Restoring Values in the American Experiment

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Hello and welcome to the Bullwick Podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. We have one Monday without Bill Crystal because well, I could not turn down this beautiful setting for those of you on YouTube, we're at the Aspen Ideas Festival. So I search for a suitable replacement among the global elite, the thought leaders, the illuminati . We needed someone wise and wry . And among all of the notables here, the only choice was, of course, the former host of CBS Daily News and the politics podfather himself, John Dickerson, and I hear you have a substack. Oh, I do. I have a substack like everyone. Like all humans now must have a substack. I think you're born with them. I have one. That is nice. It's good to see you. It's great to see you, Tam. This is nice doing this in Aspen. Yeah. I mean, what's I don't know if you were here last night, but what's gorgeous about the clear sky is that it's a clear sky because there are fires over in Utah that at the end of the day , everything looks totally haze. Yeah, when we got in yesterday morning it was a little spooky. Yeah, you know, blood red sun, it's a little ominous. All right, we got a bunch to get to. We'll do a little media talk at the end. Is there any media news that you think about you might be worth shooting mountainous media news? I am in the flat lands of my ability to weigh in on it I'll enjoy ducking your questions. Well, I don't know about that. We'll see. My questions might be more fun than you think. Well, let's talk about Iran first. I'd write this down because since Friday's podcast, here's what happened. Can I run you through the events? Iran launched a drone offensive on ships in the Strait. They were mad that Oman had opened an alternate lane for ships. They said that that other route violates the MOU, the U ret.al Si.ated, we I brombedan again. Iran then hit back against eight U. S. military targets in Kuwait and Bahrain. Those were countries that you might remember were on Marco's All is Well Trip just last week. We retaliate again. Then Trump threatens Iran with annihilation again. Iran then says now we're going to go ahead and get a nuke then. And then our friend at Axios Brock Ravid reports, well, we've actually now agreed to stop escalating right before the market's open. And we plan to meet again this week. Talks Tuesday in Doha , for the New York Times Iran has not yet confirmed their sending reps, so we'll see. So that's the state of affairs on our ceasefire. Yeah, it feels like this is the state of affairs every Friday, weekend and Monday because a week war. One of the substanti things I do is a compilation of the weeks news and every Friday I ended and I think, oh, there's there's, you know, a breakthrough at the end of Friday. The president was often saying like we're ready to sign a deal. And I think, oh, you know, I haven't really accounted for that. But then it washes away by the time you get to Monday. So this feels like a similar thing. I mean the fact is that all of the issues, the key issues are so up in the air, they can't even get to the other issues that are up in the air. Right. And that shipping lane , you know, if you look at the number of ships that are still able to get through, it's tiny compared to the one hundred and thirty a day that we're going through. I think it's over a couple of days they had seventy eight. And they've got to go through that narrow non mind lane even in the best of terms and we should talk about what that even looks like, this is just super slow going a half a foot forward, two steps back. Yeah . And the two things that just stand out on this, which you will note are not neither of these things were part of the reason why we went into the war as particular holdups here as Lebanon. Item number one of the MOU mentioned Lebanon three times. So I think Iran was pretty clear about what was important to them. So that makes things challenging when that's out of our hands. And then when it comes to the strait , it seems that there's like maybe an intentional miscommunication, I don't know, but a miscommunication about like what an open strait is , right? And I think that it seems like Trump is at least pretending like or acting like an open straight means ships can just go through. And Iran means no, an open straight means that, you know, you get our approval, you send in a TPS report, like we let you know if you can come through, and that's open. Right. And that's a precursor to Iran saying after sixty days and the MOU is over. We're going to hold we're going to have tolls. We're going to charge people to go through this. This is which is a new arrangement. Pre war, this didn't exist. And so all this conversation about the strait either what's going on now or what will happen after the MOU is over is all leverage points that Iran gained by the war. And so as we measure, was this worth it, which is the question we should always be asking about everything that happens. Everything that's being debated didn't exist as a point of leverage or complex complexity beforehand. So it's a new thing that's been created. Leaving aside all the other thorny issues, Lebanon's another one that was not originally a leverage point , but now is a part of these negotiations on Iran's side. JB, the vice president has been a point man on this lately. I like this little fact that I read. During negotiations in Switzerland last week, one of the things that V an thoughtced was important that they agreed to is that there's a hotline in the U. S. military and Iran because we haven't been able to get a hold of them. They keep saying like, oh, the Iranians are in caves . And so we don't know. And then like Taznim or whatever, they'll put out information on state news. It's like, it seems like, you know, we can get to them, but they keep acting like it's hard to get hold of them. So we're supposed to have a hotline that Iran starts bombing on Friday or starts droning the straight again on Friday. And JD like sends out a tweet that's like, I wish they would have called me . And they should have just called . And as of a Saturday, I don't know if the hotline's become operational since then, but we still didn't have a hotline. It feels like the hotline is like when people are in the salary negotiations with a job and they can't give more money so they give them a title. It felt like the hotline was the thing they could name as a piece of progress when there was no actual progress. On the other hand , it has been reported throughout these negotiations that one, of the challenges for the U. S. negotiators, for JD Vance and others is like, who's in charge? Remember that first round of meetings, the Pakistani spent more of their time trying to adjudicate the arguments among the Iranians , let alone then between the Americans and the Iran ians. And so getting a person on the other end of the line would be nice because it would mean there was one person on the other end of the line. On the other hand, the idea of a hotline is the reason I'm being a little bit glib about it is because this war has taken place by social media, essentially each side acting and then threatening in public for a variety of their different reasons. So a hotline is like it's a little late because it's all happening in real time on social media. You can't see it. You're so here for your wisdom. Do you have any wisdom about where things go? Well, no, I have no I have no wisdom about where they go, but I do have what I hope is wisdom about what we should always keep in mind. Was the war worth it? And I think there are three things three ways you measure that. Was it worth tearing up the Obama era JCPOA, which was negotiated by several countries, had a series of constraints on Iran, which President Trump tore up and thinks he's going to get a better deal. Let's talk about just one little thing, inspections. When JCPOA came out, Senator Tom Cotton and others said the inspection regime is too puny. It has to be inspections anytime, anywhere. JD Vance just announced before things fell apart that the Iranians were going to have inspections again. They were not anywhere, anytime inspections. So if you measure the inspections that they might get out of this deal against what was the previous standard, this war has not been worth it. So you measure the war against the JCPOA, you measured against where things were before the bombing started there were negotiations, the Strait of Horn Moves was not a leverage point. And then you measured against what President Trump said this war was about. So keeping those three things in mind, every time there's a development, like the hotline, great, right? Okay, hotline's a development. But if you measure that against all the previous situations, like a hotline's meaningless development. Yes. So I just think you want to keep those three in mind because the problem is when there are some of these agreements like to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, it's treated by the White House as a great development. Okay, without thinking about the context, maybe it's a great development. But the context is it wasn't a point of contention before the war. It was open . It was open already. So just keeping those three things in mind every time there's development I think is I mean, given those three things, I don't see any path back to something that looks even remotely like success. Like honestly, even if you think about what a best case outcome from here could be , like it's hard to see how it would be any better than the pre war status quo or the JCPOA. I think that's right. And by the way, if you're really doing the math, you've got to then calculate all that was expended, not just the loss of lives, the damage to the international economy, all those missiles that you can't replace very easily . So that's another thing worth keeping in mind because there's really nothing more important for a president than the decision to go to war . And so this isn't some decision about a reflecting pool. This is like at the center of the presidency. The only thing that would be worse in terms of a president using or misusing their power would be if they encouraged some sort of kind of an attack on the free and fair elections that are a part of the American Constitution. Back to JD. Last week he was at the Nixon Foundation or something libraries . And this was not an off the cuff comment. It was a prepared comment. To go to this event and announce that he thinks that Richard Nixon's having a renaissance actually? Actually, he says actually a couple times . And that if Watergate happened today , twelve hour story did say on Friday show , I said that that was not true. That's the Nick is having a Renaissance and I follow a lot of, you know, political I'm a political watcher. I haven't seen any of this. My colleague Will Summer did correct me that there is like a niche sub culture on right wing TikTok where they do Nixon edits to Charlie XCX songs. So it's a brave new world. So there's like maybe small , small renaissance happening there. Your mother, Nancy Dickerson, was there. She was covering all of it. She was there . She actually she was covering the White House for the for NBC . And Nixon, during the period that where there were protesters on the mall. He gave a press conference, and she asked him, why don't you speak to the protesters? And his answer was a traditional press conference answer. But then he called her later that night and he had been drinking a great deal. He also called Helen Thomas that night. And he said, I love those kids. And then he later, that was the night that he went down on the mall and met with the protesters. It was a very odd conversation Yeah, yeah. And Haldeman writes about this in his diaries, the drinking part. I mean, and this period was going down to talk to the to the young protesters and he ended up talking about like the Super Bowl. It was not a deep interaction . But that was one. And she knew Nixon going back to when he was on the hill in the fifties because she had been working on the hill. And she also did a documentary about Watergate. So yeah. So how do you think she'd process the notion that Laurateig wasn't that big of a deal and that he's now many years later having a supposed renaissance going for the new vice president. Yeah, defining deviancy down. Yeah, essentially is what's happening. You know, there has been a line of thinking and Republican thought over the years since Nixon and among obviously his defenders , that they all do it. Nixon just got caught. That was the that's been around for a while. That abuses of power happen in every White House, you know, Kennedy , Blah blah blah. The Dill Trump line about were so great when Scarborough was asking him about , you know, yeah, what Putin had done? Yeah, exactly. Right. Like who are we to talk about? Putin's throwing people out of windows? We're not so great ourselves. I think what struck me about what JD Vance said is he said, well, this was the deep state. And Nixon certainly, if you read the tapes and you listen to him, he was obsessed with the deep state and the bureaucrats in it and the liberals in the media and everything. But the problem for that argument is that if there was a deep state, it was Nixon's mouth. I mean, the thing that got him in trouble is the smoking gun tape is Nixon himself saying to have to have the CIA stop the FBI investigation into a break in a political party's headquarters, which is, you know, again, messing with elections. So you can't define that down. Also, just we should just say also about the deep st ate at the time. This is kind of this amorphous word and I was trying to figure out what he's talking about because when Trump was talking about the deep state , you know, he was going after him, he was talking a lot about the intelligence services . And the intelligence services were working for Nixon as well. Like the CIA was part of the cover up . Trump also talks about the Justice Department as part of the deep state. The Justice Department was on was with Nixon. Like there were some lower level people, but like the attorney general had left by the time Watergate had happened, Mitchell , but was like part of the planning on the front end, while he was still attorney general of the United States. Right. You know, the obvious benefit of this politically for JD Vance at the moment is to connect their sense of grievance about any questioning of presidential power with a big popular thing you know and to try to say essentially it has a modern valence, which really has nothing to do with Nixon , but which has to do with basically like these ninnies who think that what Nixon did was bad, they're the same ninnies barking at our heels and the whole thing is just the product of elites and not actual law breaking caught on tape. I mean, think about what JD Vance is trying to do. This is literally the definition, smoking gun, right? Literally the definition of evidence that is so powerful it is unfalsifiable except think about one of the projects of this administration and JD Vance in particular. He said essentially, okay, maybe they aren't Haitians eating their dogs, but if I have to tell you something that's untrue to get attention to it, it's okay. You know, he called them domestic terrorists in Minnesota, which they weren't and which there was no evidence of for Renee Good and Alex Predi. And that project of taking things you can see and know with your own eyes and trying to cast it as something else is essentially what's happening that in that watergate exchange. Minnies or Minnie Mattering Neighborhubs Mattering Nabs of Negotism. Yes, that was creepy. That was the other vice president . I also think it's Jad Van saying it's okay for us to do the crimes. Like we're hard, I mean, there's a certain groups that we're tough on when it comes to the rule of law, but us in Washington if you're on our side, you can you can do it. It's fine. No big deal. Right. When a president says it's law, which is a version of or I'm paraphrasing what Nixon said . But I think that's right. You define down any previous crime, any previous abuse of power, any previous obstruction of justice . So then when you are accused of the same, it's like, oh, this is the same . These are just these are points of etiquette that we're being called on. And that's always been there's always been a sort of etiquette critique by elites in Washington. It happened with Nixon and now, you know, it's happening to us to downplay the severity of breaking essentially your constitutional oath. Here's another reason they want to downplay it. It's a New York Times story this morning . The government is actively doing critical minerals deals with do, you want to guess how many different companies that have financial ties to Trump or Lutnik? Oh , dozens . Fourteen , I don't know, a dozen plus plus a dozen plus. Yeah. Fourteen different companies . It's worth in total about nine billion . Nine billion. How much was in the paperback that Agna was taking? It's like twenty grand or something. Hold on. I just want to do one example of that. Yeah. The meeting last September , Trump, Lutn andi thek President of Kazakhstan . After the meeting it resulted in an exclusive deal for an American company Kaz Resources to Mine Tungsten in the country. Both Trump and Lutnick family soon announced a highly lucrative business connections to the deal, Tungsten mining in Kazakhstan . That's some creative corruption. Yeah. Well, I'm headed to him, I guess. Every time I hear about one of these deals and there've been a lot of them or the that comes the way of the Trump family . And also obviously this is shot through all of the Middle Eastern negotiations going on. It's hard to keep up with. I mean, it's hard to keep up with what's in the MOU and what's not getting dealt with just in the MO U, but then all the relationships in the Trump family to the various countries that are involved, it's very hard to track. That's just one thing. What I keep thinking about is the President Trump's first inaugural address in which he said this, period where the elites in Washington protect themselves and ignore the forgotten men and women of this country, that ends right now. That there will be no more of this using the system Latinken Whitcoff kids with the forgotten country . What we didn't know is that what we didn't know is that they were the forgotten. And so every time you see a perfection of the use of or the benefit of people with ties to the Trump family in a way that he directly built his entire presidency around in that inaugural address. It's crazy to think back . I was kind of young, but like some of the other ones like Roger Clinton. Trying to think of the other family members who are in on the takes right and I don't recall Mariah Arnie Bush getting in on anything. Oh yeah. Not Marvin, but Neil, there was a lot of Neil Neil got in on some stuff. Well, it was anything I don't want to be wrong or more wrong than normal, but there was a lot of speculation in the SNL crisis about Neil Bush, as I recall. I don't know where that ended up. I'm not trying to impune his character. Yeah. And the point of it is just like how small that stuff was. Yeah, yes. And for me, one of the tip offs was when President Trump made those first feints about giving up control and access and connection to his family business , he had his lawyer go out there and say, you know, when Nelson Rockefeller was vice president, nobody cared about this. In other words, again, like with Watergate, nobody cared about it in the Rockefeller case, therefore you shouldn't care about this now. So it's using the past to try to frame the present except that the past was totally wrong. Rockefeller had to go testify on Capitol Hill about his private fortunes, right? So when they were preparing the way like that, just at the beginning of the first term, you kind of got the sense and Haberman and Swann's book has a passage where Trump and I'm paraphrasing essentially says, you know, I did some of that stuff and nobody cared about it, so I'm not going to bother with it anymore. That stuff being caring about fair wall within the business and you know, pretended and they stopped doing some of their hotel deals overseas, not all of them, but it's like not now. All that shit's supercharged. I should do this. Actually, actually. would This be a fun podcast game with guests is like create like a fake Trump business deal and a real one and try to get people switch on the switch 'cause some of them are so preposterous that you could not possibly believe that it was true . Y'all know I love Souls Out of Office sparkling beverages for an easy way to unwind without drinking . And if you haven't tried them by now, you need to get yourself some of those or some of their new mood gummies as well. If you're anything like me, your day and night routines are not really routine , whether it's doom scrolling, keeping you up, something I'm still doing , or whether you went to the geese concert last night like I did and so you're a little bit sluggish the next morning . Bad habits can throw you off your rhythm. Soul's mood gummies can help balance that out. 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By the end of the yes, so I don't know. This felt like a good podcast topic. And I was just like, what ideas are hot right now do you think? You've been coming to this thing for a while. Is there something that's new ? It's out of fashion. Why you think I'll talk? I have some theories on this. Okay . I feel like there is a , you know, kind of Europe stepping up is a very popular topic right now. Whether we're capable of that? Yes. Certainly not in the UK. Well, the UK is a big countervailing point to that. Yes. The UK prime minister is the spinal tap drummer of world leaders. I mean, they just keep as Ian , UK and Peru competing. Yeah. Ian Bremmer said, you know, in the future, everyone will have fifteen or fifteen minutes as a UK prime minister. The UK thing is pretty worrying because we did kind of follow their footsteps in Brexit . And some of the problems that they're having budget wise , immigration wise do feel like things that are coming down the pike for us. You're exactly right. And this is incredibly important. So we just had the tenth anniversary of Brexit. You now have a majority of Britain saying, Hey, can we get rid of that? Like let's go back to one analysis said it's between four and eight percent of GDP has been hurt over the ten years of Brexit for a variety of reasons the trade didn't take place with as easily with the EU. Labor was restricted, but as your more important point is the right one, which is when you look at Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest on the debt , we are facing the same fiscal problems challenges that they are in the UK. And why did Starmer, among other things get bounced ? Because he tried to do some restrict the payments that went to pensioners, restrict the disability payments and like got screamed by his own party . Same in the states. If we try to tinker with some of those programs or tinker with the other parts of the budget, which are tiny by comparison, politically, it's too painful. Yeah . Another one I'm noticing and I guess I'm trying to put this right way because obviously at Aspen and here there's a lot still of talk about climate happening . I almost felt like a little bit of a time machine, you know, coming here and looking at the panels and saying all the climate talk because that is like so absent from the political discourse now. Like that's another kind of trend I'm noticing, even like the DSA types, right? You have this kind of big moment with all these DSA left candidates. In twenty eighteen, like Green New Deal would have been their thing. Like if it was twenty eighteen. And you know, some of the trends have gotten slightly better on climate, but like things we haven't solved it in the intervening eight years and now it's, you know, health care, it's medical care for all, it's Israel, it's costs, right? It's not even really on the agenda. I mean, sometimes it gets mentioned, but it's like not on the agenda. Yeah, well, I think when you have a forty percent increase in the price of gas as a result of the war in Iran, you have a difficulty selling an argument that has always had embedded in it some upfront costs to make a better f uture, which is often what the case with a lot of climate conversations. Also, though, I think it's just this is distinct from Aspen for the moment, but when you think about housing, education, healthcare , those are like you got to get to those three first. We now have a situation where wages are for the last two months behind inflation. So in the order of operations, talking about long term threats is tricky. Now it's not a long term threat when you look at the f ires in California and the wave, but still , what I'm seeing at the gas pump or seeing it month by month and my bills are always as you know so well from politics are going to get in front. One of the wonderful things about the IDEAS Festival is those ideas are still important and they are what, you know, they are important . But if you don't tend to them at a place like this, then by the time they make it into the political conversation it's too late . because Yeah you, haven't done any of the work. Okay, this is a half baked idea, so we're just doing this live, 'cause another thing that I'm noticing that's different is did all my previous ideas have to be fully baked because I'd like to restate it now. This one's particularly half b ank. This one's a quarterback. You know, I mean, all at these sorts of things you always have corporate sponsorships and stuff. Like the corporate America shift , you know, particularly like somewhat on climate, on DEI, on tech , you know, it's pretty noticeable. Again, this is another thing. We come here in twenty eighteen . I think that there would have been a lot of the big tech companies , you know, either sponsoring or doing panels that are like, you know, we got to think about trust and safety. You know, we've got we're a little bit worried about disinformation on the platform . Not really a ton of that anymore. And like there has been and I think one of the big cultural shifts of Trump, and obviously this is paying with a broadbush, they're good CEOs, but like is kind of in Trump two point zero's been kind of like we're unleashed for having to do some of this stuff. Well, I mean you see it explicitly from the CEOs who went to the White House and visited with him, you see it in Haberman and Swann's book about how and this is one of the particularities of president President Trump's felicity with power and the enjoyment he takes when Jeff Bezos or Zuckerberg sucks up to him, it's a thrill. I mean, those companies trying to stay alive under the tariff regime, like it was existential for some of them. I mean, Apple in particular . So there were there was both a diminution of the virtue signaling that you got from talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion. And then there was an increase in the things you had to do to stay on the right side of the administration and now with, the AI comp anies, there is this new sort of emerging White House policy that you have to run your new models by me. Yeah . I mean, that's a lot of great leverage. Yeah, Mark Andreesen basically said he supported Trump because he was worried about the Biden or Dean Harrris administation would do to do oversight of AI . And like now , I guess as long as they feel like as long as they're inside the house, it's fine. Yes, although I mean, so anthropics in a two front war with the administration. just wrote on Friday that their new model has to go through the administration before it can be released. Ch has a better relationship with the administration than Anthropic did . But even a good relationship doesn't mean that you can get you can just do what you want, which was the original promise of the Trump policy on AI, which was like let a thousand flowers bloom. There is now a gatekeeping function, which I'm fascinated to watch because if you can control the spigot on what gets to go forward or not go forward on what might be the most powerful technology in our modern age, that's a lot of leverage over activity. This is kind of one of those be careful what you wish for lessons. Like there's myself included, there's a lot of mockery of like the Cvheron Plide pride float and, you know , like, you know, these sort of performative called it Virginia, these like corporate performative efforts to show that the companies care , you know, about the, you know, society and the environment and equity . And now that that's gone, it's kind of like, well , you know, there's something to be said for virtue signaling, maybe, maybe better than the alternative totally. Well, because virtue signaling, I mean, this is always true, you know, okay, let's strip let's strip away the virtue signaling, which might have been a kind of cynical glib thing for me to say. We know this from no there was there was there was some fucking virtue signaling. It's fine and that's fine. They deserve some teasing what I What have. have it? What you don't want to lose is the scholarship that shows the benefits of diversity, right ? That this is both decisions are better. Your workforce is more robust when people can see models of others like them who've risen up. I mean, as the son of the first woman correspondent for CBS News, the number of people in my life who said who had never gotten in the news business, who said that their eyes were lifted up on the horizon by seeing a person like them doing a job in public where there were no where there were no other women. Like that is super powerful . And so to deny the power of that, to deny the power of human example for basically everything other than white men is ridiculous because it is powerful. It's some of the most powerful stories in American history are the power of what diversity can do. And then there are the studies that show the powers of what diversity can do. So I don't want the mocking , which is justified in some cases , behind it, there is there is a reality , which is that diversity, equity, equity, and inclusion was a part of a real and important thing for government and for corporations. Was your mom torn at all about being recognized in that way? Like would rather have not , you know, always cited as the first or did she have just a pure pride about it. She was, yeah, she had a pure pure pride because it was a bitch of a climb to get there. I mean, told for years that audiences didn't care about women. And then also you can imagine in the fifties and sixties how an attractive woman was treated by men in power. If you would like to if you would like to advance in your career, we have some ideas for you. Yeah, you . And so if you have to crawl across all that glass, like she would also recognize that she maybe was a little too proud of herself, which caused some trouble later in her career . But you know excessive pride in the media is true . I know, exactly , exactly. I think that there's been plenty of men that went down there. Right, exactly. She has a good example in all the men that came before. That's very cool, though. Mom like that What if you could get more from what you already do? When you're a shell fuel rewards member, you can. So your Monday afternoon could be filled with more rewards, more special offers, and definitely more savings when you're fueling up your car. When you join, you'll save ten cents per gallon on your first fill. twenty cents per gallon on your second, thirty cents per gallon on your third , and more savings on every fill after that. There are no extra steps and no changes to your routine, just more value built into it. You earn rewards when shopping and dining out, and you always save more at the pump . So wherever your day takes you, you get a little more out of every stop along the way with Shell . Join the Shell Fuel Rewards program in the Shell app and enjoy life with more. Your nearest Shell station is closer than you think . The stage is set and the drivers are ready as NASCAR returns to TNT for an unforgettable summer . This week, the NASCAR summer series rolls into the windy city for the ero four hundred , as the stars of the Cup series make their return to Chicago Land Speedway for the first time since twenty nineteen . Former winners Alex Bowman and Denny Hamlin know what it takes to conquer this track, but they'll face a stacked field including Chase Elliott, Ty Gibbs and B ubba Wallace , and the stakes just got bigger. The Eero four hundred marks the second race of this year's in season challenge where every pass, every pit stop, and every lap bring drivers one step closer to a one million dollar prize. Add in pride, points and playoff positioning, and you've got all the ingredients for an unforgettable afternoon of racing. Don't miss NASCAR's return to Chicago Land Speedway, the ero four hundred live Sunday July fifth at five PM Eastern on TNT, and streaming on HBO Max . All right, I want to do open ended twenty twenty eight on Y O. Because I think we first met. I mean, this is not true. Do you do know where we're from? I think we first had dinner in Oklahoma City at a Midwestern Governor's Conference or something that all the candidates were supposed to come to. I don't know if Jeb actually went. We might have met before that but I, remember having dinner . There you go. I met you one time before that . I can remember it was twenty eleven. Okay. That's fifteen years ago. All right. The Iowa Strawpole, which doesn't exist anymore. Yeah. The Iowa Straw Pole , which was would have been the Romney year? The Romney year. Yeah, I don't even remember who won the Strawboy that year Stantorum, I think. Didn't Romney win but because he'd finally decided to participate and he just dropped money in on it. Yeah, that's right. He busted all the people in. Damn it. I'm gonna Google it. We should know. But in the meantime, I brought that up because, you know, you've been covering these things a long time . And I mean, I don't care if you want to talk about Republicans, Democrats, just what 's catching your eye? Oh, well, you know, I man, I'm I love those days the you know Oh my god we're both wrong. Oh no Michelle Bachman won the two thousand twelve . I was oh my gosh. Well sound guys laughing . That's what who came in. Michelle Bachman . mister Bachman. What's he up to? Marcus? I don't know. I should invite him on the pod. Oh my god. He was a hoot. I have a particular fondness for Iowa because I spent so much time there covering both Republicans and Democrats. And also I started my career, well first covering Arlen Specter. Can you imagine a pro choice Republican candidate? He never got like zero one percent in any poll, but even just saying like, I think I'm going to run it just would be unheard of now. But then Lamar Alexander, who essentially tried to hear me at the exclamation point before Job just stole the exclamation point from Lamar. All ninety nine counties . I traveled with Lamar all through this state. Anyway , huh? Well, you know my boring feeling about twenty twenty eight, which is the same boring feeling I had about twenty four and twenty, which is that the horse race fine. But what we're learning in the Trump administration we, lear asn with all presidencies, but particularly in the Trump administration, is this person you're picking has the ability to go to war unchallenged basically because Congress is supine for the moment. We'll see if that changes when there's a democratic president and a democratic Congress if that's the case, but they can like launch a war. Keep that front of mind, right ? Keep in mind all of the power that a president has and that it's not just about the single president. It's about the team they put around build around them, you know, Stephen Miller has extraordinary power . And there is a lot of reclamation that needs to happen. The Department of Justice needs to be moved from the personal personal grievance factory of the president into something that actually deals with the challenges that we face from crime and terrorism and the rest . Like there's a serious bunch of issues and the parlor game is like I spent my whole career as you said you're you're resisting doing the horse race parlor game. I am. We're gonna do it. Okay, okay. Because I only allow myself fifteen to twenty minutes a week on twenty twenty eight. I have a cap somewhere I don't even use the cap . Yeah, but I have I have a ceiling for myself and I was looking at the guests this week and you're really the only one that I want to talk about twenty twenty eight with. So we're going to use some of the cap. Let's just do the Democrats for a second. Well, I have a particular Democrat I want to ask you about, but do you have any thoughts just about the field broadly right now? Well, the field broadly, the Democrats are about to have a big I like these fights in parties. I love these fights. They're going to have a huge fight between if you look at the Pew Political Typology Survey of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, and you look at it's about fourteen percent of the Democratic Socialists inside the Democratic Party . They, however, are the noisy end of the room right now, right? And so what's going to happen when democratic socialists and the energy behind that movement clashes not only with the establishment, but with the political scientists and the political hacks who will say , we love your energy . What you're talking about and the distribution of wealth in America and the diminution of the American Dream. Love it . We'll get back to you. You know, because we're going to go run our race. Well, this takes us back to Bakman actually. So twenty ten was the tea party. Yeah , and twenty twelve, the Republicans nominated Mitt Romney . But what's funny about that is so you have the Democratic Socialists representing about fourteen percent of the Democratic coalition. On the Republican side the Tarty represented a much bigger part of the coalition. As you know, sent seventy people to Washington sent seventy to Congress as opposed to, you know, maybe we'll have a handful . So it had a much bigger part of the party and yet even Romney nevertheless is, the Mid Romney won CPAC. It's talking about straw holes. Mitt Romney won the CPAC struhle, which hard to imagine. But he won it as an unexpected fusionist. And so this is where the DSA can end up having power even a nominee and this was the Tea Party power Romney. You know, I never believed it . I love Lord Mitt Romney, but the idea that Mitt Romney was like a tough border deportation wall guy. Sure was. He was the first one to put self deportation into the lane. Exactly. Self deportation. Yeah. I think that, you know, that was to me, it seemed like him trying to trying to appeal to the Te Party guys and find Elane and realizing that like just doing the belt tightening ec,onomic stuff wasn't going to be enough. You needed to do part of the culture war. And I think you'll see some of this from the Democrats. And you look around and it's like, well, who can do that? And I think that the key Democrat, like that my little rule of thumb I'm trying to use is I feel like Kamala , who I like personally, was in the sour spot where like the DSA types or broader progressives thought that she was a corporate chill, and the moderates thought that she was a California progressive, right? And the challenge will be to find Mitron doesn't end up winning. So this person ideally for the Democrats would be more talented, the Mid Romney more appealing to a general election audience. But the principle of winning the primary is you have someone who's more from the middle but who has an appeal to both sides who the progressives feel like oh they're pandering to be enough to make me feel like they believe it and I can get on board with them because I don't know if I really trust Rick Santorum, right? I don't know who the Rick Santorum and Michelle Bachman is in this analogy, but anyway and I, wonder if that person is John Assof. Well, one thing I want to grab in what you said, which is like the thing about, as you know well, about both the conservative the most conservative wing R ofepub thelican Party and I think is also very true of the most liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Being hondled , being like managed is infuriating. So a candidate who tries to do that can in fact cause more problems. Backlash. Yes. And there will also be a candidate who decides, hey , I'm going to grab the core part of the left wing part of the party and be their spokesman. Yeah. And so now when you try to handle the very progressive part of the ring, you've now got a person who's going to come at you at every debate . So you're going to spend all this time on that territory. Sure. Well Warren was basically in this situation where she ended up having the Bernie people go after her very aggressively last time. Let me pitch you on something else though then. Maybe it's just grabbing an issue that they care about. Maybe the immigration stand in either Medicare for all or maybe a foreign policy thing such as our relationship with Israel and you have someone that kind of really like captures a mantle of that while also you know not maybe checking all of the boxes . The issue rather than being, you know, we need a wall with a moat with alligators in it to appeal to the T party something, you know, something that appeal more to the DSI . And that issue has to be both one that appeals to the actual voters and then one that has avail ance or sends a message about your entire it becomes the proxy for all your positions on everything else. Does that exist? Well, they used to think in the Democratic Party in twenty twenty that that was Medicare for all. Remember how much they debated that and it was never going to happen, but they spent a lot of time in the debates talking about it because it was a way to send a signal to voters about where you were in the party. I don't know if that I don't know if that's possible or whether more powerful prospect may be that a candidate comes forward, maybe it's Osov, maybe it's somebody else who has the athleticism of the political skills where basically everybody decides at some level he's just good at this and we're going to we're going to just kind of shilly chally around the real fights inside our party. The thing is, Democrats like to have the real fight . And I find that hard to believe as an immigrants to the coalition. I mean, I noticed that there's a lot of a lot of nitpicking, a lot of fight ing about white papers. You know, and also a lot of discussion about like, hey, we need the fight. We got to figure out who we are because like all this trying to kind of maneuver around our differences is a disaster and it's part of what happened in twenty twenty four, some would argue. In other words, there should have been a robust fight. It should have just been an anointment of Kamala Harris. Whether you agree with that or not, there is a significant number of Democrats who want to have this big open debate. They want to have it too early for my taste. I'm like, sometimes I want to say to some of my Democrats I'm like, You're aware Donald Trump still president for two and a half years. There's a lot of time ahead. Like why are we doing Twitter fights to the death right now right now in the summer of twenty twenty six , you know, there's a lot of prepositioning as if as if Trump's already gone, as if the future's already here, and I need to win for my faction. And there's like a big fight going on right now on Twitter where there's like a group started like we're representing the center and they're fighting the and they're nastier to each other than they are to Trump. Yeah, this is right. This is all church basement fights over . But I think as you know, though , when two members of Congress incumbents are bounced within their own party in New York, that is political, there's like political gold there. And somebody wants to grab that energy to, as you said, define where the debate is. Like you can you can really never start too early defining where the territory is because if you define the territory, then oh look, I've defined the territory of the future around all the things my candidate is good at, right? So they're trying to say, this is what the fight's going to be about, and it should be about this. And then and then they'll come up and they'll say, well, this is why so and so should be president. So you got to start that all early, but it's all completely detached from the actual job itself , which is what I always constantly keep coming back to. Yeah, just one man's opinion, but I have some disagreements with Zoron, I have some disagreements with Josh Gothamer. I've had both of them on the show. We've argued if you're madder at them than you are at Steven Miller, I do think that maybe your eyes aren't the ball, one man's opinion. Yes, and also you need to be able to articulate the arguments against Stephen Miller more than just bad Trump. Because obviously there's some people in the country who are not where you are on whatever issues you want to be against Stephen Miller and the White House. And the inability to articulate the set of values underneath your disappointment with the Trump administr ation or whatever has been damaging for those for those kind of candidates. They need to be able to talk about why Trump is bad, not just say Trump is bad. You're good. You keep getting the off horse race, but we're going to do the payoff on Os.f But I feel like you I feel like this is useful twenty twenty eight conversation. So I think I've only expended a little bit of my ths. Okay, great. This is all quote up. All right, so Dosoff has been doing the strategy, which is working for him. He gives these speeches on the weekend. He's very good at them. Clips from the speeches go out on social media. They start to go viral. There's another one this weekend talking about corruption, those excellent. Just a couple of tweets I saw about it. Osof just has the sauce, man. It's a guy Jeremiah Johnson, I follow. Tommy Vitor, I wanna roll this speech up and smoke it. I'm Sarah Longwell on the Secret Podcast. She was thinking about how much she likes optimistic guys with nice young man energy. Yeah. Rogan and Tim Dylan were having a manosphere podcast I was listening to on the flight out here. They were talking about Osoff. Rogan actually didn't know who Osoff was, which shows you how much attention he's actually paying to the news, but then they played some clips and they're like, yeah, this guy could be the right guy. Yeah. So you know, and he's got a senate race to do first, but I don't know. It does feel like there is some there's a lot of awesome off energy but now you know, and we'll just trade the cliches of the business that you're trafficked in the peak too early . Peak too early and we're peaking too early. Here we go. Here's another one. His best day was the day he announced for president . Oh yeah, actually. Yes. We had a great announcement day. I was there a great announcement today. I don't remember it. It was really n aice day. It was either the day before or after the Trump came down the day before. That's why we had one good day. Yes, exactly. Yeah, so I remember that quite well . So this isn't to take it anyway. It's early and you never but I think the secret sauce for a Democratic candidate is being able to tie so corruption, right? So that corruption is a thing. People get angry at it. But once you get outside your coalition, what does corruption mean? Corruption means that the attention of the person who has the powerful job in the world is always centered on himself, which means he doesn't care about your housing costs, he doesn't care about your education costs, he doesn't care about your healthcare. And guess what makes up a life? Those three things. The American dream is not possible if housing has gone up for forty percent in the last ten years , if education and healthcare are beyond what a middle class family can afford. So the attention corruption on its own terms is a powerful issue, but as a signal of the president's attention and the attention of his administration , which has not been on what is the concerns of the American family, that's a way in which a subtle politician can weave those things together and somebody's like starts nodding. Yeah. Now, if they're good looking and they can do it with certain alone, then that is arms. That's the short guns . That 's's that the beginnings of what is a candidate where who could bring a whole coalition? He wouldn't tell me what his workout routine was on the pod. You told me before he started that you listen to the pod sometimes while working out so will you tell me what your workout rout ine is? Well, I'm fifty seven, so it includes a lot of mobility. A lot of mobility work, a lot of like body weight work, you know, because there's a point in where sleeping starts to hurt. Okay , you know, you went through your whole life, you know, a teenager, you slept for sixteen hours, maybe in college, you didn't sleep for several days . But the act of sleeping didn't used to be a possible source of pain. Now sometimes I get up, I got like my shoulders almost. So that's a mobility thing, like some bands. No, it's a lot of like rolling around. We had these gorilla mats which you put on the floor of the garage, mostly 'cause there's a lot of oil and gasoline on the so you try to cover that smell, but also you just do a lot of like rolling around and it's like yoga slash stretching IT band sure there's a lot of like now that we've said it out loud, your Instagram account is going to be full of people doing the windshield wipers with their hips and all that and all that stuff. And then you know, I'm hurling around some steel , you know? I bet I bet you are what if you could get more from what you already do? When you're a shell fuel rewards member, you can . So your Monday afternoon could be filled with more rewards, more special offers , and definitely more savings when you're fueling up your car . When you join, you'll save ten cents per gallon on your first fill, twenty cents per gallon on your second, thirty cents per gallon on your third, and more savings on every fill after that. There are no extra step s and no changes to your routine, just more value built into it. You earn rewards when shopping and dining out, and you always save more at the pump. So wherever your day takes you, you get a little more out of every stop along the way with Shell . Join the Shell Fuel Rewards program in the Shell app and enjoy life with more . Your nearest Shell station is closer than you think. The stage is set and the drivers are ready as NASCAR returns to TNT for an unforgettable summer . This week, the NASCAR summer series rolls into the windy city for the ero four hundred , as the stars of the Cup series make their return to Chicago Land Speedway for the first time since twenty nineteen. Former winners Alex Bowman and Denny Hamlin know what it takes to conquer this track, but they'll face a stacked field including Chase Elliott, Ty Gibbs, and Bubble Wallace . And the stakes just got bigger. The Eero four hundred marks the second race of this year's in season challenge where every pass, every pit stop, and every lap bring drivers one step closer to a one million dollars prize. Add in pride , points and playoff positioning, and you've got all the ingredients for an unforgettable afternoon of racing. Don't miss NASCAR's return to Chicago Land Speedway, the ero four hundred , live Sunday, July fifth at five PM Eastern on TNT and streaming on HBO Max . I know that you've called in some loggers, called in a band , a symphony to try to play me off so that before we start asking about CBS, but you were unsuccessful. Exactly. Like an airborne is coming. It's time to talk about the media. Yeah. We're gonna start with this. I noticed when I said it that it was wrong, but it's kind of apt. When I introduced you , I called it the CBS Nightmare News CBS evening news. I didn't want to correct you. Okay . I think it's apt because it's kind of like, who cares? Does the Does it matter ? Like who is on the evening news anymore? Does the evening news programming matter, do you think? You know, I know that this was your job, and so I hate to kind of diminish your life's work. Here's what we here's what we believed when we tried to create a different kind of evening news, which is that at the end of a busy day , a thousand things going on . What is important and what can you tell people about that respects their attention, treats it not as something you want to freak them out about so you can hold on to it, but respects their attention and puts the day's events in context and does it with storytelling because you remember stories more than facts often and tells the story in the tradition of CBS News. That's what we tried to do. And we felt like at the end of the day, that is useful. I still think that's useful. Yeah. I still think that's useful. Can you were you talking to anybody that was sixty and getable for Donald Trump . And were you really just talking to boomer and elder Gen X liberals though on the news? Is that wrong? No, no, no, the well, CBS has a has a good strong, solid and God love them .udience A in rural America, which are not these are not . Liberals. Oh yeah, oh yeah, it's one of the joys of working for CBS is that it forces you to practice the kind of journalism I was trained in at time which is, not to present the final product as like, you know, this person believes drunk driving is good. This person says it's not. Who's to say? No, but you go and talk to everybody and then you draw you use the evidence to marshal your claim about what you think is actually happening. And CBS always had a good relationship when I would be out in Red State America. You know, there are lots of good people who when you said CBS, they weren't angry. Having said that, CBS, you know, there's a long history of things that that conservatives and Republicans have not liked about CBS. You may remember the George W. Bush . Dan rather had a band . Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I'm not, I don't want to create a false . But I do think at the end of the day, if you could deliver to people, here are the top fifteen stories in your world ordered in order of importance with context, facts, color , attaching people to the wonder of the world, like we're not supposed to just keep people freaked out about politics all the time. Yeah. The news is supposed to attach humans to knowledge . And knowledge is happening in science, in sport, in fashion . Like that's also part of the mandate. If you could do that at the end of the day, if you could get that at the end of the day in half an hour, Bob's your uncle. You'd be so happy. You have some early twenties children. Yeah. Where they did they want you? Oh my gosh, they've never watched anything . Did any of you did any of their friends watch you? Yeah, actually they did because and I taught at the Institute of Politics at University of Chicago and spent a lot of time with college students. And they care a lot about CBS, the New York Times, mainstream media in part not necessarily because they watch it. They do read the Times, but because they think it's shaping worldview. They also cared about the Ellison family because of their relationship with TikTok, CBS. And as I said, when I worked at CBS , I basically don't want to talk about CBS now that I'm gone because I have a lot of dear friends who work there who are fighting the good fight and whatever my opinion is positive or negative. When you're in the middle of it, like some dude kibbotsing on the outside, like it's I don't think it's kind of dickish. I hear that. The TikTok thing though does tie it to a big likeger thing. I guess part of why I'm being cheeky of course. Like obviously like whatever, four million people are watching the CBS evening news, maybe a little bit less now with Tony Deep. So that's something. Obviously it has big audience still , but like the Ellison thing as it ties to TikTok , I guess my just concerns going forward when it comes to these questions about media consolidation is what's happening on the platforms like, where people are really consuming stuff and where there are no editors and where the algorithm is the editor and it's feeding them the nonsense . And if you have the Allison families close to Trump owning TikTok, Elon close to Trump or Brump's biggest donor owning Twitter, you know, Zuckerberg can you have a democracy when the billionaires own the way that we learn things? Yeah, yeah. I think it's a fundamental question for our democracy and also for our ability to think critically, because when you're being whipped around by the algorithm, even if you told the algorithm, like, just give me political news, you know, because there are now some ways you can train the algorithm it's not working. When the algorithm is whipping you around , it's pickling you and diminishing your ability to actually evaluate questions of the day. So it's not only keeping you addicted and stealing your attent ion, but it's creating habits of mind that are not healthy. And it's basically in the hands of like a few people. Yeah, not good. No. And so I guess like when you assess the landscape broadly, like, where is your alarm the highest ? I guess. Like when it comes to the media and social media companies? My alarm is the highest when you have a kind of an allioupe that happens where you have an administration that tries to re write what's happening literally in front of our eyes. I mean , Secretary Nohm when she talked to Jake Tapper right after the deaths in Minneapolis and there was video and she was arguing for something that human eyes could tell was not true on the actual video . That's the furthest example of what is a thoroughgoing effort to reshape the very notion of verifiable information. Yeah . If you have the most powerful person in the world and his administration trying to teach the country that verifiable information is totally up for grabs and there is no such thing. My narrative is my narrative and everybody else 's is treason . That's incredibly corrosive and dangerous. And then if you have news organizations who are supposed to fight like hell against that idea , allowing it to go for ward, not fighting like hell, or as I said when I worked at CBS, and I make that distinction because again, Kibitzing now that I'm not there, I don't I find sort of I don't agree with, but when I was there, maybe it's why I'm not there anymore, the idea of paying off a president in a meritless lawsuit completely undermines your ability to hold that administration account. And it's not just holding people in power account, it's holding people in power who are trying to rewrite things like an attack on free and fair elections on january sixth. Like the stakes are extremely high. So the effort to rewrite misinformation plus the at the very least supine response to that effort to rewrite misinformation. That's what worries me. This is where so the meritless lawsuit point. This is like what I care about more than I care about the characters and the drama and the personalities of what's happening in CBS. Like it was a corrupt game. Like it was a rigged game from the start. So like everything that happens underneath that is the fruits of a rigged game, right? So if even I believe you that you have former colleagues that are working there, I have friends or at CBS that are good reporters that are doing their job . And yet, like the whole structure now is a structure that was started because the president bullied the network . Like that's bad . And it's bad because it undermines, again, as I said at the time , it undermines the ability of people to trust, trust is a big problem, trust those of us who are in the job of saying, you know, you can't ask a question the president a question , but we can on your behalf. And so we're going to ask him a question that's going to directly affect your life and we're going to try and do it with you in mind . Well, can you do that when you've shown that you're going to pay off this lawsu it, which is basically keeping him in mind . And that is just directly contradictory to the job that a news network does. And again, you know, I said that ball was n't work there. So NN thing were you? I don't know. TV. I don't know. I've spent a lot of my time since I left in December thinking about other things that No, CNN people have called you. I find that hard to believe. They've called you like, What should I do? Dickerson, you've already been through this. Yeah, yeah. What should I do? I know I don't believe you. Well, I know me on this podcast . No, no, no, no. This swear to God, nobody calls me. I think because like I'm not useful . Like which is to say like I don't there are people who have called me many of them who were fired or let go at CBS who I talked to about what do you want to do with your future? All of those things. I really care for a lot of people who worked there , but I don't I got no advice and I got no knowledge . And I mean, despite all the hot takes I've had here, I usually try to base what I say in some reporting or some analysis or something . And I haven't I've spent my thinking. I have some knowledge. You don't have to comment on this, but I have some knowledge because I've watched Tony D . So I've got a little bit of knowledge because my eyes can see and my ears can hear. Okay, this is my last question for you on this. I just want to know how much makes you feel like on the inside. Like everything that happened at CBS. Like how like how are your emotions as you relate to all this? I mean, Pelley said that the dismantling of sixty minutes was similar to the death of a spouse . That's some pretty , Scott I worked very closely with Scott when I was political director and then when I was at Facination. I mean, I was on two or three times a week when he was anchoring the English News. And one of the great things about Scott, which is, I think, important in any organization was that he not only worked incredibly hard, but he was a model for everybody else. And one of the things that I'm that I'm saddest about is that being in touch with Guy Campanill, who was the EP of the Evening News, one for most of the time I was there modeled what being a leader was and being in the being in the company of people who do work where you're like, oh I want to I want my game to be that good. That's thrilling. When Colbert's show is ending, you know, I spent some time there and you look at his staff, like everybody wanted to be better because of the leader. And that is a cool thing to be under . When you're part of a tradition where people are like wherever you are in the ratings, I want to be good because of this sort of thing inside that we all believe in, that's a great thing to be a part of. So I miss being a part of that. So I miss being a part of that. You don't seem that hanging out. Melanch, that's incredibly lucky. I get to , mod youer know,ate p anels here. I've been, you know, one of the great things about Substack, which you have lived and breathed is you have a barn, you can put on a show. And so I spend a lot of time, you know, writing and thinking about things that I might get an audience of four people who really, you know, want my practice. We're going to give more than that for the topic . I perfectly thought through about why Alan Greenspan changed the way we think about the chairman of the Federal Reserve and nobody may care about it, but I do, and that's really fun to work on. So I'm having an advantage. Finding internal fulfillment is important. I learned about this in therapy, you know, not requiring praise of others , but finding fulfillment within yourself. Very challenging for people in our business. Sure, yes, exactly. And it's an important thing to continue to work on. It is, it is, and one of the ways you can do it is to try to develop a value system where you think seeking to achieve these goals within my value system is important to me and fulfilling for me and I can spend my day doing it . We all still seek validation of it. It's not driving the bus and I'm hoping that you validate my interview skills at the end of the section I'm trying to get validation right now. It's already been validated by the enthusiasm with which I'm responding to your questions. All right All right, well, that's good. I'm happy you're not sad. And there's just there is a little bit of melancholy about everything, but you know, things move forward . Well, this is life. I mean , I'm really lucky. I can I can go and substack and write and come to places like this. There are people who were at the beginning of their careers who have don't have a job now. Yeah . And who bought into the idea of meaning and the mission . And the mission can sound super elite and it's basically just trying to tell stories on behalf of the people in the country. Like it's a basic job of journalism. There were people who bought into that or dying of jobs now. I'm super sad for them What if you could get more from what you already do? When you're a shell fuel rewards member, you can. your Monday afternoon could be filled with more rewards, more special offers , and definitely more savings when you're fueling up your car. When you join, you'll save ten cents per gallon on your first fill twenty cents per gallon on your second , thirty cents per gallon on your third, and more savings on every fill after that. There are no extra steps and no changes to your routine, just more value built into it. You earn rewards when shopping and dining out , and you always save more at the pump . So wherever your day takes you, you get a little more out of every stop along the way with Shell . Join the Shell Fuel Rewards Program in the Shell App and enjoy life with more . Your nearest shell station is closer than you think. The stage is set, and the drivers are ready as NASCAR returns to TNT for an unforgettable summer . This week, the NASCAR summer series rolls into the windy city for the ero four hundred as the stars of the cup series make their return to Chicago Land Speedway for the first time since twenty nineteen . Former winners Alex Bowman and Denny Hamlin know what it takes to conquer this track, but they'll face a stacked field including Chase Elliot, Ty Gibbs, and Bubble Wallace . And the stakes just got bigger. The ERO four hundred marks the second race of this year's in season challenge where every pass, every pit stop, and every lap bring drivers one step closer to a one million dollar prize. Add in pride, points and playoff positioning, and you've got all the ingredients for an unforgettable afternoon of racing. Don't miss NASCAR's return to Chicago Land Speedway, the ero four hundred , live Sunday July fifth at five PM Eastern on TNT and streaming on HBO Max . I'm sorry about one other thing. We're going to close this one thing that we're here. So I was one of the neat things about being here. I honor and respect you doing six panels up here. And I love the people of Ashma and the IDS Festival. I appreciate them having us. I just don't really like rich people panel stuff. Like it's tough for me sometimes like I just 'cause it feels detached from yeah and I don't have city hall. Yeah real life a little bit I like being a I'm a man of the people, you know? I like being at the bar ch,atting with people. I like people, but something about the panel culture is something I need to work on to find value from. But there is one element that I do like , which is for all of some of the nonsense that you get and some of the fart sniffing at, you know, at a place like this, you also have people that did real interesting things so and like I just I just do give you one and then you can add a guy last night that came up after the show , ultra guy, and they're just excited to see the bulkwork things. And like, we were just chatting about the news. And his wife was like, well, you know, he was an ambassador for thirty five years. And I was like, I didn I't didn't know that. Thank you for bringing it up. So we started talking about that. And he was talking about how he was in an ambassador from Reagan all the way through Obama. Different administrations. Yeah. And like the thing that I gave, I'm going to getotional a m about, the thing that gave him the most pride about that job was like, we had values that we cared about. And like there were different disagreements with every president at that time, but there were like basic values of human rights , free people , open mark ets that like we argued for in those jobs. And he's like , I couldn't do that anymore. We couldn't like that the person in that job as an ambassador doesn't, we don't have any values anymore that we argue for. And even if the someone who does have values gets back in twenty twenty nine