Matthew Yglesias is a liberal policy writer and longtime blogger. He co-founded Vox, now writes the Slow Boring newsletter, and is known for wonky-but-readable takes on housing, economics, Democratic politics, foreign policy, and the abundance agenda.

-Matty finally makes it through the firewall

-What type of gay is Kmele?

-Yglesias says Welch gave him his career

-Substack’s right-wi…

We talk about broken housing markets, broken healthcare, broken Congress, Trump’s corruption, a broken Cuba, Epstein, UAPs, and the tragedy of being a drummer with no place to practice.

-Making music is for rich kids now

-From jazz drummer to Hillary field organizer

-Sandy Hook, March for Our Lives, and the road into politics

-Florida’s felon disenfranchisement fight

-Guns, swamps, Confederate flags, and talking to people who don’t like you

-Florida’s politics are red… its ballot issues are a lot messier.

-Gaining political power is easy. Keeping it is the hard part.

-The case for going big, whether Congress likes it or not

-Housing abundance, rent hikes, and the great pet-fee wars

-Donald Trump’s extremely lucrative career in public service

-Biden’s DOJ, Brazil’s crackdown, and the problem with accountability theater

-Political violence, Trump’s rhetoric, and blaming the victim

-UAPs, Epstein files, and the bipartisan hunt for weird stuff

-Cuba, war powers, and why Frost doesn’t want another Venezuela-style adventure

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- Steven Pinker on why “common knowledge” is much stranger than it sounds

-The social machinery behind weddings, money, and power

-How a norm starts to die once someone breaks it and gets rewarded

-Trump as the great destroyer of polite restraints

-The institutions that lost the authority to enforce trust

-How new taboos appear without anyone admitting who created them

-T…

His next book, China Whisperers (out in November), looks at the diplomats, journalists, scholars, and China hands who shaped America’s understanding, and misunderstanding, of its chief geopolitical rival. But we pretty much cover the entire globe in this conversation.

-The experts had it coming

-Federalists, anti-federalists, and America’s oldest argument

…

-Kmele gets glasses

-The return of Soho legs

-Matt’s movie-theater race science

-Trump sends a letter to Congress saying the war is over, Iran says, “wtf?”

-Little Marco, Fog of War correspondent

-A very leaky White House

-Strange new respect for the anti-war MAGA set

-Little Marco puts the best face on Iran

-Welch discovers gas prices

-The affordability caucus …

We’re joined by Anthony Scaramucci, founder of SkyBridge Capital, former White House Communications Director, and one of the more memorable casualties of Trump 1.0

-The Mooch reads the stars

-The truth is out there, allegedly

-954,000 seconds in the White House

-The Ryan Lizza thing, briefly

-the reason God made Steve Bannon look like this

-Why Bannon scared …

…and how raising a black daughter changed the way he sees America.

-David French returns to the Fifth Column

-SCOTUS drops of a few ruling

-Free speech wins 9-0 (First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Davenport)

-The Voting Rights Act gets another trim (Louisiana v. Callais)

-Racial gerrymanders vs. political gerrymanders

-Smart racists, dumb racists, and …

After the failed shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the boys sift through bad manifestos, assassination discourse, microlooting, conspiracy politics, and the strange moral permissions of America’s bored radicals.

-Matt’s 15-year Werner Herzog hangover workshop

-judging the newest failed killer manifesto

-America’s stupidest assassination d…