Well, ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention?

Greetings, dear listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast, brought to you by the Dispatch and Dispatch Media.

I am home. That is right home. I'm very excited to be home. I'm very excited to check on all my gold bullion, which is exactly where I left it.

And I'm very excited to get back into the swing of things, and so to help me decompress and get back into normal inside the beltway punditry mode, I have one of my favorite pundits and also one of my favorite eggheads.

He's also a colleague of mine who happens to be dead to me because he's left the good shop to go run some other cheesy shop down the hall.

And I don't even know what his actual title now. I don't know if he's going to keep the old title or give himself some grand new fancy, you know,

Mubutu, Seste, Seiko, social studies kind of title. But regardless, we have fan favorite Matt Contanetti back on the remnant. Matt, great to see you.

Thanks, Jonah. It's great to be here. My new title is Director of Domestic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

So you can just refer to me as Director.

Yeah, that's going to happen. It's totally going to happen.

How's Absolute Power treating you? Does the gauntlet fit? Do you like it? The jams come loose?

Well, I've been snapping my fingers, but some of the people that I'd like to disappear have not. So I think I need to take it, the gauntlet back to the shop and work out the kinks.

Fair enough. Fair enough.

And so like, I can now ask you this because I could never get a completely straight answer at a streeter.

What does your shop do?

Oh, we do everything. We do it all.

I think this is the problem. When you say you do everything and you do it all, it defines easy definition.

It does. But you know, AI is a legacy institution. It's been around for a long time.

And the organization of AI internally is probably of interest to a very small elite cadre of folks.

But we have four research divisions at AI. One is economics, which is kind of the bread and butter.

That's the reason the institute was created. Then another is foreign policy, which we're well known for in the 90s and the Nazis.

Then there's you've all the vins group, the newest group, which is called social cultural and constitutional studies, tends to look at broader questions involving the constitutional order,

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