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Hi, it's Mike. It's Saturday. It's the Saturday show. We usually do one from the week and one from the vault. And this week I shared a story of cooking rice. You would think that a daily news show would talk a lot more about cooking rice, but the uncooked to the cooked ratio is the centerpiece of a great spiel that I'm going to bring to you. In case you missed it, a listener did write in and said I talked about FTSE full time employees, but I think FTE in the context that I mentioned them might have been full time equivalent. So people, from what I understand, when people work for a corporation, they like not being called employees, they like being called equivalents, or they like being seen as a fraction of a human being. And then when you refer to them, you don't say, oh, you're a full time employee. You're the equivalent of an actual, actual human being who we would value if he were an employee and ate too much rice. So enough about that spiel. This week a very important Washingtonian, a former Secretary of the Navy, died and his name was Paul Ignatius. Paul Ignatius has a son. Paul Ignatius was 104 when he died and he has a son who, who's sort of the dean of the foreign policy establishment press corps, David Ignatius. And I think David was on the show twice. But the most recent time I did assume that his late father, because we're talking about a man who at the time was 100 or would have been 100 had he been alive. So I think I may have mentioned his late father was not late, was still kicking around, kicked around for another few years. I enjoyed my conversation with David Ignatius. This reminded me of it. I only talked about Paul Ignatius a little bit. But it's a really interesting guy. Just a real public servant and had his name Secretary Undersecretary of the Navy. You know, I'm not even mad I had an Undersecretary of the army on this week. That is pretty coincidental. Enjoy my interview about cooked rice and with Paul Ignatius. Life's a little crazy lately and members of my family definitely need to unwind. This is not the throwing under the bus. This is about relieving aches and discomfort and CBD Gummies which as I said, there are many people around here who avail themselves of the Cornbread Hemp Gummy. They're formulated to work with your body, not against it. Cornbread Hemp CBD gummies are made to make you feel better, stress, discomfort, if you need a little relaxation. They use the best part of the hemp plant, the flower for the purest and most potent CBD. All products are third party, lab tested and USDA organic to ensure safety and purity. Right now the Gist listeners can get 30% off their first order. Just head to kornbread hemp.com the gist and use code the gist at checkout. That's kornbread.com the gist and use code, the gist True work. I'm wearing it right now. Fall weather changes fast, so I'm dressed in layers. I've got this hoodie that's a lovely shade of green, but on top of that I've got a true work zip up jacket and if I wanted to, I could pivot to a truer coat. A true true work coat. They're made by trade professionals who are tired of wet, heavy gear weighing them down. And every piece is tested on job sites with trade pros. The trade could be podcaster or it could be, you know, actual construction worker or logger. I wear Tru work. I don't know, maybe a little too much given how often I'm clearing brush, which is not much. But it's just a testament to the fact that this stuff really and truly does work. And it also looks damn good. Upgrade your day with workwear built like it matters and get 15% off your first order@truewerk.com with the code the gist. That's spelling's important on this one. T r u e w e r k.com and use the code the Gist the government will never shut down again until it does very soon. The next time it inconvenienced millions and got us. I'm not going to say nothing, but not much. Morning Joe called it a big win for the Democrats. Here's some of that argument. Massive, historic in some ways, where Steve Bannon said Democrats erased 10 years of Republican gains in one night. And why did that happen? Donald Trump said it happened because of the government shutdown. So all this fear and loathing and all this whining. I wish Democrats for once, just once could take a win and then understand the Republicans, they were never going to help working Americans. They learned that through this process. So you know who else learned that through this process? The American voter. The great thing about our media ecosystem is you could choose whichever reality you want if you want. Great win for the Democrats. There is a very well watched cable network to tell you that other outlets are going with the fact that almost every Democrat besides the eight who defected strongly disagree with the defectors. I'm talking everyone from AOC to Roc Hannah to Amy Klobuchar and John Hickenlooper. Here is the ABC podcast Start Here, where they express incredulity over Democrats. I don't want to say caving, but doing a toe touch of a spelunk and agreeing to settle at this juncture. One of the biggest reasons Senate Democrats were not funding the government is because they were like, we cannot let people lose their health care or pay way, way more for their health care. We're going to shut down the government to make sure this happens. And now a month later, 40 days later, they're caving on that effectively for what? A pinky promise that we might vote on the health care thing and it might not even pass? What, like, is that going to fly with constituents?
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I mean, that's right. They didn't really end up getting very much out of this. Despite a very long fight about it. There are some Democrats in the group that voted to advance this thing who are going to say that this was a concession that had to be made. I understand that not all of my.
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Democratic colleagues are satisfied with this agreement, but waiting another week or another month wouldn't deliver a better outcome.
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They say that this is a record shattering shutdown and the pain that it was beginning to cause the country was starting to really escalate.
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C
We were seeing lines to our food.
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Banks in northern Nevada.
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These were lines that I hadn't seen since the pandemic.
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The shutdown did inconvenience a lot of people. Did it ruin lives? No, but it rerouted aircraft and caused a lot of stress among those who rely on snap. There is still uncertainty for people hoping for a favorable outcome on ACA rates that Is, by the way, I got to tell you the just difference. I did not weigh into this. The day ins, the day outs. I covered the broad contours, but I really didn't see it being much more than a time wasting bummer. I didn't see it resetting politics. I talked to a lot of people citing polls showing Democrats were winning okay, and yet eight actual elected Senate Democrats disagreed with those polls. Did they not see the polls? Did they not think they themselves would be helped by the polls? I know a couple of them aren't running for office again or aren't up for reelection, but why would they then care if they're not getting elected again about their constituents? I'm talking about Dick Durbin, who's 80 and said he won't run for election. So he's a humanitarian who cares for the people of Illinois, but not politically motivated and doesn't think he himself will benefit. Isn't that more of a good thing, say something good about Dick Durbin than something bad? Other Senators read the situation quite differently, right? Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Bernie Sanders, Ruben Gallego of Arizona, Bernie Sanders from Vermont. I just skipped over that. You know, he's from Vermont. These Democrats, I guess, have better poker playing instincts than the eight who caved. They read the Republicans as, oh, somehow close to guaranteeing ACA subsidies rather than just doing what they did, saying, okay, we'll one day vote on ACA subsidies. By the way, that vote might just turn out to be a win for the Democratic position. Plenty of Republicans, Marjorie Taylor Greene among them, know that they will be hurt if their constituents have to pay a lot more for health care. It does strike me as a little bit odd that the eight defectors are being assailed as weak or cowardly or even having caved. Because in other contexts, wouldn't we say the opposite of any politician who reads the polls and sees that the polls show the tactics are working, working for their political advantage, but still rebukes the politics in favor of the wealth, health and well being of their people. The shutdown was hurting everyone's constituents. Some Democrats wanted to press on ahead and some said no. I wanted, if you're TIM Kaine, the 150,000 federal workers who I represent to get paid. My initial assessment stands. This was a fine fight for Chuck Schumer to take up, not because he would win, but because the alternative, where he didn't take up the fight, would have killed him. And it is a bit of a rallying cry for Democrats who I don't think were ever going to get the win, but benefited from the fight, but the benefit accrued to success in the midterms. I don't think it would carry over if they pressed it for for weeks and weeks or months and months. And look, they did do very well in the midterms. So that's it. Mission accomplished. It's plausible that they will have a reputation for showing a little bit of spine in 2026, but overall, I more hate this aspect of government, the one where everyone can pull the brakes but no one has any incentive to actually reroute the train. For all the sympathetic appeals to medical insurance, accessibility subsidies, of course, come at a cost. And I am not echoing that Republican line that Obamacare has failed, or that there is some big, beautiful Nixon plan to end the war in Vietnam, I'm sorry, Trump plan to fix health care. But I do acknowledge that in the real world, it all costs money. And yet no one in Congress, I don't know, maybe 10 people in the Tea Party, half of them just might be nuts, seem to care about a budget deficit that actually, during a government shutdown, added a trillion dollars when this was when spending was supposedly halted. So if you want to be mad at Chuck Schumer, be mad at Chuck Schumer. Being mad at Chuck Schumer is basically what makes you a good Democrat these days. He tried to keep his caucus in line. He did not. Because of the underlying dynamics. I really do not think he was ever going to, quote, unquote, win this shutdown, except to the extent that Joe Scarborough Van Jones also agrees with this, to the extent that I guess he already won the shutdown. But the members of his caucus who defected have rational self interest and constituent interest at heart. They define their jobs in a way that said, I'm going to get my people paid and fed before I'm going to press on with a tactic that is winning in the polls by, but might not win on the metric that we have defined the point of this shutdown. They saw Republican cruelty and Trump indifference as a constant. And in that regard, I think they're right. I've been using Cove Pure water purification and it's great. There's no installation. It tastes good and I'm thinking about giving it to my parents because they're always drinking bottled water, which can be fine, but it's inconvenient and not good for the environment. And you've got to, of course, recycle it. Not with COVID Pure. You just fill it up right from the tap and you put it into the unit and what you can get is purer than, say, boiling water. And you could get hot water, you could get cold water. I like the cold water. But, you know, my mom, she enjoys a cup of tea. And my dad, he enjoys a decaf coffee. And they have a tea kettle that. And this is more about the tea kettle than co Pure. It's metallic on the top. So when you try to open the latch on the tea kettle, you're engaging with a piece of metal that was just on a stove and burns in sue, not with COVID Pure. Cove Pure also has this. My dad's gonna like this because he's very empirically good. Has the number right there on the front. So TDS is the total dissolved solids. And there's, I don't know, 500 in the water that we have. And after going through Cove Pure, it's down to nine, sometimes five. This is what makes the water of Coke Pure taste so good. So pure. But it's not just the taste. You know, what's in your water could be here in New York. We have pretty good drinking water, but I've been to places where you just don't, don't drink the water. And cove pure removes 99.9% of contaminants. We're talking PFAS and pharmaceuticals, fluoride, lead, arsenic. It is the purest water you could get. So if you're looking for a gift that's good for your loved ones and one that they will actually use, I highly recommend Cove Pure. And because I partner with them, they're giving you a special $250 holiday discount with my link covpure.com the gist that's C-O-V-E P-U-R-E.com thegist to get $250 off covpure.com the gist hurry before the sale ends.
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Hi, I'm PJ Vogt and I want to tell you about my podcast search engine. We try to make sense of the world one question at a time. No question too big, no question too small. We will even answer your questions if you send them in. Stuff like what happens when a cemetery goes out of business? What should we do about teens using AI to their homework? Who buys luggage at the airport luggage store? Follow and listen to search engine in partnership with Odyssey wherever you get your podcasts.
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David Ignatius is a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the Washington Post. I would say he's one of the most important and consequential columnists working today. Journalists of any stripe. He Is also an author. He writes thrillers. His latest is called Phantom Orbit, A subtle and masterful novel. It is described as masterful. That's always good subtle. Do you want subtle in a thriller? Well, in a way you do. When the issues that are being written about are fairly complex, you don't want to come at them with a blunderbuss. We're going to talk about the state of the world, the state of the art, and the new novel that he's out with. David Ignatius. Welcome to the gist.
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Thank you, Mike.
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When you write your novels, do you have rules of thumb? Like, you will invent the characters, but you won't invent technology that doesn't exist?
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C
So I try to stick to technology that exists or is in development. A couple years ago, I was thinking about this book. It was obvious that space systems were going to be much more important in terms of defense, the future of warfare. I began work on the book when the US Space force was stood up by the Trump administration over a lot of objections. The more I looked at it, the more I thought it was actually a good idea that the Air Force, which was responsible for space, kind of dropped the ball that didn't see what the Chinese in particular were doing. So, yeah, this is a technology that was ripening. What I discovered when I was working on the book was that the Ukraine war has many elements of being a space war. It's like the first space war in history because the Ukrainians depend to such a great extent on largely commercial assets in space. Elon Musk's Starlink system, with its 5,000 satellites in space, that's the only way that Ukrainians can communicate information, including targeting information, to their front lines. So, yeah, this is space war. I tried to make it as accurate as I can. I try not to make stuff up.
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The United States currently assesses that Russia is developing a new satellite carrying a nuclear device. So that is a little pine, a little bit bad news for the world. But do you look at that and think, kind of a good tie in for my novel?
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That would be so crass, Mike? Of course I do. So, I mean, when I. When that. When Mike Turner said that he wanted to brief Congress on this new weapons system, I understood this was part of the larger story I was trying to tell in Phantom Orbit. The thing about this Russian system, from what we know about it, the New York Times just last weekend had a much more detailed account than has been published, is that it's a very crude attempt to. To deal with a very subtle problem for Them which is that there are all these largely US commercial satellites in orbit that can do all kinds of things for friends of the United States against adversaries like Russia. And they don't have a good way to deal with them. So think about you got 5,000 Starlink satellites. They have broadband capability to provide communications to Earth. But what else might be in those little satellites the Russians can't really know. Amazon, a company that works very closely with the US government, with the CIA, has plans to launch 2,000 satellites as part of an extensive network. There's a British company very much in the national security that's got 1000 plus array in space. So the Russians I think are trying to figure out what will we do in a crisis to stop this. And they've come up with this blunderb idea. It's a dreadful idea which is to explode a nuclear device in lower earth orbit and basically create a debris field that wrecks low earth orbit for everybody. Not just the US commercial companies, but the whole world. I think down the road the technologies that are going to be more relevant are ones that disrupt the communications of these satellites in low earth orbit. The fascinatingly, the Starlink network has its own mesh network in space. It's like an Internet in space where the satellites bounce signals off each other before they send them back to ground stations on Earth. It's a really cool system, but probably vulnerable to disruption. Maybe that's part of what the Russians are thinking about with this nuclear device. It wouldn't explode and create debris, it would create radiation that would damage the ability to communicate. We're also talk about electromagnetic pulse systems in space that would kind fry the circuitry of satellites that are up there. But this latest news I think reinforces that the frontier of conflict unfortunately is space. That our adversaries, Russia and China are being very aggressive and that the US Space Force is now beginning to develop both sophisticated defenses and although we don't know much about them, offenses for the.
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U.S. do you think that the idea of the Space Force was denigrated because people just like making fun of Donald Trump or how Donald Trump said the words space Force or the actual phrase space force. Do you think that there were a lot of bad arguments against the Space Force that were related to, I don't know, making jokes about Space Force?
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Yeah, so I think when the Space Force issue came up, there was reflexive opposition to it. The military services, which were always subturf conscious, never really liked to let another kid on the playground. So the idea of creating a new military Service didn't appeal to them. The Air Force didn't want to give up what it had. Trump made it easy to make fun of the idea by seeming to celebrate the uniforms and the theatrics of it. But the more I looked into it, the more it seemed to me that the arguments that the Air Force wasn't doing the job adequately were right. I mean, the Air Force, inevitably, because it's run by, you know, fighter jet pilots, has a different DNA. And I began to think that had to put aside the fact that Donald Trump was advocating this and think about the substance. And the more I did, the more I thought it was, it made sense. And I wrote that at the time, there were some people who thought I was nuts. But the Pentagon did come around to think it's right. My fear now, Mike, is that in this very turfy Pentagon world, the Space Force isn't getting the resources that it needs to be robust. And this is really a big deal. It's really important for the United States to get this right. And so you need the infrastructure of a real military force. Now that space is hot. Every service, of course, wants to have its own space programs, inevitably. So each. Each service is feeding into the Space Command, which is the Joint Combatant Command. That's all the services, their own people. And I worry sometimes it's Space Force, which ought to be the leaders getting crowded out.
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Yeah. You would think that if anything could be disconnected from turf wars, it's space, or especially space within the Air Force. But all of these branches, right, The Air Force started as a part of the army and then was broken off. And the Marines, I think, were the Navy. And then. And then, you know, when I think Andrew Jackson made them into the Army. But this is how all the new branches that we don't argue against now, they are all born of another branch. And I suppose in the past, maybe it wasn't as true during the Andrew Jackson administration that there was a lot of infrastructure in a military industrial complex objecting to it. But there's probably some version of that. But this is how all expansion and expansion that's even widely seen as necessary. It's the history of how it happens, right?
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C
Absolutely. The defense industrial congressional complex is just ferocious. The vested interests, you know, put aside the military's own vested interests in carving up the defense world the way they want and then doing log rolling to each get their share. My dad, who works in the Pentagon, used to joke with me that the Navy never really had any doubt about who the real enemy was. It was the Air Force because they both flew airplanes off. So I could give you a dozen different examples of how this bureaucratic overlay with defense keeps us spending too much and spending it on the wrong things and denying resources to the new things that matter.
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A
And when you say your father worked in the military, he was Secretary of the Navy, right?
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C
He served in the Navy during World War II, but yes, he was Secretary of the Navy.
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A
That's pretty cool. FDR was that too, wasn't he?
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It's super cool. But the coolest thing of all is my dad's still alive at 103.
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A
Wow. Is he opining on world events still?
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C
Yeah, he is to me. And my dad's very lucid. He's a lucky man. Still reading and thinking. And many of the issues that are in this new novel are ones that we talked about over the years I was composing it.
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A
Wow. Has his insight informed any of your opinions or lately?
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So my dad has a wonderful skepticism born of his years serving in the Pentagon during the Vietnam War. He was very much involved in the Vietnam buildup. His logistics was his specialty and he really ran that buildup. And I think over time that experience made him very skeptical about claims that our military could achieve outcomes that were basically political. So he's approached each of the questions of deployments of US forces to Iraq, Afghanistan, elsewhere with a healthy skepticism. Sometimes I should have listened to him more, to be honest, in my own writing. So I think that's healthy. He's one of the last of that generation of people who came into government with President Kennedy with. Were formed by that ethos of public service. And they're pretty much gone anyway. My dad, God bless him.
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Yeah. And in fact, I mean, there's a. There's a battleship named after him. Right. I don't know if it's been deployed.
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Destroy. It's a destroyer, but it's pretty. Pretty darn big.
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So. So I'm just wondering, have you reported on any conflicts in which the USS Paul Ignatius was deployed?
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So it hasn't been deployed in Valley. It's now stationed in the Med. And could be part of all kinds of actions, but I'm not aware of. It's an interesting question whether I have a conflict of interest.
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It's among the more bizarre possible conflicts of interest that journalists can deal with.
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C
I'll talk to my editors when we get to that one.
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A
Is there a danger in looking so far ahead and spending so much time on anticipating where war will evolve to? We lose sight of the fact that war is still Currently fought in ways that are antiquated or classic, but are extremely bloody. We have a land war in Europe which experts told us, oh, that wasn't going to happen, and it's killing tens of thousands. We have a war in Gaza that either by intention or and design, or I think not, but maybe by inattention, a siege has actually taken place, or medieval siege tactics that's killing tens of thousands of people. The question is how to properly balance the absolute threats that are tied to what will happen next with the realities of just age old ways of death that are being visited on the populations of the world today.
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C
You go to the paradox certainly of the Ukraine war, that it is almost medieval, the carnage in the trenches in the east, It's World War I, but even more, even more primitive, the ways in which drones, this advanced technology, turn into assassins. If you watch some of the horrific video footage, you're seeing the drone cameras, it gets closer and closer to the soldier and then poof. It's pretty grim stuff. So at the same time, warfare is evolving. The ways that forces are commanded and control, the way intelligence is collected, the way targeting is done. And I think we're going to live with that mix. One takeaway for me, Mike, as I look at these wars, travel to Ukraine and even Gaza to cover them, is that it seems to me that in this new era, defense is stronger than offense. And there's some hopeful aspects of that. One recent example is the Iranian attempt to really knock Israel with 100 ballistic missiles following a swarm of more than 200 drones, meant to overwhelm Israeli defenses. And it failed. Israel's ability to track the telemetry of the missiles after the drone swarm to do the targeting. Just think of the signal processing issue involved in that, how subtle that system must be. And it worked. Basically no significant damage was done to Israel. Defense worked. And rather than having a catastrophic exchange between the two, the Israelis did something very smart. That said, you didn't get us, but we can get you anytime we want, and then took out a very specific target the Iranians thought was defense. It, you know, you think about the Gaza war. If defenses had been more robust in Israel on October 7, if they'd been better prepared physically and intelligent sense, this nightmare would not have happened the way it did.
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A
Right.
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C
They ignored intelligence. It appears their defenses just weren't ready. And you see how hard it is for offense to make up the difference. You know, the Hamas dug into these tunnels. Israelis are still struggling to figure that one out. So I'd make the same Argument about Ukraine. Ukrainian defenses have held off this Russian onslaught pretty well. They're struggling these last few weeks, but they'll balance that. Russian defense has held off the Ukrainian counteroffensive last year as Ukraine's big failure because defense is tough. You can make the same argument with cyber. As we get into more AI driven systems, the ability of defenses to see what's coming at you, to interpolate from limited evidence exactly what the nature of the attack is. I think it's going to be more and more important. So for what it's worth, people need to think more about the use of power in terms of defense, not just offense.
- [32:18]
A
Yeah. So part of your role is you serve as your journalist and you suss out information, you explain things to the public. This is all things you do. But you're also a diplomatic channel, unofficially or de facto. This is one of the purposes of journalism. You are among the very few people who have the ear of the US Administration, deep sources within the Israeli administration. You just wrote an article, article about yo Gallant thinking about the day after the war in Gaza. So I want to ask you a couple of questions about that role. You don't want to just be used to send a message you want to not send. I would assume you would not want to communicate an intention that is just bluster or that is administration officials say they are very upset and could withhold funding if you find out or if you don't believe there is any actual intention to withhold funding. So I want to get to some specifics, but what are some rules of thumb or tactics and strategy that you've devised over the years so as not to be used, but to be an actual journalist in those situations.
- [33:35]
C
So the first rule is to do everything you can to make sure that the information that you're giving to readers is accurate. I think over time, people who read my column have come to have some confidence that if I say something, even though I can't go into detail about how I know it, it's probably right. And so they read it. I think a second thing is to try as best you can to sift information from one source or set of sources against others. So if you hear something from the US about what Israel's going to do with Saudi Arabia, you need to talk to the Saudis. You need to try to test the information. That's not always possible. I do think that, and it's a mistake if you're a columnist trying to give people a sense of the evolving story, to wait until it's finished to report it. Their diplomacy and the conduct of national security policies is about messaging and signaling. Some of that inevitably is done through the press. And if you can just maintain enough sketches to just say, I don't, we don't know if this is going to happen, but here's the way people want it to happen. Here's how they're describing. If you can tell people along the way, little bits of information. I had a column a couple days ago, the fact that Iran had reached out when the helicopter carrying President Raisi crashed to the United States and asked the United States for help in locating it and sent a map. It was a little tiny detail. It was like a sense and a in a thousand word story. But that's a pretty interesting little detail at a time when people were wondering what's the level of Iranian conspiracy thinking about the U.S. u.S. Possible role in this. Turns out that the Iranian government actually was asking us for help. If you can share that information with readers, I think it's beneficial.
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A
All right, that's it. Cory Wara produces the gist and a whole slew of other FTEs who are too equivalent to get into now. Talk to you Monday.