Source: Why Is Trump Trying To Purge Thomas Massie? Channel: The Reason Roundtable Published: May 18, 2026 | Archived: May 24, 2026

Video: Why Is Trump Trying To Purge Thomas Massie?
Channel: The Reason Roundtable
Published: May 18, 2026
Duration: 1:09:13
Views: 3,039
Category: News & Politics
Video ID: f0HtHW0bfjQ

Description

This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch are joined by Reason Senior Editor Robby Soave to discuss Rep. Thomas Massie’s (R–Ky.) competitive Republican primary challenge and why President Donald Trump has made him one of his top political targets. The panel examines Massie’s opposition to the Iran war, his push to release the Epstein files, his longstanding focus on spending, and why his brand of libertarian-style politics has become increasingly rare inside today’s Republican Party.

Next, the panel turns to the economy, where inflation continues to rise, the U.S. debt has surpassed gross domestic product (GDP), and working-class voters appear increasingly frustrated with Trump’s economic agenda. The editors then examine New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s claim that he closed the city’s massive budget gap without cutting services and whether the plan relies more on gimmicks than serious fiscal reform. Finally, a listener asks how to develop political confidence without losing intellectual humility.

https://reason.com/podcast/2026/05/18/why-is-trump-trying-to-purge-thomas-massie/

0:00—Massie’s primary challenge 20:57—Inflation and the national debt 40:31—Listener question on intellectual humility 51:15—Mamdani’s $12 billion budget gap 57:41—Weekly cultural recommendations

Producer: Paul Alexander Video Editor: Ian Keyser Illustration: Adani Samat

Tags

Thomas Massie Donald Trump MAGA Republican Primary Kentucky Epstein Files Iran War National Debt Inflation Government Spending Zohran Mamdani NYC New York City Budget Libertarian Reason Roundtable

Transcript — YouTube panel (human-authored)

0:06 Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie wants to end the war in Iran, release the Epstein files, and balance the budget, eliminate the national debt, but he is now facing a primary challenge, backed by none other than Donald Trump. So, how did he become Donald Trump’s enemy number one? What does this mean for the future of the Republican party? And what if anything does all of this have to do with Ron Paul? Welcome to the Reason Round Table. This is your libertarian review of news and culture from the editors of Reason magazine and friends.

0:40 I’m your host Peter Sudterman. And today I am joined by my colleagues Katherine Mangu Ward, Matt Welch, and Robbie Suave. Katherine, I want to start with you because you wrote a great piece about Thomas Massie for the New York Times. You spent some time. Sorry. I I wrote the New York Times’s endorsement of Tom and Thomas Massie. if you heard that. Yeah. So, just to be clear, that was not actually the New York Times. It wasn’t even it wasn’t even reason endorsing.

1:05 We don’t do that either because we don’t do that here. Right. So, one of the things you you wrote about him um that I thought was interesting uh is that Trump calls Massie disloyal to America, but your argument is the Republican party actually needs a lot more people like Thomas Massie. Yeah. So I mean I want to start by saying Mangui Ward’s law if there is such a thing applies here and that is all politicians are garbage and will disappoint you in the end. So I really like Thomas Massie. I really like him and I wrote nice things about him in the New York Times and I still fear in my heart of hearts that somehow he is bad and will disappoint me in the end. So I will say that now. But um I probably did not do that man any favors by writing nice things about him in the New York Times because it seems to have triggered um or at least exacerbated an already very very testy race where um Trump sent in a kind of empty suit to primary

2:02 Massie because he is annoyed that Massie is a heterodox Republican in the Libertarian direction. And that’s just like an unforgivable sin. If he’s not going to vote with Trump all the time and do any number of like backflips and nonsense and self-contradiction in order to stay in line with Trump’s views, Trump hates him and he’s going to get rid of him. So, do you think this is about Trump’s views, his policies, or do you think it’s more about personality? Because I mean, I I was just looking at the places where they disagree. Uh Massie voted against Trump’s tax bill. He co-authored legislation to release the Epstein files. Trump obviously doesn’t like that. Maybe we don’t think of that as policy, but it is legislation. It’s about transparency, right? Um he sought to revoke the tariffs uh that Trump imposed on Canada, which is good in my opinion. Um and he also opposed Trump’s uh Trump’s war in Iran. Um the actions in Venezuela, as well as the billion

2:55 dollars in taxpayer funding that Trump is seeking for the ballroom. So is this I mean Matt are we talking about a personality dispute or dispute here or are we really talking about policy issues? I think about Thomas Massiey’s personality is that he was back when there was a freedom caucus and that that meant something in the house before Trump brought that to heal in 2017 like it was one of his first bids as president to to um establish orthodoxy within the Republican party. Massie was never part of the freedom caucus because he was too independent to be part of the freedom caucus. He was part of his own caucus because if you really believe in freedom, you’re not in a caucus.

3:31 Basically that. So nothing wrong with voluntary association. He’s always been an independent cuss who speaks his mind, who talks about um the kind of open corruption of the way that Congress works, the people who come around and say, “Hey, you haven’t raised this amount of money for me. You need to right now.” He’s always spoken about that in interviews with all of us in in the past in a disarming way that libertarians generally find charming. Um Trump has now and this past weekend I mean we’re talking about Thomas Massie but Bill Cassidy um is an incumbent senator lost a primary came in third place in a primary. Trump uh endorsed one of his competitors and said the other one’s not bad. Um but basically went after Bill Cassidy because Cassie was one of seven Republicans in the Senate to vote uh for the Trump impeachment in 2021. There are only two more of those Republicans left in the Senate. Um so Trump has been going kind of like Godfather 2, I guess, part two.

4:25 He’s been going piece by piece at um at the people who have at various times defiled. There’s 10 House members who voted for the impeachment. Are any of them in the House anymore? I think they’re all gone by now. So Massie was a very conspicuous one. And he got Trump in a place that Trump hated, which was to sign over that Epstein files thing, which I’ve been come around to the Robbie Suabi point of view. I disagree with I mean that that does not go in my merit category for Thomas Massie things.

4:53 Um this was a great irritant to Trump. Trump hates that. Um, and is irritated by him being disloyal and voting against things. And Trump has a very very strong record of deciding if you have crossed me, I will bounce you in a primary. Um, so Massie is about the last person left. Ran Paul is still kind of there. Um, still there and not necessarily as oppositional, but Massie is the last the last speed bump left and I wouldn’t be surprised if he loses.

5:19 Matt mentioned the Epcene Files, right? You have you basically think the Epstein files are a nothing burger and you oppose Massiey’s push to release the files. Sure. I changed my mind. Uh I supported uh releasing them because I was told by people who knew more about this issue than I did that uh powerful elite people had gotten away with sex crimes against children and that had all been covered up and so we needed to release the files so that we could hold those people accountable or at least socially sanction them. Having released all those files, we now know that’s not true. um that there’s no evidence of uh of wrongdoing of that nature except by on the part of Jeffrey Epstein who’s dead.

5:55 Uh so I I don’t know why we would have done this given that there was there was no further people to pursue criminally. And it’s also the the the kind of files that were released. It’s just like emails. It’s stuff that was that was that was created because government had coercive ability to pull stuff out. And there were a couple of reason people like named very very tangentially as I recall possibly everyone on this podcast besides me. The files are just any if you wrote an article about Epstein, you might be I mean that’s you know we don’t need to get too into this again but um but yeah it’s an exercise mass cancelling people. So this is the thing is it shows his independence. It shows his willing disagree with him on one thing and still think by far that he on libertarian policy is the best person in Congress and is making important stands on a lot of issues. I almost put him in a very different category from a Bill Cassidy who is it can go both ways, but there’s a

6:51 category of Republican who has been destroyed by Trump because of opposition to him for not that these are not policy reasons, but they’re like because of how Trump comports himself or the legal aspects of what happened on January 6 or things like that. You’re you’re Liz Cheney, you’re Adam Kinzingers, etc. Those people, for better or worse, depending on how you feel about it, there’s just no room for them in the Republican party whatsoever. And I think Cassie is more in that camp. Massie, it’s about actual Massie, at least on paper, is voting for things that Trump and MAGA said they wanted to do, that they want to control federal spending, that they want no new wars. So, in some it’s like almost being the other way, like he’s he’s doing the things Trump ran on. Does that matter more than Trump literally saying, “You’re annoying. I hate you. Please go away. Okay, we’ll find out.

7:39 Well, and and this is this is totally Massiey’s MMO, right? Like he has always been very clear on his principles and he votes on his principles. I don’t think he is like he says like I don’t have a problem with Trump. I am happy to get along with Trump if he’s happy to get along with me and he says but he didn’t invite Trump to his wedding. He didn’t invite Trump to his wedding despite the wishes of his then fiance now wife uh who suggested that maybe that would help with relations with the Oval Office. But um but you know, one thing I’m just struck by is that is that Massie doesn’t see it as personal beef.

8:13 You know, he thinks it’s fun. Like, but that’s also self-interest. And I I I don’t I don’t I don’t think that he’s a reliable nar narrator in that as much as I’m fond of him personally in that look what notes he’s he’s hitting. He’s not running against Trump. Like the people who are out to get him in his thing is not Trump. It’s Apac. It’s Israel. He’s been talking an increasingly, I think, conspiratorial line about Israel and Apac coming after him and people.

8:39 They are spending millions millions of dollars, but it’s not just millions. It’s the most expensive house race ever. I think a huge amount of that is outside money. I think the I think the numbers in the political story were that there was $9 million in Apac and other pro-Israel funds. It’s a little bit amorphous, but then seven million come from Trump and Trump. So like it’s it’s they’re about equal and as far as in spending, but as far as what actually matters, it’s Trump. Of course, the only reason why there’s a candidate there is because Trump is the most popular politician in Thomas Massiey’s district, as he is in every Republican’s district. And so that’s why there’s another competitor going after him. Massie, like all Republicans, like Bill Cassidy, Bill Cassidy was out there saying like, “Oh, you know what? Um, if you really want Trump, you got to vote for me because, uh, you know, he signed four bills that

9:27 I worked on.“ kind of thing. Like Dan Krenshaw did the exact same things. It’s like, you know, my opponent, he’s he’s back backstabbed Trump on immigration. Like these people are terrified to name the elephant in the room, which is that Trump doesn’t like them and he’s going to make them roadkill. Yeah. I mean, I will say when I say it’s not personal, like clearly Trump doesn’t like Massie. That in that direction, it’s personal. Yeah. And I think, you know, at this point, because he has been so under siege both from Trump and from folks who perceive him as anti-Israel, um you know, at this point it’s very heated. It’s the day before the election as we’re sitting here, the primary. And so it’s, you know, we’ve we’re at peak kind of panic on all sides. But the the the reason he got here is just because he voted the way he said he was going to vote from the beginning. And he has always voted. And the thing that’s like really notable to me is so my Twitter mentions are full right now of people being like fighting out whether my New York Times

10:23 piece was a New York Times endorsement of Massie or whether it shows that he’s the Democrat’s favorite candidate and all this stuff. And one thing that keeps showing up is people tweeting Massie is a monster. He’s the worst Republican who’s ever Republican and then someone else going and finding their endorsement of Massie from previous elections, right? because he as long as he was just Republican enough and those principles were moderately aligned with MAGA, it was all warm and fuzzy. And now that’s and he has changed nothing about his political character or what he supports or what he would vote for. He has been although he has he does say and and I you know talked with him about this when I was hanging out with him for the New York Times piece. He changed his mind on Epstein.

11:07 So that’s actually kind of an interesting one. like he said, “Yeah, I just thought it was a dumb internet conspiracy theory and I wasn’t too bothered for a long time.” And then he was like, “Let me, you know,” and it was actually the Pam Bondi binders that ended up convincing him that something needed to be the binder’s not full of women. The binder is not full of the promised Epstein files. Um, and he kind of started to get that like, why is everyone being so weird about this? But I think he’s in addition to like there’s a transparency argument to do this and also kind of instrument instrumental like I’m going to do a thing that Trump doesn’t want to do which is kind of interesting and and tap into this populist anger. But for me it’s gone uh it’s gone further than that. He’s he’s in believe all women category with some of the Epstein victims. Michael Tracy has done a lot of reporting on this

11:56 which I agree with or at least find persuasive that a lot of the people that he’s coming out and and portraying as these brave truth tellers are not at all like if you actually read the transcripts and and yet like I I’ve like I said at the very beginning of this podcast it makes me so uncomfortable to defend a politician. I am very I’m breaking out in hives right now. But um when I was interviewing him, we come out, we came out into the hall, the Raburn building after we talked and there’s some people kind of like hanging out in the hallway and you know the representatives of the Kentucky Tourism Bureau who were here to drop off their flyers, but it wasn’t them. I forget who it was. Um, and this like blonde gal with like a Sabrina Carpenter kind of haird do comes up to him, clearly works herself up to talking to him, says, “Um, hey, I’m not here for this purpose, but I want to thank you for doing the Epstein file stuff because I’m a victim of sexual assault and it’s

12:52 really meaningful to me.“ She’s got tears in her eyes. He’s got tears in his eyes. Everybody is just like having a whole moment. If you were not a robot, you would have tears in your eyes. And it was very touching even for my, you know, robotic inards. I was like, “Okay, this is what’s happening here. This is like a real interaction of a person who changed their mind.” That’s kind of nice. I kind of like it. Even if I don’t think the things that happened with the Epstein files were totally rational.

13:18 It’s really amazing. You’ve come very close to sharing an actual feeling on this podcast. We are. We’re going to come back. Um, okay. So, I I think we’ve demonstrated at least with the Epstein files here, right? The main thing they show is is that he is going to do what he wants. Thomas Massie is independent and doesn’t care if Trump is going to oppose him. And it seems like his challenger, this guy who’s running against him. The only thing we know about him is the opposite of that is that he’s just going to be a rubber stamp for absolutely everything Trump wants to do. Is that right? Like we we know almost nothing about this guy.

13:53 Well, he hasn’t participated in any of the debates. Massiey’s debated an empty chair. Uh he’s barely campaigning. It’s reminiscent of Joe Biden 2020. Uh I don’t need to show up. Trump is campaigning on my behalf by truththing on Truth Social constantly that you have to vote for me. He said that he also he’s like a Navy maybe Navy Seal background. He certainly is trying to give people the impression that he was on all these secret missions. He was right there when they shot Bin Laden.

14:21 And he’s not actually claiming that. He just wants you to infer that based on him not saying anything about his past. He said that Trump has reviewed his top secret files and gives him the heartiest recommendation. If you trust Trump, you should trust me. It’s so pathetic the lack of trying to educate people about his own record that he’s doing. He will be you when asked about ga on the little campaigning he’s doing. It’s asked about gas say well Trump’s playing five-dimensional chess. Then he ran it up later with nine-dimensional chess.

14:51 the dimensions of chess. Trump is play he is he is reaching into alternate universes to beat people at chess and it’s somehow driving up your oil prices and that’s fine because Trump says so. That’s the campaign he’s running. Uh it’s uh frankly uh disgusting that he’s being allowed to get away with this but Rick and Morty situation. We’re going to get back to affordability issues just as soon as we get the straight sorted out.

15:11 There we go. Two other things that stick out about him are one he was fired from his job at the Oakidge nuclear plant in 2013. He had some kind of post Seal Team 6 career as a security something or other. Um that didn’t work out. Don’t know why I got fired. Um and then the other one that Well, there’s something about a whistleblower complaint, but the details there are pretty I think he blew the wrong whistle or something. You’re supposed to tell very sensitive nuclear plants, but not that one.

15:36 Don’t push Don’t push the big red button, please. Uh but the other one that somehow crossed my radar was that he’s in favor of restarting the military draft. Um uh which is which is your favorite? Boomer slop. Uh, that’s some boomer slop. Boomer slop is national service. Military draft is like, you. That’s that. That’s greatest generation slop. Greatest generation slop. But doesn’t this tell us something here?

15:59 Right. So, I asked Katherine at the beginning here. I was a dy in the Crimean War so you could avoid military service. Whatever. I do think that’s what it tells us. Uh I the the thing this makes me think of though is I asked whether this was a personality dispute or a policy dispute and Massie is running against Massiey’s opponent is running essentially not on any policies at all. He’s running on Donald Trump says elect me and I can’t even tell you what I did in the military. It was something maybe bin Laden was involved. We don’t know. I’m not even I’m not going to say we don’t know. Nothing has been said. I mean, what what what did the, you know, six Indiana state senators who got bounced two weeks ago, what were their platforms? I’m sure they had platforms, but for the sake of argument, I’m going to also be sure that they didn’t really matter. What matters was that Trump said yes to these Indiana state senators.

16:52 This is like in Indiana. This is not even in Congress. But that’s the extent to which elected Republicans have to live in Donald Trump’s world at all times, which is discrediting, I Before we go, I want to ask about Thomas Massiey’s world because Thomas Massie is really fun, kind of charming. He has I I have to read these words in order because they he has a solar powered mobile chicken coupe.

17:16 He does. And it is called the Klux Capacitor. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Uh so you can watch actually a whole documentary about Thomas Massiey’s farm made by uh Matt and Terry Kibby who are friends of the pod. It’s called Off the Grid and it’s quite delightful, not least because the documentary really does not get into politics at all. It’s just like look at this dude’s farm and uh and it’s pretty neat. Um he uh he told me that there was like a a contramps going on with his uh with his new wife because she wants to plant more flowers in the special terrace garden that’s watered entirely by the runoff from the thing which he built. and there’s like maybe a Tesla battery in there somehow. Uh, and he wants to keep growing vegetables so he needs to build her another garden bed. And it’s like that’s the kind of stuff that Thomas Massie is up to. If you look away for like one minute like he’s feeding chickens, he’s building and you know he

18:13 also started a successful tech company with his with his late wife. Like he’s it’s not just home steady, it’s also like MIT engineer, you know. I suspect that many viewers and listeners to this podcast are like ish is also this guy. And I like those guys, including Matthew. The detail that stood out to me was that apparently a neighbor asked him for help hiding uh home distilling equipment. And so, of course, we all know that it is illegal to distill liquor at your house.

18:46 And in every single still, even if you’re just doing this, you know, in your bathtub making, you know, prohibition gin, every single still is supposed to be registered with the federal government. And so when the neighbor asked, Massie was like, “Look, I can’t be part of this at all. I’m, you know, I work for the government. I’m a congressman, but there’s a building up the road where, you know, I don’t think they check there very often.” And I guess he he says he saw no equipment and participated in nothing illegal. This was I I think first reported by me in the New York Times. This is a news story and uh I did get a tip. I I floated it to Massie and he paused and he was like I think the statute of limitations is probably up on this one before confirming the story. So yeah, he’s like uh you know he wants to help you hide your still from the revenueers and I think we have to be in favor of that.

19:34 One of us so many ways. All right. Um we’re going to take a break now. When we come back, we are going to talk about Trump’s economy and maybe something that Thomas Massie cares about, which is the national debt. Hey, Reason Round Table listeners. Do you know a student looking for a serious intellectual experience that strengthens the foundations of a free society? Reliance College invites students ages 16 to 24 to the 2026 Great Connection Seminar in Chicago from July 25th to August 1st. This year’s theme is reason and love. It explores the ideas that shape character, choice, and human flourishing. Students engage directly with thinkers like Aristotle, Einrand, Alexis Dtoqueville. They’ll be in small dynamic discussion groups where every claim requires evidence and reasoning.

20:19 They don’t just sit through lectures. They’re going to practice thinking for themselves. Outside the seminar room, students will have other activities they can explore. Chicago’s landmarks. Analyze art firsthand. Experience live improv comedy and build friendships rooted in shared intellectual ambition. Parents, if you want your student equipped to reason independently, speak confidently and contribute meaningfully to a free society, this program was built for them. Registration is just $900 and that includes room for the full week. Scholarships are also available.

20:51 Visit reliancecol.org/reason to learn more and apply. That’s reliance.org/reason. All right, let’s talk about the economy under Donald Trump. He’s been president for over a year now. And last week, we got updated inflation numbers. They are not good. Uh inflation is soaring 3.8% that is the highest in three years. And that was driven by increases in gas and food prices in particular. Katherine Trump ran explicitly. I mean, just one of the biggest themes, maybe the single biggest theme of his 2024 campaign was he was going to lower food and gas prices, which had soared under President Biden. It was true, inflation was really high under President Biden. Food and gas became much more expensive.

21:35 But the same thing is now happening under Trump. And look, one thing I was thinking about is we sometimes talk on this podcast about how presidents don’t actually have much control over the economy. But in this case, I think you can actually make the case that Trump does here because this is a direct result of tariffs, the war in Iran, and immigration restrictions that have made labor more expensive. And those are all Trump policies. They’re not even congressional policies. They’re things he did unilaterally unilaterally. He has become the high prices.

22:08 I Yeah, I am having a little bit of a like it’s just not that hard. moment and that’s wrong because everything in politics is hard. It’s all hard and uh and yes, we have historically said like the president can’t just make prices go up and down, but I think we do need to revise that like the president can make prices go up and he has. Um it’s pretty clearly what’s happening here. And uh also it’s all pretty fixable. Like you could unilaterally reduce tariffs. You could allow you don’t even have to open the borders, right? You could just allow like the tomato pickers in and could open the straight of Hormuz or or maybe not start an incredibly expensive war.

22:49 The war thing is a little harder to reverse, but many of these things are within his power to reverse pretty much. It would have been within his power to not start this stupid pointless but that is something uh you could disagree with it and I substantially do disagree with it, but is in pursuit of some other goal that he thinks is important. The problem with the terrorist then we’re gonna think he thinks it’s important work.

23:15 Well, I’m I’m again mad at Robbie. Let me finish. His goal is he thinks it is necessary for our safety for Iran to not have a nuclear weapon. And then this pain we’re experiencing right now is uh justifiable short-term loss. That’s different than the tariffs and some of the other which just speaks to a fundamental like misunderstanding of economics that he has always fundamentally had where he thinks if we that there’s a giant pile of money and other people have stuff and if we have less money and then stuff we like we’re worse off because we don’t have as much money like fundament how trade works on a very basic level is not part of his vocabulary. He wants things built here.

24:00 He he wants like goods to not leave the country or money to not leave the country in exchange for goods and that is really warping his thinking. I think that’s a little different than the foreign policy, which I don’t care for either, but that’s about me not prioritizing the policy outcome he’s out to. theory the theory of the case that he had and that I’ve always said is the measurement of of whether his policies might work to my surprise uh is that if we limit curtail immigration uh legal and illegal um and we uh institute these tariffs and try to promote manufacturing at home we are going to see working age people get back into the labor force.

24:40 Um, so the labor force participation rate for 25 to 54 year olds when he took office was 83.5%. It is now 83.8%. Which is better. Nailed it. But it’s that much better. Um, and it’s unclear whether that’s sort of statistical noise going up and down. Not watching on YouTube. How how much better? How much would you do better? Um, it’s it’s not much better. And that is and these have been pretty uh draconian changes with the the tariff increase um in it’s the biggest increase in tariffs in in nearly 100 years. Um uh the immigration decrease is you know it’s 90% year-over-year in certain categories of immigration. So this is really really huge numbers um applying towards his theory and the theory hasn’t shown results and he’s the restrained one on that like he does periodically backpedal when he talks to some association of farmers who are like we need more people and then he’ll back off it and then on the highskilled he’ll routinely go to

25:43 conservative media and be like well I don’t know who else is going to build the factories if we don’t have any South Koreans here. he’s the everyone else in the coalition when he’s gone will would be more in favor of cutting that scary but also maybe less bold in in doing it. I think uh our friends at Kato have pointed out um that he says those things and this is usually greeted with like oh he’s changing his mind on things but if you look at the big numbers the big numbers are really uh quite startlingly different. Katherine, I want to ask you about a big number. $ 38 trillion. That is uh what the Peterson Foundation debt uh federal debt calculator showed as of this morning. So, as of I believe last week, federal debt surpassed the size of GDP. On the one hand, like that’s not like oh, and then that triggers something special happening. On the other hand, that’s a that’s a lot and it’s very big, right? And didn’t Trump

26:39 say like a decade ago when he was president the first time or when he was running for president the first time that he was going to eliminate the federal debt? No one believed it. He didn’t. He definitely didn’t believe it. Um I Yeah. So putting That’s great. Putting an asterisk on all these numbers because actually there are like many different debt numbers and maybe we actually want debt held by the public and not but like it’s a lot of debt. Oh my god, there’s so much debt is a perfectly sound analysis. He’s the king of debt.

27:07 And um unfortunately, I think that it’s just you can say anything you want about the debt at any time and it no longer is like audible to the American public in any way, shape, or form. Like you can say the debt is too big, they can’t hear you. You can say it’s same, you know, it’s surpassed GDP, they can’t hear you. You can say I’m going to fix it, they can’t hear you. And it’s because it it feels impossible. It’s like these stories you read in the New York Times of someone who got like four master’s degrees in social work and now has like, you know, $600,000 worth of student debt. Like, it might as well be infinity because the roar of the sound of that large number is so loud that you just are like, it doesn’t contain information anymore.

27:55 Is the solution that we all need Thomas Massiey’s lapel pin? only need Thomas Massiey’s lapel pin, which takes the national debt off and he wears it everywhere he goes and he built it himself obviously. Um, and I love this man. I w but I walk by the there’s a bus stop uh on my commute that shows the national debt and it has a little ticker there too. It’s on K Street. Everyone in Washington can see it anytime they want to see it. Seeing the number, knowing the number, hearing the number, unfortunately has no power. And that sucks for us people who want everyone to panic about the number.

28:32 Ryan reminds me of the opening. I just started catching up on uh Euphoria. And the opening uh scene is to explain what happened to the characters for the last four years. And Zenaia like the drug dealer she borrowed money from appears. And Zinda’s like, “Oh yeah, I owe you $10,000. I know. I I’ll come up with it.” And she’s like, “No, you owed me $10,000 four years ago. Now it’s like $200 million, but I’ll settle it for you becoming a drug deal.” Right.

28:54 And that’s that’s how the season kicks off. I think that’s the way out for the United States as well, by the way. Except for it’s going to be like we’re going to swallow a bunch of fentinil and smuggle it into the United States. Awesome. I think we’re actually still bombing drug boats and we’re also we’re also the war. I’m just going to keep going back to it because it’s such an unforced error. So, the Pentagon now says that the war in Iran costs something like $29 billion, but that almost certainly understates it. Every outside estimate is much higher. And the Pentagon’s also asking for a $1.5 trillion defense budget that doesn’t even include the war supplemental.

29:29 There was a time uh I swear to God in 2014 I want to say where uh Rand Paul was then kind of a leading presidential candidate and he had floated the idea of uh increasing and I might be getting some of the details wrong but it’s more or less correct. uh increasing the defense budget by a little bit, but that bit would be the exact same amount that would be offset by some other thing that people want. Like get rid of all foreign aid, we’ll put that in the defense budget. That some kind of gimmick like that. Libertarians blew up at him.

29:58 They’re like, “My god, you are defaming Ron Paul for not being libertarian enough.” Yeah. Um like this is terrible. And this is back when the defense budget was more like $600 billion a year. Um and people lost their crap uh to to Rand Paul. Many of those people, I might add, became eventually Donald Trump enthusiasts. Um, and it shows that I think a lot of people um have temporal ideas or or passing enthusiasm.

30:24 Well, I think those people are not happy with Trump now over this. They had a moment and now they’re back. Smith type people or whatever. See, I mean, I routinely see them call him like the antichrist or something. They’re they’re in like a cool Peter Teal way. Just in a negative way. They’re religious. Do you think it’s important to a cool Peter Teal way of being the antichrist? I think so.

30:47 Okay, agree to disagree. It’s also because I made it sound like earlier that I didn’t care about the war or something and address that. Get up on the soap box. Like Trump is, you know, he just will say on True Social, they got to accept this deal or I’m going to wipe them off wipe them off the face of the map and then doesn’t do anything and then threatens that again. And I I don’t like they’re not doing anything because they don’t take it seriously because he just is saying things all the time that we don’t know whether to take seriously or not and it’s not working. And this is why you vote on wars by the way. You have a a Congress say this is the mission. We are going we authorize you the president to fulfill this military objective and we voted for. We don’t do that anymore. So we don’t know what the goal is. And it seems at best to me we’re going to come away with a deal that was the exact same deal Donald Trump tore up that Obama had that he

31:36 said was awful. But at best we’re going to have the their assets unfrozen and some deal to halt their nuclear enrichment for some period of time which is exactly what we had before we spent however many billions and possibly establishing a metered choke point on a major source of trans shshipment. um which is not a great thing when there’s other meter choke points or potentially meterable choke points uh in the world.

32:01 So Trump is losing the American public generally. Republicans don’t believe that his tariffs are helping the economy. He’s also losing white workingclass voters. Exactly. The voters that the MAGA intellectuals said were specific white um non-olucated voters because I’m one of them. So in fact um I just I recently had He’s He’s lost me. Never happened, but he’s lost me. Okay, that that’s true that it’s not that maybe you’re not working class, but I recently had an experience with an outside publication where I wrote um uh non- college and they were or or something like that and they were just like, “No, no, you just call them workingass. That’s what we’re going to do here.” Those are different things. In any case, the thing that I want to do is bring this back to Thomas Massie who many years ago said what I think remains one of the most perceptive things about politics in the Trump era. It’s our favorite. It’s our favorite.

32:57 Holy it explains everything, right? So, he was talking about uh the Ron Paul vote and he said talked about how the people who had voted for Ron Paul in Iowa back when Paul was winning caucuses were now voting for Trump. This is in 2015 16, right? Um, and in fact, the people that voted for Rand Paul in Kentucky had switched over to Trump. All this time, I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soularching, I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron Paul and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas.

33:31 They were voting for the craziest son of the son of a in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class. And I wonder I think that was that totally explains the last 10-15 years of Republican politics. But maybe Donald Trump is losing the crazy son of a vote. Well, let’s think let’s think about who are some of the people who are like have defected on the right from him. It’s Marjgerie Taylor Green.

33:56 We’re talking Jewish space lasers. It’s Loen Boowbert who is Lauren Boowbert who is Beetlejuice enthusiast who was uh who was uh campaigning for um Massie openly. Now Trump’s going against her. Um it’s people and Massie himself. I mean Massie is kind of in the Ron Paul uh era where where era or like ambience of like about 10 15% um flirtation with some con conspiratorial thinking let’s say. So it’s people who have a little bit of crazy good crazy uh for the most part in Massiey’s case. Um, so I I think I think there is something to that, but also what we’re witnessing is a uh in in a broader way, you see this also kind of in influencer, podcaster, kind of journalist fights amongst themselves on the right. Um, it’s a succession battle because Trump’s not going to be here forever and everyone knows it. So it’s it’s a battle over which block which politician is going to be.

34:49 It’s also a side effect of having nothing. Democrats are at a low right now. They have no power over anything. They don’t control any branch of government. There’s no leader of their movement yet. They’re still going to work that out. So, a a sort of right-wing media ecosystem that thrives and is successful and united when there’s some someone to point to that they’re in opposition to. They just don’t have that right now. They’re victims of their success. And, you know, in a couple months, that will no longer be the case. And AOC and Gavin Newsome will be making their pitches more generally to the country for why they should be in charge. and we’ll be reminded that there’s a whole wing of Democrats who want to shut down all new technological development in the entire country for the foreseeable future. And maybe even some crank people on the right will agree with that. I don’t know. It’ll be interesting. Uh but that will that will cause some sort of uh defaulting to team-like behavior. Um

35:44 Oh, great. So, it’s only going to get crazier. No. So I actually I I’m gonna tr I though I yield to no man in my love of that Thomas Massie quote. I do think that it very well describes the moment that he said it. And I’m not sure that I just don’t think it’s true anymore. I think at this point the craziest son of a in the room test you don’t have to keep readministering it. The test is now just Trump does Trump want it’s just a loyalty cult. It’s just it’s calcified into uh a single rule that does not require a reality check. You don’t have to say like, “Oh, what’s going on with the policy proposals? What’s going on with the conspiracy theories? What’s going on? Who seems the angriest?” Like, nobody’s doing those checks there. It’s just does Trump want it or no, it’s Trump among elected Republicans and to a large degree, but not totally among voters. Um, but it’s not necessarily Trump like the closer you are to actual power, that’s where he can enforce this.

36:40 and he can enforce this even at at the expense of of protecting policies that are broadly unpopular even with with well I also just don’t and I I don’t I try not to use the word or phrase conspiracy theory anymore because you believe in that things are things are complicated but no since the aliens came and told me to stop again there’s a lot of uh very like just evidence-free incorrect things said about Israel and the effect Israel has on our politics that Israel killed Charlie Kirk no you know, everything down to JFK and deaths of people who were died before Israel existed. That’s all just wrong and bad and people shouldn’t believe that. But also, Massie is again facing millions of dollars in pro-Israel lobbying groups trying to defeat him. Thomas Massie, I do not believe at all, is an anti-semite. I’ve never seen ev any evidence of that. He simply doesn’t think we should continue to give money to the Israeli military.

37:32 Consistent with his view for every other nation on earth, which is a standard libertarian view that uh frankly most Republicans have. And for that they are they have singled him out and are spending millions of dollars to defeat him. That part’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s true. And that makes this is this is always the classic Jesse Walker who is our official conspiracy and conspiracy theory correspondent. He literally wrote the book.

37:54 He literally wrote the book United States of Paranoia. book. Um, he is constantly adjusting in our copy and noting failures to adjust it in other people’s copy. There’s a difference between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory. Right. Right. A conspiracy is just a secret agreement to do something. One is happening. One is only a theory. And that’s actually like a distinction. All right. Here’s my theory. Just to pull all of this together. I think the Trump ccentricness of the Massie race of all of these races is in fact part of what is pulling down Trump’s polling numbers because there’s no one else to blame. And Republicans, voters can see that. They can see not only that he’s doing all these things, tariffs, immigration, the war, and that not only that he’s doing them unilaterally, they see that the test is are you with him or are you not there’s there’s no kind of debate, no disagreement. That’s what Thomas Massie represented. That is one of the reasons we like him.

38:44 Don’t put him in the past tense yet. That is what Thomasy has represented so far and hopefully will continue to represent. We are going to find out this week whether he is still going to be with us. We hope you stick with us cuz we are going to be right back with a listener question about why our opinions are so strong. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Are you having a tough time? You sometimes feel alone, like there’s no one who understands, no one you can talk to. Well, May is mental health awareness month, and it’s a reminder that whatever you’re going through, you don’t have to go through it alone. Having someone with you to listen, to understand, to support you, it can make all the difference in the world. And look, I get it. Sometimes I can’t sleep. I have racing thoughts.

39:27 It’s like there is a podcast in my head and it never ever ends and it’s really hard to turn off. But one way to deal with that is to talk to someone else. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, if you’re feeling stuck or anxious, therapy can help. And that is where BetterHelp comes in. BetterHelp has quality therapists. They work according to a strict code. BetterHelp uses a short questionnaire to match you with a therapist who understands your needs and can help with your goals. And if you want to talk to someone else, you can switch at any time. BetterHelp has over 30,000 therapists who have served more than 6 million people globally. It is the world’s largest online therapy platform and it works. There’s an average rating of 4.9 out of five for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. You don’t have to be on this journey alone. Find support and have someone with you in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/roundable.

40:27 That’s betterhp.com/roundable. This is sponsored by BetterHelp. So, a reminder as always, we love to answer your questions. Please send your short succinct pathy and otherwise not very long questions to podcasts.com. That is podcastsreason.com. And thank you to everyone who has been putting listener question in the subject line. That lets me know it’s a listener question. Saves me some work. Okay, this week’s listener question comes from Julia who writes that she is so excited to be writing to you all and hopes that we are having a very great day in recording session so far. We are. We are. Thank you, Julia. Uh, her question is, “When I listen to podcasts like yours or even talk politics with co-workers or friends, I’m honestly intimidated by how strongly other people seem to believe what they believe. As a recent college graduate, I feel like I have not had enough time to sit with my own views, to defend them with the same confidence, even when I think they are probably right. It’s hard not to compare

41:26 the strength of my convictions to the certainty others seem to have, especially when they can argue so forcefully and flatly say that someone else is wrong. So, how did you develop the confidence to stand firmly behind your beliefs while still remaining open to the possibility that you might be mistaken? Any advice for doing the same? Robbie, I want to start with you just because you were the closest to college and um Oh, God. Now, that’s all over.

41:51 Yeah. You’re our millennial. No, no. Forever you will be our suburbs. 37 years old. That’s gross. And for all of your 37 a burden to your parents and you’re frightened. And for so many of your 37 years, you have lacked confidence in your opinions. How did you change that? Oh yeah. Um I I really appreciate uh this question asker thinking through this. I have a lot to say on it. Um I would say that not being super confident in your views is certainly is not a negative thing. uh people who are just totally confident in everything they think all the time are intellectually uncurious and annoying and so good to you know process new information or lose I I think I become I haven’t really changed any of my convictions but I become maybe a little less certain of some of them as I get older and you’re just exposed to the world and the way you thought about things when you were in college how you changed your mind on Epstein right right yeah I think that’s a good thing I think it’s good to change your mind I

42:46 also you should never say you should not watch podcasts or debates and say, “Oh my god, those people are so sure of themselves and why aren’t I like that?” You’re watching people who are professional debaters, talkers, explainers who come across as very confident because they’re just they’re just good at what they do for a living. I mean, there’s also a premium on that in the podcasting business, right? Like I once I I if you’re not good at that, you’re not going to do it frequently. It’s it’s a there are rhetorical little tricks we all use to win debates. There are there are things we all like insider information tactics to come across as confident and assertive and sure of yourself in video and audio format. That’s just like that’s not your job.

43:28 So, you wouldn’t be good at that. Do you know what I mean? I once heard a friend of ours who has written for Reason magazine. I’m not going to say who this person is, but um notable journalist who has been on television who said, you know, I’ve been on I’ve been on TV and you find yourself getting asked questions that you have no idea the answer to, but you cannot you you become incapable of saying the words, I don’t know.

43:52 This is how I feel every time someone asks me a question about the Fed. It’s just it’s a tumble weed. Just blows the mind. Sure. I don’t know, man. You just said I don’t know. There we go. Good. Good. Just on a Well, on a podcast you’re allowed to say I don’t know, but you can only do it as a rhetorical stance to show that you’re a person of good. You’re being modest. You could absolutely deliver a saliloquy against the fed right now. And you have done it before because you’re good at what you’re doing.

44:20 My first but my first the first moment in my brain is just and there’s nothing in there. So, um I also like this question. I was pathologically certain of every single one of my views when I was a new college graduate and I remain probably overly confident in almost every dimension. Well, we were all little randroids. It was different just you know what if you can do your philosophy standing on one foot that’s great.

44:45 Um but uh you know this is juggling it’s a very classic like the worst are full of passionate intensity and the best lack all conviction. Like that’s real. that’s immortalized in poetry and continues to be very real. We are the worst. I’m sorry to say our letter writer is the best. Uh Julia um is I think uh in one position and then Steven Crowder and the memes in the other one.

45:13 Whatever. Change my mind. Like don’t be Steven Crowder ever. Like for anything in life. Uh just do not uh be Steven Crowder and be more like Julia. It’s fine. It’s totally normal. And I do. You can only use it about once every three or four months. It’s a quarterly thing. You can use the I don’t know on cable news and you have to hit it the right way. My favorite way of doing it is like way to pause and go, man, I don’t know.

45:36 Like that’s a classic, right? Like uh uh but like also to express with that sense and that tone of like not everyone is going to know all the things and have like a strong opinion or be able to figure it out. I usually use that and I’ve used it on on this podcast when people as they invariably do want an immediate balancing score between Democrat and Republican or Democratic person and rep Republican person. Well, aren’t they worse? Aren’t they worse?

46:03 You know, aren’t they more historically like this and for me it’s just kind of hard to measure and I’m not temperamentally suitable suited towards uh declaring such judgments. Um that’s fine. It’s it’s normal. Um don’t be timid if you believe something. Um, and one way you can, I think, do this is just say, “Well, I believe this.” It’s not that I’m trying to persuade you, but if you’re asking me what my beliefs are, my beliefs are pretty weird about certain things. Like, I I believe that we should um, you know, uh, unilaterally withdraw from all trade trade or just unilaterally dismantle all tariffs. That’s a weird thing to say.

46:35 Libertarians think that, but, very few other people do. Um, I don’t necessarily spend every day trying to convince people of that. Um, but like it’s okay to have your Sundays and Wednesdays, something like that. Um, you pick your spots, but don’t be overly timid. Truly, I would say I do detect in the letter, maybe I’m projecting, but I do detect in the letter like maybe a longing for a little more confidence or like the desire to be more. This is what I was going to ask is what are the actual tips like that you can if you are not a naturally confident person who asserts himself or herself what do you do I think that there’s a real case for being a confidently incorrect and then rapidly admitting error like there’s a fail fast mode of debate that I think can be good for people who don’t have kind of the natural like you just say something and then you say like all right I just let that come out of my mouth and now going to see if it’s true.

47:31 This is best used in dinner party conversation amongst people you actually trust to help you sort out your ideas. It is not best used, as Robbie notes, when you are playing a character on TV and then there’s a lot of middle ground like this conversation where we’re like basically just being our real selves, but just a little TV. So, there’s different places, but I think like try a thesis confidently knowing that you might not be wedded to that position till the day you die. I would also very quickly uh suggest if you want to become more or more able to articulate a position read something not like a whole book on the subject but just read an article about it that contains I mean that’s asking a lot of people but it contains some information rather than just listening to other people discuss it for instance uh I didn’t know very much about data centers a few months ago but Christian Britishki wrote a really terrific cover story for reason about

48:24 them that contains uh useful and easily you can easily store it in your mind information about the water usage question and the electricity question and the benefits they’re bringing and I’ve now done he’s done them too I’ve done several debates with people on this question where I and I don’t always feel this way when I do a debate where I’ve just demolished the other person uh after reading this article so just read an article that has facts you can draw on that will always help support your position I really appreciate Rabbi you backing the official position of uh Reason’s editor-inchief which is only write a large magazine article never write a book Yes, correct.

48:57 And he says this as somebody who I can literally see Robbie’s books. Robbie’s books are all around us. I feel sitting behind like I’m in a surveillance state of Robbie’s books over there. You want a whole crate of them take home for the kids? I would also just add quickly add start with what you know. So obviously baseball statistics and rock music. Yeah. I mean this is this tracks my experience in so many ways because so I’ve never been exactly a wilting flower like had strong opinions, right? You can imagine I was always the first one to raise my hand in class. Katherine doesn’t know anything about this, right?

49:27 Because I, you know, I had an answer to the question that was being asked in my film studies class always because I’d seen the movie, right? But, but then something happened. I moved to Washington and I got a job at a regulatory policy think tank, the competitive enterprise institute, my first job out of college. And I had not studied economics in college. I had not I was a film theater and like lit major.

49:48 And so I remember even in in the in a job interview, they asked me about some like obscure EPA policy that like I had in fact done a bunch of research. I I had spent as much time as I possibly could reading CI’s materials before I went into this job interview, which is a thing that you would be surprised many people going into job interviews do not do. So I’d like done as as well as I could, but I I couldn’t come up with a single fact about this thing. And I remember my response. I was 23 years old. I was just like, “Well, I guess I’m not sure. I’m not an economist.” I ended up getting the job, and it’s true, right? I just was wasn’t not just not an economist, but wasn’t trained as one. I ended up getting the job and working with a bunch of economists um as an editor and had to read all of their material and basically spent a year and a half reading everything that one think tank put out and a lot of stuff that other think

50:37 tanks put out. And that gave me I wasn’t reading books, but it gave me a huge base of knowledge. It also gave me access to experts who sort of said, “Look, you’re on the right track.” made me feel a little more confident and also allowed me maybe in a dinner party type way except it happened in a you know boardroom in an office on K Street is that it allowed me to kind of test my views against people who actually knew what they were talking about and when you can do that when you can have that opportunity to talk to somebody who really knows and even if they’re not like your mentor mentor just find somebody who you can talk to that’s going to give you confidence and once you have some confidence that you understand one thing that’s going to transfer to the next And that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to move on to our next thing. Uh which is New York City and Zoran Mom Donny’s budget gap. I’m gonna Did I get that? Mom

51:24 Donnie, you did it. You really You bring a lot of like boomer energy to saying his name. Mom Donnie. Um because uh he has a budget gap or had one. Now he says it’s gone. We fixed it. Yeah. Socialism works. The budget gap was 12 billion dollars. Uh is that a lot for a city? It’s more than the budgets of all but two cities in the United States of America. Um those two cities are uh Chicago and Los Angeles.

51:53 Um the size of the budget in uh in New York City that uh mom Donnie. So think just think of mom. You love mom and you love Donnie Osman. So two things that you love together. My mom does love Donnie Osman. See exactly. Um the size of the budget is $124.7 billion. Um that’s like a Iran war supplemental. Uh uh the budget for a city of Chicago is $16.6 billion. So um New York City is out there spending a lot of money. It’s the second highest per capita uh uh budget uh just behind San Francisco. Um the 12 billion stop gap. It’s all stop gap stuff. The biggest line item is a $2.3 billion Well, we’re not going to fully fund the pensions.

52:39 Okay. Isn’t the argument they are going to fully fund them? It’s just going to take longer to do take longer and that uh usually when you take longer to fully fund pensions that become cost we’re going to do it later. Somebody else is going to pay for they got stop gap stop gap funding from uh Governor Kathy Hokll New York City or the state of New York and New York City in the tri-state area has just the most arcane horrifying uh levels of of government structural and budgetary dysfunction. Jim Epste wrote a great piece about it for us 10 years ago um about the progressive era reforms that that allowed that to happen. So it’s a little bit confusing to to track, but it’s smok and mirrors. Smok and mirrors that he then in classic mom Donnie uh style um celebrated with a really clever uh like straight to camera video on the top of city hall um and and walking around and using his eyebrows a lot. Um and it’s it’s garbage. New York City is uh if you look at Wallet Hub which does

53:35 pretty good uh number crunching on this out of the 149 largest cities it is the 148th best governed in terms of of like bringing um what’s the worst what’s the uh it’s either San Francisco or Oakland. I think it’s San Francisco. Um uh so congratulations. We we spend more money in taxes. we pay more than $40,000 per student in public school um and getting terrible results for that money and um and are are taxed very high and we’re not bringing services. But he wants to be able to tell a great story about how his socialist ideas are working. Um and so he was able to get some money from Kathy Hokll and claim some savings here and there. But it really is just a smok and mirrors.

54:17 Beyond the smoke and mirrors this year, it’s just going to leave them with a 7 billion budget deficit next year. So they haven’t really cleaned this up at all. Isn’t this I mean in some ways isn’t this just a demonstration of what democratic socialism in practice in the United States actually is? It’s budget gimmicks and kicking the can down the road. I think it’s just a demonstration of what all campaigning on budgets is. Like I don’t think that socialists have any kind of an edge with this. This is everybody’s budget rhetoric everywhere is you just, you know, make this one come due a little later and we assume a growth rate that’s totally implausible and we, you know, technically sunset the bill, but then it’s not really going to sunset. Like these are just Congress does it. It happens at the state level.

55:06 It happens at the local level. This is just like very very standard operating procedure. To me, the weird part is I know a lot of really smart New Yorkers who seem to have fully fallen for this. Like literally just looking me in the eye and being like, “Mom, Donnie, balanced the budget.” He’s been in office for eight minutes and he hasn’t done anything substantial, certainly not any of the things he ran on doing that would have raised revenue.

55:32 Isn’t part of the story here that one of the reasons the budget deficit was 12 billion dollars was some stuff that Mum Donnie has already done? Isn’t he part of the isn’t he part of making this larger? Not to say that he’s responsible for all of it, but that he has he isn’t like it’s the opposite of what he’s claimed in a lot of ways. He has run up the budget deficit and then you get all of this gimmicks on the back end to claim that it’s been uh disappeared.

55:58 But he makes good short form videos. I don’t know. people do seem to like him. U I mean I don’t think he’s running confident in his opinions. I bet he could give some lessons to Julia. Yeah. I mean I I think he’s neither like actually tried to Well, he the socialism comes part on the revenue side, right? That he wants to he he does all this speeches about how the rich should pay more pay their fair share and when you really explain to them how much more I want to tax them, they’re not going anywhere. They love New York.

56:25 He’s also very socialist. On the benefit side, not as much. uh on the on the benefit sides, he’s he’s increased uh child care for um I think pre preschool or pre-K, I forget. And part of the the money that he got to help balance the budget was Kathy Hokll threw him a bunch of money to kickstart that program. He’s gone to landlords, right, that he’s done tours of apartments that are dilapidated because specifically because they can’t uh fix up the place and then raise the cost of the rent because of policies that he supports to freeze the rent in place for like a thousand years.

56:56 And there are some fees in there, too. Like some some of his balancing of the budget is like, “Oh, they’re gonna move the line item for who replaces the trees when they die from this budget to that budget.” There’s a bunch of stuff like that. Catherine, what did you think of the anonymous Democratic consultant who told the New York Post that Mumani’s budget figures were as real as Kardashian lips?

57:18 I feel like that is a super dated reference and they could have done better. A lot of fake lips. Everybody’s got fake lips. Everybody’s faces are fake. It’s like frozen in place. All right, let’s all try to do You know what I mean? I think that Let’s all try to do better here. We were about to go on a really good tangent here. Their eyebrows except for Zoron. Next, next week everyone’s faces are fake. Reason discusses. You know what I mean?

57:45 Actually, the next segment, the next segment is cultural recommendations and we’re going to move on to that. In fact, we’re going to start with Matt Welch. where you’ve been watching uh reading otherwise consuming in the cultural realm you want to recommend to us on Mother’s Day uh to see the sheep detectives. That’s a good move. Not bad. That was a good one. No wonder he was so excited about me talking about this. He had this in his pocket for like an hour and a half. He’s been waiting for this.

58:15 Katherine wants to die. Um that was sheer joy. It was it the classic Mother’s Day movie because you can bring your kids because it’s got talking sheep. Uh and then the moms get to look at Hugh Jackman and like it’s just it is win-win. If you liked Pig and if you didn’t, you’re a communist. Um then you’ll uh like the sheep detectives because it’s like pig except that there’s the sheeps are solving a murder mystery of their of their shepherd who is Hugh Jackman and there’s it’s great.

58:42 There’s a guy pig. Do you mean babe? Babe the pig. Yes. Babe the pig. Thank you. We were doing the same pig. I was like, there’s probably a movie called Pig with a detective pig. Uh, that’ll do. Pig. Uh, not a good movie. No, Pig is Nicholas Cage, which is the best movie ever. Um, cuz someone took his pig. You don’t truffle pig. It’s truffle pig. Don’t do that. There’s there’s a uh there’s a character in in uh the sheep detectives who looks like Robbie Swather. Is he a sheep? No. No.

59:12 Sheep Robbie? No, he’s he’s a cub journalist. Oh, or so we think. Um, anyways, it’s uh just absurdly uh delightful and uh made by the guy who did Lorax and some other like Minions type of movies. Produced by Lorden Miller, the guys who did Project Hail Mary. Um like there’s some kind of surprising resonance between the two of these things. Uh kind of like not that subtly Christian movies about learning to deal with death.

59:42 Yes. Um there’s heaven sheep and clouds and and uh and also being a winter sheep as you know or was it a Yeah, like it’s a sheep born in the winter. So in and of course it’s a black sheep and a big part of the movie sort of the a big part of this is about learning to accept the sheep born in the winter that sheep normally reject for reasons we don’t understand. Even though it turns out that these sheep they’re kind of loners but they they know what life is really about. It’s uh I’m going to go see the baby elephant at the zoo next weekend. And the baby elephant was also rejected for reasons we don’t fully understand. Oh, really? It’s okay. Baby elephant’s doing okay. Go see the sheep detectives, too.

1:00:21 This sounds like a a mystery that needs to be investigated possibly by sheep detectives. Okay. You want to tell us what you have? Yes. I read um The Hill by Harriet Clark. Um, Harry Clark is one of what seems to me to be an astonishingly large number of the children of the Weather Underground or similarly violent leftist groups who then make at least part of their careers out of processing the fact that their parents were in prison for doing leftist violence. Um, like more than you would think of that in the world. This uh novel is very very good.

1:00:57 I have been on a kick of reading kind of like vaguely atmospheric novels with existential angst floating over them. And this one Does this have anything to do with nothing to do with what’s going on with you? No, I’m fine. Um, but this is a a really very good one. So, it’s it is um you know, the main character is uh her mother is in prison. She visits her mother. She lives with her grandparents who are kind of like vaguely nostalgic communist types, her grandmother. So we have kind of these three generations of women who are all whose lives are all marked by the fallout from leftist violence in this kind of interesting way. The book is not super political, but it does do this thing where by the end you just see the ways that the existence of kind of like very very long prison sentences is basically a generational punishment.

1:01:57 Like you feel the obligation that the main character feels to her mother and the kind of ways in which she is trapped in life by her mother’s sentence. And it’s very powerful and it’s very good and it’s it has like 17 ways it could have gone wrong and and doesn’t go wrong. And so even though I was just kind of uh snippy about the Weather Underground children’s memoir genre, um Harriet Clark very talented.

1:02:27 Does it change your opinion of the Weather Underground? It does not, but it does uh reinforce my opinion of the uh the downsides of mass incarceration. Like it’s genuinely unclear to me that uh the sentences that were given to you know and it’s always the person who drove the getaway car who didn’t even really make the you know like there’s always kind of extenduating circumstances but um those sentences were clearly meed out in a moment where they were politically reactionary on the opposite side just as much as the violence itself was in some ways. And um I think it’s worth re-examining the the length of those sentences even if you think the crimes themselves were quite heinous.

1:03:09 Uh so I’ve been watching the television show For All Mankind. This is in its fifth season now. Katherine, I know you have seen at least a few seasons. Are you caught up on I am not caught up, but I will bravely face the spoilers threat. So even more than in season 4. Season five is union propaganda and it’s kind of getting to like it’s dragging the show down. I really like the first couple seasons of the show. This is um an alternate history. You would like it, right? It’s sort of a history dad. It’s like it’s this it’s this side of the of things, right? Of the podcast here because it’s a combination of history dad and science fiction.

1:03:44 I was going to History Dad handshake you. Yeah. History. History Dad plus science fiction because it’s an alternate history of the 20th century in which the Russians made it to the moon first. Oh god. The first scene of the first season is everything’s happening right. It’s it’s in NASA and they’re like all concerned and right oh it’s happening it’s about to happen you think it’s going to be no then you look and it’s like on the moon right cuz the Russians are on the moon and now what happens so every season jumps forward by a decade or so fifth season is around the 2010s they finally got some iPhones and all that stuff but also they are have a colony on Mars and the show is basically just like an extended labor dispute between the colonist s and the the private companies that are doing the mining on Mars and they find out in this season that the private companies are like actually we’re going to do some automation and everybody on Mars is like no like absolutely not we

1:04:43 any kind of automation of the of the Mars mining stupid and we’re supposed to be sympathetic to them and Ron Moore is smart enough this is the guy who rebooted Battlestar Galactic and he’s smart enough to show okay look some of these labor revolts can in fact go wrong. They can get violent. Like it’s not just a sort of pure like, oh, these guys are just angels, right? Like there’s there’s some but it’s just we are supposed to understand deep in our hearts that automating the mining on Mars to use machines to do that would be wrong. And it’s I it it is it is ruining the show for me. Um it’s getting better in the second half of the season uh as the conflicts get just a little bit more thorny and a little bit more complicated. But I wish I could recommend this if you are at all. I don’t even like doing political readings of shows like this. I want to just sort of accept them. Okay, this is your world, your take. And I I just found this. It’s getting to be kind of unwatchable.

1:05:36 The first season is real good though. First and second season both fantastic. Robbie, what do you have? Um I’m often asked for board gaming recommendation, so I’ll do one. We’re playing a lot of Code Names duets in my household. Uh, code names is game you can play with four people. The duets version you can play with just two. It’s a fun little game you can play with your person and uh it’s a lot of fun with a uh playing with my better half who is a English as a second language and this is a word game. Uh so it’s a lot of fun to do it. That’s mean.

1:06:10 Uh no, you just have So are you winning? What I mean is it it relies on common No, it’s it’s a collaborative. It’s not you’re trying to win together, but it relies on a your kind of cultural understanding or just different cultural experiences. You’re trying to get the other person to guess. There’s a grid of words. And so there’s like 25 words and you’re trying to get them to guess some words but not others by giving them some clue that links the words. Like you want them to guess blue and lemonade and moon. So you’re going to say something that pertains to those things to make them guess just those things and none of the other things on the board. And uh it’s fun. So you can rely on things, you know, like if I say uncle, maybe my uncle has a beard, it’s pointing to the beard word or but maybe he gets it wrong cuz blah blah blah. So it’s a fun game.

1:06:55 So it’s sort of co-op gaming. Co-op game. Yeah. So no one and Code Names is great. Just like also the OG code. The OG code names is 2v2, but this is a version you can play uh if you don’t have more than one friend and uh if you like collab some people like more some people don’t like the cuz we play a little too cutthroat when I play board games with people. You get really serious about games. Uh yeah, my brother and I didn’t speak to each other for weeks after a serious game of Settlers of Katan, which is now banned in my household for all time, but uh Code Names is fun uh fun collaborative game.

1:07:24 On my mother’s side of the family, they banned Uno from family gatherings because there were too many shouting match arguments where people would storm out of the house. Yeah. And you just you you test, you know, the limits of how well you know each other and blah blah blah. Like he’s given me things. I’m like, I don’t know. That’s a K-pop reference probably. So, now I’m trying to guess the things that could conceivably be K-pop references without knowing anything about that.

1:07:48 There was a Mario Brothers game, I don’t know, 15 years ago on one of the older systems where you had the two characters that would play at the same time together on the screen, which is not typical for Mario. And in fact, at some points, one character would have to carry the other character. And there was I want to say it was a Penny Arcade uh comic book about this uh or or or essay or something that just called it a divorce simulator. I’m trying to think of which one this is.

1:08:14 Well, isn’t the one where he has the hat kind of like that? The newer one. Yeah. Now they’re allowed. A lot of new Mario and just new Nintendo things have like a basically a little brother function where your little brother can collect the collectibles. Like I play the little brother occasionally to my son’s uh legitimate Mario. In my day, the timehonored tradition where you’re playing with like cousins or everything, the youngest cousin gets the controller that isn’t actually hooked into the device. And then when they get a little older, they realize and then we tell them, “No, that’s you on the screen.” And then they realize that’s not actually them. It’s timehonored tradition like being at the kids table for life.

1:08:49 All right, we are going to have a tradition of ending this podcast. If you like what we do, you can give us your money at reason.com/donate. That’s reason.com/donate if you like this podcast. Support the magazine, the Reason Foundation, all of the work we do here at Reason. Thank you all so much for watching. The Reason Roundtable will return.