Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / PREVIEW: “Tariffs, Greenbacks, Qatar’s Air Force One, and American Empire” with Assoc. Prof. David Smith

Transcript

PREVIEW: “Tariffs, Greenbacks, Qatar’s Air Force One, and American Empire” with Assoc. Prof. David Smith · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day, humans! Welcome to The Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas, and it's an idea, a question
• 0:08
  that has plagued me ever since the beginning of Donald Trump's political career. What exactly
• 0:14
  is his theory of the case of international relations? What is his view of diplomacy? How
• 0:21
  do you reconcile the Trumpian passion for American greatness with his disengagement and withdrawal
• 0:30
  and disdain for all of the international systems which America itself set up, like free trade
• 0:37
  deals and security guarantees and so on? This conversation provides me with a better answer
• 0:42
  than I have ever heard before. It comes from associate professor David Smith, who's an expert
• 0:48
  in American and international politics at the US Studies Center in Sydney, and he's an associate
• 0:52
  professor at the University of Sydney, but he got his PhD at the University of Michigan,
• 0:58
  PhD in political science. He appears frequently in Australian press as a decoder of all things
• 1:04
  Trump and all things America. Here we really get into the weeds on the theory underpinning
• 1:09
  Donald Trump's foreign policy. That expands to conversations about tariffs, about the
• 1:15
  strength of the US dollar, about what bond markets and rising yields on bonds could
• 1:21
  pre-sage about the fate of the US dollar as the reserve currency of the world and what
• 1:25
  exactly will that means, whether Ukraine can be resolved by Donald Trump and Vladimir
• 1:30
  Putin alone, and where all of this leaves America in relation to the rest of the world,
• 1:36
  PS, what the hell is going on with the Cateri 747 that Donald Trump wants to use as Air
• 1:42
  Force One, and what does that reveal to us about the great man's mind? I hope you enjoy
• 1:47
  as much as I did. This conversation with the one, the only, David Smith.
• 1:56
  Everyone's sort of spinning around trying to figure out what to make of Trump's first
• 1:59
  100 days in domestic policy. Let's just start with international relations. I haven't noticed
• 2:05
  anything so far in the Trump administration, Mark II, that is notably different or notably
• 2:11
  revealing about Trump as a president. There are a few things. One is everything is just very
• 2:18
  much Trump's foreign policy now. There are really no independent voices in Trump's foreign policy.
• 2:24
  When you look at the fact that Marco Rubio holds the positions of both national security advisor
• 2:30
  and Secretary of State, last person to do that was Henry Kissinger, who was a very powerful
• 2:37
  and influential voice on Richard Nixon. Most presidences you look at have these very powerful and
• 2:44
  influential independent foreign policy figures. George W. Bush had people like Rumsfeld and
• 2:51
  Cheney, Bill Clinton had people like Warren Christopher, Barack Obama had Hillary, Clinton,
• 2:58
  and John Kerry. Trump certainly in his first administration, he really did own his own foreign
• 3:07
  policy, but he still had people around him who were associated with more traditional foreign policy
• 3:12
  positions. This time around it really just belongs to him. I mean, the weird thing is sort of
• 3:18
  jump in, but he does have people who have traditional foreign policy positions. He's just chosen
• 3:23
  the spineless one. He totally had first time around. They actually had backbone. Marco Rubio does
• 3:28
  believe all the same things as Hillary Clinton on internationalism and intervention. He just won't
• 3:38
  Trump was confident in giving him two positions because he knew he wouldn't
• 3:43
  Marco. He wouldn't be an independent voice stand up. Having said that, Joe Biden was very much
• 3:48
  the singular voice in his foreign policy as well. I mean, he had experienced foreign policy
• 3:54
  people like Jake Sullivan and Anthony Blinken, but I can't ever remember anything that they said
• 3:59
  that was anything other than just being a mouthpiece for Joe Biden. Joe Biden, because of his
• 4:05
  experiences in the Obama administration, where he kept getting overridden on things like we're
• 4:09
  drawing from Afghanistan, the lesson he took from that was I just have to completely own my own
• 4:15
  foreign policy. I suppose the difference is that he's one of the most experienced and oldest
• 4:21
  elements that's been in the world. He literally sat down with golden may air and
• 4:26
  joined with Churchill and Thomas Jefferson. Who would he have around him who is more
• 4:33
  experienced or knowledgeable about enacting his vision of foreign policy than him, whereas in the
• 4:38
  case of Trump, not so much. Not so much. No. So it is very much solely Trump's foreign policy.
• 4:45
  That is the way that he likes it and he's not the sole negotiator because he doesn't want to be.
• 4:53
  He wants to leave a lot of negotiation to other people, but certainly other countries have been
• 4:59
  learning very quickly that really the only way to deal with the United States is to appeal directly
• 5:04
  to Trump, which is another thing that Trump really likes. What else we've discovered about what
• 5:10
  Trump really likes is announcing deals. He is always prepared to announce a deal before there's
• 5:17
  any substance of that deal worked out. Now that is a continuation of his first turn as well. The most
• 5:23
  memorable example of that was when he claimed he had a comprehensive nuclear deal with North Korea,
• 5:28
  which just turned out to be a half page memo and apparently very nice personal letter.
• 5:33
  We're also seeing the announcement of deal after deal, which in most cases, at least politically
• 5:40
  have very little behind them. There have been some big sales deals announced like the 142 billion
• 5:47
  dollar weapons deal to Saudi Arabia. That's something. But in terms of actual political agreements,
• 5:54
  very, very little. And even in terms of trade agreements, we've had announcements of frameworks,
• 5:59
  but not actually a very much. So what Trump really, really loves is announcing deals. And other
• 6:05
  countries are aware of that. They have decided as they did after a while in his first term that the
• 6:11
  way to deal with Trump is to come up with things that can be announced. Just as a way of keeping
• 6:19
  things moving, of getting Trump away from his most intransigent positions like 90% tariffs on things,
• 6:26
  yeah, like that. But when it comes to really difficult conflicts, when it comes to things like
• 6:31
  Gaza and Ukraine, none of this is amounting to very much at all. Even the minerals deal between
• 6:39
  Ukraine and the United States involves minerals that may as well be hypothetical because they're
• 6:46
  inaccessible. A lot of them are in territory that's under Russian control or it's going to require
• 6:51
  years, decades of investment before they can actually be extracted. So far, we're seeing a lot
• 6:58
  of announcements of deals without much that is very substantial. And I think that the whole world
• 7:05
  is kind of in the process of working out exactly where they are with Trump and how to get what
• 7:11
  they want out of him. I mean, in real estate, a deal is good when you shake on it and you've
• 7:16
  got the big broad outline of the deal. And then you can let the lawyers go off and they can iron out
• 7:21
  the little details, which are usually subservient to the deal itself. In politics and foreign policy,
• 7:27
  often you have to build from the ground up and then you can't just make the handshake because
• 7:31
  actually the devil is in the details and it's really, it really is a sticking point what the
• 7:35
  right-of-return of refugees means, for example, or some post-nickety little thing that he would
• 7:40
  probably bore him to tears. But he's actually the fundamental sticking point for the deal to work.
• 7:46
  The kind interpretation, the Trump supporter would say, well, this is precisely the problem
• 7:52
  that we can never get anything done because we're so focused on the minutiae of everything.
• 7:56
  It's a little bit like reforming government or anything like that. He's trying to do big things
• 8:03
  and not be stopped by the process and the roadblocks and the bottlenecks that have accreted
• 8:10
  in the system that make it impossible to change the status quo. What do you make of that rational?
• 8:17
  Well, the reality is anything that can be done as quickly as Trump wants to do it can be undone
• 8:23
  equally quickly. If you want anything that is going to stick, whether it's in international
• 8:29
  politics or in domestic American politics, it involves long detailed negotiations. That is just
• 8:36
  the reality. There are too many people in the world. There are too many powerful players in
• 8:41
  the world for in any situation just for a couple of powerful people to be able to get together and
• 8:47
  sort out the world's problems over handshake. Let's talk about specifics then. A couple of powerful
• 8:53
  people sorting things out over a handshake sounds remarkably like an illusion to the Ukraine conflict
• 8:58
  where Donald Trump felt that he could sideline the Europeans and even sideline the president of
• 9:03
  Ukraine and just go straight to the two big superpowers and they can hammer it out as if this was
• 9:08
  1962. Where do you see things going? What is your take on the snapshot of the current? Where are we?
• 9:16
  It's very difficult to say where we are at the moment. I don't believe that Vladimir Putin is
• 9:24
  really has much desire for peace at all. Peace is definitely the second best option for him
• 9:29
  behind victory and he clearly still believes that victory is possible. Despite the fact that he has
• 9:35
  been throwing all of the might of the Russian military machine at Ukraine for the last three years
• 9:41
  at a cost of hundreds of thousands of Russian lives for gains that on a map hardly look like
• 9:50
  anything. I mean, it's not nothing, but it hardly looks like anything. He has sunk so much into this
• 9:58
  that I think for him victory is the only thing he really wants to consider at this point.
• 10:06
  Peace he'll start to consider when he's facing genuine existential threats. As far as
• 10:12
  Ukraine goes, they are really desperate. I think that Ukrainian people are completely exhausted
• 10:23
  from the war, but they're not so desperate that they're prepared to surrender at the moment.
• 10:28
  And even if they lose US support, they're still counting pretty heavily on European support.
• 10:33
  And European support seems to be getting firmer. We've had the announcement from
• 10:41
  Germany's chancellor, Merz, I forgot his first name, probably Friedrich or something like that,
• 10:48
  that they'll raise German military spending to 5% of GDP.
• 10:54
  And I said that a lot. They have said that a lot, but there does seem to be this acceptance
• 10:58
  among the European powers at the moment that they need to have military capabilities that are not
• 11:03
  completely dependent on the United States. And given how long Ukraine has managed to hold out
• 11:10
  with what it has, certainly it's going to be very, very difficult for Russia to get the victory
• 11:17
  at once. And so we're still at a point. The victory at once, you mean that's like taking the whole
• 11:23
  thing. Taking the whole thing at the very least, really reducing Ukraine to a satellite of Russia
• 11:30
  that never looks towards Europe again. And I think there's just been so much sacrifice on both sides
• 11:38
  that we're at this stalemate point, who wants to give up after everything that they have that,
• 11:44
  you know, the both sides of sacrifice. And even without US support, I think there's enough European
• 11:51
  support that the Ukrainians will keep on going. As much as Trump says, Zelensky's got no cards left
• 11:58
  to play, he still got that European support, which the resolve seems to have hardened as a
• 12:04
  result of Trump. Is that not a testament to Trump's strategy? Look, you could say it is.
• 12:12
  I'm not sure if that was actually the outcome that Trump intended for Europe to become more
• 12:17
  independent of the US. Oh, I think it was. I mean, he doesn't phrase it like that, but he always
• 12:22
  says they've been mooching and freeloading for too long. He does pay for their own, pay their own.
• 12:26
  But I think what he wanted was a continuation of the dependence, but with Europe paying the
• 12:30
  United States a lot more. This I think is actually Trump's fundamental vision of the world.
• 12:35
  It's not American withdrawal. I think it's always been a mistake to call him an isolationist.
• 12:41
  When he's complaining about other countries freeloading off the US, what he's saying is he wants
• 12:46
  them to pay the US. As much as people claim that Trump's foreign policy is incoherent and impulsive,
• 12:53
  there are elements of it that are nearly 40 years ago, he published this open letter in the New York
• 12:59
  Times and a couple of other newspapers saying there's nothing about US foreign policy that a little
• 13:04
  backbone can't fix. And what he was complaining about then was the US Navy guarding oil shipments
• 13:10
  from Saudi Arabia to Japan saying why are we doing this? Why is our Navy guarding these ships that
• 13:17
  aren't ours for oil that that isn't ours? What he says towards the end of the letter is let's
• 13:24
  tax these other countries. Let's use our war machines to make money. We could solve our problems
• 13:30
  everything from the deficit to homelessness if other countries were paying for defense.
• 13:36
  That I think is what his basic vision is. The idea that the United States can use its power
• 13:41
  to tax other countries. It's the same vision behind tariffs that other country in Trump's
• 13:49
  understanding of them anyway that other countries are going to be paying. I think he really does in
• 13:56
  some ways see the US as his mighty empire that completely failed to take advantage of its imperial
• 14:04
  power in the way that previous empires did. It didn't demand tribute from other countries which
• 14:09
  is what it should have been doing. And his view is that every problem with the United States can
• 14:14
  be traced back to the US allowing other countries to take advantage of its
• 14:20
  imperial altruism rather than the US taking advantage of its own imperial power.
• 14:27
  I think that's a very misguided view personally but there is something quite consistent in everything
• 14:32
  that in everything that Trump does. So I actually don't think that Trump wants Europe suddenly taking
• 14:38
  charge of Ukraine's security which would ultimately kind of leave the US out of the
• 14:43
  out in the cold in the process. I think what he would like is for the US to be benefiting a lot
• 14:49
  more directly like benefiting financially from its security agreements with the rest of the world
• 14:55
  which is why when people ask me is Orcas under threat from Trump? I don't think so because I think
• 15:01
  also the submarine deal that Australia has with the United States and the UK to buy a bunch of
• 15:05
  nuclear subs. Yeah, I think Orcas actually conforms a lot more closely to Trump's idea of what
• 15:12
  alliances should be. Right, they pay us money and we give them things. We supply them security.
• 15:18
  That's fascinating. You've done an amazing job of resolving a contradiction that I have been
• 15:23
  mulling over since throughout this term which is he talks about American greatness and make America
• 15:28
  great again is his slogan. He wants America to be great and everything that he does globally
• 15:33
  is accelerating American decline because it's empowering other countries to form alliances with
• 15:39
  each other that exclude the United States because they realize that the United States is telling
• 15:43
  them to fuck off. That's right. So if someone tells you to fuck off you go and you make alliances
• 15:47
  with your other friends. Yes. Of course you would. So NATO will become emboldened in the absence of
• 15:53
  the United States, whatever that means. Australia looks to alliances with Japan and South Korea
• 15:58
  and India and whatever else we can muster and Europe and the UK and even economically we'll
• 16:04
  just be like okay well if there are this erratic tariff regime all of a sudden in the United States
• 16:09
  and we can't depend on them if they're not bankable then we'll form our own multilateral alliances
• 16:14
  which I'm sure we'll come about and trade deals that exclude the United States. All of which
• 16:18
  just precipitates an era in which the US is no longer indispensable for security, no
• 16:22
  all are indispensable for economic security and yet he talks about American greatness and that
• 16:27
  that contradiction has perplexed me because it seems like I would understand the consistency if
• 16:32
  he was saying why do we want to be such a big great country standing astride the planet? Why
• 16:38
  can't we be sort of humble and just do our own thing? Why can't we be Switzerland? But that's
• 16:45
  interesting that it's not that he doesn't want America to be an empire. He wants it to plunder more.
• 16:50
  He wants he wants to get the spoils like if you're going to do Iraq take the fucking oil if you're
• 16:55
  going to do Ukraine take the gems. That's what he said. He wants to reinigo shops the terms of the
• 17:01
  contract. He wants to raise the rent. Is the basic way of looking at it. So what is just my
• 17:08
  devil's advocate? What is wrong with that? I mean there is a well understood phenomenon in
• 17:13
  Europe that they basically have had their healthcare subsidized by the United States because they
• 17:18
  didn't have to spend money on bombs. So they've had they've had the luxury of having great welfare
• 17:23
  states because they had much lower defense budgets. They've spent what America had been spending
• 17:27
  on defense during the Cold War. They wouldn't have been able to have such lavish social welfare
• 17:32
  mess. Was that fair? And if not then what do you do about it now? I think we have to remember that
• 17:38
  the US constructed this order for its benefit. Yes it benefited other countries as well. Yes it
• 17:44
  allowed the rise of the European welfare state but it was also immensely beneficial to the United
• 17:52
  States because the US had all of these countries around the world who in political terms were prepared
• 17:57
  to do basically whatever the United States wanted. And that was a massive source of American power
• 18:08
  in the world because getting countries to do things because they believe in your legitimate
• 18:15
  authority as the leader of the free world. That's a lot cheaper than coercion. I think one of
• 18:21
  the mistakes that Trump is making is believing that coercion and threats are somehow cheaper than
• 18:29
  the alliance system. They're not. The alliance system was the cheapest form of American domination
• 18:35
  that the United States is ever going to have. Threats are expensive. How are threats expensive?
• 18:41
  How are alliances cheaper than threats? Yeah so when you make the threat of a tariff like a 90% tariff
• 18:49
  and then you back off it in return for some sort of fairly trivial deal then what you've shown
• 18:57
  is this is what I will actually accept instead of a tariff. It means that you can't use that
• 19:02
  threat again very credibly. So when for example first time Trump threatened 25% tariffs on
• 19:11
  Canada and then backed off when Canada created the post of fentanyl's are in its government
• 19:18
  that then completely weakened the tariff threat. So you know Trump had to threaten a trade war
• 19:26
  in order to get one meaningless government post created. That's what coercion actually costs
• 19:31
  when you're trying to use it on an ally. Now Trump is in an incredibly expensive trade war with
• 19:37
  Canada and because he spent months pissing Canadians off by talking about the 51st state and
• 19:43
  governor Trudeau, Canadians are much more prepared to fight that trade war than Americans are.
• 19:51
  So the cost I mean the Trump would say yes of course there's a short term economic cost to
• 19:55
  rebalancing things. You got to take your medicine and your medicine doesn't taste good but in
• 19:59
  the long run you have to fix the problem and if the problem is that there's an imbalance of power
• 20:03
  and that everybody just assumes that American largest will be showered upon them with nothing
• 20:07
  expected from them in return. You have to shock the system a bit, make a bold threat, then retreat
• 20:12
  from the threat and see what's boils, see what you have gotten, see what your subjects have been
• 20:16
  able to deliver unto you and at least you know yes there's a short term cost but there's a longer
• 20:22
  term gain in being not in not looking like a Trump. So maybe if he if he did that in a more strategic
• 20:28
  and consistent way rather than this one day it's a threatening the worst trade war in history
• 20:36
  and then the next day pretending it didn't happen then that strategy would probably make a bit
• 20:41
  more sense. This is like a lot of things with Trump tariffs in order to bring the manufacturing
• 20:46
  industry back there are specific ways of doing that you target them in particular ways you give
• 20:51
  everybody a lot of advance notice that you're doing it doing them and you stick to it and you accept
• 20:58
  rising prices because the whole idea is for prices to rise on foreign goods in order to change
• 21:03
  people's consumer behavior. Trump just doesn't seem to have a lot of interest in that level of
• 21:11
  strategy. With the tariffs he's doing several things at once isn't he I mean he's right to do
• 21:17
  several things. Yeah he seemed to actually believe in tariffs and actually want them in order to
• 21:21
  fund the resurgence in American manufacturing which many economists say if you want manufacturing
• 21:27
  if you want to be able to manufacture your own stuff in a particular industry just subsidize it
• 21:31
  into it's it's cleaner just to pay money to it is the industry to make it rather than to tax what's
• 21:37
  going in but then he's also doing the I mean he's a businessman he's a wheeler and dealer right he
• 21:42
  likes making deals so he likes he likes the game yeah like announcing deals and he likes well in the
• 21:48
  case of tariffs they are actual deals in the sense that it's an agreement with a country for them to
• 21:53
  give him something in order for him to remove the threat of the tariff in I mean it's a pretty
• 21:56
  rudimentary deal but it's you know I threaten you with this yes you give me that yeah we it's a
• 22:01
  haggle it's a little haggle yeah yeah and he can't resist himself from haggling and but the haggling
• 22:07
  undermines the credibility of the tariff as a tool of rebuilding American manufacturing because as
• 22:13
  you say there's no consistency there's no expect nobody believes that he's gonna stick by it for long
• 22:17
  enough for them to bother investing in a factory yeah in Arkansas yeah that's not going to open
• 22:22
  until 2028 and then he claims that the tariffs are going to raise enormous amounts of revenue as
• 22:26
  well now if the tariffs were serving their purpose of reviving the manufacturing industry they wouldn't
• 22:31
  be raising a lot of revenue because people wouldn't be buying they'd be buying American that many
• 22:35
  foreign goods so there's a lot of contradictory things going on there the other thing is and I
• 22:41
  think this this gets to a few of the questions that you've been asking the elephant in the room
• 22:47
  is the very strong United States dollar it's really the US dollar is this is part of what's
• 22:55
  behind all of the subsidies of the US to the rest of the world this is one of the things that makes
• 23:00
  it possible but it's also one of the reasons why there is such a massive imbalance in trade it's
• 23:07
  because of the strength of the US dollar which is being driven by the fact that the US dollar
• 23:12
  is the world's reserve currency it's traditionally the safest thing for the safest currency for foreign
• 23:18
  investors to just apologize sorry about how it creates trade imbalances because yeah sure I always
• 23:23
  have to think this through yes logically in a clean series of steps how does that a high a strong
• 23:29
  dollar weakens exports yes it does because it makes American goods import cheaper for America yes it
• 23:35
  makes American goods more expensive for foreigners and it makes foreign goods cheaper for Americans
• 23:41
  so this is one of the big things that leads to the imbalance right so if I'm in the states and I'm
• 23:48
  shopping at Walmart and I'm comparing an American made good from a foreign made good the delta
• 23:53
  between the two is exacerbated by the fact that my buying power and the buying power of all the
• 23:59
  people who made the American thing yes is so much stronger absolutely then the buying power of the
• 24:05
  people who made the Chinese thing yes because they live on a much lower wage I mean put yes set
• 24:12
  aside the economic differences but even just in terms of the the exchange rate yes and conversely
• 24:17
  if I'm in France and I'm looking at something uh well maybe let's not let's not take the euro but
• 24:22
  you know I'm not in your own country I'm in Norway yes and I'm looking I mean my store and look at
• 24:27
  an American producer versus Norwegian produce the American one is artificially expensive
• 24:32
  dollar is so yes strong yeah yeah so this massively strong dollar is the single biggest economic
• 24:39
  benefit that basically the US gives to the rest of the world and it but the effect is the imbalance
• 24:48
  of trade one of the most thoughtful economists who proposes protectionist policies is a guy called
• 24:55
  Michael Pettis who was an advisor both to the first Trump administration and the Biden administration
• 25:00
  so he's for for people who want to do who want to take a more protectionist angle he is one of the
• 25:09
  well-respected figures that they turn to actually teaches economics in China and he wrote a really
• 25:14
  interesting foreign affairs article in the lead up to the Trump administration saying tariffs would
• 25:19
  actually be appropriate now because unlike when the disastrous tariffs were put in place in the 1930s
• 25:26
  back then the US produced a lot more than it consumed so the US was really shooting itself in the
• 25:31
  foot with tariffs so now the US consumes far more than it produces and tariffs would be a way
• 25:37
  of rebalancing that but tariffs are for Pettis they're a secondary thing the big thing he believes
• 25:44
  that has to be tackled is the strength of the United States dollar as long as the US dollar
• 25:49
  is that strong as long as other countries are buying so many of them this trade imbalance is
• 25:56
  going to persist forever now what's Trump's position on the US dollar he loves the strong US dollar
• 26:02
  he just sees that as the most important symbol of global power when there was some ridiculous
• 26:09
  pie in the sky proposal to create a bricks currency which could be a rival to the world's reserve
• 26:17
  currency now I expect being Brazil Brazil Russia India China and South Africa the developing
• 26:23
  yeah yeah now try to imagine those countries really doing anything like that together creating an
• 26:30
  alternative car India and China in an alternative currency together a complete pipe dream but Trump
• 26:36
  was so incensed when he heard about this that he truth out if you threaten the almighty US dollar I
• 26:44
  will put a two hundred percent tariff on you right so he is very very protective
• 26:51
  get a humans well if you've listened to this much of the episode then you must enjoy it
• 26:56
  presumably unless you're just releasing from masochistic reasons uh so you should listen to the
• 27:00
  rest of it and the way you do that is by subscribing to the premium feed where you not only get to hear
• 27:05
  the rest of this delightful conversation and trust me oh it gets better than what you just heard
• 27:10
  but you also get to hear no ads zero ads and previously up until now you had to go to the old
• 27:15
  sub stack to do that and follow me on sub stack and add one more platform to your life if you're not
• 27:21
  already on sub stack but here's the thing we're now on apple premium podcast as well so with one
• 27:27
  click apple will just subscribe you up to the premium feed you'll be able to listen to the rest of
• 27:30
  this conversation right now right now right now so open up your apple podcasts click the old
• 27:36
  pay old zepsi button that's probably what it's called pay old zepsi and you click the button and
• 27:41
  then you no longer have to be a free rider you can feel like you're contributing to the mission
• 27:46
  of this show which is really what we're all here for better conversations uh a freer more free
• 27:51
  wheeling attitude towards the things that we can talk about uh a way to steal man our opponents
• 27:56
  and to take the most gracious approach towards disagreement that is what you're voting for when
• 28:01
  you vote for uncomfortable conversations by going into your apple podcasts and clicking
• 28:06
  subscribe uh i love you if you don't do that that's fine and i'll see you the next free episode i
• 28:11
  guess take care