Hey, weeds fans, this is Matthew Glacias. It's Friday afternoon. And as you probably know, on Friday afternoon,

Donald Trump and congressional Democrats reached a deal to reopen the government and fund it through February 15th.

That is a good news for the American people. It is bad news for the Weeds podcast because we recorded Friday morning and in every

podcaster's nightmare, we talked about the shutdown, not knowing that the shutdown would be on the verge of ending by the time the podcast was over.

So if you're listening, keep in mind, we're not idiots. We just didn't know. I think if you look at the discussion,

you're going to see that we get into the longer term issue here, which is still on the table.

We only have funding through February 15th. We talk a lot about the fundamental dynamics in the White House and the United States Congress.

I think it all holds up. I think it's a pretty good analysis, but you know, there's a first part where we say we don't know

how long this is going to go on for. And in fact, we now do know how long it's going to go on for. So sorry, those are the breaks in the podcast and

game. You can't win them all, but you know, when we do our best and I hope you enjoy the episode.

Hello, welcome to another episode of the Weeds on the Vox Media podcast network. I'm Matthew Glacias here today with Ezra Client and Jane

Kostin. We are in the day 35 now of the government shutdown. It is, I think, the official second mispay check by federal workers.

And I think that, you know, if you have been working without pay for over a month now, it may seem like this just goes on and on and on and on with no end.

But we've actually seen this week. I think the beginnings of the Republican parties political position on this crumbly and that that one sign of that was in the state of the union standoff, where, you know, Pelosi and Trump had these letters going back and forth.

Trump sort of conceded that no, he's not going to give the state of the union until the show.

I asked you about that, Matt. Yeah. Why do you think he did that? Because that actually surprised me.

It surprised you that he backed down surprised me that he backed down, given what his public position had been given the talk that maybe just go give a state of the union at the wall.

Like for him to back down to a powerful, but just say like, OK, then I guess I'm not given the state of the union anymore until you tell me I can seem to very out of character for it.

It was out of character and it doesn't make narrow tactical sense.

And the reason I think it was significant is that to me that was the beginning of an implicit admission by the White House that they are looking for an exit strategy here.

Right. That like they did not want to further escalate the confrontation with Congress.

And then I think you started to see in some of the, you know, gossipy White House reporting that came out today.

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