You're listening to Serious Inquiries Only.

Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only.

This is episode 254. I'm Thomas Smith coming at you solo today because yeah, as I'm sure you know, bad news.

I don't even know what day it was Friday. When was it Saturday? Whenever that happened, it's been I've been a been not happy since that.

Probably going to continue to be not too happy going into the future.

Things are bad. Not going to lie to you. Things are bad. I have some thoughts. So I would like to express them.

And so I just want to start by saying things were already bad. Things were already bad, you know, like any...

Well, I was going to say like any optimist. I'm not really an optimist, but at the same time, I'm also not like a fatalist.

I'm not, you know, I'm not thinking the worst is literally always going to happen. I'm always keeping in mind the plan.

You know, I'm always thinking, okay, yeah, I'm not expecting anything good to happen. But if we need to fix things, here's my plan.

You know, here's the plan. I'm not in charge of anything. I'm just saying like, here is the route that we take.

And with the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, that route just got, I don't know, narrower, way more difficult, the stakes got higher, way higher.

You know, with RBG living forever, which was, you know, my plan. And I guess hers too, a lot of people's plan.

That would have been nice if she could just go on to 130 or something. That would have been great.

That plan would have meant that something like Biden winning the presidency, but Republicans still hanging on to the Senate, would have been bad, absolutely bad.

Obviously not optimal, but it wouldn't, it wouldn't have been quite as devastating. It would have been something where we could have said, all right.

And by the way, I'm just launching right into it. I, how are you doing? And I, and of course, I, we're so that's part of it.

I'm going to step back for a second. I'll get back to what I was saying. But that's part of it. Like I would love to be able to spend a week just in like celebrating RBG's life.

And we're going to, by the way, that we plan to do this very thing over on opening arguments. We recorded a reaction episode because we already had the mics on.

We're recording something else when the news came and we were just devastated and we had to, we thought it might be a good idea to record.

But that was very much a, a fear episode that was a, you know, dear God, what's going to happen episode? What does this mean episode?

And, you know, we've made a point to say, okay, we, we want to make sure we can take the time to enjoy her legacy, you know, to celebrate her legacy.

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