The Big Weekend Pod

In 2025, Americans lost more than $21 billion to fraud and identity theft. That's why so many people are turning to Aura. Aura helps protect your identity with fraud alerts, dark web monitoring, and up to $5 million in identity theft protection. And if you become a victim, Aura's 24-7 U.S.-based support team is there to help. Don't wait until your identity is stolen. Start your free trial today at Aura.com slash safe. That's Aura.com slash safe. Welcome to today's podcast, sponsored by Hillsdale College, all things Hillsdale at Hillsdale.edu. I encourage you to take advantage of the many free online courses there. And, of course, I'll listen to the Hillsdale Dialogues, all of them at Q for Hillsdale. Or just Google, Apple, iTunes, and Hillsdale. Morning, Gloria, and Grace, America. Welcome to Big Weekend podcast, and it could be an explosive weekend. At least I'm going to get you prepared for that. by talking with our regular guest, John Ellis of news items. And remember, if you want to be in the know every morning by 6 a.m., subscribe to news items, head over to news items and Google news items and John Ellison. You can subscribe. John will go over some of the stories you might have missed this week. Then we have our heavyweight line up right in the middle of the, what you call Murder's Row with the Yankees. We got Eli Lake, Matt Continentie, Ben Dominic. And we'll be talking primarily, if not exclusively, about Iran. because this is the weekend that matters. Now, I know you've heard me say that before, but it really does come down to the American people are watching and they're wondering, what's going on? And they trust the president on this. And none of us have classified information unless we're in the government. And if people are talking, they don't know. And if people don't know, they tend to speculate. And I don't speculate about what the conditions on the ground are in Iran. But I absolutely can speculate about what will be the reactions to various deals if they come out, and to the resumption of combat operations of what that's what we see. We do know that the president is not going to Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding because you've got to be at the White House, which tells us he's on the edge of his seat. He's waiting to see if, as Dwayne says, the Iranians bend the knee, which is their smart move. I don't think they're particularly smart, so I don't think that's going to happen. But whatever it is, we will talk about it, turn it over, and you're in the right place. You're here for the big weekend pod. Stay tuned. Good evening, Grace, America. Happy Memorial Day weekend to you. I hope you have a good one planned. And I hope that you thank everyone in uniform or those who have served, and especially those who've lost loved ones who did. As is the case with most weekend shows. I begin with John Ellis. John is the founder and chief editor of Ellis, of news items by Ellis items on X Ellis items. And John, I'm going to go out of order with the stories you sent me because last night I had dinner with a bunch of people, one of them was two speech, Tony, Tony McDonald, one of the great commercial real estate brokers up in Maine. I said, John, I get your news. And he said, I... love Ellis items. I love news items. You turned me on to news items last year. Then we got the podcast and he said, I really like John Ellis's podcast. And I said, which ones? And we went through him. You, I did not talk to him about the one you did with Stephen Roach. So let's start there. I don't know, Mr. Roach. What did you talk to him about?

Well, he is the former chief economist at Morgan Stanley for 30 years. He's now at EO University. But for our purposes, he is one of the leading experts on China. He's been going to China since he was chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia. He, in the early days, got to know the leadership there. He led their China Development Forum discussions, so on and so forth. So he's very, very well-versed. in Chinese politics and Chinese governance. And he said something to me that I hadn't really thought about, which is 70% of the U.S. economy is consumer-driven. 40% of the Chinese economy is consumer-driven. And I asked the stupid question, well, why isn't 70% of the Chinese economy consumer-driven? And he said, because... The government of China doesn't want people to have choices. They want to, they don't want people to get the idea that they can make, you know, this choice and that choice and that they eventually get used to maybe they will, maybe they'll make different choices on governance. So by suppressing purposefully consumer demand, they're hoping that that will prevent political unrest. And I never thought of it that way. Yeah, that's quite an insight. Now, which podcast? I always listen to you and Richard, but which podcast did that appear under? You brand a couple of different ones. Yeah, I now just do the one. I occasionally do with Joe Klein, who's an old friend, but I'm doing that much less. I do one-on-ones where I just interview somebody that I think is really interesting and that the news items subscribers would find really interesting. And then I do the back and forth with Richard Hauss about foreign policy, essentially. Do you agree, by the way, the conclusion of our conversation last night is that people want to be informed are going to find podcasts that go longer. And like the acquired podcast, are you familiar with that? I'm not, but I do think that the problem that we have is that people only have so much time. So Richard and I have made the decision that we can go no longer than 30 minutes on the theory that the average commute for people is 35 minutes. But some, the one-on-ones, I just did one with a man named Sebastian Malaby, who wrote a great book about Demis Hasibis, who's the founder of Google Deep Mind. And it was so interesting. It just went on and on and on. I think it's an hour long. Acquired is three hours long. My wife turned me on to it. It's deep dives into the history of companies. I listen to the NFL. I listen to the Costco. I'm hooked. But it's for long drives, for short commutes. TSL for this, my radio television show is typically around 28 minutes. And so you're right on the average person, but good stuff goes longer. Second China story.

Property prices in Shanghai are rebounding. Now, that is counterintuitive to me. I thought they weren't sort of a slow collapse across the country. Well, it's the most dynamic city, obviously, in China. And so it's not surprising that there's been a rebound there. On the other hand, all of us had been told for years and years and years that there were 60 million empty housing units, mostly apartments in China, 60 million being the population, the entire population of Germany. But the new data shows that there are 90 million unoccupied housing units. And so the property crisis that has bedeviled the GIV government for, you know, I don't know, a decade at least isn't getting better. It's getting worse. All right. Let me again go to the... Republican crisis in Texas. I have endorsed John Cornyn, and my cards are on the table. He's a layup. He would win in a layup. I don't think Ken Paxton can win. You're a little more generous than me. You think he maybe possibly could, but I hate playing Russian roulette with a safe Senate seat. What did you say? Flawed doesn't begin to tell you about Ken Paxton? Yeah, I'm, well, John Cornyn, John Cornyn is a subscriber to news items, so of course she's one of my favorite. He's a smart guy, yeah. But. But I think it's fair to say that not a lot of people in Texas have a high opinion of Ken Paxton. And I think that he is, I mean, I think the difference between Ken Paxton being the Republican nominee and John Cornyn being the Republican nominee is a difference between maybe the Republicans won't win and certainly the Republicans will win. That's right. You know, we haven't had the runoff primary, so we don't know. for sure that John Cornyn is going to lose, and one hopes that he doesn't. But I think if he does lose, then I think that Senate seat is very much in play, and I understand all of Mr. James Talarico's problems and vulnerabilities, but they seem to be matched at least by Ken Paxton's... It will be a billion-dollar campaign. Now, you may have noticed I left math for last. That's because when I took the SAT a million years ago, they always said skip the hard ones and go back at the end. I don't understand this, John. Explain what OpenAI did with the model that Paul Recep Tayyip Erdogan's planner unit distant conjecture. I hadn't turned to that yet.

Well, we start at the beginning. There's something called artificial superintelligence, ASI, that refers to a hypothetical form of AI that surpasses human intelligence across every domain. not just in narrow tasks, but creativity, problem solving, et cetera. And an open AI model tackled a geometric conjecture that has stood the test of time for 80 years. The brightest mathematicians in the world couldn't crack it. And artificial intelligence, this open AI model did. And so... This week, I think, will be remembered as, you know, one of the seminal moments in the development of artificial intelligence because in this domain of math, artificial superintelligence was achieved. 80 years of the most brilliant mathematicians, fields, medalists, you know, heads of major university departments, all of these people have been trying to disprove this conjecture and have been unable to do so, and the machine was able to do so. Now, is that good news in your view, or is that alarming views in your view? Because you do more AI than anybody. It's both. No, it's both, right? I mean, what it implies on the good news side is that, for instance, you know, the spread of cancer is something that, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent to try and figure out how cancer spreads, how it, you know, how it. how it melts with proteins and so on and so forth. Well, if artificial and superintelligence can be applied to this problem, how does cancer spread, it may be that it can figure out what all of these genius human people haven't been able to figure out. So a lot of people in the biology sphere say that they think cancer will be cured by artificial intelligence, essentially. within the next five or ten years. Same is true of Alzheimer, same as true of dementia. You can go on and on and on. The downside, obviously, is that the machine decides it wants to turn us into pets and figures out a way to do that, and then we're all pets. So John, for layman out there, and by the way, news items covers AI better than anywhere else. Would you rather have us win an AI race, in other words, get to artificial superintelligence first and finally, or would you rather have us cooperating with China in that competition?

It's an enormously difficult decision for President Trump to make. He decided that, you know, to not put up guardrails and to not engage with the Chinese at this time on, quote, regulating, unquote, AI. And there's a very good case to be made for that. I mean, Open AI has achieved. It looks like they have achieved super intelligence in this realm of math. So you want that. You want to be ahead. On the other hand, bad things can happen. So maybe you want to cut a deal. I don't know. And maybe you want to stay abreast of what's going on in that field. Subscribe to news items. Just Google news items and John Ellis. A couple times a day I'll drop a tidbit into my feed. But it really is the way to get smart about everything. Thank you, John. Have a great Memorial Day weekend. Coming right back with Eli Lake. Stay tuned.

Welcome back, America. I'm Hugh Hewitt. As usual, Eli Lake joins us. Eli is a reporter for the free press. He is the host of the Breaking History podcast. You can follow Eli on X at Eli Lake. Eli, we're at kind of a crossroads this weekend. The president's staying in town, not going to Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding, suggesting things are afoot. To me, there are three results. And neither you nor I have classified information. I haven't had a clearance since 1989. So we're all guessing. But it does seem to me there are three categories. We go back to combat operations. Iran capitulates or we continue in this land of nothing except the blockade. What do you think most likely? And what do you think the media narratives would be attached to all three alternatives? Well, I would add a fourth option, and that is that there is clearly something that's happening. We've seen some reporting on it of what Israel's Mossad has been doing in terms of what might be called kind of political warfare and whether there is an opportunity to mobilize Iranians. I still think of that as kind of an end goal that we should keep in mind. It's unclear whether that's going to be happening now, given the state of... sort of the security crackdown in Iran, the lack of any internet access and so forth. But let's just keep that kind of going on in the background. I think the media narrative is a damned or they do, damn if they do, and one thing I would hope that President Trump understands is that if he takes a capitulation deal, and I don't actually think he will, then he will be deemed a loser. And the narrative will go from, this war has been so costly, it's responsible for inflation, and to, you know, the president got us in a misadventure and doesn't have much to show for it. It'll be taco. I think he understands. It'll be taco. Yeah, he'll be. It'll be taco. And if fighting resumes, then you'll see, you know, that, you know, it's a further lunge into the abyss and so forth. But I think that the media narratives are not, we're dealing in a different kind of environment right now. This is a president who I don't think cares at all what the elite media has to say. And in fact, I think you could argue that Trump's political rise has coincided with the loss of power for the elite media that you and I kind of have a memory of, but it's not the same. When New York Times does not have the same kind of clout that it did before in terms of setting the national news agenda, I think it's much more. It's not the paper of record so much as it is the American equivalent of LeMond, the elite center-left newspaper. And in that respect, the president doesn't care as much as past presidents, even Republican presidents cared. Reagan used to say, like, you know, used to say that Ronald Reagan's superpower was he didn't care what they said about the New York Times. But he lived in an immediate environment where, you know, the White House had to worry about what the New York Times had to say. So that's...

On the one hand, there's that. I think the pressure for Trump is coming politically from Congress. It's coming from his own party. And there's a lot of jitters right now about what the war means in terms of the actual midterms and how this will play. And I think the answer to that, if you're Trump, and I think you would agree with me, is that if I lose the war or am I perceived to lose the war, it's going to be worse. So you just kind of have the only way out is through at this point. I 100% agree with you, and I don't care what the legacy media narrative is. I care what the narrative is on our team. By our team, I mean serious journalists who understand that Iran is an existential threat to the world, and if we can bring down the regime, that's a world historical win that puts Trump on a pedestal. However, our team, if our team, blisters him for the result. And there are people ready to do that if it's a bad result. That could hurt him in the midterm because turnout will go down. We are the turnout engine. You, me, everybody who talks about this sort of stuff, we drive turnout. When we say, hey, pay no attention to those bozos over at the New York Times, this was a big win. And we explained it at length. I mean, the one thing that the president isn't great at is explaining the importance of this. He's very good at defining the bottom line. No nuke, no nuke, no nook, nook, nook. He's not really great at the eloquence part. Now, am I being too harsh? There are moments when I think that Trump can cut through a lot of the hazy. He can be funny at times as well. But I think you're generally right. I mean, I think he would have done himself a big favor if he'd given his kind of oval office address if there was an effort to try to prepare the public for this between January and the end of February when the war actually started. It doesn't mean that you give away your tactical advantage. It doesn't mean that, you know, there are ways of doing it. But I think that. He could have kind of brought the general public along better, and then I think he would have probably seen higher approval ratings for it. But, Eli, I do know. Yeah. I do know that we have more resources going in, more ships, more different kinds of arsenal, more defensive weaponry, and that this blockade is going to just be a killer. If the president has in front of him. data classified information that says they're dying they're bleeding out it's not as fast as we want but they're bleeding out their gas lines are an hour long the people are upset should he share that with us should he tell us that um

Well, there's an argument saying no because it's easy for Iran, which can still control the propaganda space, to try to kind of counter it. And also, the only thing is this, normal countries would not have been able to survive this long. Iran's not a normal country. They don't care about the well-being of their people. In fact, they're happy to slaughter them and see them suffer. So in that respect... The timeline, even though the pain will be there, is longer because you do not have a regime that is in any way accountable to the people. So I'm not sure that that's going to necessarily help him. I think it's better to help him to kind of keep repeating what we heard from Admiral Cooper last week, which was, hey. We've taken out this percentage of Iran's industrial base. We've got more of this, more of that. Now, there are gaps. I mean, I think they have more missiles than we originally thought because we thought we'd taken out more of them. That's okay. But go through the list of how Iran's conventional military and its nuclear program is now largely rubble, that's a good thing. I think most Americans can understand that and it cannot be a threat to its neighbors. And that if he can then... back that up with, and here's a credible plan for how we are going to rest control of the Strait of Hormuz. That's the way you got to. I think that's the way he can do it. And I think there's so many options. You and I have both talked to people retired and active in the U.S. Navy. This is not an mission impossible. This is something that's quite doable. No, it's not. Pause for a minute, Eli, we'll be right back. Don't go anywhere, America. I'm back with Eli Lake. Eli, we were talking about. the American narrative. Who shapes that narrative for the middle 10%. I don't think it's the New York Times, and I'll confess repeatedly, I only subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, the free press, and news items. I want real news. I can't be brainwashed by the New York Times. Who sets the narrative anymore? Well, it's a combination of things, I think. I think you get a lot of it in terms of the algorithms that feed your social media. A lot of Americans get their news that way, whether it's Facebook. Like most normal Americans are not on X the way that you and I are, but, you know, certainly Facebook is still very powerful, I think. And I think it's also just a matter of, so I think it's an a cumulative. It's a bunch of different sources in one, so it's no longer that all, you would get all of your news because you would read the New York Times, your local newspaper. I think you're getting stories from all over the place. And, you know, the problem is that sometimes, especially when you're talking about viral stuff and the defamation of Israel, some of those stories can just be completely untrue. So that's the issue. What is your assessment of Axios, Barack? and that pipeline of information. I don't have a fix on it.

Um, I mean, Axis is very good for inside Washington stuff. Did you say GROC? Yeah, I know. Barack Ravid, you mean? Yeah. Okay. So, Barack Ravid, I mean, listen, I know him. He, um, there's always, there have always been reporters like Barack Ravid, and he is, in my opinion, very good at what he does, which is he covers the sort of minute by minute diplomacy. He obviously has sources because of his. Very quick turnaround time, and this is not a criticism of him. He is sometimes used by his sources to try to influence events, whether it's, you know, the oil markets or other kinds of things. But I don't think Barack Rabid is talking to real people who he grants on anonymity for it. It's a long kind of Washington tradition. And you can learn something. What I would say is that it's not the final word on things. Sometimes you read a Barack Ravid piece and you say to yourself, there's a reason why people want this out. There's a reason why the people who talk to him wanted this out. And I think he has become in some ways. And there's nothing wrong with this, a vessel for people inside the administration who disagree with the president's policies at times. But that is, by the way, I just want to say there have always been journalists like that. Oh, sure. Problem with it. You know, so it's, I don't want to put him in the category, as some people do. It says, oh, he's just a tool he's being used. You know, that's a. No, no, I just want to know how to wait. It's like, yeah. If you're cooking up a news conclusion, there are different things in your recipe. And I see Barack, I read Barack. I just don't know how much of it to put into my recipe. I want to close by asking you about Marco Rubio at NATO today. He had very sharp words for NATO. And I think we are at a crossroads with NATO. They better get in this game in a hurry. And I really believe that. Do you, Eli? I think they do need to get into the game. But there's a deeper issue with you go back to the speech that I think Marco Rubio gave it, NATO a few months ago. And that is that there is like almost a cultural issue going on right now inside of our traditional European allies. And we have to start asking ourselves. A very serious question, Hugh. And that is, even if the Germans, even if the French contributed enough money to their defense, would their young people, is there a military tradition there? Would they be willing to fight? There have been surveys that I've seen of German young people that would not even fight. if they were invaded, a majority under 30, I think. That right there is telling me that there is a deeper problem that cannot be solved in terms of, you know, just the budget. It's a cultural issue, and I would say the flip side of that is the kind of immigration policy. If you're letting people in who are not willing to assimilate into the majority culture, you're setting yourself up for a catastrophe later on. Those are the issues, and that affects U.S. national security as well. And when I talk to Trump administration, people, that's one of the things that they talk to me about, which is when we talk about NATO, which is that these are the long-term, longer horizon, but it's something we've got to start thinking very seriously about. And that's why I'm glad the president's sending 5,000 trips to Poland. Talk about a signal. Yep. If Finland and Poland want to be serious, we can play ball with them. Ukraine is serious, obviously, maybe Bulgaria and Romania. But old Europe, as Donald Rumseld used to say,

It might be sclerotic and near-death Europe. Eli Lake, always great to talk to you. Have a wonderful Memorial Day weekend. Follow Eli on X at Eli Lake. Listen to the Breaking History podcast, read them in the free press, and we'll talk to them again next week. Thank you, Eli. Welcome back, America. I'm Hugh Hewitt, joined now by Matt Continent. Matt is the head of domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He's a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. He's a Thursday contributor to the commentary podcast. And Matt, John was not eager to embrace your request that commentary and make a formal request to the president to resume combat operation. So perhaps you and I can do that. Shall we make the formal request and see if that gets anywhere? Well, I know you talk to the president regularly, Hughes, so a request coming from you to restart the military campaign could go far. It could seal the deal for us. I'm worried, but did you see the alleged deal that Noah Rothman just reported on? It's not a deal. It would be a surrender by us. I don't see, I don't think it's real. We've had earlier deals usually leaked to Arab media outlets, as I believe this one was. They don't tend to have anything to do with reality. So I look at this current deal with skepticism. You know, that said, I've also seen the reports that the high-level officials of both Pakistan and Qatar have gone to Tehran. to exert some pressure or to do some type of negotiation as we're haggling with Iran. So that makes me worried that there might be some kind of announcement this weekend that doesn't have to do with resuming the military campaign and opening the Strait of Hormuz. I'm worried about that, too. I don't know anything. I haven't had a clearance since 1989, but I think there are only three options for what comes next. Number one, resumption of combat operations. Number two, we get the uranium. They open the straight, and we negotiate on other stuff. And then number three, we do a bad deal. What do you think that we can't control what happened? We don't know what's going to happen. What would the media narratives be that followed those three outcomes, Matt? Well, if the combat operations resume, I think the media will go back into its anti-war mode that we saw throughout Operation Epic Fury, Hugh, just the constant belittling of the American war effort, despite all evidence of the contrary. And a glorification is the only way I can see it about every single Iranian missile launch or every time Iranian munition landed near its target.

It was cast by the media as some great Iranian victory. This is the same media. many parts of which claim that Iran is more powerful than ever after America and Israel hit a combined 19,000 targets, destroyed the Navy, destroyed the missile production capacity, destroyed the defense industrial base, and destroyed the leadership. So there would be an anti-war narrative if combat resumed. There would be a, I don't know how to say it, a bad deal would be greeted probably with a kind of negative headlines, skeptical of any result. I guess it's safe to say that anything Trump does is going to be greeted by negative media. The worry, though, is that Trump is going to go for a deal that looks good on paper but doesn't actually address the underlying issues here. And I think the two underlying issues are these. The first is that Iran cannot exit this conflict with control over the Strait of Hormuz. That would be a victory for Iran. And then the second is we can't allow U.S. funds or U.S. permission for the regime to rebuild and rearm. Right now, we're in the situation where the blockade is working, it's effective, and we are not relieving sanctions. The question is, how long does President Trump have the will to maintain this blockade so that it can continue to exert damage on? the Iranian regime and the Iranian economy squeeze it that way. Well, that's why I brought up at the beginning. They don't know. We don't know what's going on inside of Iran. If the president is getting a daily briefing from the CIA that the gas lines are getting longer and fighting is broken out here and people are out of food there, he might be tempted just to keep the pillow on their head and not tell us, right? Just not tell us. Because if that story comes to light that Iranians are starving and they're out of gas, We'll be told that we're being inhumane. That's the narrative that's waiting on the left side of the stage to come on stage is that we've got to feed the Iranian people. Is that not right? Am I overestimating our media? No, I think there's something to that. We don't know what's going on, Iran. We have some pictures of them rebuilding their drones. Drones are easier to rebuild than missiles, obviously. We have some reports of executions resuming. We know that the Internet is out. There are also reports of fights breaking out between soldiers who haven't been paid. There's clearly gaps within the leadership. As the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is trying to exert control and the political leadership, many of whom were once the IRTC, are trying to do something different. That's why it's important to keep up the pressure at the very least and not to somehow give this regime a lifeline.

I'm going to talk with Matt during the break about his new Wall Street Journal column on Donald Trump's The Brawler, which I recommend to all of you, and you can listen to it on the Big Weekend pod, and he'll be back after the break to talk autopsy. Yeah, Ritzley stuff, autopsy. Stay tuned. I'm back with Matt Contonetti, whose new Wall Street Journal column, is about Donald Trump the brawler, and he's been winning. He took down Thomas Massie. He took down Bill Cassidy. He took down most of the senators in Indiana. I don't know why he wants to take down John Cornyn. He's a reliable vote, and I hope he doesn't. I hope John Cornyn survives. There is a limit, right? What's the purpose of winning if your caucus blows up like it did yesterday, Matt? What? Did he go a bridge too far? I think that by going after these incumbents and succeeding, Trump is burning some bridges, you know, because the fact is when you win and when you defeat an incumbent in a primary, they still have to serve out the term. And since they no longer have anything they owe to you to President Trump, they're going to be more independent. Are they going to go against you? In some ways, they're going to prove your critique. of opposing the president in his agenda. That's what we've seen from Senator Thom Tillis, who wasn't defeated in a primary, but was essentially forced into retirement by Trump. We saw that this week from Bill Cassidy. We're seeing it from senators who are very wary of some recent Trump developments, whether it's the... money for the ballroom, whether it's the weaponization fund. And Hugh, the point is, when the margin is so small, 53 Republican senators, every single one counts. And so if I were in the White House legislative affairs team, I'd be worried that if John Cornyn... is defeated by Trump endorsed State Attorney General Ken Paxton in Texas next week. You're going to have another Republican senator who feels, you know what? I only have seven, eight months left, and I'm going to do what I want. Not necessarily what the party is interested in or what President Trump is demanding. No, I listen with interest to your commentary on the ballroom. I'm a ride or die guy on the ballroom. He tore down the building. Everyone who's ever been in the South Lawn at any kind of an event knows it's crap for big events and we can't put on a big dinner. And they may not like the decorating choices, but the next president can change that. And meanwhile... If you've been in the basement of the White House, it goes down quite a ways, and I went there a long time ago, I'm sure it's deeper now. There are reasons to build things in the White House. Why are the Republicans shooting themselves in the foot? They ought to just stand up and say, it's a ballroom, and we need what's underneath it, and we're giving you the money. I just don't understand the self-inflicted wounds, Matt Contennetti.

Hugh, Republicans are in very bad shape right now. I think they've caught Beltwayitis. A lot of these Republicans in the House and in the Senate, all they're doing is responding to the headlines they read in the Washington Post. And that is always bad for Republicans because then you start just basically following the media's cues and not thinking about what is in your best political interest. You're absolutely right. The building's torn down. Just authorize the reconstruction. Just finish it. And you're going to have to live with it. Just finish it. And then when it's eventually built, you can take some credit. And I don't mean this personally. They're my friend. Unsubscribe to Politico Axios semifour, all the newsletters. They don't mean anything. I'm coming right back with Matt on the other side. Stay tuned. What's your big beef for the Nazis? What's my big beef? Yes, it seems like you're always knocking. What's my big beef? Everything you're always knocking the Nazis. Oh, it's this time for Mal Brooks to knock the Nazis, it seems. Any education at all? I bet not finish. No, I went to college. What college? Queens. As Governor Chris Christie said on his honeymoon night, I couldn't physically do this by myself. And I think that's why you are in Comedy Central. Can you imagine if you were in real show business, where you'd be then? Good for you, and three cheers for you. I can tell that you are a poser. And I don't mean that negatively. A poser. Well, I mean, you got a poker thing, right? Do you want to shoot the strong? I think like I'm singing outtake. I'm funny, girl. Welcome back, America. We're playing a little Steve Martin because the recommendation, Martin Short, because the recommendation by Matt Continental was on a Martin Short documentary. What's the name of it, Matt? Marty Life is Short and it's on Netflix. And you said that you love the Marty Life is Short and that you like coterie stories. I don't understand that. Explain that to me. Okay. So coterie is a group of like-minded people and who come together and, you know, share ideas and usually engage in a... cooperative enterprise. So it's basically a small group of people. And as I've read and studied over the years, Hugh, I've just found that so much happens because of coderies. Think of the American founding, as I've been thinking about in the past 250 years. There's a coterie of men. They are all in one place at one time. They're writing together. And they're brilliant. And of course, they create the greatest political system in human history. the American political system. The Renaissance is the same way, right? You can look at Elizabethan writers. Shakespeare was part of a whole group of people who were writing different plays. And I happen to think the same applies to Canadian comics in the 1970s, because Martin Short is just part of this incredibly talented crew, which includes Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara.

John Candy, Paul Schaefer, you know, the list goes on and on. And it's just fascinating to me how these talented people somehow find each other at different parts of our history. And when they do, the talent just explodes. So my question about the documentary, the fetching Mrs. Hewitt has already said, that's on for tonight. I came back from my trundle and I said, have you heard of this? We're going to watch that tonight because she loves Martin Short. However, I hate finding out terrible things about people. I learned on the commentary podcast he's had quite a lot of tragedy in his life. That's not finding out something terrible. He's not a terrible person. Terrible things have happened to him. Is that the correct assessment? Well, I think like any person, he's suffered loss, and I think he's suffered greater loss than most. He's lost a wife who he loved very deeply, and he's also recently lost a daughter. That aspect was not covered in the documentary, though the film is dedicated to the daughter's memory. But I think what struck me about the movie and why I really liked it as a Martin Short fan, as a fan of the comics from the 70s and 80s, is he just has a remarkably... realistic, but also very hopeful and faithful outlook on life. And he just loves making people laugh. You left out on that Jiminy Glick, one of my favorites is when Jiminy Glick asked Steven Spielberg when he was going to make a movie that really connected with the public. Yeah, I can't wait to see Martin Spielberg. I mean, Stephen Spielberg has a whole movie of Martin Short, which you teased on the podcast. I'm looking forward to that. Okay, speaking of comedy, the DNC released its autopsy. As I said on Fox earlier today, it's not an autopsy, it's an alibi. Apparently nothing, no one had anything to do with the campaign disaster that was 2024. What do you make of the rollout of a disastrous autopsy? Well, I think it's emblematic of the state of the Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee in particular, Hugh. They have to remember this is a party whose ratings are down on the dumps, mainly or partly because many Democrats don't like the way that Ken Martin, the DNC chair is performing. Their fundraising is down on the dumps. They kept this report hidden from the public, and now we know why. The only reason it was released was because I believe CNN had the scoop and was publishing parts of it. And then you read the whole thing and you see that it contains basic factual errors. It doesn't really have a conclusion. It has a total kind of, as you said, alibi aspects to it, not really facing up to Joe Biden and all the cover up about his health. And I think it's also unnecessary in a large way, right? We know why the Democrats lost in 2024. All it takes is to look at an exit poll. And you can see that they were clearly out of touch on the economics and on the culture. And Kamala Harris was not the type of leader the country desired at the time.

And this is, I mean, this is a very tragic situation. It's really awful and sad. And, you know, it's almost eerie the fact that the last truck race that he had, the remarks that he made after about, you know, having to appreciate every time you win because you don't know if it's going to be your last. And, you know, his son celebrated his 11th birthday just a few days ago. And it's just a very, very sad situation. So I'm sure, you know, Hart goes out to the family, and the racing fandom community is really rocked by this. He was someone who was expected to be, you know, racing for a long time. So what I don't like is I open up the New York Post last night and I see the headline, and immediately the comments are full of his COVID. And is that going to be the storyline after any young person dies that they got the shot and therefore they died five years later? Is that going to be it? Well, I will say that, you know, in my own friend group, we had a couple of younger men in particular die who had been kind of, no offense to them, but they had overdone it on the booster side of things. These are friends from New York, and both died of heart-related issues. You don't know if that's, you know, related or not, but there is some evidence that it can be. I think that in this case, there is no evidence that it's had anything to do with that. had a sinus infection and everything else like that going up to this. He talked about being sick. So who knows what exactly it was? I will just say, Hugh, from personal experience, you reach a point in life where... Even guys who are resistant to go to the doctor, you got to go. Oh, yeah. So I just always encourage, hey, if you're worried about something and you're over the age of like 35, get it checked out. Don't like just wait the way that you used to when you were 25 because that's not a good idea. All right. Now I want to switch to the Big Ben podcast, your opening monologue, which I found very provocative. There is an age gap, not a gender gap, not a soccer mom gap, an age gap. Republicans are doing better on the war and everything with everyone over the age of 45, and Democrats are doing a lot better on everything with those who are under 45. I think, now, Ben, Hugh Hewitt, making this up as he goes along. The only thing I wanted to do when I was young was get a house because that's the first step. And getting a house meant saving for a down payment, which is really hard when you got student loan debt. I had some, but we paid that off. and the fetching Minnesota is working, and we bought the Fairlington Townhouse. You know, we did the whole deal in D.C. one step at a time. I want to see the Republicans come up with a, hey, we will match your down payment and we'll take half the upside or 40% on the upside, burning off over here, something that goes after housing in kids. That's their sweet spot. What would you think is the sweet spot for younger voters? No, I actually think that you're really on to something there. And keep in mind, so much of this is driven by frustrations that are created by leftist policies, preventing the building of homes, the areas that they control. And just think about it. If you're a young person who lives in a blue city and who might otherwise be inclined to vote Republican in a congressional election or something like that, and what you see around you is a situation where...

You know, if you're going to get married and have kids, you're going to be doing it in an apartment, which not a lot of people want to do. And a lot of them still have, especially if they have conservative values, the idea that you should necessarily be able to afford a home before you start going down that road. People are priced out of the market in part because... Older people are not selling their homes. They're keeping multiple homes. They have a, they well over index in terms of the amount of property that they own in the country, and none of them seem all that interested or willing to sell it. And I don't entirely blame them. It's a rational decision on their part, but it's one of these situations that has created and been exacerbated by these blue city policies and the like, which essentially make it impossible to build homes in states like California. As I was discussing earlier with Adam Carolla, the idea that you have to have all these different requirements, regulations, you have to do all these ridiculous things that make no sense to carpenters, but that the bureaucrats have decided you have to do because safetyism is the rule. That's the kind of approach that ultimately leads to people being priced out of the market, becoming frustrated and becoming resentful. of a lot of things, and guess what, when someone comes along like Zohran Mamdani and says, I'm just going to have the state take over the housing situation, and I'm going to fix this with my power, then they start to listen to them because they're not ideological, unless you have a conservative resistance to that kind of messaging, unless you've been taught capitalism by accident by listening to someone other than in public schools, then you're very open to that kind of argument from the left. It's a foolish argument, of course. but it's also one that Republicans, I think, are not addressing. And I want to explain to people not inside the Beltway like you and me. Fairlington was World War II housing that has served as the entry-level housing market for five generations of Beltway people. They get a... two-bedroom, attached townhouse, and then from there they moved to Reston, and from there they moved to Vienna and Oakden, and then they come back in, or they go to Great Falls. There's a path, but the path is shut down. The path doesn't exist. And I was a land-use lawyer for 30 years in California. We don't build those kind of houses anymore. Because for 30 years, the left didn't like that. They wanted stuff that wasn't going to get built, but they had no market for it. But I think if we come up with a match for a down payment and we pour our money not into Section 8 housing, but to getting young married adults into houses, we win. Yeah, I think a big part of this, Hugh, is that the party has been lulled, and this is something that I hope came through, but I probably should have stressed in a larger way. The party has been lulled in the happiness about the economy because the people that they have in their ears are happy about the stock market. Yes. Happy about what's been going on there. The stock market is not the economy. It is an indicator, but it is not the economy. And that's the problem that I think we're facing, which is that...

Republicans, if you are a Republican who watches Fox and I hope that you do, if you pay attention to what's going on on the stock market, if you have seen your portfolio performing very, very well, you feel like the economy is doing really well. And if you actually look at the numbers and the breakdowns in that New York Times-Cyenne poll, there are a lot of people who are way more optimistic about the economy than you might think, given the general coverage of it. But then you see young people. who do not have that same experience, who are not living that way at this point in their lives. People who are under 45 are sour on the economy. They do not think it is working, and many of them are very fearful that it is going to go down the tubes. They're actually, you know, in the opposite sort of category. To such a degree that it's like living in two frames of reality. And I don't think those are the people that Republicans know they need to actually listen to now because 45 is not young. I'm 44 years old. You are not young. You have a family. You have a mortgage. You have all these different. you know, things that you have to pay for. You're paying attention to the economy. You're just experiencing it in a very different way because you have to buy eggs a lot more often than the other people do. The eggs are actually okay now, by the way. But the point being, you have to spend things, you spend money on things that a lot of the people who are over 45 don't have to spend things on. The other thing, by the way, health care costs. I don't know why we have just ceded this argument entirely to the Democrats. The Democrats own the health care system in America. Everything that's gone on in the health care system is what they did to it, okay? And yet somehow it's Republicans' problem that they have to fix. I just don't understand why this is an argument that Republicans have lost so fully to you. I don't know if there's any way to claw it back, but essentially they get blamed for everything that's going on, even though they had nothing to do with the policies that made it. And I got to say one more thing. AI should scare the living daylights out of you. You don't know. If you make the wrong choice for a career, you're screwed. And I don't know what the right choice is. Republicans are very quickly becoming the party of AI whether they want to, when they want that label or not. They are viewed as a party in favor of. of data centers and a party in favor of these tech billionaires and the like. And Hugh, I actually think that the backlash to this is something that's very dangerous. I talk about it in an interview that we have going up tomorrow at the Daily Wire with Jason Miaris about the danger that we believe is posed by this Luigi Mangione culture. Sam Altman had survived two attempts on his life already, and serious attempts. And the thing that I think is significant. I didn't know that. Yes. Wow. There are backlashes to this that are going to take off across the country. There's a Wall Street Journal article I commend to you from earlier this week, Hugh, that looks at some of these cases, including local officials who've received death threats for the way that they've voted about data centers and the like. And, of course, a lot of this is fed by Chinese propaganda that wants to undermine these data centers is making a lot of the same arguments that they've...

made in the past around climate, dumerism, and the like, and they are pushing that on social media to the endth degree to scare people into feeling like if the U.S. has these kind of advances in technology that they are going to be the ones that pay the price. You've got to listen to Big Ben podcast this week. He'll be with me on the other side during the break. We're going to talk about the autopsy on the other side of Iran. Don't go anywhere. I'm Yu-Uitt with Ben Dominic. Follow Ben on Ex-Dominich as well. I am back with Ben Dominic during a break from our national network show, and this will be on the Big Weekend podcast. Ben, the autopsy, I was on Fox earlier. I said, it's not an autopsy from the DNC. It's an alibi. No one's responsible for everyone. No one was near anything that happened. What did you make of this fiasco? I think it's an absolute, absolute joke. I mean, they, there was a good encapsulation by my friend Amber Duke on X earlier, and then we have a piece by Alex Castellanos today at the wire that goes over it. But the truth is that the Democratic Party does not want to admit what killed them. They do not want to admit, you know, any, I mean, the fact that they're sweeping Joe Biden basically under the rug, the fact that they're, There's no mention of culture war issues, like trans and women, girls and having a face off against men in their sports. They want to turn this essentially into something that is a completely different narrative about why they lost in 2024. And I think it's laughable. I also understand both why they did not want to release this now because it's such a joke. because it doesn't grapple with any of the real problems that they have. And I think the real thing that we're actually learning about this is... Democrats are not actually taking any lessons away from 2024. They are pretending. Like this was just a unique scenario, a historically weird scenario that Kamlin just needed more time to run or that there were no essential defects about her campaign. That's annotated version where they basically are saying that none of the cases were actually made for this. It's absurd. I think that at the end of the day. The Democrats just don't want to admit what they got wrong about the country in 2024, and it's why you see them doing the same thing again. Here they are this week, you know, knocking down the Women's Museum because Republicans basically were insistent.

that we do not allow men who believe that they are willing to be in that museum. Oh, my gosh. They have learned nothing here. Absolutely nothing. Now, Ro Khanna came out and immediately said the autopsy is terrible because it didn't bring up the fact that we should have stood up for Gaza. And I immediately came away with the idea. If there's a Supreme Court vacancy this summer, I want the president to nominate an originalist, a Thomas or an Samuel Alito clerk, someone who's been on the bench for a long time. And that's my field. And in that field, there's a guy named David Strauss, St.R-A-S, judge of the Eighth Circuit, happens to be Jewish, goes to Temple, grandchild of Holocaust survivors, a superb judge. Do you think nominating a Jewish nominee, we've got a minute, helps us in November? You know what, Hugh, I think it will drive the Democratic left absolutely nothing. Exactly. Something like that. And when you drive them nuts, they have a very difficult ability to create any kind of wall between their brain and their mouth. So I think that that's something that is ultimately politically helpful. I don't know if he's the best choice or not, but I would just say politically, that is absolutely something that would benefit the Republicans. S-T-R-A-S, look him up. He's right on every decision when he dissents. He's right to dissent when he writes for the majority. And he's backed up the president often just up there in Minnesota, in South Dakota, North Dakota. Not many people know the judges up there. He's a keeper. I'll be right back with Ben Dominic. Stay tuned.

Welcome back, America. Ben Dominic's back for seven more minutes. Ben, as we speak on the web, two narratives are emerging. One is we're about to sign a document that must resemble what Imperial Japan signed on the Missouri in 1945. It's a complete loss. And then there's a story in the Wall Street Journal. Trump is returning immediately to the White House because combat operations are in the offing. What do you hear? What do you think? Well, I think that is – I actually – I mean, I believe that reporting, and I believe it not just because of that reporting, but because it's what I'm hearing as well. And, you know, I think that as much as people would like to laugh about it, the president actually does need to be here as opposed to going to his son's wedding, all-time Trump clip, by the way, about that. But the thing that really strikes me about this is – and I think we've talked about this before a number of times, obviously. The president is not willing to accept a bad deal in this situation. There are people around him in his ear who would be, I think, willing to accept a bad deal because of the politics, because of the domestic politics of the situation, because they worry that things will not right to ship in time. The president does not have that attitude. And I think that he is, this is the thing that's so interesting about it because you hear all the time about. People, you know, it's the blind men and the elephant. They're like, well, Trump's like this. Trump is like that. The actual thing is that the president keeps his own counsel. And as much as he takes the advice from people around him and hears them out, he knows what he wants and he knows where to, he knows the end game that he wants to pursue. And from my perspective, he has been the one kind of holding back the people who have been in his ear, and they definitely, I mean, there are fellow Republicans who are concerned about what's going on. By the way, some of those same people are on Capitol Hill, you know, pitching a hissy fit right now about this weaponization fund. And those are the same people who want a lot of those same people want him to back off when it comes to Iran because of their own electoral situations or because of the cycle, et cetera. I think that the president is very firmly of the position that, no, I want to win. And a win has certain definitions for me, and none of them are in this document. Okay. Last question. Shelly Moore Capito, Senator from West Virginia on a props, was on the show on Thursday. She said, I am a finish-the-job person. I have to think a majority of the Republican conference in the Senate are finished the job people like Tom Cotton and Roger Wicker put out a statement today. Susan Collins is no shrinking violent. I just can't believe that anyone doesn't want to win. They'll all get wiped out. We'll actually lose the Senate if we lose this war. That's the thing. That's the thing. I think, Hugh, that some of these people. are very short-sighted. And I just, the perspective that I have on this is, you know, look, you are, you're about to be six months into a year. And you have done very little, from my perspective, to establish a Republican narrative about what we will do for you if you reelect us or if you elect us. They have done very little, I think, that is good in that vicinity. They have been squabbling amongst themselves and with the White House.

I think that's very stupid, and I think that instead they need to get on the same page and understand, you are in this. This is happening, and you need to be dedicated to victory in this situation, because if you don't achieve it, that is going to be the test of this election one way or the other. People will say they're voting on the economy, but the ramifications of this war on the economy are the things that they're actually talking about. You're right. I want to close by just saying my heart goes out for Tulsi Gabbard. Her husband's really sick. I know she's a friend of yours. Whatever people's political thoughts are about that. What an awful situation. It's truly awful, and I appreciate it, Hugh, and thank you for saying that. Look, the thing that I would just stress to everyone is I hope that they will pray for Abraham Tulsi Gabbard's husband, who is a wonderful, wonderful man. and built like an ox and is the last person in the world you would ever think would be diagnosed with an extremely rare form of cancer. And truly, I mean, I would just say, Tulsi Gabbard has been, despite the press clippings around her on occasion, she has been a very loyal, you know, pursuer of the agenda Donald Trump put her in that job to do. I do think that it's going to be interesting who comes out to replace her. She's staying on for another month in order to ease that transition. I'm sure that there will be names that are floated by various factions. And look, I have my own thoughts on who that might be, but I'll keep that now, maybe right about it next week. But I really appreciate your heartfelt thoughts. And I would encourage all your listeners, just pray for her family. And don't be evil. Don't be evil. The online stuff is just evil. Don't be evil. I just can't believe it. Instead be good. Ben Dominic, thank you. Have a great Memorial Day weekend. Be Dominic on X. Listen to him. Always at the Big Men podcast. Read him at the Daily Wire. We'll talk again next week, Ben. Thank you. Now, I want to take a moment to tell you about our great sponsor Consumer Cellular. They have a brand new offer. So I want you to listen carefully to this. You've probably seen the headlines are worse, your latest sell bill. Big wireless is raising rates again. Well, you can switch to consumer cellular right now and get $200 off your bill by going to consumercellular.com slash hue and use a promo code, Hugh 200. That's right, Hugh Hewitt-U-G-H-200. And when you switch, you'll get the same coverage as big wireless carriers, just not the coverage that's anything other than high quality. Are you tired of your wireless company telling you have to talk to an AI chat box or even pay 10 bucks to talk to someone when paying your bill? That's happening now, really. With consumer cellular, you'll talk to an actual human being based right here in the United States who will help you every step of the way when you switch. For a limited time, if you're over 50 as well, you can get $200 off your bill when you switch two unlimited lines. That's two lines of unlimited talk, texting data for $60 a month, plus $200 off. Hurry, the extra $200 off your bill will not last long. This offer ends June 14th. Visit consumercellular.com. Use the promo code.

Hugh, 200, or call 1-800-4-1-41-44, 1-800-4-1-4-4-44, 1-800-4-1-4-4-4-54. We all would love to see an agreement with Iran. in which the straits are open and they abandon their nuclear ambitions and so forth, their nuclear weapons ambitions. That's what we would all hope for. And that's what we're going to continue to work on. And that's what work is ongoing even as I speak to you now in that regard. But we also have to have a plan B. And plan B is, what if Iran refuses to open the streets? What if Iran decides we refuse to open the straits? We're going to own the straits and we're going to charge tolls for it. At that point, something has to be done about it. And I would argue that there are countries represented here today that are more deeply impacted by this than even the United States is. So all I'm saying, and I've said, and I think this has been reiterated by others, there are other countries that agree with me on this, is that we have to start thinking about what do we do of a few weeks from now. Iran decides we don't care. We're going to keep the straits closed. We're going to sink any ship that doesn't listen to us or it doesn't pay us. Then someone's going to have to do something about it. They're not just going to voluntarily reopen the straits. in that scenario. So we have to start thinking about it. I raised that point today. I got a lot of nods. I got a lot of people that came up to me afterwards and acknowledged it, but we don't have an announcement for you today in terms of something that's happening. I know there's a plan in place for what to do if the shooting stops. It's what the French-UK initiative talks about when the conditions are set. What they mean about where the conditions are set is when no one is shooting. But we have to have a plan B for if someone is shooting. How do you reopen the straits? And so I made that point today. I don't know if that would be a NATO mission necessarily, but it would certainly be NATO countries that can contribute to it. So that's Marco Rubio. I have more tape of the Secretary of State at the NATO summit. I do want to let you know I'm standing by waiting for Mack Teasley. Mack was the foundation director at the Eisenhower Foundation because there's a movie coming out next Friday called Pressure. Brennan Fraser plays Ike. I'm very invested in this movie, not just because they're sponsoring ads on the program, but because my first job out of college was a researcher for David Eisenhower's book, Eisenhower at war. And not many people know the story of the run-up to D-Day. Pressure is going to tell that story. I'm very confident with Mack Teasley. who was the president of the Eisenhower Foundation for a long time and a historian of a bike. I'm very, very confident they will tell it correctly. There are aspects such as the training disaster. If you're watching on Salem News Channel, I just played a little bit of the trailer for you. There was a training disaster. I believe it cost 9,000 lives as we trained for the NATO invasion. They gave everyone pause. Then there were meteorological reports. that said, go, don't go, go, go, go, go, go, go. Then there was loading the ships with people who are thrown up in the ships. You might remember the opening scene of saving Private Ryan. Then there's the famous scene of I going to meet with, I believe, 101st airborne before they take off on their most dangerous submissions. And the trouble is the channel had defeated...

Many, many attempts to invade England. Was it going to defeat the attempt for the Allies to invade Fortress Europe? Hitler had thrown up everything. There were two lines of 45. The Western Wall was at Germany, but the European Wall was all along the coast. Oh, Mac joins me. Matt, how are you? And congratulations on making the rounds on this. How good is this movie going to be? I think it's going to be very successful. And I went in with the historian's view to see how accurate it was. I came away convinced that the writers did their homework and attention to the details and so forth. And so I think, and I love the name pressure because it's not just, it wasn't just about the air pressure, the weather. It was about the pressure on Ike, the most important decision he ever made in his life, really. Everything was easier after this for him. I began my post-college career working for David Eisenhower on the book, Eisenhower at war, as his research assistant. I didn't know any of this. Do you think a lot of people know about the TikTok about everything on Eisenhower's shoulders, all the different considerations? Do you think people know that story? No, I don't think they appreciate it. And it went, you know, his first day in the Oval Office as president, he said, he basically said it's a continuing, lots of decisions and tough issues. It's a continuation of everything I've been doing since 1942, another day at the office, more or less, you know, but he's, but yeah, there's a reason he, I mean, he was only 53 years old at the, at the time of D-Day. But he looked like he was 60. I mean, he had, of course, he was living on coffee and four packs of cigarettes a day, too. So that wasn't very good. But just the stress that he was under is just totally amazing. Now, there's a supporting cast of people around him, all of the various people from Beetle Smith and on up. Are they cast well? Do you like how they are portrayed in the movie? You know, I'm looking for it. I saw the movie five weeks ago, and I'm looking forward to, I'm going to see it again next week. And so I'm going to take a closer look at things because I was Captain Butcher, his naval aide portraying. I mean, I need, was he in there too? Okay. I mean, I need to look at that more closely. But yeah, I think it. You know, I think I think Brendan Fraser did a good job with Eisenhower, the cadence of his speaking, and he's a little heavier than Ike was, of course, but still he showed the gravity of the situation and the pressure that he was under, and I think the K. Summersby thing, my antenna was up on that one because I wanted it to be professional. And they did show that the relationship was.

was indeed professional. There was one little lapse where maybe they had a conversation about, oh, we've had a couple of moments or something like that. That was reference to that at one point. But by and large, it showed that she was just a, and she was still driving him then. And one of the things they were calling her to Lieutenant Somersby, and I thought, aha, she didn't, she actually joined the U.S. military. in November, November 20th of 44, but not yet. And she became an Air Force, I mean, an Army lieutenant in the U.S. Army. So last question, Matt. Did they tell us in the movie, do you recall what it was that Eisenhower witnessed the training accident, how many people died in the training accident for D-Day? Was it 9,000 people died? No, no, no, it was only, it was 750. Okay. The first day, the first day of Normandy was 2000. So, but, and it, and it was. communications problem. We were, our terrierly deaths. A German, and the German fast boat had snuck in and sunk two LST, so a lot of our troops drowned in the water or had, you know, thermo, you know, died of thermo hypothermia. So, yeah. And Keith RISB. Let's talk again next week. I'm looking forward to pressure so much. It comes out on May 29 theaters across the United States. They work with people like Professor Teasley, who's a great historian, ran the Eisenhower Foundation forever. I'm really looking forward to seeing pressure. Thank you, Mack. I'll be right back to America. In 2025, Americans lost more than $21 billion to fraud and identity theft. That's why so many people are turning to Aura. Aura helps protect your identity with fraud alerts, dark web monitoring, and up to $5 million in identity theft protection. And if you become a victim, Aura's 24-7 U.S.-based support team is there to help. Don't wait until your identity is stolen. Start your free trial today at Aura.com slash safe. That's Aura.com slash safe.