klein or Bradley Balco on Bradley Balco.

A (38:34)

Yeah, so, yeah, podcast.

B (38:37)

And they talk about American members of law enforcement like they are Nazi soldiers. Well, so good luck to them if they really want to. If they do they really want to go down this road.

A (38:52)

Well, they're doing something even worse, I think, because they are taking, they claim to be asking a legitimate question, which is these images of asylum people who've come here illegally claiming to seek asylum, coming to court to have their hearing, and masked ice, paramilitary forces swooping in and disappearing these people as if it's a third world country. That's not what's happening. So if you look it up, the Immigration Nationality act requires ICE to legally detain even asylum seekers. That does not deny them due process. They will have access to attorneys. They will still have due process. But if you come here illegally and you show up, ICE is legally allowed to detain you while you start the due process for asylum seeking. And the, as we've discussed many times, the asylum seeking process has been really heavily abused in the last several decades when it comes to illegal immigration. So that's one part. And you can have a discussion, discussion about whether those policies are good, should we change it? Should they be allowed to detain them? What should that look like? But what they do is then they lie to distinction. They say, well, this is clearly evidence that Trump is trying to build his own paramilitary force that will then go out into the country and arrest, you know, take people off the streets with no due process. This is fascism. And that is where I really get annoyed, because that is not what is happening here. And to encourage that kind of fear mongering right now, when there are some, there are actual legal and policy questions around immigration that we do need to resolve. I just think that's obnoxious. And what I found interesting was that Barack Obama is getting a lot more political lately. And so he retweeted part of that conversation that Ezra Klein had with Radley Balco and said, oh, look, here come the shock troops. I don't think that's helpful to the conversation we need to be having about a lot of these issues.

E (40:44)

It's like, as I wrote a few weeks back, resistance fan fiction. You know, it's like they're sustaining the plot of Trump the tyrant. If they can't get enough that's actually happening, then they start sort of spinning these narratives.

B (41:03)

But it's weird because it's not as though you can't adduce evidence of Trump's extra constitutional behavior. That should be worrisome. Yes, there's plenty of it.

A (41:14)

We talk about it.

B (41:15)

Not to be in this realm that they're obsessed with, which is like signs of American governmental order are evil as opposed to emoluments, weird side deals for members of Witkoff's family and Trump's family, bitcoin.

A (41:33)

I mean.

D (41:36)

I talked to a while ago, the CEO of one of the crypto groups, you know, a crypto billionaire. And it was like they were, I asked them about their lobbying, like, who, when you, when you send your lobbyists to the Senate, who are you? Like, what are you actually trying to do? What do they understand about the words that are coming out of your mouth? And it was a funny conversation because it was like, try explaining to a 78 year old, 8,000 term, you know, senator, who, you know, was inaugurated as a senator the same day that his, his state was inaugurated as a state or, you know, whatever, like, explain them crypto. And it was very difficult. And you, you sort of have to, basically what he was saying was that, you know, you kind of have to be a pressure group. You kind of have to be like, you know what, there's a lot of crypto people and they vote and you want their vote, so do this. So it's, it's, it's analogous to when I got my driver's license, okay, if anybody does not want to drive with me after this, I'll understand when I got my driver's license. In New Jersey, the instructors, you, the tests, testing places, used poles that were sticking out of the parking cones. And so the driving instructors, when they taught you how to parallel park, taught you how to park by using the poles, cut the wheel when the pole in your rear view mirror is at this point, right? So it was like a math thing, but you didn't actually know where you were or where the car was. You learned the test. This is what's going on with cripple. It's like they can't, they don't know, they can't explain. And so you have these issues, these modern issues. And it's not the only one. It's just a good example. You have these modern issues where people aren't spending the time to understand the issue. They only need to know, do I need this to get elected? And so they completely ignore signs of really bad behavior because they don't even really understand that it's bad behavior. And so that's, you know, you Talk about the emoluments and stuff like that. But if you asked one of them to make the case against, you know, Trump's son's crypto deal that he made in Saudi Arabia or the UAE or something, no one could possibly explain what it is or why it's bad. And so they're sort of forced to stick to the things that A, they understand and B, they think their voters will understand.

A (44:08)

Well, Eric, Eric, Trump is right now in Hong Kong shilling the Trump family crypto business. And that's what he does. And now you can, you know, assuming there's a, there's a very strict wall between what Trump does policy wise and what his family is doing to build, to make money. You know, you could say, fine. By the way, there is one person in Congress who, you know, understands crypto and all stock, all the stock market, and that's Nancy Pelosi, who's profited from it for decades. But I do think that this, I'm not sure that Trump's policymaking with regard to cryptocurrency is separated from his long term financial interest for himself and his family. And those sorts of things really are. John, you're absolutely right. There are plenty of issues we could, we could name where the left actually could have an impact on keeping that in the conversation and really helping the American people understand why there's another way to do this. It's also setting a pretty bad precedent for the next again, who comes into that office if they have a D after their name? Where are the rules that are going to prevent them from profiting from family businesses while also being in office?

F (45:11)

I'm Oliver Darcy.

D (45:12)

And I'm John Passantino.

F (45:14)

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D (45:22)

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F (45:46)

My understanding having reported this is that the Pentagon protested to CNN and tried to effectively exile the CNN producer. And when the moment calls for it, we've got some hot takes. I just think Brad Pitt, honestly, he kind of seems a little washed up.

D (46:02)

Oh my God.

A (46:04)

That's.

D (46:04)

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B (46:18)

Since you brought up cryptocurrency, I want to shout out, send a shout out to Walter Russell Mead and his column this week in the Wall Street Journal because I found it revelatory. I am baffled by cryptocurrency. I will confess. I tried and tried and tried to understand what it is and why it's necessary, all of that stuff. And, and I, I, it's just I, I'm having, I have conceptual difficulties with it and I, I had myself even thought, you know, this is interesting because in the early 19th century, the famous first major financial or economic fight in the United States as the company was, was growing and becoming a world power, was over the establishment of the national bank. And this was the major political issue of the 1820s and 1830s in many ways. And Walter analogizes what is going on with cryptocurrency to the fight between the Jacksonians and the anti Jacksonians on the National Bank. So I'm just going to read a little bit because I say as I found it enlightening for me, maybe it'll enlighten other people. As, as, as Mead says, American populism has always been suspicious of the banking establishment. Jackson's presidency was largely shaped by his bank war. The Second bank of the US Enforced standards that made life difficult for the cash hungry speculators and entrepreneurs on the far side of the Appalachians eager to develop the western frontier. And he points out that these bankers at the Biddle and others were very happy to loan money to their friends in the Northeast and were much more loath to free up capital for people elsewhere. And this caused resentment and a kind of culture war. But as he says, many populists demanded easy credit and often raged paradoxically against the creation of, of fiat money. Banks could issue banknotes greater than the amount of gold they held in reserve. This made credit more widely available, but it concentrated power in the hands of the financial elite. And this was Jackson's like the bread and butter of Jackson's war against the bank of the United States or the Second bank of the United States. And here's what Walter says about this. The cryptocurrency movement embodies the suspicion of fiat money and the desire to take credit creation out of the hands of the financial establishment. And Jackson won his war against the Second bank of the US the immediate consequence was a boom in the underdeveloped and underbanked regions of the west and the South. But that boom, like so many ended in tears. The panic of 1837 set off the most severe depression Americans had experienced up to that time and had serious international repercussions as American private and public entities defaulted on their debt. But, but again, Walter says, despite the turbulence it brought, Jackson's populism ultimately strengthened American capitalism by decentralizing the banking system and accelerating frontier development. Whether that history repeats itself remains to be seen. But Mr. Trump's campaign against the Fed could be as consequential as anything Jackson ever did. So here, cryptocurrency and the rise of cryptocurrency is an expression of the ultimate loss of faith in the ultimate American institution over the last hundred and some odd years, which is the full faith and credit of the United States government and whether or not the people who are in charge of this, particularly at the Federal Reserve Board, are playing or sitting around playing poker with everybody's wealth creation possibilities by futzing around with more interest rates.

A (50:18)

And that one other strain for the, for the MAGA types and this is a genuine concern and shouldn't have happened, is the debanking. You know, there were debanking by financial institutions of people who, with whom they had political disagreements or who were like at the January 6th protest, that sort of thing.

B (50:35)

Right.

D (50:35)

Yeah. And there, and also there were, there have been proposals about turning America into a cashless society too, which makes people reasonably nervous because ever then everything is just an electronic thing that the government can flip a switch, you know, on and off. Literally you have nothing in your hand that you could go and you know, pay with. So the crypto, the rise of crypto is also part of that, I think that skepticism that the government is moving toward taking your other cash away. So here's, you know, we have to have some sort of non government cash.

B (51:06)

Yeah. Although again, like that's a, it's an oddity because then you also have a, the whole thing about cryptocurrency is it's supposedly completely transparent. So it's not private. So you, so you, you. Every transaction is, is, is, is, is in a public ledger. And unlike our, our banking, which is entirely private, like you don't know what goes on in my checking account. And if we, if we're all in.

D (51:31)

A crypto, only the Chinese Communist Party knows what's in all our bank accounts.

B (51:35)

Exactly. Anyway, I, I only bring this up time. I have some sense that the, that the idea, the, the, the appeal of, of crypto is, has this quality of I don't trust the American system any longer and that as he says, when this fight happened in the United States, and Andrew Jackson, like Trump, was one of those guys who didn't, did not like the Constitution particularly. And it was, of course, much newer then than it is now. Said famously of the court, you know, oh, he doesn't like what I do. Let's see him. Let's see them enforce their rulings. Like, I'm not listening to them. You know, sounds sound kind of familiar now, but that, but that people are playing with fire because they are skeptical of the financial system and want some kind of an independent financial system apart from the full faith and credit of the US Dollar. And what they're going to get is something vastly more irresponsible and freewheeling and weird with the possibilities, like the panic of 1837 of a complete worldwide economic crash, because nobody will know where the money. No one will know who's protecting whose money and from what. And I just wanted to bring up, because I, as I have such difficulty here conceptually, and that puts me in mind of the period of time in the 1820s when it was really hard for people, including Andrew Jackson, to understand the idea of money being symbolic, that transactions that you could take a bill and it would take the place of your gold or it would take place of your cow or something like that. They couldn't get there conceptually. And I have real difficulty getting to what the purpose of crypto is conceptually. And I'm increasingly beginning to think that that's my failing and not crypto's failing. But maybe it's crypto's failing. I don't know. It's been around.

D (53:42)

If you do, John, if you do figure, if you do figure out crypto and become a crypto expert, that will make you a crypto Jew, right?

B (53:50)

Oh, you can't even.

A (53:53)

Oh, Seth, well done.

B (53:56)

Yes. Speaking of Jews, maybe we should conclude by talking about the immensely complicated situation that's going on in the Middle east right now. Because, of course, everyone's focused on this question of whether or not the Israelis are going to take over Gaza City or whether they're sort of holding on to the outskirts of Gaza City because they're putting pressure on Hamas and that somehow there's some idea that Hamas will agree to a comprehensive settlement in which the hostages are returned and the war is brought to an end, that the Israelis will say that they have done so while largely destroying Hamas and not letting Hamas get back into power. It's almost impossible to believe that if a deal on the table does release all the hostages, that it will also include some kind of voluntary agreement by Hamas to leave power. In other words, not that they, that they can't be sort of ousted from the management of Gaza, but that they can play a political role later, which would only mean that they would eventually take it over again. But we don't know what's going on there. It's very confusing. The only thing we really know is that Netanyahu has decided that his, his position is that there's no deal to be had that does not involve the complete release of, of the hostages and that he's not interested in half measures. And then, then it's like, no, no, there are, there are, there are deals on the table. Hamas is offering 10 hostages. And he's like, we're done. We're done with this because we're just going to live in torment forever. And, and we're going to live in, you know, Zeno's paradox in which there are 10 hostages and then there are 10 hostages left and then there are going to be five hostages released and there'll be five hostages left and you will never get to the point at which all the hostages are returned. Meanwhile, astounding things are going on in Lebanon, Syria and, and in regards to the threat from Yemen. So, you know, the Lebanese government is, is on the verge of insisting on a complete monopoly of force, which is important. Most governments sovereign, have the monopoly of force in their countries. And Lebanon is one of the few that doesn't function that way because it had given quasi, I don't know what you call it, sovereign status to Hezbollah in the south. And they're basically.

D (56:20)

Well, they had, they had won enough seats in parliament that they essentially had a veto over legislation and government decisions.

B (56:28)

Right. That, and, and what they, what the veto was, was in order was, was designed to ensure that they could have as many weapons as they wanted in their control and not in the government's control in the south. In this, you know, as a part of their Iranian satrapy arrangement and with the weakening of Iran, the overthrow of the, of the regime in Syria and other things that, that fertile green shoots are appearing all over the place that there is a new least growing, particularly in areas that were dominated by, by Iran. And then yesterday, I guess it was yesterday, Israel executed a pretty astonishing strike designed to be as decapitating as possible of the Houthi leadership in Yemen. We don't know what the end result is. They claim, I think, that to have eliminated 15 leaders of the Houthis in one go, the Houthis continue to fire weaponry at Israel and they, they upped the ante earlier this week by firing a multi headed, rather than just a drone or you know, something like long range, they, a multi headed missile from, of Iranian manufacture at Israel. Which of course, if the warheads can split off and go into different directions, the possibility of intercepting both of them is made vastly more, more difficult. So Seth, any thoughts here?

D (58:01)

Yeah, I mean the, the crate. The crazy thing about the Yemen stuff is that it, this was apparently a watch party, right? The Houthi leader whose name is Al Houthi, you know, for obvious reasons, he was the only one who spared because he was giving a speech and everybody was supposedly gathering at somebody's apartment. Maybe the prime ministers, I'm not sure, but the prime minister was expecting, expected to be there in Sana' a, in Yemen and you know, and they got the apartment. So one thing is that Israel has been very bad for watch parties because this is at least the second, maybe the third such strike. I mean, we, there were, there was, you know, Benjamin Netanyahu was giving a speech at the UN while the, while Hassan Nasrallah's bunker was being you know, rubbleized. So, you know.

B (58:53)

Right. Yeah.

D (58:54)

In Beirut. Right. I mean, that was part of the, the feint, that was part of the, the op that he would be giving this big speech and you know, maybe Nasrallah would turn on the TV and watch what he had to say until, you know, the big plot twist. And so that's one, the other thing is that it's, Israel understands that nobody's going to, nobody's going to try to disarm terrorist organizations like the Houthis.

B (59:23)

Right.

D (59:24)

This is very much related to what's happening in Lebanon. Hezbollah was supposed to disarm 25 years ago. The UN was supposed to oversee it. That's, that's another matter. But the, the, the idea is that like, so they'll strike a deal now and the Lebanese have to, and the Lebanese are saying you've got to give up your weapons. But no, still nobody really knows about enforcement of something like that, right? Because nobody, nobody can make Hezbollah just give up its weapons. These terrorist groups have to be defeated, you know, soundly or mostly in order to, you know, to, to be. So I think what Israel is doing with the Houthis is saying like I'm, we can't let them get to a Hezbollah or Hamas point, point, right? This is like they, they have, the Houthis had figured out a way to be semi independent from their masters in Tehran by organizing a, you know, a hijacking crew, piracy, and to bring in money. And Israel realized that at this point, if you took Iran out, which, you know, Israel has certainly sidelined Iran in various ways, the Houthis could continue operating on the, you know, the Houthis could continue spinning on their own axis. So Israel is just going to take out the axis. That's the idea, is that you can't let them get to that place. And that's also very much related to what's happening in Syria. Why is Israel in southern Syria? Why is Israel conducting strikes? You know, the other day, Israel conducted more strikes in defense of religious minorities in southern Syria that actually got complaints from a couple of members of the Senate, including Republicans, who said, like, we were just in Syria. And they said they need some time and space to set up a government. Maybe Israel, you know, could give them the time and space. And Israel saying, you can't give the time and space to terrorist organizations or to these sort of chaotic, you know, anarchic, you know, areas to let something fester. So that's the idea, is that you can't let something develop in Syria that developed in Lebanon. You can't let the Houthis turn into something semi independent like Hezbollah turned into all this stuff. It's all connected by the idea that you just have to nip it in the bud. And, you know, and that's that.

B (61:52)

So what this means is that Israel, you know, knocked Iran off the board, we think, at least for now, but it's still fighting on four or five fronts. So it's fighting in Gaza, it's fighting the Houthis, it's. It's conducting missions in Lebanon in support of this effort by the government to assert its primacy over, over Hezbollah, which is weakened not only, you know, because, I mean, because of all the strikes and everything like that, but because Iran is rocked on its heels and Hezbollah is effectively simply was simply an arm of the Iranian army and, and in Syria. And of course, there is the continuing question of patrolling the west bank to make sure that Hamas operatives don't somehow trigger some event or events on the west bank that caused that to implode. And so Israel's difficulties continue. Don't focus on just the question of Gaza. If you are. If this is a matter of concern to you, understand that the challenges to the Israeli military and the Israeli government in terms of security remain incredibly complicated and are being managed with rather more delicacy than anybody is willing to give them credit for, for managing them. And last thing to say is that it is now clear with all of the reports over the last two weeks that the single largest infusion of humanitarian aid in the history of the planet earth has gone to Gaza. So if you hear that Israel starving Gaza out and you hear that Israel is doing terrible things in Gaza and trying to starve people and kill people, just remember that according to the data, there has never been an infusion of food aid like this ever in the history of mankind. And don't let them tell you otherwise. Don't tell your friends who utter nonsense in your ear about the genocide, that genocidal regimes don't feed the people that they're trying to kill. I think that is axiomatic. And yet here we are with no, no axiom to support this behavior. All right. I hope everybody has a wonderful Labor Day weekend. We will not be doing a show on Monday, so we'll be back Tuesday. Let us hope that things are pacific and easy and we don't come back with 75 different things that we have to talk about because this country is so meshuggah. Have fun barbecue, go to fun places, whatever. Seth has six kids. He's got to entertain. Good luck.

D (64:59)

I'm gonna learn to juggle or something. I don't know. What.

A (65:01)

I don't know.

B (65:01)

Yeah. Okay. Well, shout out to our oldest, our long, our longest lived contributor, current contributor Joseph Epstein, now in his late 80s and a man with. With impeccable juggling skills. Here's something you didn't know about Joseph Epstein, America's foremost literary critic. Man can juggle like nobody's business. So happy Labor Day to him. Happy Labor Day to all of you. And for Seth, Christine and Abe, I'm John Bot Horowitz. Keep the candle bur this is one of the most spectacular venues with all kinds of character and hospitality scenery. These people in this Kitatas valley, they love when you come to see what they have to offer.

C (65:53)

I'm JJ Harris, Ellensburg rodeo clown, and.

D (65:55)

I want to invite you to the rodeo.

C (65:57)

Come hang out with us in Ellensburg. Great rodeo, great time. Two performances on Saturday. One is the extreme Bulls of the year event. Do not miss the Ellensburg Rodeo August 29th through September 1st. We'll see you there.

A (66:11)

Join Vanguard for a moment of meditation. Take a deep breath. Picture yourself reaching your financial goals. Feel that freedom. Visit vanguard.com investinginu to learn more. All investing is subject to risk.