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- [00:00]
Mike Pesca
Wait, you're not a Hotels.com member, so you're choosing to pay full price? Did you not hear the song? How could you not be a member and save up to 20%?
- [00:14]
Katherine Stewart
That's less than 50%.
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Mike Pesca
But it's more than zero percent. You're welcome. See, the math is mathing. Save up to 20% on hundreds of thousands of hotels with hotels dot com.
- [00:31]
Katherine Stewart
Hi, it's Mike with a major announcement. It is not about the gist. It is about something called the gist list. So let me tell you, every day I construct the show by reading and listening and imbibing a tremendous amount of information. A lot of it doesn't make it onto the show, of course. So what do we do with that? What do we do with the effluvia, the jetsam, the sods, but also the odds? Enter the gist list. And every day on substack, I will be compiling the most interesting, important, maybe unfairly ignored stories that I look at and say, there's something there. You know, we must nurture that which is interesting in this world. Some of these stories do end up as segments. They all start off as ideas. We need ideas. The gist list is designed to interest you definitely. Not to waste your time to make you smarter. To see where I'm heading every day on the gist, so head over to Mike pesca.substack.com today and every day to sign up for the gist list. It's Tuesday, May 20, 2025. From peach fish Productions, it's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca. The bombing outside a fertility clinic in Palm Springs was, authorities say, probably the largest bombing scene in Southern California history. But what were the motives of the man who blew himself up and injured four others? There is a word for his belief system now. He said, quote, basically, I am anti life. And IVF is like, kind of the epitome of pro life ideology. Some outlets describe this guy as anti pro life. There is a phrase I heard, double unpack it, and you get pro choice. You definitely don't get pro choice. No, he does not mean that. He just hates the living. Other outlets use this phrase.
- [02:24]
Mike Pesca
Now, one of the things that the.
- [02:25]
Timothy Snyder
FBI will be looking into is the.
- [02:27]
Mike Pesca
Suspects that what they're calling antinatalist views.
- [02:31]
Katherine Stewart
The belief that people should not procreate antinatalist. But that doesn't go far enough. He doesn't feel that people shouldn't be born. He feels that people shouldn't have been born. He hates the living. He hates his life. Some experts in this fringe ideology and other fringe ideologies immediately said we know what this is. We've seen this. This is a philism. E F I L I S M. I always pronounce it elfism. And if philism means something like anti joy, anti living, anti the people who are living or could live or who have ever lived it. Just basically hating the world and everything in it and wanting to make it end. So suicidal but also homicidal. And this seems to be really important to affilism. Got to have a lot of access to online writing and YouTube videos. There are all these affiliate videos out there. Apparently Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, looked at these affiliate videos. They go back a long way. And here I am to tell you just how stupid this all is. There needn't be a word affiliatesm. Some idiot made it after looking into a camera and talking too long. And I keep calling it elfism, so that bothers me. But then I crack the code on a philism and I realized just how 10th grade goth bullshit it was. A philism gets its name because it is life spelled backwards. L I F E becomes E F I L. Oh God. The Washington Post in describing this shooter's let's call it ideology. Let's hatred, self hatred, other hatred. They use the right word and that word is nihilism. Sometimes people pronounce it nihilism. This guy was a sad depressive and also, sadly for everyone else within the bomb radius, grandiose. His friend had been murdered or maybe it was a murder suicide where the suicide was via murder. She apparently got her boyfriend to kill her and she apparently was stupid. Word alert in a philist or believed in a philism or just another diluted sad sack with too much time on overly long YouTube videos. At least the suicide murder victim had some version of decency to leave innocent people out of it. Now the four other people who were hurt in the blast apparently weren't seriously injured, the reports say. And if you care, the embryos were all saved. And I say we bury a philism and give it only the attention to satisfy the question what was he thinking? And then upon finding out, quickly decide. Not much on the show today. I'm going to go back to Toronto where we find those three Yale law professors. Some new details have surfaced. Do to do it too. That just brings you there. But first we're joined again by Katherine Stewart. She is the author of Money, Lies and God Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy. And we start from a jumping off point of anti Democratic factions overseas. Katherine Stewart up next.
- [05:56]
Mike Pesca
Foreign.
- [05:59]
Katherine Stewart
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- [09:58]
Mike Pesca
Well, there are nuances that are specific to different regions and countries. One thing that I do detail we did spend a short period of time in Europe and I did go to some of the gatherings there where US based organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom, it's established outposts overseas. I went to an anti abortion it was called Rethink Abortion Day. I really described this. It took place in the UK and there were four main speakers. Each one was a UK head of a US based organization. So you had 40 days for life. You had center for Bioethical CBR, center for Bioethical Research UK. You had these different sort of abortion organizations that are based in the US but are establishing outposts in other parts of the world. But what I also attended several years back gathering called so what what that shows is that they're sort of taking strategies and ideas that sort of workshopped within the US and sort of perfected and have worked in the US context and exporting them, although adapting them to different cultural contexts. So for instance, in the UK they're not quite as shouty I would say as they are in the U.S. you know, there's this lady who's a head of one of these organizations, UK outpost of a US Based organizations. And and she violates the law because they have these protective barriers around abortion clinics and she'll violate the law by violating the barrier and then she'll get arrested because she's violating the law repeatedly and then she'll go on TV immediately like GB News which is the equivalent of sort of Fox. Or they're trying to establish it and say, oh, I was just arrested for silently praying in my head. You know, she's not out there with a bullhorn like the US anti abortion activists are doing. She's kind of.
- [12:00]
Katherine Stewart
But the anti abortion movement in the UK is very small.
- [12:04]
Mike Pesca
It is small. I mean they're kind of, there's a kind of, they're, they're certainly behind the US and again different cultural contexts. Um, so it's not like the equivalent of the U.S. but they're, they're doing their best. And one of the speakers at a big, you know, March for Life rally said, you know, he came from the US and he received training from the Leadership Institute. He's, you know, trying to sort of help build the movement in the uk and he said, if we can do it. Meaning we in the U.S. he said, you can do it. If we can do it, you can do it. I mean, remember the anti abortion movement in the US didn't happen overnight. It was not a sort of grassroots uprising in response to Roe versus Wade. It was very carefully plotted out and planted by right wing activists who wanted to drag the Republican Party to the right. Like Phyllis Schlafly, if you have any questions about that. She wrote a fantastic book about the process. It's called how the Republican Party became Pro Life. Because it wasn't, it wasn't an anti abortion party. Took a long time, it took a lot of effort. She really details how much effort it took to purge those pro choice voices from the Republican Party and get everybody on board. But what it really shows her book and others is that what we see today in America, the sort of pro life movement as we know it, it was, it was, it's a modern creation and was created for political purposes.
- [13:37]
Katherine Stewart
Yeah, it's so interesting. It's not just Republicans. There are two part in the US So they have to be coalitional. But the coalitions that the Republican parties that the Republican Party is consisted of has changed a lot. And if the modern conservative movement was created by Barry Goldwater, Barry Goldwater was at the forefront of being pro choice or pro abortion and his wife was. And they give a prize in Goldwater's.
- [14:04]
Mike Pesca
Name for being co founded Planned Parenthood in Arizona.
- [14:08]
Katherine Stewart
Yeah. And this is not just someone who ran for president. This was the foundational figure of the modern conservative movement. So yes, it's very interesting. And there are coalitions within the Republican Party that you wonder how they're going to last. Certainly it's a very coalitional party when it comes to international affairs. But it brings me to the question, is there anything that Trump could do that would be a bridge too far in turn in terms of policy with the particular people you're writing about? We I think the, I think it's settled that it's nothing in terms of personal conduct. We it's interesting to write about and to think about how they explain away all the things he does that are unchristian, that is documented and that phenomenon is well established. But what about so many of the people who you write about, so many of the rich funders, I would assume Harlan Crowe is extremely free trade, that many of them are pro free trade. What about this, this tariff policy? Might that could that so disgust some of the funders that it shakes apart? Some of what's going on in money lies in God.
- [15:23]
Mike Pesca
There's so much incompetence right now. I mean if you look at Doge, which is supposed to be about efficiency, I mean the lack of efficiency is astonishing. You know, all of these trade policies were promised like we're going to make America great again. Our economy is lurching around like a drunken sailor. I mean, I think there are so many opportunities, there are so many fissures in this movement and there are opportunities to exploit them and those and those fissures should be exploited.
- [15:52]
Katherine Stewart
So the last thing I want to ask you is I think you've done such a good job, your vivid descriptions, your taxonomies, I really got inside the movement. But I still question and I, I mean this, I have questions. Not that I think you're wrong about how much the forces of the left are to blame for pushing wokeness to the point where it inspired an inevitable reaction. And let's stipulate an overreaction, a horrible overreaction. But that's my question. Now maybe you're going to, you can make the case that no matter what they did, they would exaggerate one or two examples. But I still come back to it. There was definitely a time where there was a, an ideology that the left Democrats embraced. We saw it in the 2020 presidential election and answers about gender change, surgery in jail. So how much did the left play into the hands of this nation movement that would take advantage of the issue?
- [16:54]
Mike Pesca
Well, this is where the lies fits in with my title. Money lies in God. Americans have been subject to this massive disinformation and propaganda campaigns. And you go to these right wing gatherings, every single speaker is going to talk. They, they talk about how well, let's just take for example public schools. They cast them as Marxist indoctrination factories. They say you're going to go to send your kid to school at 9am, they're going to come back at 2pm and they're a different gender. Well, this is absolutely not true. They will often find one little stupid thing happening in one little place like Libs of TikTok does and imply that characterizes the ENT movement. Look, I've been writing about the Christian right for 16 years, so I've been in plenty of lefty spaces. I don't happen to use pronouns. You know, it's never been an issue like, but the way they cast it, you know, we are, you know, having to endure Marxist struggle sessions every single day. It is absolutely not true. They say, you know, in these spaces they'll say Democrats want to abort babies after they're born. I have heard that at nearly every single right wing conference I've been to. And they're using this lie. This doesn't happen by the way. That's called infanticide and it's illegal. Right, but they'll use this lie to ban medication that ends abortion, like morning after pills. They're using it to try and go after the most, some of the most popular and effective forms of birth control or policies that say, you know, that, that, that end abortion. It's very earliest days and weeks. So they'll take anything they can, some of which might have some little grain somewhere that chimes with something that's happening somewhere and then they'll apply. This is characteristic of the entire Democratic party. So unfortunately it is true. No matter what happens, they are going to cast the entire. And when I say left, I'm talking like normal, like moderate Republican, politically moderate centrist, liberal left, liberal progressive left. That whole project, including what they call rhinos, you know, they'll cast the entire thing as, you know, as not just Marxist, right, but also demonic and satanic and under the thumb of Satan. You know, I, I went to Reawaken America. I've been to three actually Reawaken America tours. It's.
- [19:27]
Katherine Stewart
You got re reawakened. Wow, you must be on Vibrant.
- [19:31]
Mike Pesca
It's a kind of pro maga conspiracy fest that takes place in mega churches around the country. Each one draws thousands. It's actually a really fascinating experience. You see people wearing T shirts that say rhino, I'm going rhino hunting with pictures of firearms. Rhino means Republicans in name only. They're casting moderate and progressive pastors, pastors who emphasize Jesus's teachings of social justice as woke heretics or even agents of Satan. I mean, they're just the kind of hype, hyperbole and hysteria is endemic to this movement. So again, you know, forgive me for saying that, you know, this stuff is really, these things that they're saying are the issues are really not the issues facing ordinary Americans.
- [20:21]
Katherine Stewart
Were regular people more willing? There's, there's always been lies and the lies have accelerated and gotten crazier and there is no, there is no collection of kids in the basement of a non existent basement of a pizza shop.
- [20:37]
Mike Pesca
Like a sector of the, of the extreme left that is actually aiding this, this issue, this project, this authoritarian project. I mean, you know, there's something that people call the horseshoe theory, which means that people, you know, and I actually have a section about this in Money Lies in God and I name a couple of the organizations that are, appear to be giving the far right everything they want. They seem to be sort of live action role playing, sort of the kind of images of chaos that the right needs to scare, you know, the normies, whatever, into like supporting their. When I say normies, I, you know, people who are sort of on the 40 yard line of politics right and left.
- [21:16]
Katherine Stewart
Yeah. They scare the persuadable voters that every election is pitched after. Yeah.
- [21:20]
Mike Pesca
And people look at that and they're like, well, I don't like that so I better vote for this person who stands for law and order. Right. But, but the fact is that their collective actions of these people who call themselves leftists redounds to the benefit of the far right. And it's really hard to know are they useful idiots or are they like. You just can't know whether they're useful idiots or whether they're really.
- [21:47]
Katherine Stewart
Or some combination where I believe, I've talked, I've interviewed Jill Stein. She definitely believes what she believes and yet Putin likes what she believes. And so we'll put that stuff out there. See my, I don't even know if it's even worth getting into. I think we're mostly aligned. But my inclination, my question is it's not mostly about how the fact that the far right or just the right will lie anyway. I mean, Fox News is programming is the outrage of the day based on some, you know, supposed and sometimes chronicled woke transgression. It's not just that, it's not just the fact that there is misinformation. It's not just the far, far, far, far left that becomes the horseshoe. There was an element during the time when Republicans made Big gains. And it was the wind in the sails of this movement. And the element included, you know, arguments in the 1619 Project that everything about America comes back to slavery. I could read you the exact quote that was the argument. And then this gets put. Put in schools. And a regular person who doesn't have any truck with the people in your book is a little alarmed. Or to talk about someone who shows up glancingly. The governor's race in Virginia is won by a more or less moderate Republican who campaigns on the issue of transgenderism, transgender kids in bathrooms in schools. And something actually happens in Loudoun county which gets the regular person pretty upset. And what the school district did there was, you know, pretty gross mishandling of the situation that could be described as, you know, woke. So that's what I'm thinking. I'm thinking that no one could be perfect. But there was an opening for all of this, an opening for the lies. Granted, they're going to lie. That was provided by the left.
- [23:38]
Mike Pesca
There was also. Also always been openings. But what's true. That's true. Don't pay attention to the fact is the number one cause of child death in this country is gun violence. Gun violence. Are any of them taking that on? The, you know, yes, something happened at Loudoun county, but the, The. The most sexual assaults are actually committed by. By men. Are they taking that on? No. In fact, Andrew Tate was imported into this country and is being hailed by the Republican Party. He's a. What is he, a trafficker and perhaps a rapist? I mean, the kind of elevation in a way of. I mean, let's just start with Donald Trump himself, who's been credibly accused of sexual abuse by dozens of women, and yet he's being hailed as a hero by the Republican Party. So I feel like this is a movement that has been determined to seize what it can and will. And in fact, a lot of those sort of positions are not really normalized within the sort of. Within the, say, moderate middle left at all. But they will cast everyone they don't like. I mean, it's really interesting what they're doing to the pastors. This movement is determined to cast any pastor, any Christian pastor who isn't in alignment with their vision as a heretic. You know, when I was at America Fest last December, it's held by an organization called Turning Point usa and they.
- [25:16]
Katherine Stewart
Charlie Kirk's organization. Yeah.
- [25:18]
Mike Pesca
Right. And it's Turley Kirk. He played a really important role in youth recruitment and things like that, and also get out the vote stuff. And there was a head of Turning Point Faith, a guy named Lucas Miles, who wrote a book titled Woke Jesus. And I'm paraphrasing here, but maybe the heresy destroying the Christian church. And he said, I've made it my mission to eradicate wokeism from the American pulpit. What does he count as? Wokeism? He specifically named this social gospel. This is wokeism. He even took aim at that. He gets us ads. Do you know, Mike, those ads that were ran in the Super Bowl. Jesus, he gets us. It's kind of a sort of friend, faith friendly Jesus friendly ad. And he said he actually took a full mark.
- [26:00]
Katherine Stewart
Jesus, sure.
- [26:02]
Mike Pesca
He. He is. He said essentially that those ads are too woke. And he said he's working with 3,500 pastors to form a new Nicene Creed and Council, referring to. Referring to the 4th century cyanide that established this sort of core doctrines of Christianity. And the idea is that we need to take Christianity in a much more reactionary direction. He said the sin of wokeism and the sin of progressivism started to infect the Christian church back in the 17th century. 17th century. I mean, this is, you know, this is a movement. They're always talking, you know, back. I characterize this movement as a form of reactionary nihilism, and this is really a key part of it because they're always. I think they're more defined by what they want to destroy. The woke, whatever that means, you know, anything they don't like. And they characterize everyone they don't like, they throw them all into that bucket. And by the way, that will include you and me. And. And they. And. But they're much more defined by what they want to destroy rather than that. What they want to create. And when they talk about what they want to create, it's always some fantasy of an imaginary past that never existed the way that they think it did. Sometimes they talk about harkening back to the 1950s or even the 1850s, right, when apparently everybody supposedly knew their place and supposedly everyone was the same religion, which isn't true. And when there were sort of elements of regressive social order, which is really what they're after. They want to be a new elite in a sort of more authoritarian system where you've got a kind of cronyistic kleptocracy. I mean, we haven't even begun to talk about the level of graft that we are starting to see where Trump is overtly trading for his own personal benefit on the power of the presidency through meme. Coins and through other means, you know.
- [28:05]
Katherine Stewart
Term one, he had a hotel. There were at least records there and there could be a report and you see how many, how much foreign government spent staying in the hotel. Now there's a meme coin, which is directly just bribery. Open season.
- [28:20]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. When you look at this kind of thing happening in other countries, I think it's much more easy to understand. Right. If you look at, like, what, what Erdogan did in Turkey, or if you look at leaders in Iran, or if you look at Russia, you know, Putin, when these leaders, they bind themselves very tightly to ultra conservative religious figures in their own countries to consolidate a more authoritarian form of political power, they're bubble wrapping themselves in sanctimony. They're saying, you can't touch me. I got the holy men on my side. It hampers any investigation of their crimes and the abuses they're perpetrating against their own people. They divide their people, as Trump is doing, into the righteous and the damned, the true Americans and the sort of deviants, which is everyone who's not on board with their agenda. And you could, I think, you know, their countries may be theocratic in a certain fake sense in that there's an official religion, their clerics have a lot of power, et cetera, but they're more aptly described as cronyistic kleptocracies with absolute suppression of free speech and political opposition.
- [29:28]
Katherine Stewart
Kathryn Stewart is the author of Money, Lies and God Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy. Thank you so much.
- [29:36]
Mike Pesca
Thank you.
- [29:48]
Katherine Stewart
And now the spiel. Last week, I talked about a New York Times video featuring three Yale professors who explained that they're experts in fascism and that they're taking their talents to Toronto. Since then, I've come across a few new details that, if anything, cast these peripatetic profs in an even less flattering light. Here's a clip from the Times video. The first two voices you'll hear are Professors Jason Stanley and Timothy Snyder.
- [30:12]
Mike Pesca
I look at fascist rhetoric.
- [30:15]
Jason Stanley
I've been thinking about the sources of the worst kinds of history for a quarter of a century.
- [30:21]
Mike Pesca
Experts say the constitutional crisis is here now. The Trump administration deporting hundreds of men without a trial. A massive purge at the FBI to.
- [30:30]
Timothy Snyder
Make people afraid of speaking out against him.
- [30:33]
Katherine Stewart
Now, that last voice was Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark. In the video, she was used to buttress, though not quite Bulwark, the idea that when fascism hits, even Fashcon level one, it's high time to hightail it to Toronto. But in real life, Sarah Longwell disagrees with the professor's choices.
- [30:53]
Timothy Snyder
So I don't want to accuse them of alarm ism. I do think, though, that, like, they specifically were far from being threatened, like, not in a real way. And that I think that the signal that it sends to leave the country is a similar one. It's different, but it's similar to the law firms or the universities or.
- [31:22]
Mike Pesca
The.
- [31:23]
Timothy Snyder
Media companies, the other people who've caved, which is that to say, like, is basically to say, like, we're already too far gone, right? Like, what's the point of standing up? It's too. It's too. It's too. You know, we just need to put our heads down. And I just think that's exactly the wrong thing to do in this moment. Like, exactly the opposite.
- [31:43]
Katherine Stewart
She aligns herself with our mutual friend Ben Wittes, who recently wrote a piece called Abandoning America. Yale intellectuals congratulate themselves for moving to Canada. He writes, quote, these are the people who should be out there doing stuff, taking risks, so that others who actually have real vulnerabilities don't have to. They should be leading from the positions of incredible safety they occupy. Making videos. Congratulating yourself for abandoning the United States is just thumbing your nose at the people you leave behind. And here's the kicker. Timothy Snyder didn't move to Toronto because of fascism. He moved, he says, for family reasons. It's unclear if that's also true of Marcy Shore, but she is his wife, so it's a reasonable inference here. Was Snyder on the Prof. G Podcast?
- [32:34]
Jason Stanley
The major considerations had to do with, you know, family things, which I'm not particularly keen to talk about.
- [32:40]
Katherine Stewart
So lifestyle. It's a lifestyle move, not ideological. We don't need to read any.
- [32:44]
Jason Stanley
No, no. I mean, if any. No. I mean, there's this weird timing thing now where I'm kind of caught with historical conjuncture and feel a little helpless about that. But I had already moved to Toronto. I had been. I've been recruited for three years. Actually, more like ten.
- [32:58]
Katherine Stewart
Wow. Curious that I had such a different impression. That is on me. Well, you know, maybe a little bit on the New York Times headline, we study Fascism and we're leaving the U.S. odd that I inferred a connection between the two clauses, huh? It's like saying I was bitten by a raccoon and. And I contracted rabies. What? Oh, no, no, not from the raccoon. The rabies came years earlier. It was after I enjoyed a meal of skunk and bat. Sweet Breads. Maybe I'm taking it all a bit too far, but I really do think the video and its framing undercut the credibility of the trio, such as it was. And to be fair, I was only a fan of Snyder to begin with. I didn't, I didn't know. Sure, nothing on her. Jason Stanley always struck me as a bit over the top, but honestly, they're all over the top. And so of course it must be said, is Donald Trump and Kristi Noem. They're community theater level dramatists preening for the camera, pitching reality shows. So what about this stay in fight idea? Sure, yeah, I'm on board. I'm going to fight. How will I fight? I guess by listening to the Bulwark and occasionally quoting the Bulwark, also quoting Ben Wittes and texting with him and saying, should we fight? And then Ben will say fight, and then I'll fight. Call me a partisan of Vilnius. Call me a member of the Warsaw Uprising. I'm Jean Moulin and the French Resistance over here with my podcast, Consumption Habits. Reality Check. I am probably you. We do spend our time thinking about the Trump administration's misdeeds, paying attention, not liking it, conversing with people we know. Maybe if we have anything approaching public profile, we say these things, we worry, we talk. And we will certainly vote for the other guy or gal. It may take a bit more organizing than usual, this defeating of Trump in the midterms and whoever runs again in 2028, because I do not think it will be Trump. But this is the antifascist project. It's probably going to come down to turning out 3% more new and infrequent voters. That's what Kamala Harris failed to do. A new survey says people who aren't watching New York Times videos, people who aren't aware that there is a Yale to Toronto pipeline. Get them. Convince them you're normal and you care. Don't say your code talking to them, just talk. Talk to them and you'll probably win the election. Here's Timothy Snyder again from that same Prof. G interview.
- [35:27]
Jason Stanley
If you deny his fascism, what you can do is you can sit at your office and you can edit the volume about how it's not fascism. That's just about my colleagues. But more broadly speaking, if you deny it's fascism, then you can imagine, okay, the normal. The normal pathways of politics are going to work. Somehow things are going to self correct.
- [35:44]
Katherine Stewart
Now listen, if I understand the publishing world, the it's not fascism reader isn't moving any units. But also he doesn't believe, because he believes it's fascism. He doesn't believe that normal politics can work. Well, if by normal you mean something like apathetic or exhausted, yeah, that'll lose. But if you're talking about energetic, focused, determined politics, not only do I think it'll work, I think it's the only way. What else you got? Armed Resistance, a sublet in Toronto. Normal politics include rallies, big rallies, attention, donations, all that stuff. And if that works and the non maga leadership takes power one day, then we will all say, well, I guess it wasn't fascism after all. No, we'll not say that. We'll probably say something like, great job everyone, we defeated fascism and we did it by not leaving. And that's a terribly exciting prospect. We did it from within our country's shores with a rabid intensity that is born only of conviction and also possibly of raccoon bites.
- [36:50]
Mike Pesca
Foreign.
- [36:55]
Katherine Stewart
And that's it for today's show. Cory Wara produces the gist. Astrid Green runs our social media. Michelle Pesca is the CBSO of Peach Fish Productions. CO C being her. So is Ashley Khan. And Leo Baum is the intern. The intern. And thanks for listening.