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- [00:00]
Mike Pesca
The gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.
- [00:22]
Nick Gillespie
Oh hey.
- [00:22]
Mike Pesca
Welcome to gift wrapping. Whoa. So is Saldana.
- [00:25]
T-Mobile Representative
Hey, can you wrap these please?
- [00:26]
Nick Gillespie
Wow.
- [00:27]
Mike Pesca
IPhone 17s you splurged at T Mobile.
- [00:29]
T-Mobile Representative
You can get four iPhone 17s on them. The new the new center stage front camera is amazing for group selfies. It's the perfect gift for everyone.
- [00:36]
Nick Gillespie
I'm the worst.
- [00:37]
Mike Pesca
I only got my mom a robe.
- [00:38]
T-Mobile Representative
Well, it's better than socks.
- [00:40]
Mike Pesca
So I have to trade in my old phone, right?
- [00:42]
T-Mobile Representative
No AT T mobile. There's no trade ins needed when you switch. Keep your old phone or give it as a gift.
- [00:48]
Mike Pesca
Incredible.
- [00:48]
T-Mobile Representative
In fact, wrap up my old phone too for my Aunt Rosa. Forget that. Aunt Liz will be jealous.
- [00:53]
Mike Pesca
Sounds like my family drama.
- [00:54]
T-Mobile Representative
Oh I got it. I'll give it to my abuela. I'll take reindeer paper with. Hey where are you going?
- [00:58]
Mike Pesca
To T mobile.
- [00:59]
T-Mobile Advertiser
The holidays are better. AT T Mobile get four iPhone 17s on us. No trade in needed when you swift plus four lines for just 25 bucks a line. And now T mobile is available in U S cellular stores with 24 month legal credits and four eligible boardings on essentials for well qualified customers. Photo Pay + taxes, fees and 35 device connection charge credits and imbalance due if you pay off earlier. Cancel Contact Us Finance Agreement 256 gigabytes 830 required.
- [01:20]
Mike Pesca
Visit T mobile.com I have promos to tell you about. You know I do the gist list every day. I round up stories, give them to you and I put them behind a paywall because it costs me money but also I think it underlines the value. It was $55 but the boys and accounts receivable tell me due to tariffs it's going to go up to 5,999 in January. But I'm going to give it to you not at 55 but at $49 from now through January 4th. If you text Mike to 33777 you get access to the paid version of the just list all the stuff that's behind the paywall for $49. You know one time I wrote about the bobcat trapping return to Indiana and same day I wrote about the Philippines facing a gambling boom that's costing them 17.89 billion pesos in March alone on eGames. And then if you subscribe I also tell you what 17.89 billion pesos is worth in dollars. So it's really worth the money. And the money being I won't give it in pesos. It's 4 $49. Text 33777 for the substack offering. Now I'm a talker. We also have our audio offering if you want to get this show without ads and with all the bonus content to support me as best you can. There was once a Pesca plus offering and it cost $89 for the year and that was a good price. Now it costs $75 through the new year. We have to be laser focused on affordability. Use the code Laser Focus and at checkout go to subscribe.mike pesca.com to get our Pesca plus audio offerings for only $75. Laser Focus is the code to use at checkout. Two great codes, two great ways to experience Gist content it's Tuesday, November 25, 2025 from Peach Fish Productions. It's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca and today is a not even mad day. We have on reasons Nick Gillespie. He's been on before he guy but he's a smart guy and I think his intelligence got in the way with him. Really sparring with our other guest Russ Muirhead, who is also a very smart guy. See, I know Nick and when Nick gets intellectually excited by someone, the point isn't to try to rip their head off. There is one exchange in which they got maybe not even mad. Actually fact checked it and you'll hear it. It was about the percentage of Dartmouth students that come from the top 5%. Nick was pretty close. I mean he was just riffing on that one. The one stat I found is from I think 2018 article that 60% of Dartmouth students come from the top 6% of the income distribution. I have no idea why anyone is looking at the top 6% of the income distribution. This is the first time I talked to Russ. I found Ross on my friend Yasha Monks podcast, a panelist. What I do is I scout all the panelists podcasts and I say who would be a good panelist? Who haven't I heard? And Russ Muirhead, a Dartmouth professor and state legislator. He really stood out as a guy. I needed to have on pair with Nick Gillespie, have them go out at about the top 6% of Dartmouth student earners. But Russ also says there are plenty of people throughout the income distribution and they represent you know, a working class background there at Dartmouth, and you would hope so with all the cross country skiing going on. I will also say that I am perhaps overly impressed. When someone is an elected official, it doesn't mean that I think they're right. It doesn't mean that it won't take one misstatement for me to say, all right, you're full of shit. And that wasn't the case with Ross. It's just I think running for office and especially getting elected to office is just from who I am. It's kind of amazing. It shows me something. Especially if not, you're not a scion of political dynasty yourself. And in New Hampshire, each representative in the state House represents about 3,300 people. You know, so each U.S. representative in the House of Representatives represents over 700, 760,000 people. The New Hampshire House of Representatives has 400 members. Oh my God. Over 200 districts. But that's great. That's also great. So in Russ. And you'll hear him talk about sitting there listening to speeches among 400 members. That's democracy or some version thereof. As you could tell, I was super enthused by this conversation. So please enjoy Russ and Nick. They're not even mad. I sometimes struggle to find gifts to give for my mom and dad especially. But now I have a great idea because I've been using Cove Pure. Cove Pure is a way to get without fancy hookups. Get great water, great tasting water. And water that is, as half of the name implies or flat out promises, is pure. It makes your water taste very, very good. Pure, clean, no aftertaste. But sometimes it gets those contaminants. Slash floaties down to single digits. It's lab certified to remove 99.9% of contaminants from your water. That includes stuff like PFAS and pharmaceuticals, fluoride, lead, arsenic. The purest water you could get and so easy to install. Fits right on the countertop. Looks great doing so. So if you're looking for a gift that's good for your loved ones and one they will actually use, I highly recommend Cove Pure. And because I have partnered with them, they're giving you a special $250 holiday discount with my link cove pure.com the gist that c o v e p u r e.com/the gist to get $250 off covpure.com/the gist. Hurry before the sale ends. Hello and welcome back to the show that urges you not to give up the ship by which we mean, I don't know. Certainly nothing seditious. It's not even mad. Today we speak of Comey in the clear. Exonerated claims. James, don't say fascist when standing next to one. And the MTG skedaddle. The affordability straddle and the Texas redistricting. Now back in the saddle. As we do so, we promise to uphold our reputation for refutation while at the same time vowing to be not even mad. We? I say we. Who are we? We are Nick Gillespie, editor at large of Reason magazine, the libertarian magazine of free minds and free markets, host of the Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie podcast. How do you get that job, Nick? Of hosting the recent interview with Nick Gillespie.
- [08:40]
Nick Gillespie
You know, you stick around long enough and, you know, it just happens.
- [08:44]
Mike Pesca
They go through all the other Nick Gillespies.
- [08:46]
Nick Gillespie
Yeah. You know, it's like there's a phone book full of them.
- [08:50]
Mike Pesca
We're also joined by Russell Muirhead, who is Dartmouth's co director of the Political Economy Project and the Robert Clements professor of Democracy and Politics. He's also a member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives and also the author of Ungoverning the Attack of the Administration, the Attack of the Administrative State, and the Politics of Chaos. Russ, is Robert Clements. Is that the angle is anglicization of Roberto Clemente? Tell me it is.
- [09:17]
Nick Gillespie
That would be so nice.
- [09:19]
Russell Muirhead
I'll tell you, Robert Clement was a great guy, but no relation.
- [09:22]
Mike Pesca
Who was exactly 3,000 hits.
- [09:26]
Nick Gillespie
Who was Robert Clement?
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Russell Muirhead
Robert Clement was an insurance entrepreneur. He grew up in the staid insurance industry, and then he couldn't quell his entrepreneurial spirit, so he ended up starting his own insurance companies and in his generosity, decided to endow the position that I presently hold. But I have to say, I did meet the gentleman and he was incredible, man.
- [09:51]
Nick Gillespie
I know Dartmouth, and this is, you know, a million years ago, but they had to change their mascot name. Right. And what. What is Dartmouth now? Are they like, big green or something?
- [10:01]
Russell Muirhead
I actually think that the. The. The. The mascot is a keg, and it's called.
- [10:05]
Nick Gillespie
Yeah.
- [10:06]
Russell Muirhead
Keggy. Keggy the Keg. And it's not the official mascot. It doesn't matter that it's not official. It's out there anyway.
- [10:12]
Nick Gillespie
Okay. I like that.
- [10:14]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, they. They were, in fact, confirm that. Yeah. But now there are.
- [10:20]
Nick Gillespie
Do they. The Green Wave.
- [10:22]
Russell Muirhead
Is that.
- [10:22]
Mike Pesca
Is there a wave involved in their greenness?
- [10:25]
Nick Gillespie
I think wave is Tulane, isn't it?
- [10:27]
Mike Pesca
Yes, I thought there might be a.
- [10:29]
Russell Muirhead
Couple of green waves where the pine trees.
- [10:33]
Nick Gillespie
Okay, that makes sense. I don't Think I lived in Oxford, Ohio, for many years because my ex wife taught at Miami University, who had been the Red man of all things until a couple years before we moved there. And it had changed before that. But there were these faded images of the old mascot that became the Red Hawks. And you would, it was, it was strange, you know, like to see, like you would look at some faded sign and then realize there was the old mascot kind of peeking through paint.
- [11:04]
Mike Pesca
Oh, it was worse than the red men. That was St. John's you could get away with it saying, no, we just wear red. They were the Redskins.
- [11:09]
Nick Gillespie
Oh, the Redskins. Okay.
- [11:12]
Mike Pesca
The news of the day, the day being yesterday when this airs, a federal judge dismissed the indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Why? Because President Donald Trump's appointment of Lindsey Halligan was invalid. Now, there were many other reasons to throw this out, and I think reasons that were better would have been better for Jim Comey's narrative. Like a selective prosecution reason. That would have been a legitimate reason. Or another judge was currently looking at this and he was finding some evidence that Lindsey Halligan played fast and loose with the evidence in front of the grand jury. But this is what I want to ask, and I want both of you guys, if you wish to take this in any direction that you want. We should also add that the James prosecution could come back on appeal. The Comey one seems done because the statute of limitations is passed, which is one of the reasons why the Halligan appointment was done as such a rush job, but also because the Trump presidency is totally dissolute. But I wonder, and I think where I've decided about what this says about the fear of burgeoning autocracy, which is that I never dismissed the fear. I just always thought the institutions would hold. And so you could look at this as this outrageous norms violation, which just shows that we're closer to an autocracy of the autocrat using the Justice, Justice Department for selective prosecution. Or you could look at the autocratic glasses half full saying, yes, but this thing barely got off the ground. Russ, how do you look at it? Or any other aspect of.
- [12:52]
Russell Muirhead
Well, I'm with you. Look, there are only rock bottom two things that you need to make democracy work. You need the people who lose elections not take up violence, and people who win elections not use their power to prosecute their opponents. Those are the two bedrocks of democracy. And it's just not good. Let's just say it's not good for people in Power, especially executives, to use their power to, you know, criminally prosecute their opponents. And Trump shouldn't be doing this. He should know better. He shouldn't. Even though I think it was wrong for Letitia James to prosecute Trump and to run for office, promising. Run for attorney general, promising to prosecute her political opponent, Donald Trump, that was a travesty of justice. I think Al Bragg's prosecution of Donald Trump was a grotesque travesty of justice. I do. I'm on Trump's side when he says he was politically prosecuted, persecuted in the prosecutions against him. I agree with him. But to do the same thing just, you know, it doesn't make democracy stronger to do the same thing. So just, this is just obvious. This will take down democracy if this gets normalized. And so we need to maintain in the minds and hearts of citizens that this is bad. You know, there's a lot of very technical legal stuff going on, but aside from the technical stuff, just maintain the common sense. This is not good. Good people don't do this. And Trump doesn't need to do this. He's stronger and bigger than this.
- [14:08]
Mike Pesca
Wow, that's encouraging. You're bucking him up. You're better than this, Donald. Well, what do you think, Nick? What about my original question, which was, is this a favorable development in terms of those worrying about democracy and autocracy, or even if this was dismissed, do we still have equally as much to worry about?
- [14:28]
Nick Gillespie
I mean, I agree with Russ that, you know, anytime, you know, lawfare, particularly by the government in power people, you know, and obviously we can't talk about the government. I mean, it's government at all different levels, and it's, you know, there are always multiple interests working with any branch of government or any level of government. But it's. It's bad to be doing this kind of shit. Mike, to your question, you know, the institution that seems to be holding really well over, and I would say not just over the past couple of years, but over the past 10, 20, 30 years, are the courts. And, you know, they have been, I think, good in terms of striking down Trump when he has done various kinds of overreach. I fully expect the Supreme Court to rule against, you know, the pretext on which he put his tariffs into place. I hope that happens. You know, so the system, you know, the. The institutions are holding, like, I think we've been undergoing stress tests for, you know, at least the entirety of the 21st century. You know, even the. The 2000 election and the way that that ended up Getting decided, you know, that was a stress test of democratic institutions. And it was a, a decision that you could argue either way, you know, that Gore or, or Bush had the upper hand. Or it should have been, it should have been decided at the level of the Supreme Court of Florida or at the US Supreme Court. But, but we got through it. The institutions have been holding. But to go with Russ, you know, it's like you can't keep doing this and expect this to keep, you know, to happen. Like at a certain point we need a break from this kind of willful, you know, you know, just like beating the hell out of, out of democracy. I mean, it's not good. And we have already. I write a lot about this at Reason, and this actually started for me in the, during the George W. Bush administration. And the duplicity that the Bush administration used to pass certain laws or do certain types of things, including surveillance of Americans as well as torture and things like that, but also funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They did a lot of that secretly. We have become a low trust society. If you go back and you look at going back to the early 70s when Gallup started asking, do you think that the government tries to do the right thing? In most circumstances it was like two thirds of people or higher. Even after Watergate, there were higher levels of trust and confidence in government than there are now. It's been a kind of continuing decline. And it's been a continuing decline because politicians act really badly and we need better politicians so that they turn that around because nobody wants to live in a low trust society.
- [17:21]
Russell Muirhead
And speaking of better politicians, how do we get members of Congress, how do we get senators to stand up for themselves, to stand up for their institution? Because the nitpicky issue at stake in today's decision about Comey and Letitia James had to do with separation of powers. It's the basic idea that when a president appoints a US Attorney, that appointment is confirmed by the Senate. It's the constitutional responsibility of the Senate to confirm these appointments. And you know, if they don't have time to do that, the President might appoint an interim for up to 120 days. So what's going on here is they appointed an interim. The interim wasn't indicting Comey and Letitia James. So they appointed another interim. They fired their first one, appointed a second one. The court is saying, hey, you can't do that. You can't just keep appointing interims. You've got to appoint somebody who's confirmed by the Senate. So the court is standing up for the Senate's prerogative. Why doesn't the Senate stand up for that? I know that it's a Republican majority, but why wouldn't Republican senators want to belong to an institution that mattered, that had a say? And so, like you said, we need better politicians. We. Sure. We need politicians who are more proud and more ambitious and stand up for their own institutions because that's what we need for the Constitution to work.
- [18:29]
Nick Gillespie
Yeah, I agree. And, you know, I'm friendly with Justin Amash, who is a Tea Party congressman from Michigan who was a Republican and then he got fed up with Trump and he reaffiliated or de. Affiliated with the party as an independent, voted to impeach Trump. Trump ended his term. He joined the Libertarian Party and he, he was getting primary. He got run out of Congress. But he talks a lot about this, that, you know, Congress that, you know, they should. Congress or the House should be more people in the House have more in common with each other, regardless of party affiliation, than they do with people in the executive branch or the courts. Like, if you don't, if you don't have a, a legislative branch that gives a shit about its own position that, you know, things don't work that well and, you know, eventually we're going to get a court that is not good in, you know, in, in all sorts of ways for limited government or separation of powers and, and actual representative government.
- [19:30]
Mike Pesca
Well, Russ, you're in the legislative branch of your state, and I would assume that the reason you just don't give. Well, you're a Democrat, he's a Republican, but even the Republicans don't give Sununu a rubber stamp. Is. It's not the politics of New Hampshire that to go against the governor or the executive is almost certain political death. But that is the reality for most of the Republicans. So Amash doesn't. Or the example of Amash doesn't dispute this point.
- [19:57]
Nick Gillespie
No, no, it confirms it. Yeah. And the person who followed him. The person who followed him, Peter Meyer, who's the son of the vast Meyer superstore, you know, franchise, he voted to impeach Trump the second time and then he got primaried.
- [20:16]
Russell Muirhead
So, yeah, I mean, if, you know, if there's.
- [20:19]
Mike Pesca
But that. Answers. I just want to say that. Answer your question. Why don't they stand up for themselves? Because.
- [20:23]
Nick Gillespie
But it's.
- [20:23]
Mike Pesca
Because politics are political animals first, and they don't see any margin in it. Given the construction of how politics are done on a national level these days.
- [20:32]
Russell Muirhead
Yeah. I mean, if 50 Republican senators stood up to Trump, he wouldn't be able to take them all out. If there's two, he can focus on them. He can turn off their money spigot, he can activate primary voters in two states. But it's only in a context where most of them are cowards that you can pick out and take out the one or two or three courageous members.
- [20:53]
Nick Gillespie
Yeah. I want to say, though, that the legislative branch rot at. The federal government is older than this, too. The Congress has not passed the budget on time in decades, and half the time they don't even bother submitting them anymore. And this goes back to, you know, they went along with recess appointments, you know, during Obama, et cetera, like something Congress has stopped functioning as, you know, arguably the first branch of government. And I'm not letting Donald Trump off the hook to say that, you know, there's a bunch of Republicans who wet their pants every time he remembers who they are, but it's much older than that. And, you know, I mean, if you go back, you know, you could go back to Andrew Jackson or whatever to start talking about the imperial presidency, but there's no question that over the past 50 years, even after attempts to rein in the executive branch, after watergate and after LBJ's excesses, too, somehow Congress always finds a way to misplace its spine before they show up for work the few weeks out of the year that they actually convene.
- [22:03]
Russell Muirhead
I mean, back when Trump imposing these tariffs last spring, I thought, gosh, you know, I've read the Constitution. I teach it occasionally. I remember the tariff power being a congressional Article 1 power. You know, how does he get to do this? And I should have known. But, you know, you can't know everything. My colleagues probably wouldn't say I'm the brightest bulb in the chandelier. So I find, oh, there's this act passed in 1977 that gives, you know, under conditions of emergency, gives, you know, the president the power to set tariff rates. I thought, well, this is probably the first time that act has been invoked. And then I find out, no, it's been invoked over and over and over again multiple times under Obama. And I thought, well, I didn't. It's funny, I don't remember being in a state of emergency over and over again in all these years. So this is just the routine abdication of its fundamental constitutional power by Congress over a period of, you know, gosh, like 50 years.
- [22:59]
Mike Pesca
Yes, yes. And there are all these instances where there's another drip and Another drip. I was interviewing a scholar who wrote about the Iran Contra affair. And there you had at least the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate with Republicans like Jake Garn and of course, Teddy Kennedy on the other side, wanting to hold the president to account, but not having the actual mechanism to do so. So if you do read the last 50 years, you won't find one of those great, not just abdication, but abrogation of power moments. But I want to know, do you guys think. I think that there. It's one reasons. One is something about money in politics which leads to the weakening of the parties. So the strength of the parties used to be very important. Now they're weakened. We'll talk about Marjorie Taylor Greene. You could go around them and just raise all the money that you want. But the third is the media and how we get messages out. So even though the president was powerful, I would say the sum total of powerful of power of all the other elected officials used to swamp Trump the ability of the presidency to get attention, but no more. Quite clearly, no more. So of those three, or add any others, what do you think most explains this phenomenon of the legislator just wanting not to legislate?
- [24:15]
Russell Muirhead
Yeah, I think. I think that it's also. It could be this sort of, you know, the desire of legislators to. They don't want to actually craft public policy. They want a certain amount of celebrity, and they don't really want to do the hard work that legislators used to do, which is mostly in committees, and they became kind of experts on a particular policy domain. And that's what gave, you know, the legislature in the largest sense, its standing vis a vis the presidency. They actually did have some expertise. But I think insofar as what you really want to do is just be a little celebrity, you know, then all that policy stuff just gets in the way.
- [24:55]
Nick Gillespie
You know, it's complicated to kind of point to a single factor or even the set of factors. Mike, I think you're broadly right that the parties control. They certainly control elections and campaigns much less than they used to. And part of that, some people would point to something like Citizens United, really making it easier for outside voices to kind of dominate or to create the issues that campaigns are fought about. I actually, I like Citizens United. I like anything that allows more people to spend more money and make more communications during an election season. But, you know, it's not all pretty or clear. On another level, you know, I'm a big fan or admirer of Morris Fiorina, the Stanford political scientist who talks a lot One Nation, after all. What's that?
- [25:44]
Mike Pesca
That's his book. His book is One Nation. After all, we actually agree more than we don't.
- [25:49]
Nick Gillespie
That. And then also more recently, a book called Unstable Majorities where, where he talks about that the ways that the parties actually select candidates now at, you know, at the local level, at the state level, at the national level, that both parties, you know, they've sorted into a, generally speaking, a conservative party and a liberal party. The people who work the machinery of those parties are more extreme than the centrist or the modal, you know, Democrat or Republican. Right.
- [26:18]
Mike Pesca
And so you certainly young staffers are.
- [26:20]
Nick Gillespie
Yeah, yeah. And you get just you, you end up getting more and more candidates that don't represent either the party base or, you know, what's going on in the country. And so you end up with a kind of motley crew of people who are not, you know, necessarily united by all that much. But, you know, having said all of that, people like Amash talked a lot about how, you know, first under, you know, various Republican speakers of the House, like the way that they change the ability for, for Congress to actually debate and argue about laws and modifications to them basically made it impossible. It doesn't matter who you are as an individual Congressman, in the way that it used to. Having said that, somebody like Nancy Pelosi is remarkable. Like she may be the last super effective speaker of the House because we don't. Mike Johnson isn't. Paul Ryan wasn't. Dennis Hastert had pastimes that kept his full attention from being focused on passing laws.
- [27:24]
Russell Muirhead
And you know, one of the like, they're not thinking institutionally. Look at the way the Senate Democrats shut down the government using this filibuster power that they thought shouldn't exist in the first place. I would love to have seen they had no end game. They had no exit. They just, their idea was that, was that they, they had leverage and they'd be able to compel the administration to negotiate. And short of that, they had no plan B. But what if instead of doing what they did, they'd done the following? They had filibustered the old fashioned way, and they had filibustered and said, we're going to filibuster. We're going to shut the government down for five days and we're going to all camp out in the Senate. We're going to stay there night and day and we're not going to stop talking and we're going to explain why, you know, these premium subsidies matter. We're going to explain why Obamacare, whatever the ACA marketplace needs more support. We're going to explain, you know, our priorities to the American people. And we're going to filibuster for five days and bring it to the people. And then, you know, exhausted, we're going to go home and we can reopen, we'll stop filibustering. An old fashioned filibuster of speech making, of standing in the well of the Senate and using the actual setting of the United States Senate to make your case, I think would have been a thousand times more effective than what they did.
- [28:38]
Nick Gillespie
I agree with you. And I also, I think it's always the party and power that shuts the government down. You know, the Republicans could have long ago or earlier on have brokered a deal and they should have. But in a way the Democrats got what they want because it sounds like Trump is going to cut a deal for like, you know, a multi year extension of the ACA subsidies, which I'm against the, I was against Obamacare, I'm against the expansion, certainly the expansion that took place under Covid being extended longer. But it's kind of curious that, that the Senate Democrats in a long way probably have won that battle, at least in the near term. What I like what you're talking about, Russ, and I'd be curious how this plays out. You're also talking about legislators should be debating ideas and policy and what are we trying to do here and then what are the policies that get us there? And there has been such a, you know, and obviously there are theories of political power that say, you know, like elections and speeches don't matter, ideas don't matter, it's like brutal kind of economic power relations, et cetera. I tend to think at the very least that the, the discourse and the narrative and the discussions are important. But like what has happened to, you know, certainly over the entirety of Trump's, you know, kind of ascendance over the past decade or so, people, people just don't talk about policy at all.
- [30:04]
Russell Muirhead
Yeah, I mean philosophic reasons and high minded reasons. Of course, I don't know that maybe they only rarely motivate political action, but they are the veil that gives politics its dignity. And they also just stand for the idea that we're not just forcing each other through the force of the strength of numbers or some other kind of force to impose our way in the whole, that we're actually in the business of kind of relating to each other and giving reasons to each other. And even if it's not the whole truth. It never is. It's a very, very important, you know, kind of ritual. When I first got in the New Hampshire legislature, it turns out in the New Hampshire legislature, which is a very functional legislature, every bill that hits the floor gets a little mini debate. There's an argument for, there's an argument against sometimes multiple arguments, but at least one. And I would sit there on the floor and I'd say think, oh, my gosh, I'm going to be stuck here for another 15 hours when I can predict how every single one of these bills is going to go. Because I know who's in the majority and if I know what the majority thinks about a given bill, I know whether it's going to win or lose. So why do I have to sit here for 15 hours listening to these debates? And I should have been, if I had better character, I would have figured it out sooner. But it came to me and I thought, no, this is actually what dignifies our politics. We are, we are forcing ourselves to stand up and explain ourselves to each other and give our side the reason, remind our side of the reasons for whatever we want to do, and also explain our reasons to the other side. And that is this U.S. senate should take a page from the New Hampshire legislature playbook.
- [31:38]
Mike Pesca
And I will add, human beings as a tribal people in the same room will naturally not necessarily cross party lines, but just go and say to someone who gave a speech that they didn't disagree with, well, that was the best version of your argument. Or I liked your point. Or change the subject and talk about their kids softball team and then maybe bring it back to the actual content of the speech. These days in the U.S. senate or the House of Representatives, you just have to talk to your own silo. They cut these videos of senators or congressmen grilling everyone who comes to testify before them. If you watch the whole hearing, it's often the worst point made, but it doesn't matter. You put it up online, you talk to your own silo, and you never have the inclination or you're never rewarded for that interaction between human beings, which, like I say, are a fundamental aspect of our species. In a moment, we'll be back more with not even mad. And this time we will talk about maybe one of the reasons why Trump is giving the Democrats what they want on their shutdown agenda. Is he a lame duck? Back with Russ Muirhead and Nicolas Be after this. Oh, hey, welcome to gift wrapping.
- [32:56]
Russell Muirhead
Whoa.
- [32:56]
Mike Pesca
So is Saldana.
- [32:57]
T-Mobile Representative
Hey, can you wrap these, please?
- [32:59]
Nick Gillespie
Wow.
- [32:59]
Mike Pesca
IPhone 17s.
- [33:00]
T-Mobile Representative
You splurged at T Mobile you can get four iPhone 17s on them. The new center stage front camera is amazing for group selfies. It's the perfect gift for everyone.
- [33:09]
Nick Gillespie
I'm the worst.
- [33:09]
Mike Pesca
I only got my mom a robe.
- [33:11]
T-Mobile Representative
Well it's better than socks.
- [33:12]
Mike Pesca
So I have to trade in my old phone right?
- [33:15]
T-Mobile Representative
No AT T Mobile there's no trade ins needed when you switch. Keep your old phone or give it as a gift.
- [33:20]
Mike Pesca
Incredible.
- [33:21]
T-Mobile Representative
In fact, wrap up my old phone too for my Aunt Rosa. Forget that, Aunt Liz will be jealous.
- [33:25]
Mike Pesca
Sounds like my family drama.
- [33:27]
T-Mobile Representative
Oh I got it. I'll give it to my abuela. I'll take reindeer paper with hey where are you going?
- [33:31]
Mike Pesca
To T Mobile.
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- [33:49]
Nick Gillespie
You pay off earlier.
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- [34:27]
Mike Pesca
We'Re back with Not Even Mad. This is a show where we're really not even mad because Nicolas P. Is and Russ Muirhead. Our guests, I think, are enjoying talking to each other, learning from each other. Because when you get people in person, or at least on a riverside connection, this is what happens. So I have to wonder if Trump really is a lame duck. I've seen a couple data points, nick, you mentioned one. Another data point is this 2025 election. We usually don't start counting the lame duck O meter until the midterms, but why not do it a little bit early? Trump seems intent on not consolidating his power. And then we also saw Marjorie Taylor Greene leave. I don't know what this means, but one explanation was rats leaving the sinking ship. She sees where this is headed. If you read her resignation letter, it's all saying, I see where this is headed. You have to also factor in, does she think she has some sinecure, some great job at OANN or somewhere else out there for her? Maybe she does. Russ, what do you think about the lame duckness of it all? Because I've been wrong about that in the past. And Trump. Yeah.
- [35:33]
Russell Muirhead
When I think about, you know, Trump's real power over his, his fellow partisans, over the Republican Party that he dominates, you know, first, of course, his ability to inspire, motivate people who vote in Republican primaries. And, and he's not yet, you know, a lame duck with respect to that. In fact, as we were just saying, a lot of Republicans really fear his ability to bring people out, and that's a special crowd that votes in primaries. It's not the general election.
- [35:56]
Mike Pesca
2025 doesn't say anything about that. Powell? I don't see it.
- [35:59]
Russell Muirhead
Yeah, no, no. Certainly not an election in New York City. I mean, and the other thing is his ability to turn on and off the money spigot, if he can, if he can fund candidates and deprive candidates of money. Those two things are just the, you know, core sources of political power for a president. And the last thing is, and you all can laugh at me, I don't think there's any guarantee that he's not going to run again. So I definitely wouldn't call him a lame duck.
- [36:27]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, Nick, I kind of agree. I think there's a 15% chance. I think there's a 25% chance he'll make some noises about it and like something like a 10 to 15% chance he'll actually try to do it and probably a 35% chance someone named Trump will run. But anyway, Nick, what do you think?
- [36:43]
Nick Gillespie
Yeah, I'm hoping that Tiffany Trump finally enters politics. You know, we need a, we need a fresh Trump voice. I think he is a lame duck and I think it's starting to show. And actually, I do think the 2025 election, speak to it a little bit or whisper to it, because the, you know, the governor races in Virginia and New Jersey, Virginia was probably going to go Democratic no matter what. New Jersey, probably. Although, without getting into the intricacies, it's odd for either party to have, you know, three incumbents in a row and, you know, Trump was pulling in the other direction and it had no effect. So I think, think what you're seeing is Trump's agenda is genuinely unpopular. He's got some decent marks on foreign policy. Everybody hates the trade stuff. People are sickened by the immigration tactics, even if they agree with the need to stop, you know, to close the southern border, which he effectively has done. But, you know, this. He is not popular. His policies are not popular. And I think Republicans are starting to recognize that. You add to that that, you know, it's almost certain that, you know, the Republicans are really going to face a big wipeout next year in the midterms that will accelerate things. Plus, you have a whole handful of, you know, young courtiers and maybe not so young courtiers who are, you know, really kind of looking to set themselves up for 20, 28. I spoke last week to Rand Paul, you know, the Kentucky senator from. Republican senator from Kentucky who's libertarian leaning back before Trump Emerg. He was one of the, you know, straw poll winners at CPAC to be, you know, the Republican nominee. He kind of went quiet a bit in Trump's first term. He is spitting fire at people like Trump and J.D. vance and Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. There is going to be a fight that is gearing up among Republican presidential wannabes, which is going to accelerate Trump's loss of control over his, I think, over his own party and, and whatever his agenda is. Because, you know, you know, Trump smiling with Mom Donnie and talking, you know, you know, it's like it's not clear what Trump stands for other than Trump and the next Republican who wants to be president has to come up with a plot that's a little bit different than that.
- [39:15]
Mike Pesca
Well, Trump believes in Republican socialism and.
- [39:18]
Nick Gillespie
Mum Donna believes in socialism. Socialism. So you got a little horseshoe going on.
- [39:22]
Mike Pesca
Russ, why do you think. Got any theories about why? M. I mean, or is it the one time where you could just trust.
- [39:29]
Nick Gillespie
Her at her word?
- [39:30]
Russell Muirhead
I suspect I actually do think her speech is probably a good, pretty good window into what she's thinking. And I don't think she's really trying to deceive anybody. I don't think she's. I mean, maybe she imagines herself running for president, but she's. But I think also she was super lonely. I think she was super lonely. I think she felt betrayed by Trump and also by maga. Democrats think she's barking mad. Republicans think she's out of control and dangerous. She has no friends. It's really hard to be a legislator and be around a group of people where you have no friends. It's hard to sustain yourself and do that work. Normal people find that kind of loneliness. Really, really hard to bear. So I can imagine her thinking, look, this just, life is short. I don't want to spend my days in this place where I'm all by myself.
- [40:21]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, I remember being wrong about this. I was hosting a show called Not Even Mad. This was the first iteration where there were two permanent co hosts. And they were often actually, unlike you guys, they lived up to the building billing. They were mad at each other. And so this was the moment that the Republicans had not done well in 2022. And it seemed as if Trump was waning. And he jumped the gun on an announcement at. At Mar a Lago. And it seemed that Ron DeSantis was poised to be the standard bearer. And we were wrong. We were totally wrong. It was just a moment of weakness. He's never been popular. He does have that animal cunning instinct. He knows how to make, as you said, Russ, other Republicans unbelievably afraid of him. And there are two parties and he has sway over one of them. And there won't be a midterm, but. But he knows how to make Democrats look bad. And also I would say that his unpopular positions, like, say, immigration, they might be unpopular in the execution, but they are popular in terms of the effect and him promising, delivering on his promises. So there are a lot of things that make me hesitant to say that we can do anything close to write off Trump.
- [41:39]
Russell Muirhead
Oh, look, Trump. That we're talking about a cult of personality with Trump. And so it's. I agree with you, Nick, that certainly the ICE raid, super unpopular. I don't think tariffs are winning a lot of points for Trump, but I don't think tearing down the White House, I mean, in general, I don't think that played well with independent voters. But there is a real cult of personality around him. And a lot of the things that put off his opponents do cause his supporters to say, that's why we like him. This guy doesn't care. He will do what needs to be done.
- [42:09]
Nick Gillespie
Done.
- [42:11]
Russell Muirhead
He is the strong man who will collect the kind of executive capacity that's necessary to change stuff, and no one else can fix it. So I do think his own personal power, he's not yet lost his personal power. The cult is still there. How fragile it is, it's hard to say.
- [42:32]
Nick Gillespie
I think it's more brittle than we think and only time will tell. But his main, you know, his numbers are down at, you know, at historic lows, his approval ratings, people don't trust him about the economy. And that ultimately, more than, you know, almost anything else is what matters. So, you know, if there's a recession, you know, then the Republicans really take it in the chin. If there, if there's a rally, maybe they do better and things like that. But, you know, Trump has, it's a cult of personality. It's, he has a ceiling on his popularity that he is pretty probably, he probably hit running against Kamala Harris. And I think it's just going to be, you know, a slow or a fast decline from there.
- [43:18]
Mike Pesca
I think the tariffs are, of course, a terrible policy, but I don't think they're as correlative as where we are with affordability, as the general person in the public might think. I think that they have caused some prices to rise. But if they were so terrible, if you were to unplug the tariffs, you'd get a reversal on that. But you can't do that because I don't think that most of the, and it's not inflation since Trump came into office, it's a lack of having prices outstrip the price of goods, which is roundabout way of saying affordability. So I do think, hey, Trump gets all the blame for it because he got way too much credit for the strength of the economy his first time. And a lot of this is just vibes. And in general, how's the economy doing arguing independent of the president, but we credit or discredit the president for that. And Trump deserves to get bashed on this very stupid policy called tariffs. But like I say, if the tariffs were really the issue, they're a reversible issue. The Supreme Court is maybe going to force the reversal. I don't think that that's going to greatly help affordability at all.
- [44:30]
Russell Muirhead
I mean, I'd love.
- [44:31]
Nick Gillespie
Well, I think, yeah, go ahead, Rob.
- [44:32]
Russell Muirhead
Oh, sorry, Nick. Yeah, I just like, I welcome, you know, a real, I'd love to see a robust politics centered on affordability. In my view, that's what politics should be about. And of course for most people, this is about rent, housing, consumer durables, groceries, but also health care and higher education, things people really want access to. And especially in housing, health care and higher ed, there's so much that can be done. I'd love to see the two parties and different sides really compete on this. I think there's some really very, very effective market based solutions to housing affordability that need to be implemented a far more aggressive and robust way. I think there's differences between right and left on how to best achieve affordability in the short run, long run. So this is where politics should be I think this is where, in spite of everything, the rival, the political contest might produce something that actually benefits people. And look, I work in higher ed. Higher ed should be higher ed. Since I paid my parents, paid my college tuition has gone up by twice the rate of inflation. I mean, if you could have a bond that paid that, you know, you wouldn't have to save anymore, you'd be done. So the higher ed should be half the cost that it is right now. And I do think, I hate to say it, I don't think there's a way to solve this without getting. Without government regulation with respect to higher ed.
- [45:52]
Nick Gillespie
Yeah. I would argue, of course, that one of the reasons why the price has gone up so much is because of government funding and government aid. I mean, when you, I agree with you, promise massive slobs of money to everybody. Institutions, of course, you know, raise their prices to absorb that money. I actually think higher ed is going to become less of an issue ideologically. Trump won that battle, you know, and whether. Whether or not anything actually changes, it's like he de woke ified the universities wokeness is not an issue anymore. And then when you look at the raw bodies going into higher ed, we probably had peak student populations in higher ed sometime around 2010, 2011. I think it's going to be harder, hard to. When people talk about affordability, I think fundamentally what they're talking about are things like groceries, and they're often off about what things cost, but housing especially, and this is something that, you know, it tends to be seen as more of a local or estate issue. But Trump and the Republicans, at least at the national level, have done nothing to explain how, you know, they can make housing easier to get, and they should be doing. If they were true to the rhetoric, the philosophical rhetoric that they normally would be using, they would be talking about, we need to have people. The people who build houses should be paid whatever the market supports. We should be importing more immigrants who are going to work more cheaply and build houses that cost less. We should be importing more lumber and timber and nails and everything from everywhere. And instead you have in Trump this very jumbled message. And the Department of Homeland Security and ICE and whatnot was putting out tweets saying, you know, the reason housing is so affordable is so high is because of illegal immigrants. Somehow illegal immigrants are coming here and buying the houses that you would otherwise be owning or renting. It's. Nobody buys that. But this is where I think, you know, in many ways, Trump and the Republican Party at Least at the national level is looking back at old issues because they don't care or they don't understand how to move into the future. I don't think the Democrats have done a good job of capturing this either. But like I think the party that starts saying this is how we're going to make housing more affordable, they're going to win and it's not going to be Mamdani, you know, managed to win in New York with like maybe 50% of the vote. It was not robust. But nobody believes like the way we're going to make houses cheaper is by having the government build lots of houses.
- [48:29]
Mike Pesca
Russ, what's a non supply side housing fix that might just get Nick mad and will live up to the building of the show?
- [48:36]
Russell Muirhead
Oh, I'll tell you, there's a lot of. I see in the legislature a lot of bills coming out of my own party, I'm a Democrat that would limit what landlords can do. It limited landlords ability to evict tenants to renovate apartments. It would limit landlords ability to change rent. And look, I mean even I look at these bills and I see how they might actually be as an emergency measure, maybe in the midst of COVID they might have had a place but they obviously make owning rental stock much, much less attractive. And so people under those conditions will invest much less in building and renovating and owning rental stock. So that's those are disastrous, but they are there and some limit rent control. Look, the real question here, Nick, rent control is rent control was what once existed in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Is it rent control coming back? Is there a place for rent control?
- [49:35]
Nick Gillespie
No, not if you want more housing to be built and more housing to be maintained. Rent control doesn't do that. It's unambiguous. You could argue that something like rent stabilization with vacancy decontrolled is, is certainly a better policy than actual rent control, but these things don't work. I for reason. A couple months ago I was in Austin, Texas and I did a documentary about how just since COVID Austin has gained a lot of population and rents have gone down. Renting, okay, has gone down. You look at San Francisco since COVID people have left but rents have gone up. And when you dig into the housing policy, what they do in Austin, and it's partly Texas more broadly is the they they basically let anybody build where there is a vacant lot. This was a policy that was widely supported by Yimby's. Yes. In my backyard progressives as well as kind of like you know, the remnant of a John Birch Society right wingers, you know, it was remarkable. And I think those are the policies. If, you know, when you see that kind of consensus building and it's, it's abundance, economy, sovereign abundance, agenda stuff and its forward life looking. And you see that in Texas, Florida is already hedging a lot on this stuff because they worry a lot about, you know, conserving. They have a lot more kind of environmental issues that might limit growth. But a place like Texas, you know, you just build, build, build. And you know, that's very popular on the left and on the right.
- [51:10]
Russell Muirhead
Yeah, we need hundreds of thousands of housing units even in rural New England where I live. But here's another non supply side idea too. Tell me what you think about this. How about taxing property owned by non residents? Especially you go to a place like Manhattan, you see these little teeny tiny sliver skyscrapers that go up 400 stories and nobody lives in them. They're just places where foreigners park their wealth. Why not have a non resident property tax that's five times the property tax for full time residents?
- [51:41]
Nick Gillespie
Yeah, good luck.
- [51:43]
Mike Pesca
Russian oligarchs do it.
- [51:44]
Nick Gillespie
Yeah, good luck.
- [51:45]
Mike Pesca
I don't know if it scales to other cities, but I like it, like it for mine.
- [51:48]
Nick Gillespie
Yeah, I, I, I, you know, I suspect that a lot of these types of, you know, taxes, they are difficult to administer, they're difficult to maintain, and wealthy people have a very good way of, you know, of routing around them, which is not to say then, you know, because the tax is difficult to collect, it shouldn't exist. But rather taxes that are kind of flat, fair and visible tend to do better. And the problem in New York work is not Russian oligarchs building apartments that they don't live in. It is, you know, anybody who tries to get anything done in New York, you realize like, oh my God, this is going to be years beforehand, you know, and that's business owners, it's apartment owners. And it's, you know, things that still float around of the idea that, you know, what, what kind of inspection do you need before you hook up a gas oven in an apartment? And you know, it's just nobody is ever saying, you know, what we need to be doing is scraping the barnacles off of old regulation and old payoffs and old schemes just to make it easier for more people to live here, you know, in whatever location they can find.
- [52:50]
Russell Muirhead
Well, I think this is a big issue, Mike. It's a big issue. When I talk to my students, you know, they're Kind of despondent. They're like, you know, no matter how hard we work, we're not going to pay off our school loans and we'll never buy a house. And, you know, I really think, I think.
- [53:04]
Nick Gillespie
Do you laugh in their face? I mean, you know, if I may, here I'm getting angry, but. So Dartmouth students are crying the blues. Like, fuck them. They're the sons and daughters of scions of wealth, you know. No, they don't get to do that. And here I'll just say the other thing is that they will pay off their student loans if they're even taking them out. But more importantly, when you look at all of the stats, Gen Z owns more houses at their age than millennials, boomers or Gen Xers. That at the same age, the housing ownership crisis is everywhere but the data, because actually, like millennials and Gen Z are doing fine on that. Everybody wants to afford, you know, wants housing to pay less, but. And we should have more housing, but I don't know. I gotta, I gotta, I gotta, you know, put my thumb in the eye of people going to an Ivy League school crying the blues.
- [53:58]
Russell Muirhead
I don't think they feel bad for themselves relative to other people. And they're not all, you know, I'd say probably most of them not sons and daughters of this uber wealthy.
- [54:07]
Nick Gillespie
All of them are. What percentage of Dartmouth students come from the top 5% of household incomes? And it's probably. It has to be at least 75%.
- [54:16]
Russell Muirhead
Yeah, it may be. I don't know. I don't know. I will say that there's a lot of kids who don't have money and they're not coming from families with money. And I'm not sure that they don't feel bad for themselves, but they look out there and they think, wow, the, this is, you know, I'd like to be able to think that if I work hard and play by the rules, you know, some base, I'll be able to look forward to kind of basic kind of life. And I think for whatever reason it could be. What's interesting about you say, you know, what I find interesting is the idea that the statistics don't bear out the pessimism. And I think that's actually a powerful argument I could bring to young people. I think just calling them super privileged or whatever probably is going to help.
- [54:57]
Nick Gillespie
No, no. Well, I think that we also. And when I say we, I mean people, you know, let's say, you know, Gen Xers and boomers have told younger people and younger Americans that everything is terrible, you know, and there's a right wing version that we're living in the apocalypse, that right, you know, left there's.
- [55:15]
Mike Pesca
Rampant miserableism from both sides. They take a different flavor.
- [55:19]
Nick Gillespie
We're reaping. They're reaping what we sowed. For sure.
- [55:22]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. I have a son in college and I've tried to inculcate him against that. And it's very hard given our.
- [55:29]
Russell Muirhead
A lot of techno pessimism in the end.
- [55:32]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, yeah. I would just say that it does seem that, you know, whenever we talk, I think, Nick, you and I have specifically talked about Austin and people from Austin always write in talking about, actually it's the most overbought market. But okay, fine, take Houston. It does not just seem. It is the fact that Texas got it right. And while they were getting it right there, that policy was called a lack of a policy and was called sprawl. And I don't know if you pick up on this, but sprawl is somewhat pejorative. But that's the way not to have rampant homelessness in a housing crisis. And I don't detect anyone going back saying, ooh, we shouldn't have done all these articles about how there weren't sufficient codes in Houston and look how ugly all these neighborhoods are that aren't as controlled as New York neighborhoods. So there doesn't seem to be, to me, an inclination to actually take account for the people who, who perpetuated the narratives that this was the bad way to do it, when in fact it might have been the right way to do it.
- [56:33]
Nick Gillespie
Yeah. I do think that overall negativity and pessimism, it's not just millennials and zoomers, although they are markedly so. It's everybody. And this goes back to, I think, the discussion of politics. And I don't look to politics for meaning in my life. I don't need, need, you know, RFK Jr. Who seems to, you know, be able to connect with zoomers in particularly strong and trenchant ways from time to time. I don't need them to tell me what to live for or anything like that. But the lack of any kind of, you know, transcendent narrative themes, belief in the future is striking. I, you know, I was in college when Reagan got, got, I guess, got reelected. I was not a particular Reagan fan. But when you go back and you think about the way that he talked about things and even somebody like Bill Clinton who got elected on the charitably put a misapprehension or misperception that the early 90s recession was the worst in American history since the Great Depression. He was an optimistic guy. And we just, just, we have not been living in that world for a long time. And I think it would be great if we actually started, you know, if we talked about how things have gotten better. Not to shut people up or to stop, you know, reform and things like that, but to acknowledge basic reality. And the fact is, and Mike, I know you and I have talked about this in other contexts. People like Scott Winship at the American Enterprise Institute and Jeremy Horpedal at University of Central Arkansas, they look at data that shows, you know, that about 70% of 30 year olds in America are doing better than their parents were at the same time. That's down from figures like 90% in 1960 or 70. But it's still like incredibly good. And it's, you know, we're, we're such a wealthier nation. There's so many more options for people today. But we keep talking about things like it's, you know, Mad Max, Beyond Thunder, though.
- [58:42]
Mike Pesca
Well, now we're not going to move to a more optimistic part of our show, but we should, that should be the call to that. We are going to move to. You know what this is? This is contained pessimism. So we could get it. It won't be rampant. It won't gallop away from us. It won't be miserable. Ism. What it is is the goat grinder. It's an institution. It's those little things that get our goats or grind our gears. Could be very, very little and manageable. Nick, do you have a ghost grinder?
- [59:10]
Nick Gillespie
Yeah, and this is very minor, but I just watched on Apple tv, which I, I actually subscribed to because of the show Pluribus, which is fantastic so far, it's like four episodes in, but it's a really Skilligan. Yeah, yeah, it's really, really good. Even though I, and you know, they ran the first episode on Amazon prime, which is kind of amazing, for free. And then I was like, my wife and I were like, oh, we should subscribe to Apple. You know, I mean, it's amazing. But in any case, once you're on Apple, like, you know, they've got tons of shows. So I watched the studio, which came out earlier this year, that, with Seth Rogen, and it's this attempt to be a parody or a satire of how shitty movie studios are. And what's interesting is that, you know, it's a TV show talking about how crappy movie studios are because traditionally it's movies that, that talk about how terrible or evil TV is. If you've ever watched A Face in the Crowd with Andy Griffith, it's a great movie. It came out in the late 50s at a time when theaters were shutting down and TV was picking up. And it's about how evil television is. Like it gives rise to demagogues, et cetera. But so it's kind of interesting. Yeah. That you're, you know, that you were watching a TV show mocking a Hollywood studio as Hollywood is fading. But it's the worst kind. I like, I. This is what grinds my gears, Mike, is are, you know, entertainment shows that say they're going to take the piss out of the entertainment industry and they always go soft in the clinches because it's, you know, well, everybody wants to be in movies, etc. And it made me think of a show that was on HBO a year ago or debuted a year ago called the Franchise, which is set and it's, you know, behind the scenes at like a Marvel superhero tentpole movie was created by John Brown and Dominic Iannucci, the guy who was behind Veep, you know, was one of the executive producers. And that's like, that's a mean, nasty show that actually makes you realize that Hollywood is a horrible place. And it's not these kinds of self referential, you know, kind of sloppy kisses under the guise of being, you know, know, satiric and sardonic. So.
- [61:35]
Mike Pesca
All right, I, I actually like the last episode of it very well in terms of speaking of Vince Gilligan, this, the physical comedy of Bryan Cranston, he deserves.
- [61:46]
Nick Gillespie
Yeah, yeah, Brian, Bryan Cranston is. He's like the John astin of the 21st century. He's. He deserves Gomez.
- [61:54]
Mike Pesca
Gomez Adams.
- [61:55]
Nick Gillespie
Yeah, who is fantastic as Gomez Adams and he was in Candy and he just, he deserves some kind of like Congressional Medal of Honor. But Bryan Cranston is like that. Any guy who can play Tim Whatley, the father and Malcolm in the Middle, Breaking Bad, lbj and then this is like, you know, he's quite amazing.
- [62:17]
Mike Pesca
My favorite character in the pit is played by his daughter who doesn't have the last name Cranston. What a great show.
- [62:23]
Nick Gillespie
Also.
- [62:24]
Mike Pesca
Okay, I'll give you my Goat Grinder, which is this. It's also about entertainment. I went to see a show over the weekend, actually saw three versions of it. Perhaps a Relative was in it. And before the show they gave the trigger warning, as they do warning. This show contains murder and suicide. So my Goat Grinder is two things One is, we're sitting down. We're seated. The theater is dark. Everyone who's not in the front row upon hearing that is supposed to.
- [62:54]
Russell Muirhead
What?
- [62:54]
Mike Pesca
Oh, I didn't know. Excuse me. Excuse me. Get up. That would be more triggering than knowing there'd be some suicide and murder. But here's the other thing. The show we were seeing was Antigone. Antigone, a Greek drama. At this point, you might have gleaned or learned or heard through the grapevine, the Greek grapevine, that Greek dramas, and especially the plays of Sophocles without murder and suicide, have no plot. So there was also incest references.
- [63:26]
Nick Gillespie
Yeah. No smoking in it, though, right? For God's sake.
- [63:29]
Mike Pesca
Thank God.
- [63:30]
Nick Gillespie
Yeah.
- [63:31]
Mike Pesca
That would have been a crowd.
- [63:32]
Nick Gillespie
I love the. I. You know, I thought that we were mostly beyond that era, but a couple. I don't know, a couple of months ago on hbo, I think my wife, who's considerably younger than me and had never seen Gone with the Wind, and so we cranked it up and, you know, during COVID they re released it, but they. They put a warning at the front where they were like, hey, you know, this has depiction from a. From a different time. And it was funny because at first she was like, you know, it's not so bad. And then I was just give it a couple minutes. And like, even. And I say this as somebody who's Irish American, even the Irish are, like, stereotyped and caricatured in ways that are unseemly and Gone with the Wind. But it is, you know, on a certain level, I don't know how you feel about this or Russ, how you feel like it's stupid, but it's also, you know, is it so bad to warn idiots that they're about to see something that might upset them gird one's.
- [64:34]
Mike Pesca
Loins as they did in Grecian times. Russ, what is your goat grinder?
- [64:39]
Russell Muirhead
I'll tell you, I love a cozy pub or a cozy restaurant this dark time of the year, but I can't stand when they pipe music in. And I'm sitting there at the table and I'm having a conversation. I can kind of not hear the person across the table because there's this music coming from the ceiling, and I love music, and I love conversation, but I don't see what the idea. Who came up with the idea that we should mix the two. So you can't really, you know, swing to the music, sing along with it, or enjoy it. You can't really have a conversation. So please get the music out of the pub, of the restaurant. I just don't want to hear it. Did you laugh? Because last music. That's different.
- [65:18]
Nick Gillespie
And then, you know, you're not gonna talk.
- [65:20]
Russell Muirhead
I'm the grouch. I'm the old grouch. I'm like, excuse me, could you ask them to turn the music down? Turn the music off.
- [65:25]
Nick Gillespie
Well, did they?
- [65:26]
Russell Muirhead
No. They always say they will. Because I realize, like, I'm the old guy. They're like, oh, yes, we'll do that. And then they don't do a damn thing. No one knows where the volume knob is, for one thing. No one knows.
- [65:35]
Nick Gillespie
Yeah, I've been. I've been in a couple places in New York where they're like, oh, you know, we actually have no control over that. That's corporate.
- [65:41]
Russell Muirhead
Exactly.
- [65:42]
Nick Gillespie
And it's like, I can see the volume knob behind the bar. Like, you know, it's like. And they're just like, no.
- [65:50]
Russell Muirhead
And it's like, okay, yeah, yeah, there it is. There it is, Mike. That's that. If you could change that.
- [65:56]
Nick Gillespie
Well, you know, if I can piggyback on that, too, I think Yelp and a couple of the reviewing services, they used to have a thing where they would say, like, what's the decibel? Or, like, is this a conversational restaurant or not?
- [66:09]
Russell Muirhead
Not.
- [66:10]
Nick Gillespie
And that's gone away. And I think it's. You know, I like you, Russ. I'm an old man, and my hearing comes in and out, and. But I know, like, if I, you know, if you want to go somewhere to talk, like, you don't want to hear, you know, music, especially holiday music.
- [66:24]
Russell Muirhead
Yeah, Right.
- [66:26]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. I mean, if they're playing that song, Stick Season, I could take it. But if they're playing, oh, yeah, you know, another. Another, I Saw a Grandma Kissing Santa Claus. No, it's too much. All right. We want to thank our guests. They were Nick, and they still are, but they're no longer our guests. Nick Gillespie, editor at large of Reason and the host of the Reason interview with Nick Gillespie. Thank you, Nick.
- [66:48]
Nick Gillespie
Thank you.
- [66:50]
Mike Pesca
And for the first time, Russell Muirhead. You are so great. Thanks for joining us. He's a member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, and he is the author, coauthor of Ungoverning the Attack of the Administration, State and the Politics of Chaos. Russ, thanks so much.
- [67:04]
Russell Muirhead
Thank you.
- [67:05]
Mike Pesca
And until next time, we're not saying we're right. We're not conceding that you're right, but we are saying we're not even mad. The Gist is produced by Cory Warrow. We had help today from Leah Yan. Kathleen Sykes helps me with the gist list. Text Mike 233777 and you could see what's behind today's Paywall All Pageant chicanery in the Philippines. Jeff Craig does so much with the video and the socials and the visual. He's a master of the visual in this a primarily audio form. Michelle Pesca also works with the visuals but is mostly the visionary Improve and thanks for listening.
- [67:55]
Nick Gillespie
Sam.