Hello from Austin and welcome to episode 119 of the National Security Law Podcast.

We're brought to you by the Strauss Center at the University of Texas.

It's Tuesday afternoon.

It is April 30th, 2019.

I'm Bobby Chesman.

I'm Steve Loddick. Bobby, the night is dark and full of

spoilers. It's going to be so hard. Let's just say nothing. Obviously, our frivolity segment will be

Game of Thrones recap. And that's all we'll say about that for now. I just want to say,

just to preview our Game of Thrones recap, we have consciously not

said a word to each other about Game of Thrones since Sunday night, not even in our 45 seconds

of prep for this episode, so that our reactions to each other's reactions will be pure and organic.

This will be only marginally different from our prep for the actual

substantive national security law topics. But what usually happens is like you and I start

talking before the podcast and they're like, oh, what do you do? And it's like, no, no, no, save it

for the show. This time we actually were conscious, like, don't even, you know, surprise me

with your, with your take. Oh, man, the pressure's on to have a good take now. I guess I've got

45 minutes or so to come up with something. So here's my spoiler alert. Alyssa Rosenberg already

had my take. But we'll get there. That doesn't clue it in for me, but I can't wait to hear more.

What do we have to talk about? So we actually, as folks may have realized, we skipped last week. Yeah, sorry about that. In case you haven't noticed, and judging by the attendance, you haven't.

Well, that's true. Let's get those podcast listener numbers up, y'all. Now, we got kind of swaned.

This is your thing, right? It's like, you know, what is your goal? Is your goal like just more,

always more? I'm like the Night King. I'm just inexorable force. I don't want more listeners. I can't, I can't say anything because I don't want to do give any spoilers. I was going to say you're like Bobby Axelrod. Who's that? The lead character in billions. The show. I don't watch billions. I know. So why did we take last week off? Because what's your number? More?

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