It's good to be back in the stew after quite a while.

Back in Michigan.

For us, you know, we're recording on Monday this week.

Yeah.

And it's only been technically eight days since we were here last, but it's been quite a long week.

Oh, yeah.

For many reasons.

Lots of news this week.

For many reasons, which you'll learn more about later on if you stick through the episode.

But it's been a pretty long week, especially for me because

this weekend and the reason we aren't recording on Sunday as normal is because I was in D.C.

Yeah. Presenting my honors thesis for, for college. And some in front of Joe Biden,

CIA, John Bolton. And so, you know, naturally the group I'm with were exploring D.C.

seeing all kinds of things. And my observation being there this time, I think is the same as it was when we went like a year and a half ago. Oh, yeah. Which is that there's homeless people all over the place. And that's not like, I'm not saying like you homeless people back. Yeah, I'm not saying like, oh, I hate seeing homeless people everywhere. Get them off somewhere else. Two things. First, it's bad, especially considering how expensive things are in that city. Yeah. Like, $5 for a large fry at McDonald's is crazy. That's nuts. Even in like the more, the less bougie places of the city, a burger's like 20 bucks. It's insane. Like, I don't know if it's just Biden pressed the food food up button or what, but things are super expensive. And then, of course, there's the fact that they're right down the street from the people that could fix it. Yeah, right down the street from the capital. Like, they have to see them when they go into work. From most angles in the city, you could see the Capitol building, right? It's in the middle of everything. Everything shaped like a pentagram and it's in the middle. Yeah, it's right in the middle. You should, I don't know, it's just, it's a weird dichotomy seeing that. So that was my observation just like last time, but there was a fun thing that I experienced. Okay. The last day we were there, which was yesterday, Sunday for us, we went up to the Lincoln Memorial

because we had some time to kill before we went to the airport. And there was this big protest that was going on. Oh, huge. It was like we were walking up from the other side. So, National Mall is super long. Yeah. So we're walking from the other side and we can see there's a big crowd. We're getting closer and we're hearing more people. And as we're approaching, the speakers talking about how we got into the Iraq War and that was a bad idea.

We were there for afghanistan too long and i'm thinking

sick like this is gas oh no i'm getting closer and in the crowd i see a russian flag and i'm like

okay that's bizarre but maybe they're just like a heckler you you know, showed up. And then guess who comes on stage?

This dude, I didn't know who the original speaker was. Okay. Then after him, Tulsi Gabbard comes on the stage. And Tulsi Gabbard's giving a speech. In the flesh? In the flesh. They're right in front of my eyes. Oh, my God. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. and she apparently this organization is called

Rage Against the War Machine

but everything they were there for was to push this kind of like

leftist populism to cover for their defense of Russia. And it was basically, it was basically

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