Steve Hayes (3:52)

And the. I mean, this is obviously, this is not new territory for RFK Jr. He's been talking about this for decades. He's developed a reputation of somebody who was willing to share information that was, shall we say, not evidence based and amplified various conspiracies about vaccines repeatedly over the years. He made his reputation about it, arguably one of the main reasons he was chosen by President Trump. What effect does this have? I mean, they've gone to the. Their defense would be, hey, we're just giving people more options. We're not telling people what they have to do. This is really just giving people more options. We're respecting freedom of choice. How do those arguments sit with you?

Emily Oster (4:38)

Interestingly, the other thing they have said quite a lot is that this is designed to restore trust in vaccines, which for me is literally the opposite. So I think this is both designed and in practice, will erode trust in vaccines broadly. I think it will make it more difficult for people to get vaccines, but also is going to cause a variety of people to think, well, why did you change this? You must have changed it because these are dangerous. Well, maybe all vaccines are dangerous. So not only am I not going to get the rotavirus, but maybe I won't get the mmr, the dtap, or any of the things that are still on the recommended schedule. This is also gonna make it much easier for school districts and states to say, we're not gonna require vaccines for kids. And so I think that the ultimate implication of this is we've already seen a fairly large decline in vaccination rates. We will continue to see that decline across all vaccines, not just the ones that have changed recommendation status.

Steve Hayes (5:36)

To that point, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced not long ago that Florida Department of Health will be in part, with the governor. He takes pains to say we'll be working to end vaccine mandates in Florida law. Is this sort of the next step? I mean, is this where this kind of logically goes?

Emily Oster (5:53)

Yeah, this next step, I think, is to end vaccine mandates in schools. And we really know that vaccine mandates in schools are very important at propping up vaccination rates, at keeping vaccination rates high. So the implication will be, you know, some states will continue to have these mandates in schools and will continue, I think, to enforce, kind of to have their own vaccine schedules. Enforce is maybe the wrong word, but they will have their own recommended sets of vaccines, they will have mandates in schools, and then there will be other states that don't have that. And we will see a sort of bifurcation of places where we haven't up.

Steve Hayes (6:30)

Till now, just on a basic level, sort of in plain English level. I'm the parent of four kids ranging from college to elementary school, and I'm not sophisticated about these issues. I read the newspaper, I follow what you do, but I'm no expert. How worried should I be about the implications on this for my own kids and then down the road for my kids. Kids?

Emily Oster (6:56)

Yeah, I mean, I think the sort of positive news for individual parents on this is most of the vaccines we have are actually so good and safe that they are going to protect your kids even if other people are not vaccinated and even if there are outbreaks of disease. So from the standpoint of an individual parent, I think you should be a little worried about vaccine access. But for the most part, if you wanna get your kids vaccinated, which I hope you do, you will continue to be able to. The place I really worry is for families with sort of fewer resources, with less contact with the doctors, with doctors in the first place, and where these messages of misinformation may get ingrained a bit more. You know, that's. Those are the populations. We already have a fair amount of health inequality across the US I would imagine that this is gonna make that worse, which is not good.

Steve Hayes (7:48)

So the second. The second set of recommendations that you focused on in your piece was this nutrition guideline, diet, nutrition guidelines, the food pyramid, or in this case, the inverted food pyramid. And you had a slightly different view on those recommendations. Can you share with us your reaction to what you saw from HHS on that?

Emily Oster (8:06)

Yeah, so I thought those recommendations were pretty good. So one thing is the recommendations are very similar to what we had before. So they're actually for all of the kind of commentary about the inverting of the pyramid and the size of the stake in the pyramid and so on, that actually, if you read the text of the recommendation, it doesn't move very far from what has been true for a long time. Emphasis on real food, emphasis on fruits and vegetables, emphasis on, you know, on whole grains. I mean, we've, you know, there are some small differences, but it's mostly very, very similar. And I will say I thought the simplification of the advice to go from, you know, 175 pages to 10 is really good for messaging. I mean, I spend a lot of my time trying to message people. And I can tell you like you tell people something and it's on page 58 of 175 page document, they don't see it. You tell them the same thing on page four of a ten page document, they might see it. And that's actually like, you know, the administration made a big deal about shortening these guidelines. And I will say I thought that was a like, broadly, I, broadly, I thought this was very good.

Steve Hayes (9:13)

Yeah. And the specific example you gave in the piece you wrote for us was on allergens. Introducing allergens to kids at an earlier age, which is something you said had gotten sort of buried in the past, was more evident in the shorter version of the document.

Emily Oster (9:28)

It's very clear in the short version of the document. It is something that, you know, if every parent introduced these allergens early on in life, you know, it's sort of four to six months, we would see a dramatic reduction in food allergies, which is something that, you know, if your kid has a food allergy, it's really constraining. It can be very dangerous. And so that's something again, I think, just showing it to people really clearly and sort of plain English on page four. I like it.

Steve Hayes (9:54)

What was the. I mean, there were. Again, this is not my area of expertise, although some people would say I'm an expert in food. I certainly consume a lot of it. I eat a lot of protein. I was very happy to be told that I should probably be eating more protein, more steaks for me. You wrote about this in the New York Times and you had this to say about protein. The New guidelines suggest 50 to 100% more protein, 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram for someone weighing 180 pounds. This might mean adding the amount of protein that you might find in 7 ounces of chicken breast or 10 eggs. So I love eggs, I already eat a lot of them. And, you know, let's, we'll Just say for. For the sake of discussion, we'll just say I'm around 180 rough. Roughly 180 discussion with roughly. Doing a lot of work there.

Emily Oster (10:43)

Error bars, Steve, There are error bars on this.

Steve Hayes (10:46)

That's right, exactly. If I want to be healthier and I read this in the shortened version of this document, should I basically just add an omelet to every meal and I'm going to be better? How should we read this?

Emily Oster (11:00)

Yeah, I think it's complicated for a couple of reasons in terms of how people should read it. So one is another point I make in that piece is that actually these protein needs are well suited for people who have something of an active lifestyle. So if you are sort of sedentary person, you actually don't need that much protein. You'll probably be fine with what you had before. The other thing is when people add protein, they kind of need to substitute something else. So this advice, I think could be read as like, add protein, but keep everything else the same. In practice, what they mean is add protein and take away something else, carbs or fat, to kind of keep you at the same caloric density. So I wouldn't just, like, add a ton of eggs. I think closer. The advice is closer to, you know, replace, you know, replace your breakfast cereal with eggs.

Kevin Williamson (11:50)

Right.

Emily Oster (11:51)

Which would up the protein content and probably lower the sugar content, which is another. Which is another piece of this.

Steve Hayes (11:56)

Or begin resistance training in a way that I don't do it anymore.

Emily Oster (11:59)

Or do some exercise. Do some exercise. Yes, more.

Steve Hayes (12:01)

More exercise. Well, I could probably do. I probably do well with both of those things.

Emily Oster (12:05)

I will say most Americans are already eating more than the old guidelines, although a bit less than the. Than the new guide in terms of protein.

Steve Hayes (12:13)

One of the things I loved about your piece and I sent you a note about this separately, you got some grief for what you wrote in the New York Times, which was favorable about these guidelines in general. And maybe if you could explain to us why you got the grief you got and how you thought about giving, you know, offering some praise to the administration and to somebody like RFK Jr. Who has this reputation of being a conspiracy theorist and amplifying bad information.

Emily Oster (12:42)

Yeah. So I think a good way to describe the grief is I got an email from someone who's a professor, like a professor at a place that you've heard of. And, you know, he said, yeah, I can't believe you would write this. First of all, why didn't you comment in this piece on dietary guidelines on vaccines? Like, why didn't you mention that there should be, you know, that his choice on vaccines was bad? And also sort of like, how can you be saying that something that this person has done is good? We should be consistently just criticizing this, criticizing this administration more or less, no matter what. And I think there was a tenor of that in a lot of the more complicated feedback I got, which was just by saying that something they've done is not awful, you are sanewashing the administration. You are kind of making them seem normal. And that that will cause people not only to feel that their dietary guidelines are reasonable, but also to, you know, give more credence to the other things they say. And that that's, you know, that that is. That that is bad. And, you know, I thought a lot about that piece of criticism. I don't agree with it, but I think it's. I find it to be an interesting perspective, and I think it gets for me, as wrote in this piece, at what is very hard about public health messaging.

Steve Hayes (14:04)

Well, you can understand why somebody would want to say, I mean, if you believe that the guidance that we're getting on vaccines from rfk, and I don't think anybody thinks that what we've seen so far is where this ends, and I think we're likely to continue to see additional damage. Why you might be sympathetic if you've devoted your life to public health or, or the study of vaccines, the distribution of vaccines, while you might say, boy, we can't do anything at all to enhance this guy's credibility. And by saying that he's right about this or that this was smart because they've shortened the document, you're lending him credibility that he shouldn't have because now more people are going to be inclined to believe him when he says the things that he says about vaccines. But your argument, as I understand it, was, look, we just need to be honest about the data. Like, we need to be honest about what we're seeing and give straightforward explanations. And if people trust that people can consume them. Is that an accurate sort of description of your argument?

Emily Oster (15:06)

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think my ultimate feeling on this is, you know, your job as a. As a public health communicator. If you want people to like, if you think you're giving good advice, and I think I generally am giving good advice and analysis, I would like people to trust me. The most important thing is that I retain people's trust. And the most important thing for retaining people's trust is to say things that are true. And if you say things that are not true, even if there's like, you know, even if there's a good reason for it, if you say something that's not true and people find that out, you lose people's trust. And trust is very easy to lose and very hard to get back once you've lost it. And so for me, the trade off here is, I agree, it's not that I disagree that there's a little bit of transfer of kind of credibility and trust to the administration when you say something they did is good, and that's just the reality. But I think it is outweighed by the fact that by being honest about what's good and what's not good, I build people's trust and then they are more likely to trust me on the, on the vaccine point. And so I, you know, I. That's how I'm seeing the trust trade off. And that's, for me, why it's not actually very good to just continually say, you know, everything this person says is insane. You know, if RFK goes out and he says the sky is blue and you're going to come out and you're going to say, you know, the sky is not blue. Like, what a idiot. He didn't look at it today. It was gray. You know, what kind of dumb. Dumb is this? And people are not going to trust you. They're going to think you're just a shill who always says, this guy is wrong.

Steve Hayes (16:40)

Right. Isn't there a third option, though, of just saying nothing? Like, you didn't have to write the New York Times piece. And you could say, like, yeah, I don't really want to do it. I don't really want to do it.

Emily Oster (16:48)

Yeah, I think that is. That there is an option of saying nothing. And I think that there is a. Actually there's a strong temptation to always say something. And I think that we have to be like, one has to be a bit careful about the set of things that one comments on in this particular case, for me, in the lane of stuff I talk a lot about is both, like, what's the. What's about both diet and vaccine. It's actually very hard, and I think this is true for many organizations, sort of hard to say nothing because these are both things that are like, core. If, you know, if somebody comes out and says, here's our Ukraine policy, I'm not going to comment on that. That's not in my wheelhouse, and I don't know anything about it.

Steve Hayes (17:25)

Yeah, I mean, we dealt with this to a certain extent. I think during the 2024 election, institutionally the Dispatch did where you had something. If we would say, hey, what Donald Trump said on, you know, issue X makes some sense or would be an improvement from what we've seen the performance of the Biden administration, we would get criticism from people who would say just what you heard. You can't praise him. You can't say anything good about him. And I think for most people, the response, the recommendation was, therefore you should be offering praise to Joe Biden or at least not criticizing Joe Biden. And certainly as we followed the, the president's mental acuity and the challenges he had with speaking and getting out real sentences, there's an obligation, I think, when you do what we do, in this case, what you do when you're writing about these issues, to call it exactly how you see it, regardless of what the potential implications are.

Kevin Williamson (18:21)

Yeah.

Emily Oster (18:22)

Because the people that you're speaking to are saying this. They're not. I mean, again, I think this is really about respecting the intelligence and reasoning of the people to whom you are communicating. You know, they're smart and we gotta tell them the truth.

Steve Hayes (18:37)

Yep, exactly. Well, as I said in my note to you, I loved your piece because I thought the substantive analysis was great. But your last four paragraphs, it's hard for me to think of another piece that better sort of captured why we launched the Dispatch 6 and a half years ago. So we appreciate your piece, we appreciate that argument, and we appreciate you taking some time with us here today.

Emily Oster (18:56)

Pleasure to be here.

Steve Hayes (18:57)

All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast.

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Steve Hayes (21:27)

And we're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. Mike Kevin, thanks for joining me. Let's start at the end of the conversation that I just had with Emily Oster about the sort of obligation that she feels to to tell the truth, even if it lends credibility to to the Trump administration or the arguments you're making as it happens. Kevin, we have an argument from you today that in some ways does the same thing. You made an argument about Don Lemon's arrest. That certainly was not my view, but it was a pretty darn persuasive argument. Why don't you walk people through the argument and let us know why did you think to write this?

Kevin Williamson (22:05)

I have a sort of long standing bugaboo about licensing journalists or even implicitly licensing journalists. Part of Don Lemon's defense of himself was that he wasn't in this church. He was arrested after a protest at a Church in St. Paul as part of the anti ice stuff there in Minnesota was that he wasn't there as a protester or as an activist. He was there in his role as a journalist. As I said in the piece, he didn't say he was a good journalist, so we don't have to argue with him about that. But anyone can say they are a journalist and that's fine. But the thing is, our law doesn't really in most cases have any carve outs for someone for being a journalist. So for instance, there are a lot of things you can do that are against the law in the course of pursuing a story, most of which we've all done at one time or another, you know, trespassing or recording a conversation, maybe in a place that's a two party consent state where you're not really supposed to, without explicitly disclosing it to the other person. Or in my case, leaving a tape recorder on in a briefcase in a city council when they were going into executive session because I was curious about what was going on in there and they were kind of abusing their executive session discretion. But that doesn't mean that you don't go to jail for that stuff or get arrested for it because you're a journalist. I remember I was working, there's a couple photographers I worked with when I was in college. We were covering the Branch Davidian standoff at Waco, Texas. And this, let's give you an idea of my age. Some people, some people. That sounds like Normandy, right? Just so long ago. And you know, the FBI and the feds there had had this, you know, perimeter set up and all that. And I had a couple of good photographers who worked with me and they were army crawling, you know, past where they were supposed to be and they were going to go up to this cult compound and take some pictures. And of course they got swooped down on and thrown in jail. We had to go bail him out of jail. We don't license journalists. And that's a good thing because what the First Amendment protects is not a class of people. It protects an activity which is speaking and publishing, criticizing the government, making information public. So journalists, by tradition and discretion often don't get prosecuted for some things they could be prosecuted for, like receiving classified information. Almost all of us who've done any kind of journalism work have at one time or another received some document that might not have been, you know, top secret X's and skulls and crossbones on the COVID But you know, something that's, that's, it's to some extent confidential and we all get that stuff. Theoretically you can be prosecuted for that stuff. Theoretically, we should be open to prosecution for that stuff. I think journalists have to follow the law like anyone else or break the law like anyone else and deal with the consequences of breaking the law. So the thing about the First Amendment is It gives the same rights to Don Lemon if he's there as an activist or a protester or a journalist or someone who's writing a book or any other kind of First Amendment protected activity. The case against him is that he was there in the church disrupting a religious service, and he stayed after he was specifically asked to leave. One of the great ironies of this is that this is going to offend a lot of our progressive friends. But it's part of a law that was passed on largely Democratic energy back in the 1990s to protect abortion clinics and specifically to discourage rowdy and rambunctious and at times, lawbreaking protests outside those clinics. So typically, if someone was invading a clinic space in the course of protesting the activities going on inside, they would be typically up for like a local trespassing charge or something like that. And activists, for various reasons, wanted to create a federal case of action for that, which is what the so called FACE Act. I hate federal stupid congressional acronyms, by the way. Patriot act is the worst. FACE act is a pretty bad one. I. Those things made me just cringe. But anyway, and Republicans said, okay, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll go with you on this, but we also want to protect religious observances, and no one thought too much about it, but it is a specific federal crime to disrupt a religious service in that way. I think it's a dumb law. And I think one of the best things you can do with dumb laws, if they're not, you know, if they're not capital offenses, is go ahead and prosecute people for them. Because that kind of really sheds light on the fact that it is a dumb law and a law that probably should be revisited. But I think the journalists who choose to break the law are like people who engage in civil disobedience, that they may be doing it for a good cause. One can admire the cause or not admire the cause, but that doesn't change the fact that part of the deal of civil disobedience or any other willful lawbreaking is that you go to jail for it. You pay the price in some way. And this goes back from Martin Luther King to Mohandas Gandhi to Henry David Thoreau before that. Probably worth noting that a lot of the great people involved in famous acts of civil disobedience over the year were journalists also, you know, Gandhi was a newspaper editor. Yeah. So I think it's silly law, but it's probably worth, worth enforcing it in this case, and if only to Bring our attention to it and to avoid this program of, of sort of licensing journalists by implication. And the reason I don't want to create special protections for journalists is because that way, somewhere, someone in the government has to decide who gets this protection and who doesn't. And that amounts to government licensing of journalists. And we don't want government licensed journalists. We want journalism to be something anyone can do without any special license or permission structure. Did I just say permission structure instead of permission? Who am I, Jonah Goldberg? Yeah, we don't want, we don't want licensure of journalists. I think brain surgeons. Sure. Pediatric doctors. Yeah, we can license those guys. There's a couple of other professions that probably ought to be licensed journalists and hair braiders. Not that I have really strong views on hair braiding. Probably can get by without, without federal oversight.

Steve Hayes (27:25)

Let me, let me ask you one more question on the substance of your argument. And then I want to circle back to why you choose to make it in a way that I think picks up on the conversation I was having with, with Emily. Two federal judges disagreed with. You found that there wasn't cause for prosecuting. And one of those judges, Patrick Schiltz, who was, I believe, a. Had worked for Scalia, he's a, he's a conservative, wrote this. Some of the protesters, quote, were not protesters at all. Instead they were a journalist and his producer. There is no evidence that those two engaged in any criminal behavior or conspired to do so. So it sounds like he's making precisely the distinction that you think is false. And he's a, you know, he's a conservative jurist. What accounts for the differences in the way that you look at that? And are you persuaded by, or does it give you pause that he's making an opposite argument?

Kevin Williamson (28:21)

We could do an experiment. I can go to his house at 11 o' clock tonight and let myself in the front door and start asking him questions. And when he tells me to leave, I'll say no, I'm here in my role as a journalist and if the police come and put me in jail, which they will, I'm right and he's.

Steve Hayes (28:35)

Wrong, that stands tweet.

Kevin Williamson (28:36)

Is that good enough?

Steve Hayes (28:38)

I mean, there's no religious component there, but I mean, just on a pure trespassing prosecution, he would be.

Kevin Williamson (28:47)

Which is what this is. I mean, it's a trespassing case.

Steve Hayes (28:49)

Yeah, I mean, it's the, the indictment. So there's a 12 page charging document that is it, is it, it's written in such way. Even if I Accept the. The sort of. Your argument on its merits.

Kevin Williamson (29:04)

The.

Steve Hayes (29:05)

The document laying out the. The indictments are silly, like, hilariously stupid.

Kevin Williamson (29:12)

Yes. And I fully expect that this will never get past a judge. And there's all. There's 10 different reasons a judge can throw this out. You know, Lemon's going to go in and say, this is protectual. It is. He's going to say it's selective prosecution. Of course. It's politically motivated.

Jonah Goldberg (29:27)

Yep.

Kevin Williamson (29:28)

All these things. He's got an excellent case for all that stuff, and I fully expect that some judge will see that. And if a judge doesn't, a jury certainly will. It seems to me extraordinarily unlikely that Lemon would be convicted of a crime in this matter. But the law says what it says, and it's lost. It's worth dotting the I's and crossing the T's to go through it. I've been sort of monologizing here a little bit, but if I could just address one of Emily's points earlier, because you asked her, you know, why write that New York Times piece when it could seem like you're praising these people? And don't we have to be. Then we have to be sort of.

Steve Hayes (30:04)

Which is something that you did with this piece, I would say. Right.

Kevin Williamson (30:07)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Steve Hayes (30:07)

Strengths.

Kevin Williamson (30:08)

So there are two different ways of thinking about that. One is that I think our role as journalists and as opinion journalists specifically is just to say what we actually think about stuff and not to try to be, like, clever political consultants about it. And because we're in the journalism business, not the political comms business, and those are just different things. So I'm not running a political campaign. I'm not trying to get someone elected or unelected or change people's minds about. About Trump or anybody else. That's not. Not what I do exactly, but I think there's. There's questions of specificity. Right. I. I have an analogy I like to use sometimes. So say you have a friend who just refuses to save for his retirement. He never saves for his retirement, but every Friday, he buy. Every Friday, he buys a lottery ticket, and he says, I'm just going to win the lottery, and that's how I'm going to retire. And you say, this is stupid. This is a terrible plan. This is not how you're going to retire. Don't worry, I'm going to do it. Years and years go by, he doesn't win the lottery. And then, wouldn't you know it, a month before his retirement date, he hits a Billion dollar Powerball jackpot. He's got a billion dollars in his pocket now. He's far wealthier than you are. He's far wealthier than the people who saved for their retirement. Was that a good plan? No, it was a stupid plan. It's just a plan that happened to work out well in spite of being stupid. And so when people ask me, well, don't you like this about the Trump administration? Don't you like that about the Trump administration? Don't you like this thing? Honestly, there aren't very many things that I feel very conflicted about on that stuff. But if every now and then they come up with something that I do like, I can say that's a perfectly happy outcome for me. But, you know, if you sent a rabid chimpanzee on methamphetamine to my house and it just happened that he handed me, you know, a copy of a book I wanted to buy and walked away, I'd be happy to have the book, I'm sure, but I don't want the rabid chimpanzee on methamphetamine at my house.

Steve Hayes (31:49)

Mike, would you let the rabid chimp on methamphetamine in your house if he said he was a journalist?

Mike Warren (31:57)

Well, obviously the answer is yes. And I will be taking no follow up questions on that. But I was actually going to propose a question to both of you about this subject. I think we're getting into a meta situation here which is talking about the work that we do and what our role is. And one thing, that which is always.

Kevin Williamson (32:14)

Everyone'S favorite thing, by the way, to hear us talk about ourselves and our deep thoughts about our jobs.

Mike Warren (32:18)

I will say that I think DISPATCH members do like to know kind of how the sausage is made a little bit. I think this is helpful as well for us to have a good understanding of how other people view how we do our work. So. Kevin, I totally agree with you. It is a very frustrating aspect of this job, particularly in the last decade, where there is an expectation that as journalists, we are supposed to be doing some kind of positioning in order to affect a certain outcome, when all we're doing is trying to tell the truth. And I think what Emily said in her remarks at the beginning of this podcast was so. I mean, I wrote it down. It's like it's the most dispatching worldview, right, that we say that what the truth is or what we view the truth is. And based on the evidence that we have, without sort of favor or fear, I find that I exclude sort of most, if not all Dispatch members for this, but I do find that over the years that there is an expectation from audience members that cuts against that kind of. That worldview that we want to see sort of our viewpoints reflected back to us by what you write or what you say in a podcast or on TV or radio interviews. And that is something that doesn't necessarily affect. Affect my work, and I don't think it affects either of your work as well. But it seems like it's a force that is very powerful and it sort of dictates a lot of. I mean, this is what we talk about audience capture for, right? The audience wants to see these things, and they almost give us more power than we have by suggesting that by saying something that we believe is true. If I agree, and I tend to agree with Emily's view of the new nutrition guidelines, for instance, on the whole, pretty good. Some silliness about beef tallow aside, which is such a trendy, stupid, Instagram trendy thing, but just by saying that, giving comfort and aid to the enemy, that you are somehow falling down, it's just a powerful force. I'm curious how you two have. Have felt that. I have a feeling, Kevin, you really don't care about that pressure. And I'm not saying I do, but it's powerful, and it's something I feel like we should. We. We need to sort of talk about as an. As an industry, if not as just a company.

Kevin Williamson (34:56)

Not to be immodest, but, but, but, but, Kevin, don't care is generally a safe bet.

Mike Warren (35:00)

I know I will. That's. I. I know you, Kevin.

Steve Hayes (35:05)

You know, it's.

Emily Oster (35:05)

It's.

Steve Hayes (35:05)

I'll say it's interesting because I would say for a long time, decades even, I basically held the view that you do, Kevin, that people generally aren't interested in what journalists do. They're interested in the product, in what we provide them and the reporting and the information. And maybe to Mike's point in the affirmation, I will say that's one area where I've pretty dramatically changed my mind over the years, and I was probably slow to get to it. And Jonah had. In fact, Jonah and I had this conversation, or a version of this conversation a number of times in the years leading up to the launch of the Dispatch. And I think we both thought that we were wrong, which I would go out of my way not to talk about sort of how the sausage is made, how we do what we do, why people should trust us, and certainly tried to Avoid the self congratulations that I find so annoying that so many journalists engage in kind of all the, all the time. So I would give, you know, if I would give speeches, you know, whether it's sort of local Rotary Club or a men's Christian group or a paid speech to bankers or whomever, I would go out of my way to avoid talking about journalism and what we do. And invariably the first two or three questions when I finished were about journalism and how we do what we do. And people wanted to know. I feel like there's nowhere I can go. I can't trust anybody. Who do you read, Steve? How do you determine who's trustworthy and who's not? On and on and on and over the years, I think in particular in building the Dispatch with you all, I think there's great utility in actually walking people through. Now you can overdo it and it can be self indulgent and certainly I try to avoid the self congratulatory stuff, just letting people in on how the process works. There's a big gap between how we understand what we do and how the people who consume journalism broadly understand what we do. I remember being totally shocked when after a speech one time I got a question about anonymous sourcing. And it was one of those I got this question and I answered it and the question came back and. And it was obvious we weren't understanding one another. And we weren't understanding one another because this person who was asking me the question was under the impression that I didn't know who my anonymous sources were and was saying, how could you possibly quote somebody if you don't know who they are? And I finally said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait. I try not to use anonymous sources, but certainly my national security and intelligence reporting days I did. And I knew exactly who the anonymous sources were. I wouldn't use anonymous sources unless I had previously worked with them and they had a track record of credibility. And I put in the time, I put in the effort, but it was this gap in understanding. And certainly the person who asked me the question on that occasion wasn't the only person to do this.

Kevin Williamson (38:11)

I was going to say most people don't realize this either, that typically not only do you, the reporter, know who your source is, but your editor usually knows too. Because when you turn in a piece with some anonymous source making some claim that's interesting, an editor's gonna say who the hell is this? And is this your Uncle Bob?

Mike Warren (38:28)

Or what can I insert just another element of that which people don't Understand. So for instance, when I was at CNN for four years and we had specific editors who were trained and deputized to authorize single source, anonymous, single sources. And it was not an easy thing. It was not simply to go on TV or to publish something at the website that had a single source for a particular fact, a particular editor, and a small group of them had to authorize that. And it was a process and they were not always authorized. And I think just to add to this conversation, people don't quite understand on the consumer side how that works and it's maybe important for us to be more vocal about that.

Kevin Williamson (39:16)

Yeah, yeah.

Steve Hayes (39:16)

And I will say, you know, we've spent a bit more time trying to let people see into the reporting process than I would have done 15, 20 years ago. In part because, you know, people don't know who they can trust. They don't know whether to judge something as reliable or not. And our view is the more transparent we are about the process, the more likely it is that they'll understand what we're doing and why we're doing it. It's why I encour, encourage folks to our, you know, our writers and editors to go in the comments and if people have legitimate questions about the way that we put something together, like we should go in there and answer them and probably not going to be able to do every answer every question, every time. But I think if people have real questions or want to go a click further, we should help them do that. So it is one of the things that I've most changed my mind on over the past decade of doing this. And I actually have gotten to the point where I think it's pretty important, important to let people in on that.

Kevin Williamson (40:14)

I am a little bit charmed sometimes by the mystery that sometimes attends to our profession. I remember being young when I first started meeting people in finance, people who worked Wall street, that worked at hedge funds, things like that. And I was just mystified by what they did. And I thought there was some magical body of knowledge and skills they had that took years to master. Came thing after I got to know some of them and talked about what their work was and all that. It was like, oh, I kind of get what you do now. And there's nothing. It can be hard and it requires intelligence and creativity and sometimes some good luck. But there's no, there's nothing obscure about it. I try to explain to people sometimes that all we typically do is go out and talk to people and write down the stuff they say and Try to figure out if it's true and look around and look at public reports and records and see what our eyes tell us and just do normal things. Normal person would. And then try to put it into some kind of useful prose for people to consume. It's just that we do this all the time for a living, rather than just doing it as some part of our lives. On the anonymous source thing, I speak to a lot of journalism students, which is unfortunate for them because I usually start off telling them to change their majors and often they're too far along to do that. But what I always tell them is as far as the profession goes, as far as our work goes, just imagine drawing a circle and everything inside that circle is the stuff that's relevant to your work and what you do as a journalist. You just don't have any friends in that circle. You just can't. That's the first rule. No friends. We write what we write. We believe what we believe. We try to tell the truth as we see it, and we try to stay away from partiality.

Mike Warren (41:48)

Can I just button this up? Because the bigger question beyond journalism and reporting is the question of communication. And I think Emily made this point that she errs on the side of communicating what she believes is true and not worrying about sort of playing politics, small P politics with it. And I do think this is maybe a little naive, a little hopeful, but I tend to operate on the naive and hopeful side of things just because otherwise it would be nothing but despair. Despair is a sin. Is that in the long run, actually credibility comes when you say the thing that people are going to get mad about again, if it's true, if you are not grifting, if you're not simply being a contrarian, but you are trying to communicate what is true in the short run, you will have people gnashing their teeth over something that helps the other side or the wrong side and these sorts of things. But as I think she was getting at on the margins, the people you're actually trying to communicate with, it actually reveals and tells and signals, to use a business school word, signals to those people. This person's on the level because they're telling me something that might be against their own preferred preference or interest because they believe it's true.

Steve Hayes (43:20)

Well, and also, I mean, life is complicated. Life is messy like this. You have to like. The job involves explaining that to people. And I think there's an inclination sometimes of journalists, certainly a partisan or ideological bent, but also regular journalists to, you know, your job is to Explain the world to people to a certain extent. And so there is an inclination to try to make things neat and consumable that sometimes are not neat. I mean, maybe there isn't a straight line. Maybe it's complicated, Maybe it's messy. And I think where it's messy, we should be unafraid to reflect that messiness. I had a really good conversation about this with Tim Miller over at the Bulwark. In the context of covering the campaigns. We'll put that podcast in the show notes. But he said at one point, I don't want to misquote him, but paraphrasing. Yeah. Do we occasionally gild the lily talking about the Biden stuff? You know, maybe, but kind of no big deal. And, you know, my view was there should be no gilding the lily. Like, just. Just say it the way that. That. The way that you see it and be totally honest.

Kevin Williamson (44:30)

And I'm not that that particular lily gilding looks really bad in retrospect, doesn't it?

Steve Hayes (44:34)

Well, I mean, I think the Biden. The Biden stuff, and I'm not speaking specifically about the bull work here, but I mean, the Biden stuff in, in many cases. I think one of the reasons that we saw what we saw from the mainstream media on the Biden stuff was because they looked at the other side and they saw Donald Trump and they said sort of, we can't afford to tell the truth about Joe Biden because, look. And you know, I take great pride in the fact that we were asking these questions two plus years before the 2024 election and before he left and doing so in a, I think, mostly tasteful and respectful way.

Mike Warren (45:13)

Who was being tasteless, Steve? Who was being tasteless on our staff? Come on.

Steve Hayes (45:17)

You were tasteless, Mike, of course, as always, sipping from your CNN coffee mug. MSM Mike. Msn, Warren. That's what I'm gonna call you now.

Mike Warren (45:29)

Thank you.

Steve Hayes (45:29)

Before we take an ad break, please consider becoming a member of the Dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. You can sign up@thedispatch.com, and if you use the promo code roundtable, you'll get one month free. Speaking of ads, if they aren't your thing, you can upgrade to a premium membership. No ads, early access to all episodes, exclusive town halls with the founders, including one next week where we'll discuss the latest Dispatch editorial and much, much more. Okay, we'll be right back. Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. Kevin, you wrote a piece last week about the President's proposal to cap credit card fees at 10%. I want to get to specifically what you wrote about that proposal, but I also want to just put that in context in this broader discussion of affordability. It does seem to me that we're getting two very different kinds of arguments from the Trump administration, if we can call them arguments that might be generous assertions from Donald Trump and from the Trump administration. Because on the one hand, you hear the President frequently say sort of there is no affordability problem, everything's fine, things are great. This is the greatest economy in the history of mankind. And oh, by the way, the golden age is here and I'm responsible for it. But then you see in a nod to I think reality, and I do think the economic picture is messy here, it's not all bad, it's certainly not all good. There are mixed signals. You could take certain economic indicators and certain pieces of data and construct an argument that the economy is doing pretty well. And you could take others and construct an argument that we're going in the wrong direction, which makes this all very complicated. But it is, it seems to me, at least there's some tension between the arguments you hear from the President that everything's going well and the proposals that we continue to get from the President that suggest things are not going well. Before we get into that, I want to go back to the month before the 2024 election just to give people an idea of how important this issue was to voters generally and how important it was to Donald Trump in his election in 2024. A month before the 2024 election, Gallup did a survey and found that the economy was the most important issue to the 2024 presidential vote. It was the only issue, and I'm quoting here, it is the only issue on which a majority of voters, 52%, say the candidates positions on it are an extremely important influence on their vote. Another 38% of voters rate the economy as very important, which means the issue could be significant factor to nine in 10 voters. That was the environment in which the 2024 election took place and the exit polls a month later reflected that reality. This quoting from ABC News here. Nationally, the share of people saying they've gotten worse off under the current administration, the Biden administration, is the highest in presidential exit polls that have asked the question, even surpassing the 42% worse off in 2008 in the teeth of the Great Recession. So I share those numbers to make clear just how important the economy was to getting Donald Trump elected. A lot of people who didn't like him, didn't like the tweets, didn't like his arguments, didn't like the behavior, said, hey, things have gotten worse. Joe Biden doesn't care about inflation. They were laughing off warnings about exacerbating inflation, when in fact they were exacerbating inflation by the, the policies that they implemented. Where are we today on that question, the affordability question? Broadly, Donald Trump's pulling on these issues. He is underwater, to use the description of political professionals, depending on your poll, 14 points, 21 points. He's telling people things are great. He's proposing policies that suggest he understands they might not be, and voters are saying things are not good. Mike, where are we on this and what do you make of the credit card cap policy specifically and these other things the president's been proposing?

Mike Warren (49:37)

My view is both parties now have a, whether, I don't know whether it's an elite problem in those parties, whether it's a bottom up populist problem, or both that sort of reinforce themselves. But there's a profound distrust for markets and what markets tell us about prices, about demand and supply, all those sort of basic economic things. And I tend to believe that there's been a hollowing out in the elites of those parties, the sort of policy elites, the people who sort of think about these things, and the sort of populist anger about this problem or that problem regarding the economy is sort of filling that void. And so what you end up having is a Republican president proposing a cap on credit card rates that the self, that an actual self defining socialist. Bernie Sanders says it's a great idea. And so you have two political parties that are sort of, I think, captured by misunderstandings of sort of the 2008 financial crisis, frustration with the kind of what used to be called post liberal or the kind of post cold war consensus on economics. And their reaction is to say more government. We just have to figure out a way to fix the problem from the government side of things. And maybe we disagree about the various particulars of the solution. In some cases, like with this credit card cap, they don't actually, and there's nobody within either of these parties who has any power who actually believes that market forces can, on the whole and in the general and in many ways specifically, can have the answers that government can't. And so what you end up with is just people talking about affordability without any idea of what to do about it. Because at the end of the day, government doesn't really know how to make things more affordable, markets do.

Emily Oster (51:53)

Yeah.

Steve Hayes (51:53)

Kevin, your piece gets into the specifics of why the credit card cap is unlikely to do the things that the President wants it to do. I mean, I think if you're President Trump, one of the things that he does a lot is he comes up with things that are seemingly simple and maybe even commonsensical solutions to big problems. And they're often things that he can talk about in a way where people would say, yeah, I kind of get what he's doing. If you're listening to the President on this and you say, man, these credit card companies are predatory. I mean, they're charging 21% interest rates for people who can't afford to pay those interest rates. We why shouldn't the government come in and cap interest rates at 10%? Isn't he doing a favor to the people who can't afford to pay those higher interest rates?

Kevin Williamson (52:46)

Well, no, of course not. Because their choice isn't between high interest rates and low interest rates. It's between having credit and not having credit. And if you lower the price of something artificially, people produce less of it because, you know, that's how economics works. You know, I often tell people that 9/10 of the time, I'm an Eisenhower Republican, but then I have to go to, like, to the motor vehicle office and get a new driver's license, and I come out just ready to join a militia, you know, And I think most people in their daily lives are inclined to be kind of basically free market capitalist, you know, Western rich world consumer types. Until you try to cancel a gym membership or, you know, you have to deal with, you look at a health insurance statement or something like that, or.

Steve Hayes (53:28)

You buy tickets to concerts from Ticketmaster.

Kevin Williamson (53:30)

Yeah. And then you're a Leninist. Suddenly it's time to roll up sleeves and slit throats. And the masses are being exploited. We all respond to our immediate incentives. And credit card companies and banks, of course, are terrible examples of that for all sorts of various reasons. They're not very good people to work with for the most part, with some very few exceptions. And if they'd like to sponsor our podcast or something one of these days, I'll tell you all about one of them. So the problem is this, that there are a lot of things you can do economically to make life easier for people, but when you start messing with prices, you're just always going down the wrong road because prices reflect underlying realities. Prices are not arbitrary. Prices are telling you something about the actual state of production and the actual State of demand for things. So when you artificially raise the price for something, you will see less consumption of it. You see this in the case of people who jurisdictions that raise the minimum wage too much. And then you get fast food restaurants investing in automation and things like that because they don't want to hire these workers at $20 an hour because they're just economically not worth it. But you can go the other way too. When you artificially lower the price of something, especially if you do it too much, you just cut into production of it, you end up with rationing and shortages. We see this all the time where there are anti gouging rules in effect during emergencies. And so instead of having to pay 50 bucks for a case of water, your choice is to pay $0 for zero water because that's, that's what happens. And man, I just spent right before that big snowstorm hit, I went to Home Depot like 16 times to buy a generator and finally got one. There was a bit of that going on too. It kind of made me wish for a little market arbitrage, you know, something happening there where I could just pay the extra 15% or whatever the gouging was going to be on it and just get out of there with it instead of having to waste my time doing that. But prices are the wrong way to do that. If you want to increase the material well being of poor people or people who don't have enough money, the easiest thing to do is give them money. The problem is we just did a whole lot of that during COVID and that causes inflation if you do it at a very large scale and also if you do it in concert with declining economic production. And I guess the real untold story of the COVID era that hasn't been talked about very much, well, hasn't been talked about in a way that people can understand I think, is that basically we suspended a lot of economic production for about a year and as a consequence of that, we're all poor because there was less economic productivity happening. And you can do whatever you want monkeying around with prices and subsidies and wage substitutes and all that stuff, but if you're producing less stuff, you're just poor. And it takes a while to work through that. And so we'll be dealing with the consequences of the COVID era suspension of economic activity for a while. And we'll particularly see that in places that are more physical and less digital. Because that's the thing that was the most, that was the most impacted by that. And man, I just Used impacted as a transitive verb. I hate myself.

Steve Hayes (56:19)

Oh my gosh, Kevin, I'm going to.

Kevin Williamson (56:21)

Take a vacation now. Come on, impose that on myself. Yeah, so, you know, the Trump stuff is. The Trump stuff's particularly just idiotic because, well, there's no housing problem, right? We're doing fine. But here's my big idea for 50 year mortgages, which is just the dumbest thing. Imagine 25 year old person just out of school, you know, and is in his first job, wants to buy a house. We're going to give you a loan that you can pay off when you're 75 years old. That's just bananas. I mentioned this in a column the other day where there's this one particular car company I like and they make very expensive stuff that I'm never going to buy, but I remember seeing an ad for them. It's like, you can have this car for. And I don't remember what the monthly payment was, but it was, it was like, it's pretty reasonable, you know, I was like, I could, I could stretch and probably do that. But I was like, I wonder how that works. And it was like a 20 year financing deal for a car.

Steve Hayes (57:13)

If you finance a car over the.

Kevin Williamson (57:14)

Course of 20 years, you're making a bad decision. It can be the nicest car in the world. This is not a smart thing to do. So making student loans cheaper by subsidizing the interest rates on them just made college tuition go up. Because people will figure out a way to soak up the money when you put the money on the table for the same reason that people buy more expensive cars when you have the option of six year financing versus two year financing because they start looking at the monthly payment and not the actual expense of the thing. People buy more expensive houses when they're 30 year mortgages than when they're 10 year mortgages or when you don't have to put up a lot of money on a down payment. None of this changes the underlying availability of houses. And if you want housing to be more plentiful, then you should build more houses. If you want food to be more affordable, then get out of the way of the farmers and the grocers and the distributors and the dairy companies and all the rest of the stuff and let them do their thing. But we don't do that. We have these layers and layers of subsidies, taxes and regulations, not all of which are terrible. I'm not an anarchist. I'm not saying we should get rid of all the regulations on food and Drugs and that stuff. But we do have it set up in such a ways that we make it more difficult to. To produce the way we would like to and then we try to fix that by doing things like well let's have a cap on credit card interest rates as though that were the problem, not the fact that people are carrying a balance from one month to the next because they're using their credit cards to buy milk.

Steve Hayes (58:39)

Mike, I'm very tempted to ask you how Kevin's argument impacted your thinking but I'm not going to do that because I don't want to use impacted that way. And we need to get on to two more topics one more topic before before we get to not worth your time. And I just want to be. I want to briefly just ask you about the this release of 3 million documents in the Epstein files over the weekend. Pretty extraordinary release. Some of the emails that we see I think are, you know give for people who thought there is a global elite that were predators toward young women is pretty much confirmed in the release of these documents in a way that I think is. Was revolting to read in in real time. There have been objections to the way these documents have been released though in that they somebody mentioned in a document who might have had an email with Jeffrey Epstein could be construed to have have been involved in things that he wasn't involved in. And some of the victims have said hey this is too much information, too much public information about what happened to us. Mike, to you first, anything you saw as you read about this over the weekend that stood out to you either in terms of people who were named or involved or listed in emails or in the 20th of overall political impact of the release of these things.

Mike Warren (60:12)

I am probably the worst person, worst journalist to be asking about the Epstein files because page 32 against no, not at all. Against my own sort of professional interest. I find it very difficult to get to work worked up or even interested in them as a sort of journalistic enterprise. Think that there is a lot in these documents that more scrutiny, more sort of legal scrutiny might reveal to be sort of big nothing burgers or might be revealed to be really bad evidence of crimes by a lot of these sort of billionaires who were friendly with a known and by the way widely known seemed to be known by everybody who knew him pedophile. And so the problem is that it's a document dump and I have no way of knowing what's valid, what's not valid. Somebody's name pops up somewhere. I'll give you an example of something where a sort of a stupid coverage of the Epstein files. And I haven't necessarily seen this in particular, but stupid coverage of the Epstein files would look something like journalist Tina Brown's name found in the Epstein files. There was an email in which Tina Brown, who at the time was the editor in chief of the Daily Beast, essentially was asked to come visit or meet with Jeffrey Epstein at some point. And her email through a representative back was essentially to say, was essentially a very responsible email saying basically if she's going to do this, she's going to bring along a reporter from the Daily Beast. We're going to assume that everything that that reporter learns will be used to report on Jeffrey Epstein. And so it's kind of a big, it's not only a big nothing burger, it's a very responsible thing that she and her representatives did. And so the problem is the stupid coverage is like Bill Gates is in this or whomever. And you dig down into the details of the documents and you can see and understand what's gross, what's revealed to be sort of we learn new things about these people that should disgust us. But I don't think most people are reading through that stuff. They're sort of seeing memes, sort of a memeified reporting on this stuff. And it is incomplete. And there's really kind of no way for me or anybody else to judge what's valid or not. And there's a real trust problem that comes out of the way these documents are being dumped. And I just, I find it to.

Emily Oster (63:13)

Be.

Mike Warren (63:15)

An impossible task unless you gave me like six months off just to like read through all of these and do the follow up reporting.

Steve Hayes (63:22)

I mean it's literally 3 million pages. The latest version of some of these have been released before, but I mean it's 3 million documents.

Mike Warren (63:29)

Exactly. And at the end of the day my view is that Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were the, were the criminals at the sort of the top of whatever this enterprise was. And they were, they were prosecuted for it.

Steve Hayes (63:47)

Barely, I would say. I mean one of the things that jumps out at me as I read this, and I like you, Mike, I have not spent a lot of time focused on this either in the political context. I think her name is Julia Brown from the Miami Herald, has done some terrific reporting over the years, including a book. I have not read her book, but I've read a lot of her reporting. She really broke a lot of this and made it made possible. Some of the things that we were seeing over the weekend. But it certainly feels to me like he was given. Just given what we have seen that has been verified. He was given extraordinarily favorable treatment over the years as he.

Mike Warren (64:26)

Particularly in the, like the mid-2000s, there was all kinds of evidence. Correct. There was a deal. And I think. Totally agree.

Steve Hayes (64:33)

And it also looks again, reading this as a non lawyer, I think it's safe to conclude from the documents that we've seen that again have been verified that had they been interested in prosecuting other people, there was a lot that they could have done. And it seems that they were just not as interested in prosecuting people. Kevin, I'll turn to you. One of the things that sort of stood out to me was the number of people who wrote to, first of all, the number of people who had previously said, I have nothing to do with this guy. I was so, you know, Howard Lutnick. I was so repulsed by him in 2005 when I met him, I never even wanted to talk to him again. And then, well, the memos tell a different story. The emails tell a different story. The thing that struck me as I read articles about this over the weekend, the number of people who were openly emailing with Jeffrey Epstein about the young girls, like just I'll be there if you bring your harem was one that was just sort of Epstein himself is writing to other people about the ages of the women that he was dealing with. And there's a back and forth there just sort of strikes me as incredible. There were also suggestions in the documents that were released over the weekend or late last week that he may well have used these documents in blackmail efforts in a way that many people have long suspected but haven't seen a ton of evidence on that. Any of that stand out to you as you looked at this?

Kevin Williamson (66:07)

Yeah. What a gross story. I'll tell you what it's made me rethink a little bit is that I've always taken a pretty traditionally libertarian view toward prostitution and what's broadly known as sex work. That I don't think it's great for people on either side of the transaction for the most part, but probably something that's not made better by. By criminalization of it. And the Epstein story is, in part, and the most important part, I think, a story about the sexual abuse of minors, but it's also partly a story about prostitution. It's partly a story about the ways in which young women who are not minors but who are in the presence of men who have a lot of Money and power and are vulnerable to various kinds of extortion or influence or pressure. And the way in which these three separate categories of things kind of bleed into one another, they're not the same thing, but they're also not, you know, necessarily bright lines between them that it's all a pretty grisly mess of things. I'm not entirely surprised by the story in a lot of ways, just in the sense that I think Jeffrey Epstein is probably a pretty good example of what male libido, liberated from consequences and constraints and morality and other limiting factors ends up being. That I think we all have, maybe not all of us, but a lot of us have some measure of that kind of potential awfulness inside of us. I think it's just sort of a natural part of the fallen human condition. And it gives me, I guess, a sense of new appreciation for the. The subtleties of the ways in which we construct social and legal and informal barriers to try to prevent this kind of behavior. I think particularly the late 20th century and the early 21st century were a much more, I think, libertine time than what we have now in the kind of Clinton era and post Clinton era. We were all being lectured about how only Americans care about the president having a sexual relationship with. With this intern. And the French would roll their eyes if people made such a big deal about it. And as though that were the mark of sophistication, was being sort of blase about this kind of stuff. But I think that. Not that Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein are examples of exactly the same kind of phenomenon. They are related phenomena, certainly. And the line from one to the other is fairly short, fairly direct and fairly straight.

Steve Hayes (68:34)

And I think finally today, before we go, not worth your time. There has been lots of coverage over the past week about a change in the way that Southwest Airlines does its business. The way that Southwest has flown for years and now has made some changes. Among the changes are requiring people to pay for bags. Southwest is no longer doing the sort of cattle call seating, which was the way that Southwest had. Had done business since, I think, 1971 in Dallas. And it's caused a lot of problems. There are a lot of Southwest regular Southwest loyal Southwest customers who hate it. They liked the old way of doing it. They'd figured out how to fly on Southwest, and they don't like these changes. And it makes Southwest a lot more like the other airlines. Mike, are you a Southwest customer, and if so, how do you like the changes?

Mike Warren (69:38)

I'm a longtime Southwest customer. It was Once Southwest purchased AirTran, which was a low cost airline that was based in Atlanta. I had personal reasons to be flying between Atlanta and Washington D.C. for a number of years. And so I was a loyal customer. Still fly a lot of Southwest. It's been great for. If you get the companion pass, you can fly people for free on it and goes to some of the places that I still need to fly to. I have not flown Southwest since this change has happened in the last week or so. And I have to say I hate it. I understand why it's happening. It's essentially a investor driven decision. They think that they can cut costs essentially by doing this, they can raise the prices of those seats in the front just like all the other airlines do. And so I'm sure there is some sort of economic justification for this. But I hate what it's done to what was really kind of a quirky and special airline which took this aspect of kind of modern upper middle class life, which is flying, and made it a little different and made it sort of unique and created, I think, some loyalty out of a customer base that I think, think we're losing. You know, it makes perfect economic sense, I'm sure, but I don't like.

Steve Hayes (71:20)

I mean, it only makes perfect economic sense if it works, right?

Mike Warren (71:23)

If it works. I guess that's what I'm saying.

Steve Hayes (71:25)

If you have customers that run away, I'm not sure it does. So. Kevin, I have been a loyal Southwest customer for 20 years. Before that, I flew as much as I possibly could on the greatest airline ever known to mankind called Midwest Express Airline Lines. The headquarters was in Milwaukee, which is where I'm from. They had direct routes to everywhere. Every seat on the plane was first class. When they started, they served you a gourmet meal. And when I say gourmet airplane meal, I don't mean gourmet like airline food. I mean actual gourmet meal like surf and turf, filet lobster. It was free wine the entire trip. At the end of the trip they are. At the end of the meal, they served you warm baked chocolate chip cookies. Extraordinary. And every seat.

Mike Warren (72:15)

Talk about libertine, by the way.

Steve Hayes (72:17)

Every seat was effectively a first class seat. Like a huge seat was an incredible, incredible airline.

Kevin Williamson (72:24)

And I like a Garrison Keiller thing where all the seats are first class and all the children are above average.

Steve Hayes (72:29)

Yeah, I mean, it was basically. It was basically.

Kevin Williamson (72:32)

This sounds very. This sounds very Midwestern. And whatever your Milwaukee version of epicureanism is, I may be turning my nose up that just a little bit No.

Steve Hayes (72:41)

I mean it was rated the number one airline in the country sort of years running. It was great. And the round trip flights were cheap, like 200 bucks back and forth to Milwaukee direct flights. So Midwest got problem with that is.

Kevin Williamson (72:58)

You'Re in Milwaukee at the end of it.

Steve Hayes (72:59)

No, that's, that's the whole point is that you're in Milwaukee at the end of it. That's probably what makes it better than any of the other perks. But they got bought and they kind of went away and it was very sad. And then I started flying Southwest. Southwest flies out of BWI and DCA natural places for me to fly out of. And I became such a loyal Southwest customer that I got the Southwest credit card. I did the companion pass. Mike, that, that you mentioned. The companion passes this great thing that you can either get from flying a lot or from spending a lot on the credit card. But if you pass a certain number of certain threshold of miles or points, you can fly with somebody. Somebody can fly with you on any flight, anywhere you go ever for the year. And you can change who your companion is three, four times a year. When I was doing a lot more public speaking, traveling for public speaking, I took a kid along on almost every one of my speech trips. So, you know, they. I got to hang out for several days with a kid just would yank them out of school. It was great. Loved everything about it. I had games.

Kevin Williamson (74:07)

Changing your, changing your companion three, four times a year is like, that's like Donald Trump numbers. That's even worse.

Steve Hayes (74:14)

No comment. This was just my kids and my wife, Kevin. Those are the only companions I had. But I loved it and I had gamed the system, the boarding system, so that I could almost always get. If you fly Southwest and you're one of the early ones on, you can get what I always called Southwest first class, which is the one seat where you have no seat in front of you. You can extend your legs. I got it. I'd say I usually got it 90% of the time, something like that. Anyway, they made all these changes. I did fly Southwest this weekend and on the flight. It is hilarious. They're going to have to figure this out or it's going to. I think it's going to be problematic. First of all, the flights are much more expensive and flight Southwest has been increasing its flights. It is no longer the low cost airline compared to other places. I flew back and forth to Phoenix in the fall and it was 850 bucks, which was roughly the same as these other airlines. And I Bought the tickets well in advance. The if you look at the changes that they've made, you now pay for bags. The flights themselves are more expensive. They do this. They've avoided the group seating and now you go by assigned seats. So I boarded. I had pre selected the first class Southwest seats. So I got the seat that I liked, which was great. And I'm a. A list preferred member so I can check my bags without paying more. But there were about 170 seats on this flight, 80 of. Roughly 80 of which were occupied. And because you have to pay to sit at the front of the plane or in the exit rows and you don't have to pay in the back. There were about four people in front of me in that part of the plane. Nobody in the exit row next to me in like five or six exit row seats next to me and then behind me. All of the customers were crammed in three to a side. So every middle seat, or almost every middle seat was taken. And people were pissed. They were looking at the, you know, the seats up front, they're like, hey, can I just go sit up there? And the flight attendants had to tell them no. They're like, really? I mean, you're going to make me sit in between these two other people? And it was rough and I felt culture shock. I felt bad for the poor flight attendants. Kevin, I know you usually like to fly private everywhere you go. I think when I can. You're a NetJets kind of guy. In fact, would be still working on the NetJets sponsorship for the Dispatch Boy.

Kevin Williamson (76:47)

Do I have some travel expenses for you.

Steve Hayes (76:53)

Do you ever fly Southwest? And if so, have you experienced any of these things?

Kevin Williamson (76:59)

Well, you know, so growing up in Texas, I'm from Lubbock and I went to school in Austin. So I flew Southwest a lot when I was in college, going back and forth between Austin and Amarillo often to see my father. I hadn't been on an airplane until I was. Was 19. I guess I started flying then. And that was back in the days of the Wright Amendment, you know, where there are all these rules about where Southwest could fly and what their airplanes were like and all that. And so you couldn't fly direct from Austin, Amarillo, yet. Everything had to stop at left field. It was this weird, goofy thing they had and it was mainly meant to protect dfw. I think I forget what the. The machinations were in the background. The last Southwest flight I remember taking, I know I must have flown it since then, but I was still in college. It Was a very memorable flight because we stopped at dfw, changed planes, and I was getting on the plane to fly to Austin and it was me and some reason I've been talking about weight a lot lately, but I was in college, I was probably about 325 around then. And I was about a size 52 suit jacket and it was me and the Baylor football team. And so it was like, you know, everyone was just like sort of stuffed in these seats.

Steve Hayes (78:02)

Everybody thought you were an offensive lineman even though you were.

Kevin Williamson (78:05)

Yeah, I wasn't nearly big enough to play at ut.

Mike Warren (78:09)

Baylor though. Yeah, okay.

Kevin Williamson (78:11)

Yeah, Baylor. I might have, I, I could have pulled off hardly. Or Yale maybe or something. Princeton. I could have probably played at Princeton. But yeah, so that was my last experience with, with Southwest that I can recall off the top of my head. Although I must have flown it since then. You know, I lived in Dallas for, for a long time, so left field is really convenient to fly in and out of. But for me, American was always the more convenient airline. And once you've sort of, once you've thrown in your lot with somebody, you're, you're there. A couple of, couple of observations about, about air travel. One is that the only airline I've ever been on that actually has good food is Air India. And that's because Indian food travels really well because the vegetables are all cooked to mush anyway. So letting it sit in a warmer for an extra. I love Indian food. It's my favorite kind of, my favorite kind of food. But letting it, you know, sit in the warmer for an extra hour or two is not really going to make that sac paneer any mushier than it was if you got it straight out of the pot. One of the things I love about air travel, and there's not much I love about air travel, it does suck in lots of ways, is that they force us to confront, in a very plain and obvious and unassailably true way, one of the things in American life that we never really are comfortable talking about. And it says it right there on your ticket status. You know, you are either in the club or you are not in the club. You're a first class passenger or you're not. And I used to get a lot of upgrades on American Airlines because I was flying a lot and flying out of Dallas. And so, you know, that would kind of work out well. And I remember I went to the Democratic National Convention in must have been 2000, I want to say, when it was in Philadelphia. And am I right about that 2000 Philadelphia.

Steve Hayes (79:49)

2000 was Philadelphia. Yes.

Kevin Williamson (79:51)

Yeah. And Johnny Rotten was there. And he had been hired to cover it for, like, E. Or some Comedy Central or someone had hired Johnny Rotten to cover it. And so he shows up and these protesters are outside because they want communism and they want to burn Starbucks or whatever, and they see Johnny Rotten and they're just, hooray, it's Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols. And he gives him this withering look, and he says, hello, poor people. My name is Mr. Rotten, and I'm here because American politics amuses me. And every time I get to fly first class and all the people, you know, walking in, going to the back and they want to come up and use the first class bathroom or whatever, I just. I hear Johnny Rotten, the voice in the back of my head saying, hello, poor people. And it's easy that easy to let that status go to your head in. In a hurry.

Mike Warren (80:34)

Well, can I.

Kevin Williamson (80:35)

Can I say.

Mike Warren (80:36)

Can I say real quick about. About the status thing and what makes the. The Southwest change so galling is that it has made what the other airlines have made, which is essentially if you buy enough tickets, if you spend enough money, you sort of get those benefits. What Southwest's system allowed was, if you knew the system, if you sort of understood and did your homework a little bit, it didn't really matter as much that you spent as much money. But if you sort of understood how to get in the right position to get the right seat or whatever, or to, you know, hey, if I can fly Southwest, I can save money by. Because they'll check my bags for free. It's sort of. It increases the importance of essentially just money, just spending money to save, right?

Kevin Williamson (81:25)

So what you're making the case for is like Yugoslavia under communism, right? Doesn't matter the money. You got to figure out the system, you know, and how to exploit it. See, this is what I like about this is God bless America. We don't have a class system here. We just have money. And money is fair, it's democratic, it's open. Anyone can go out and make some more of it. And, you know, you can't change, you know, where you came from or your family's history or any of that stuff. You can't make yourself a Mayflower descendant, but you can go out and earn some more money. And God bless America. That's one of the things I like about our countries. We don't really have much of a class system. We do have a little bit of one. We don't talk about, but mostly we just have money.

Steve Hayes (82:03)

I think Mike is now rethinking his position on the 10% cap on credit cards. It's going to come out in favor of that. It's unfair.

Mike Warren (82:12)

Not at all.

Kevin Williamson (82:13)

I went to a party one time in New York in lower Manhattan. You know, our friend Ovik, Roy and Ovic. I don't know if he's still into this. I haven't talked to Ovik in a while, but Ovik used to be like, seriously into champagne. He was a champagne collector and. Which sounds bad already the story. But he was friends with some people who had a very, very fancy apartment in New York City. And he would have this party once a year or so and he would serve a whole bunch of different kinds of interesting champagnes. And it was a very fun party. But this apartment was spectacular. And it had one of these big, big balconies. It was bigger than my apartment in New York was at the time. And I remember I just happened to be going to this party and Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, was also there. And we were walking in at the same time. And Rich looks around at this apartment. He says to himself, maybe we should raise taxes on the Rich.

Steve Hayes (83:03)

You have those moments, right?

Kevin Williamson (83:05)

I get it. I get it.

Steve Hayes (83:06)

All right. Well, thank you very much. I'm going to take another Southwest flight soon and I will report back on how it goes. I will say just before we check out on Thursday, we talked about weird injuries and Kevin reported that he didn't really have many weird injuries, doesn't have many injuries at all, and has previously told us that he really almost never gets sick. So I don't know how to become sort of like the, the bionic man that you are, but it's. But it's pretty great. I will say we got a number of very, very funny emails with people telling us their. Their funny injury stories. And I will. I'm going to try to take just a couple of them for Friday's roundtable and maybe share, share them because they are. They're worth sharing. So if you have any more, feel free to send them to us@roundtabledispatch.com or leave them in the comments on this podcast. Thanks both for joining and we will see you next time. If you like what we're doing here, there are a few easy ways to support us. You can rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. And speaking of support, here's a shout out to a few folks who recently joined as Premium members Rick Boss, Denise C. And Joe A. We're glad to have you aboard. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns or corrections, you can email us at roundtable@the dispatch.com we read everything, even the ones from people who like sitting in the middle seat. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in. And a big thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible. Noah Hickey, Victoria Holmes and Peter Von Avenger. We couldn't do it without you. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.

Jonah Goldberg (85:23)

Do you love the Dispatch's journalism but don't have time to read it all? We hear this pretty frequently from our members, which is why I'm very excited to introduce Dispatch Voiced, a members only podcast feed that helps you keep up with our work on your schedule. Here's how it works. We've built two feeds, Editors picks for our biggest stories, and the Morning Dispatch for our daily newsletter. Powered by realistic AI voice models created by 11 Labs, these high quality audio versions are delivered right to your favorite podcast player. Whether you're commuting at at the gym, out grocery shopping, even walking the dog, Dispatch Voice fits our reporting into your schedule. Jonah Goldberg's latest column the biggest news from Capitol Hill, Our most colorful cultural analysis. Now it's all available in your podcast feed. Ready when you are. Most episodes use advanced AI narration that sounds remarkably like a professional audiobook reader and will occasionally feature authors from reading their own work too. Ready to take the Dispatch on the go? Members can set up their feed on their account page@thedispatch.com not a member yet? Start listening today when you join the Dispatch.