Hey, everybody. As you can tell from the lack of opening music and the bare bones nature of this,

this is another bootleg, muckering podcast, courtesy of me, Jared Yates Sexton, Nick Houseman,

is nowhere to be found. He's out taking care of his own business, so I am manning the store today.

And just to keep everybody on track here, I'm recording this at 4.50 p.m. Eastern Monday, March 9th.

Which means that I am not at all waiting on the supposed press conference that President Donald Trump is going to be holding

here in a little while.

Why?

Because I don't really concern myself that much with the ramblings and rantings of a madman.

I'll be talking about on this episode likely what we're going to be hearing from him,

as well as getting everyone up to date on not just

what's going on in Iran and in the Middle East, but the larger geopolitical implications.

We're going to get deep into the weeds. This is a Professor Jared episode for everyone keeping track.

Before we get going with that, as always, I just want to remind you, if you want to support

this show, if you want to keep us growing, if you want to support independent media, particularly

right now in which, my God, corporate media is showing exactly why it doesn't deserve your

support, please head over to patreon.com slash

muckreg podcast. Become a patron. You'll be able to listen to the weekenders on Fridays, which

you're already listening to the previews of, but also you're going to support us, keep us

editorially independent, and ad-free. And again, I cannot stress to you enough how important that is, especially in this awful, awful moment.

So right before I started recording this, as I was putting together all of my notes for this episode,

a little thing bubbled up to the surface.

Donald Trump reached out to a CBS journalist.

...