The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for April 5th, 2018, the Caravan of GabFesters edition.

I am David Plotz, Battles of Secura.

I am back from vacation, which explains the pep in my voice. I was in Columbia, South America, which I strongly recommend. We may talk more about that later, but man, do I recommend Columbia? And John Dickerson of CBS this morning in New York is also back. Hello, John.

Hi, can you have pep in your voice? Don't you have pep in your step? Oh, I don't know., can you have pep in your voice? Don't you have pep in your step?

Oh, I don't know. Why can't you have pep in your voice? Well, I suppose you can, but I just have always heard it when it's in your step. And then it leads me to the question of what in God's name is pep anyway. It's a little extra oomph. Yeah, it's an oomph. I have an oomph in my voice.

One of my kids tried an energy drink yesterday for the first time, and it was crazy because he was so peppy. It was those things are dangerous. There was pep. That was pep in a voice. That sounds like sugar. Yes. Sugar plus caffeine. Plus, who knows what else. that other voice. that is, of course, Emily Bazelon of the New York Times Magazine, who was back from nowhere. She helmed the Good Ship Gab Fest brilliantly while we were gone through storms and whirlpools. Hello, Emily.

Hello, hello. And if pep is short for peppy, then you definitely can have that in your voice. So I rescind my

previous comment. Before we get to the show, I learned an amazing fact on Twitter. Emily, I don't know

if you noticed this too. Someone was tweeted at us asking John about his first career. Oh, yeah,

that was awesome.

John was a member of the Atari Youth Council. And now he's agreed to do an interview about it, I believe. I can't wait. So, John, oh, come on, just give us the 10 seconds. What do you mean you were on the Atari Youth Council? Youth Council makes it say, well, I guess what it was actually called is the Atari Youth Advisory Board, which sounds more corporate,

but the Youth Council sounded like we were all like little brown shirts or something.

But when I was a kid, we were all like introduced to computers. I had a TRS 80, and then I exchanged

that for an Atari 800, which is the first, I think the 400 was the first model. Anyway, I had an Atari

800. I was like a little computer programmer.

And because I was a little computer programmer with a guy named Robert All Britain,

who is now the publisher of Politico, actually, we, you know, wrote programs, did some

things with computer games, which may have, well, anyway, we played a lot of computer games anyway.

We worked at the Consumer Electronics Show in, I think it was 1982, when that was just starting.

And then they formed this thing, the Youth Advisory Board, which was an effort to get input from their computer users. It was mostly on the computer

end, not the video gaming end. And then I got it as a result of doing that, they flew us out to

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