Welcome to the Bullwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is Thursday and we are joined by one of my favorite

columnists, the Washington Post, Philip Bump, National Correspondent for the Post, who has an upcoming

book coming out out next year, The Aftermath, the last days of the baby boom in the future of power

in America. So as a baby boomer, you're going to write about our last days. It's come to that.

You know what I hate to say, but yeah, I mean, as I was writing the book, I was always very

sort of trepidacious in talking to people like, okay, so the baby boom is going to go away and

you know, the people who cared the least, I talked to the guy who runs a cemetery in Brooklyn,

you know, if you want to talk to someone who is very blasé about the concept of death,

that's what you want to talk to. But yeah, since it's always a little sort of awkwardness as a

conversation start. So I want to talk about obviously the political news of the day, but I have to

say, and I don't have any particular insight into this except that it feels like the most depressing

news of the day that we are now seeing signs of the return of polio. And it's one of those things,

here we are in 2022 with the most advanced medical system in the world with vaccines easily accessible,

and we're seeing a disease that we thought had been eradicated coming back. You're the numbers guy.

I don't have any insight into this, but I guess my fear is that this is one of the consequences

of this new anti-science, anti-vaccine culture out there, and these ideas have consequences.

And perhaps deadly consequences. One thing to be anti-COVID vaccine, which I think is stupid and

deadly, but now we're seeing polio. What do you make of this? It seems like it's probably a

function of two things. The first is that obviously the anti-vaccine movement predates COVID by

a number of years. And I think that it has its roots in part in the success of vaccines, right?

I mean, people were able to sort of be blase about vaccines in part because we didn't have to worry

about the diseases that the vaccines were preventing because of the vaccines, right? And so,

...