Welcome to love it or leave it vacc to the future, because, well, that's. What are you going to do? And you get your jab, because that's. To the future, which going to do continue masking up until a critical mass of humanity has gotten vaccinated against this scourge, then I'm going to try to keep this tiny little speck of hope alive in my heart that we can take what we learned in isolation to make this world more beautiful, more equitable place.

Love you, bye, his remarks, that song was by Lynn Ne'eman, it was awesome. Thank you so much for sending it in Love. The Period Vibe. If you want to make a VAX to the future theme song, please send it to us at leave it at Crewcut Dotcom. Leave it at Crigger Dotcom. Before we get to the show, we have some very exciting cricket news, you know, and love Jason Concepcion from Binge Mode and NBA desktop.

He is officially here at cricket and we can finally tell you what he's been up to. Jason will be hosting a brand new sports show called Take Line with former NBA star and the new co-owner of the Atlanta dream, Renee Montgomery. It's all about sports, culture, politics and the way they intersect. And it's awesome. They are an incredible pair. And the show is very fun and fast paced. You will love it. Check it out. The trailer is out right now.

Subscribe today so you won't miss the series premiere on March 16th. Take line on Apple, iPod, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcast, please check it out. This week on the show, we have a conversation with Ezra Klein about polarization in America. And then we play a couple of games with our listeners. But first, he's a comedian, writer and co-host of the podcast Politically Reactive with W. Kamau Bell. Welcome back. Returning champion Hari Kondabolu.

Oh, it's great to be back. Thank you, John. Where's my money? You said I was a returning champion. Their money on the way. Yeah, sure.

Yeah. All right. OK, you watch that, will OK? I think so.

I don't like extra but something.

Why don't you get your. I want to hear what you know. Yeah. So we like to start each week with the worst jokes submitted by our writers. Are you ready man.

Way to throw them under the bus. Jesus is part of it. OK, that's part of it. All right. That's part of it. Let's get into it. What a week. The world's first space hotel is set to be fully functional by 2027. Supposedly their continental breakfast is out of this world.

Oh, that's the punchline. That's it. There's an expression like, oh, that's out of this world and it's happening in space. Yeah. Yeah. Why is it a continental breakfast then? You know, because it's we're beyond continents. We're into space at that point.

That's a really fair point. I mean, I think in this context, Continental breakfast is just your ordinary kind of juice pastry's, right?

Maybe there's a waffle maker that's just out to be used. Right. If you have your own mix, great. Right. Maybe there's berries.

Yeah, but the thing that threw me again is why would you have a continental breakfast?

No, I no longer problem. I see the problem. It's a branding thing. You know what. You know what. You know what. You know what? Totally good note. I'm just going to do this again. Supposedly their breakfast buffet is out of this world.

Just a tweak. You're right. Yeah. Yeah.

Continental throws you. It throws you. Yeah. It introduces the same brain thing. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. You know, I was totally locked in the second time.

Good at it. Good at it.

Thanks to the Biden administration, Merck has agreed to help Johnson and Johnson manufacture additional doses of their vaccine.

That's more Johnson than I can handle up with two of them, Johnson and Johnson. That's a lot of Johnson.

Oh, because it's it's like penis and penis. Penis in beaners. Well, it's both the no more tears people. But Johnson, it can also mean penis forever.

It's the vaccine roll out in Gila County, Arizona, has been so effective that officials are offering Seans to any resident over eighteen shots for anyone over 18. It is a vaccine roll out or a party at Bryan Singer's house. Who's Bryan Singer?

He's that director around him. There's been a lot of scandal related to young men gallivanting at parties at his home, bubbling up into various controversies over the years, sort of a kind of a scandal in plain sight created some headlines in the wake of me, too, leading to an examination of various figures in the ways in which they've used their power. In this case, Bryan Singer was exploiting young gay men, adding another layer of of homophobia onto the way our society processes these kinds of power dynamics.

I guess that was a good reference then. Hmm. Yeah. OK, hold on a second. I owe you one.

Bryan Singer, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed an order allowing businesses to return to 100 percent capacity and lifted the state's mass mandate.

Even as Texas trails most states in vaccine distribution, Gov. Abbott added, I'm only trying to say that Texas is a summer state. We need some dollars now. If people can't swim here, they'll be glad to swim at the beaches of Cape Cod, the Hamptons, Long Island. But that doesn't mean that we're going to serve them up like a smorgasbord. Hari, that's from a film called Jaws.

The governors of Texas in Mississippi both made the decision to lift mass mandates in a move Biden called Neandertal thinking. And Biden can say that because he knew some of those guys, he's old.

He's an old dude, it's been around a long time, he's been around a long time as friends with some Neanderthals from before humans killed them all.

The Flintstones was a biopic to him. It was like I knew those guys.

He was like, I you know, back in the day, we used to get a big thing on ribs and it would push the car over onto its side. That's how big the ribs were because they were from they were from Mammoth's and the car would be on its side because of the ribs.

Yeah, I had sex with. Well, my friend doesn't know.

Fred, Fred can't know that that seems sacrilegious in a really weird way that feels kind of sacrilegious. I just think I mean, look, Barney and Betty, Wilma and Fred, I think some rocks shaped like keys went into a bowl, that's all.

And yeah, yeah, I agree with you completely. And then the bird in the garbage disposal saw it and it was like, oh, I hate my job.

You know, anybody under 20 want Google that shit. Yeah, it's hilarious. I know. Barbara Timeless.

Check it out.

New York will live performances again next month with masks and reduced capacity. And you know what that means. Louis C.K. is back.

That's it. Yeah.

The businesses that manage the intellectual property of Dr. Seuss announced that six of his books will go out of print due to their race imagery. I guess Horton heard a really insightful NPR podcast about white privilege. The book's going out of print include Oh, the places you'll go south of one hundred and twenty Fifth Street, one fish, two fish, red fish, jewfish, and of course, his infamous work, Green Eggs. And you can't trust Japanese Americans.

Yeah.

What what you just revealing is a terrible truth we didn't want to hear. You're translating something that was not translated before because our third eyes were not open until now.

Yeah. You didn't know you were even doing that.

I didn't get a manifest that third, I feel like.

Are you my spiritual leader? Do you lead me and a group of others on a journey to better understanding of ourselves in the world? I'm the only Indian guy here, so I guess so.

Yeah, it's going to have to be a spokesman said of the book's withdrawn. Those titles aren't representative. Dr. Seuss should be celebrated for his compassion, his whimsy and his skill at making up gibberish instead of finding actual rhymes.

Which is the hard part. Yeah, that is the hard part is the hard part is finding real rhymes. You can't just make up rhymes. That's cheating.

Yeah, I'll still read some of those books to my kids are not the racist ones, but the the nonracist ones. Of course I loved when I was a kid. I loved Fox in socks and my mother hated it because it's the tongue twister one.

And so it would be like my almost like maniacal demand that she do this exercise of reading the tongue twister version of Dr. Seuss Fox in socks.

I loved Fox and socks, mom. I love Fox and Sox. You call me up, you want to read me Fox and Sox today.

I'm in some hot Kentucky Republican.

No, Kentucky Republicans have said Mitch McConnell put together a list of like minded successors in case he doesn't serve out his term. What's weird is the list only has two names My Ghost and Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Why was that? Why was that a bad joke? That was a great reference. That's a great one.

They still think people still like the Ninja Turtles.

I do shredder Biden for a while. It's like a brain cancer. It's like it's a brain in that in that that kind of goofy body. Yeah. Dimension X.

I like that Krang and Shredder have a really they don't like each other and they have very different working styles.

Yeah. Yeah.

And there's also kind of a Palpatine Darth Vader element to it that nobody ever discussed when I was younger, which is a shame because that would have made for a vigorous discussion of two different classic series.

I like Crank Crank. All he had was his wits.

Well, how come they didn't just push him over? And then the glass thing that, you know, held him in there were just broken and they would have died.

What gave him power? Palpatine had power. What did crying have?

Yeah, he's pretty reasonable to how I got you out of your body. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Taking advantage of President Biden has thrown his support behind the Amazon workers in Alabama in the midst of a vote on whether to unionize while denouncing Amazon's anti-union propaganda efforts.

Because if anyone knows how important a bathroom break is, it's a 78 year old because he's old. Well, he's old.

Well, Ma, I operate a crane. That's a dinosaur. It's it's a brontosaurus. That's what I do at work. I pointed it at stuff.

If he said it tomorrow, I wouldn't be surprised. I wouldn't be surprised if he was having flashbacks to that.

Figueiro On Tuesday, FBI Director Chris Wray told lawmakers that there's no reason to think lefties disguised themselves as Trump supporters to storm the Capitol, adding, I don't even think they know where to buy wrap around O'Kelly's.

I don't know what to do. It's a specific audience. There is a bit of what is good.

How did we lose patriotic imagery and o'kelly's to these people? How did they get the Don't Tread on me flag and O'Kelly's? Do you know what it is?

I think on the left we use such things sparingly. And not every single day, right, with you know, we're not going to wear USA jackets and have a don't tread on me bumper sticker and wear O'Kelly's every single day, and then that really terrible wear where you put it behind your head.

You know, I mean, we're the it's as if you have a second set of eyes in the back of your head. We don't do shit like that. That's the problem.

It's like the like the Under Armour shirt with the collar Under Armour shirt is such a symbol of these sorts of people. And I think it's because, like, the Under Armour logo is aesthetically terrible.

Yes. The way the letters overlap, the kind of the proportions of it are terrible, huh?

I feel like it must have been something like the company president came up with and nobody could be like, this is very fifth grade. Yeah.

Hey, let's try another idea. Let's try one more. OK, one more pitch on that shape. You know, that's true.

I like I like it the way it is my kid. Make this. I like it. All right. Well, you know what to say. I mean, we can keep it, but I mean, no harm in some new. I just compare it to something. Give me Steph Curry. I don't I don't care about this. Just give me Steph Curry will sell a bunch of stuff.

SpaceX Starship S10 took off, flipped, landed and then exploded due to a potential methane leak in unrelated news. Does anyone want to buy my Tesla, get rid of Tesla?

Amy Klobuchar came out in favor of abolishing the filibuster, saying, we have a raw exercise of political power going on where people are making it harder to vote. And you can't let that happen because of some old rules in the Senate. Then she turned to Pete Buddhahood and said, you see, the Senate is the upper chamber of Congress, composed of 100 senators representing the 50 states, one of which you were the cute little marein, young and inexperienced.

And she hates him. She hates his whole vibe.

Colin Jost went to Harvard with them and they lived in the same building, apparently.

Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. I just learned that I don't see them being friends.

What did he do in the Army, Pete? Yeah.

Feel like he did some sort of intelligence, perhaps. I'm not sure. So it wasn't like shooting stuff, right? I don't know. Was the caterer.

I don't think he was a caterer. I think he was some sort of intelligence officer, I believe. Oh, OK. All right. I don't know. I think I've seen him with a gun. OK, you have to learn to use a gun at some point in the process.

What does he do in transportation? Yeah, he's the secretary of transportation. How many train lines and in South Bend, how many bus lines they got there, how many lanes of traffic they got two lanes.

Here's a they can go in both directions. All right, they're working on that, right? He was working on that before he left, you know what? I don't like this anti South Bend bias you're bringing to this conversation. All right. They got real issues. They got sewer stuff. I've heard him talk about sewer stuff.

I like secretary mayor of transportation because I like it. I like it because I feel like there's there's two there's two big things we need to say.

There's a lot of big things we need the secretary of transportation to do, one of which is make sure that that climate is central to everything that they do. And the other that's very important to me. It's a pet issue of mine, is someone who's going to create processes for thinking about why infrastructure costs the United States are so high. It's not even really that ideological. And I think he's the kind of person to, like, dig into that.

He's got that like Hillary thing, like I'm going to drill down on this one thing and bore down to that reach hard stone. And that makes me that makes me hopeful for Secretary Moppy.

Right. I could take your fucking you could take your red rose. All right. And you can you can take it on a train.

The hell out of here, Secretary. It's both respectful and condescending in a way. And I really do like Secretary Baker.

I like it. I'm saying it. And it's endearing to me.

President Biden has agreed to limit eligibility for stimulus checks in the coronavirus relief package. According to income, individuals earning below 80000 and couples earning below 160000 will receive stimulus checks for anyone earning above that threshold. Will receive a text from me about buying this.

Tesla will call back. It's a callback callback.

Horny toads are disappearing, which I guess why my DMS have been so quiet lately.

You have sex with toads now they reach out to me. It doesn't imply that I'm not engaging, I guess. All right. Fair enough.

Speaking of horny toads, Andrew Cuomo is under fire for something. The front page of The New York Post called Cuomo sexual misconduct.

Somebody had written that so long ago and finally got to use it. Yeah, there's no way that they were just. Yeah, there's you know, the the Gerald Ford died today. The New York Post has that version for headlines.

Cuomo sexual misconduct. Just wait and just wait. And, you know, he also kind of deserves that.

You remember what he's accused of doing during the election when I think it was Carter was running for for governor against his father, Mario Cuomo. And there were signs that were put up that said vote for Cuomo, not the. Oh, yeah. Andrew Cuomo is accused of the one that perpetrated such a thing. So the Cuomo sexual partner, I guess, you know, probably is that him on several levels?

Is it a portmanteau?

I'm saying we got a portmanteau on our hands here. All right, portmanteau. Despite calls to resign from some members of his own party, Andrew Cuomo insists he did nothing wrong, adding, Can we go back to focusing on the real issues, like finding whoever was undercounting all those dead nursing home residents?

Yeah, it's real.

It's he was too he was too busy working on his one man show that we had to watch every single day.

I just I've been watching the show. Fargo. Have you seen Fargo? I have not yet, but I've heard it's very good. I'm loving Fargo. I'm loving I'm in season three. I got Ewan McGregor. I'm having a blast. It's really well-made TV, but I feel like it has this there's this, like, ethos running through it, which is basically like don't press your luck. Like, hey, does this seem too good to be true?

Is this coincidence going to like are you a little chill effect with Andrew Cuomo? It's like you got this good press. Some of it really was like we had a covid denial list monster in the White House. And just having governors in California and New York being like, this is real. This is serious. There was genuine value to it. I think it was overblown and how Cuomo was treating. But we needed voices like that at the time, but at the same time, like took some of his sort of bullying and kind of authoritarian tendencies and kind of was turned into a from a bug into a feature during this period.

But, hey, like, you know, you have a little fun rapport with your brother. OK, OK. I wouldn't write a book about it. No, I wouldn't sit down and write a book about leadership mid.

You know, you don't you can't imagine like Peyton publishing a book like 1943 called Like How I Defeated the Axis Powers. You got to wait until the war is over just to see how you did, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. Especially not live on air. Jeez. Hey, Chris, bring momma in here. Let's have a family reunion in front of everybody's weird. Little weird.

Speaking of horny toads, news broke this week that Representative Ronnie Jackson bullied his staff, made sexual comments and abused drugs during his tenure as White House physician. And here's what I think about this is America. And we all deserve to have physicians who are loose with that prescription pad but don't harass and bully people. All right. It's not Tylenol plus codeine plus attitude. That's what I want to say about that.

We don't need look, you're right. And you're taking an Ambien and handing Ambien out. No judgment for me. Got to be kind about it. Can't sexual people write those scripts, have a great time, treat people with respect? That's all I'm asking. I think this is the time to tell you that no one's recording and this is an intervention, John. Is it finally happening?

Sydney, Nakheel, it's time to time to let them know. Matt dogface guy logoff. Love it or leave it. I think it's wow.

It's time we let them know this is a surprise. People on the Zoome call, we got to let them know he needs help.

I did not know that this was going to happen today. I am shocked, but I'm prepared to listen.

It's weird because somehow Ronan didn't show up on it. So no one, none of my family is here and none of none of my you know, many of my colleagues I consider friends, but none of my non-work people.

So it's tough. It's tough because everyone's like.

But that's what makes them fun. No, we're worried about you. All right.

Well, see, it gets near attendance nomination to direct. The Office of Management and Budget has been withdrawn after some senators were giant babies over mean tweets. So I think Neron needs to get on Twitter right now and just say, I'm back, bitches. Just own it. Just own it. Like, yeah, I'm here to mix it up. You can be a senator. You can have five followers.

It can be midday, it could be nine p.m. I am ready to rumble.

I mean, really, though, it's just. So you're upset that a Democrat said a mean thing about you publicly.

Should we go through all your tweets and public statements? You all sorts of mean stuff there, senators.

The whole point of Twitter, if it has a point, is to say things about senators in a way that reaches people and maybe them. That is why it exists. If you can't criticize senators on Twitter and hope to rise in the government, what does that say about the kind of speech that is allowed in our politics? You can't be mean. You can't make a senator feel bad or so what are you upset about?

Like, oh, no, this Democratic appointees being partisan.

Do you this is consistent with your problems.

Just bullshit. And finally, the House passed H.R. one, which is the wildly popular voting rights bill that codifies into law reforms for money in politics, the end of partisan gerrymandering and rules to stop vote suppression, all of which will protect our democracy from Republican efforts to destroy it at the state level across the country.

Now, it's all up to Cobb and his team of dream bandits to accept the end of the filibuster to Joe Mansions mind while he's catching some Z's tuckered out after shrinking the size of the covid checks for no reason.

No, Joe, you aren't a little boy playing catch with your dad when he talks about how proud he is that you decided to get rid of the filibuster. You were asleep in your bed and wait, is that little boy getting tired from baseball and taking a nap himself? Are we in a dream within a dream? Are we on the moon looking down on earth? And is that your uncle, Antonio James Manchin, the former state treasurer of West Virginia who died twenty years ago.

Is he in a spacesuit talking about how fragile the world is, how beautiful it is without borders, with a thin layer of shining atmosphere, and how proud of you he is that you support the green New Deal? Is your mind the scene of the crime?

Joe Manchin, Joe Manchin, more like Joe studio apartment is a little man and he's unimpressive. Joe Manchin, more like Joe Nojin he has is a weak job. Can't take a punch. Here's the good. You take a punch, John.

Here's the good news. Not from NERA. Here's the good news. In 2013, a bunch of Democrats went from we'll never end the filibuster to let's do this shit in a matter of months because Republicans have blocked so many judicial nominations bit by bit, Harry.

All right.

We're going to wear them down because either we deliver for people and safeguard democracy while we have power or we'll lose.

We'll deserve it. And Republicans will make it all but impossible for us to have power ever again. And my hope is that that is something we can help Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and a bunch of other senators hiding behind them who also are not for removing the filibuster right now, that we can kind of work them and get them to the place where we can pass H.R. one and get some of that shit done. It's possible. It's possible. You have to believe it's possible.

The Democrats are dummies. They'll like rules, but it's not Democrats right now. It's like six Democrats, which is far better than it was in the past. Right. Like like Amy Klobuchar came out for ending the filibuster. Right. She's an institutionalist. Like Chris Coons opened the door.

We have a budget like this conversation is happening and moving really, really fast. So we are about to pass this big covid bill. Right. Which, again, like with moderates all the way to the left. And I'm hopeful that in the next couple of months, we can keep hammering away on this issue to make sure every Senate Democrats gets on board with because he, like Manchin, is going to say, I will never abolish the filibuster, I will never abolish filibuster.

Fine. We will never abolish the filibuster either. We will do some other reform that doesn't abolish the filibuster but still allows us to govern. We're moving the Overton Window on the filibuster so that when we don't abolish it, the compromise position is putting us in a place to still pass voting reforms, pass a minimum wage increase, pass immigration reform, pass statehood for DC a.

Offer statehood to Puerto Rico and Puerto Rico, decide if they want statehood, like we're going to we're trying to put ourselves in a position where we can get that done with some kind of reform to the Senate. And I am hopeful about it. I remain hopeful.

Filibuster, I mean, the name alone. What kind of Mary Poppins bullshit is this?

Yeah, Horton hears a filibuster, you know what I mean?

Hari Kondabolu, thank you so much for being here.

Of course. Always so good to see you.

It was good to see you, too. And everybody check out the podcast, Politically Reactive.

It's fantastic. And everybody should listen. You were on it. I was on it. We had a great time. We had a great time. Who else was on it?

Nikki Giovanni. We got Nikki Giovanni in. All right. Great. Good for you guys. OK. I think this is over. Yeah, it's done. We're done.

When we come back and when we come back, I'm an audition for Jeopardy!

It's happening. Don't go anywhere. There's more of love it or leave it coming up.

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No, I threw them out. I never even I never even carried the receipts.

Ever wonder how much you spend on a certain category at tax time? No, no, I don't want to know sometimes.

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I remember when you did that, it was alos a nadir. I think my brother still tells that story. I think you did that. When your did you tell the story about not giving me the Wi-Fi password is out there telling stories about my private life, what I to him would give me fucking wi fi you one time. The first day I didn't didn't give me the Wi-Fi password, never forgot it, never forgot Ambien.

Molly refused you the wife.

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As we all know, Alex Trebek is no longer the host of Jeopardy because he was cancelled by God. That's right.

Alex Trebek, another victim of cancer culture one.

Oh, it's tough.

But since his passing, the show has been auditioning new host of Jeopardy each week to see if anyone sticks.

And this got us thinking at this point, look, I have game show host experience, OK? All right. Not as much as Drew Carey. All right. And not as much as that person who points in laughs at Travis in his nightmares while he struggles to get a six foot sub. Ellen DeGeneres.

And since I know they'll never ask me because I'm gay, I decided to tape my own audition this week in a game we're calling Jeopardy!

Or in the form of a question, what is Andrew Cuomo? Is career currently in here to play the game? We have two contestants. We have Ian. Hi, Ian. Hi, how are you? Welcome to this edition of, I'm sure a show we're not allowed to call Jeopardy for trademark reasons.

And we have Jen. Hi, Jen there.

So here's how the game works. We have two categories of questions. Andrew Cuomo before 2020, Andrew Cuomo after 2020. There are 100, 200, 300, 500 point questions. You will choose your category and amount. I'll read the answer. Then you'll both have to guess in the form of a question. I'll flip a coin. I flipped it. Jenn, you start by choosing your category and your number.

OK, I'll do after 2020 and. In February, a former aide alleged Cuomo pressure her to play this game aboard a flight in 2017. No one who buys a buzz from me in all could be bad, what is high, the salami.

That is incorrect, Jen, last chance, but what is in the bottle?

I know the correct answer. What is strip poker? Plus what is strip poker?

Ian, over to you to choose a question before twenty twenty one hundred.

On his first day in office, Cuomo reinstated a rule forbidding governors of New York from receiving donations from their own appointees. But a later investigation found this governor had still collected 890000 from people he appointed as Jen.

Who is Cuomo? You got it. You got it. Great job sitting right there. Next question, Jen.

I'll also do before and 200.

In 2014, this governor established the Moreland Commission to expose government corruption, but disbanded it after it began looking into his own conduct Buzz.

And who is Andrew Cuomo? You got it. You got it.

Now, this is the part of Jeffrey, very important part of Jeopardy. This is when the host really shines. It's time for me to ask you both a little something about yourself. Are you ready? Here we go. I'll start with Ian. Ian, it says here you love skateboarding. Tell us about it.

Oh, well, as a prodigy of Tony Park back in the day, you know, PlayStation one got six soundtrack. I mean, of course, why wouldn't I?

So other skaters that were there, he and Ian, I want to thank you so much for just going with that. He's done nothing over to you, Jen.

It says here that it says here, I understand you're quite the opera lover.

Yeah, I was an opera fan club in college and we'd get together on Friday nights and get drunk and watch opera.

I want you to know something, both of you. Thank you. My assumption was that you would both look at me like, what are you talking about? But instead you did some light improv. All right. And I appreciate that. Back to the game. Who got the last question right? That would be me. Yeah. Yeah, I knew that. Fuck it.

We're going to edit this down for the moment when we send it in, when we send it in to Alex Trebek ghost, you just write when you want to audition for Jeopardy! Right now, you just you recorded on a DVD and then you write Alex Trebek Ghost and you can drop it in any mailbox. All right. European after twenty twenty five hundred do for three hundred.

In February, a Cuomo aide said the governor's administration deliberately delayed releasing data on covid-19 deaths in nursing homes because it might have resulted in an investigation by this agency.

What is the committee of New York?

What is the committee of New York?

No, that's nonsense. I said help. Oh, no, that's incorrect. Jen, over to you.

Above what is the Southern District of New York.

I know both of you wrong. It is the Department of Justice, the Department of Justice. And you still have the conch. I don't think they call it that, but whatever.

After twenty twenty two hundred in March of twenty twenty, Cuomo announced New York State would be bottling this item using prison labor that pays inmates sixty five cents an hour bus.

What is hand sanitizer.

You got it. You got it. I'm learning that I would never try for actual jeopardy. No, your. Hey, Jen, listen, here's the thing. All right? Here's the thing about Jeopardy. It's in here. It's about confidence. All right? I don't you know, you're doing great.

I think in last question, after Hurricane Sandy Cuomo used forty million dollars of federal disaster relief funds on national TV ads that tried to lure businesses to the state with this slogan, but what is come to New York so close, so close in what is I love New York.

I know it was what is New New York? Let's do one final question. In 2011, Andrew Cuomo secretly encouraged four New York State Democrats to form an alliance that would allow this party to retain control of the state Senate despite a Democratic majority in the chamber.

But in what are the Republicans?

You got it. You got it. And here now, it is time for a final scores. Wow. It was so gentle. Don't you know? It was very close. All right, Jenn, in second place, runner up, if you will, with minus 1000. Today's winner is Ian with minus seven hundred.

I'm a shooting star, so he just did. So you did so well, both of you. And we didn't think to come up with a final jeopardy, so. Ian, you won the game. Sweet, thank you so much. And Jen, you know what? You've also won the game because on this edition of Jeopardy! There are no losers. Everybody gets the home game. Everybody gets the home game. That was very fun. Thank you both for doing this.

Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, this is great.

I didn't go to the April show in Atlanta, so this was a good. Oh, so close. So close. So close, I think.

Right when the pandemic started, I had tickets to see in Baltimore. So this is good.

That is such a bummer. I am so ready to go back out and do tour shows and eat local foods. That's all I want to do.

When we come back, I talked to Ezra Klein.

Don't go anywhere. Love it or leave it. And there's more on the way.

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He is a New York Times opinion writer and author of the book Why We're Polarized. Ezra Klein, welcome. Glad to be here. So I was very excited to talk to you. I'm trying to institute a new policy where I read the books before the conversations implemented. I would say not faithfully. First of all, I really recommend everybody listening that they read the book. I feel there's your book, there's Adam Gentlemens book Killswitch about the Senate. There's Heather McGee's book that some of us and I feel like there's almost like a kind of unified field theory of how America is broken, who broke it and how we can fix it.

And your book is part of that. So I want to start just sort of stepping back.

What is your definition of polarized when you say we're polarized? Who is polarized? From what? What does it mean?

Thank you for asking that. That's super important. So polarization polarized to just means clustered around two polls. That is it, right? It's like it's a it's a concept from bagginess.

And so what I say, we're polarized.

I do not mean we're disagreeing or disagreeable. I don't mean people are pissed off.

I just mean that our and political scientists mean and whoever is using this term correctly just means that our disagreements or some important feature, our policy opinions, our attitudes are structured around like two groups.

And let me explain quickly what is the alternative to that?

So for a long time in American history, we had these very, very broad political parties that had the Democratic Party had really conservative Southern racists in it, and it had, you know, liberal northern Democrats in it.

And this was not the period of time in America.

We didn't have very sharp disagreements. I mean, National Guardsmen were shooting student protesters in the streets. We had riots. We had the civil rights movement. We had like the Vietnam anti-war movement. There was a huge amount going on. But because the disagreements weren't structured by parties, we would all say they were polarized. We were just disagreeing with each other. Now, what's going on is that our disagreements? Are really well supported by our parties, Republicans and Democrats are ideologically different, they're really demographically different, they're religiously different.

And as each one of these like new dimensions of difference, a lines around a party, we become more and more polarized.

One aspect of this that I found a fascinating way into this moment in politics is the nationalization of our identity. And I and I when I was reading it, I was saying, oh, that applies to me. Right. And the way that I thought about it is like I think, why am I an American? Well, what does it mean to me to be an American? It has to do with values like what is New York mean to me?

It's about restaurants, right? Like there's this that that we associate values with the country and geography, beautiful mountains with where we're from. Can you talk a little bit about how we've moved away from caring about our states? Our communities are sort of local governance.

Yeah, I love that you picked up on. This is one of my favorite pieces of the book. So this is coming from a book by I believe it's one of their like 100 political scientist named or Dave Hopkins. And so it's by a dad or Dave Hopkins, a book called These Increasingly United States.

And he shows that when you ask people to explain what underlies their different geographic identities so their their identity is American, as you say, it'll be values like what does it mean to be American? Why are you proud to be an American?

Freedom, liberty, you know, prosperity, whatever it is.

Why are you proud to be a Californian or a San Franciscan or as you know, somebody from Missouri, people begin turning to geographic features. I love the coastline. I like the mountains. I like the plains. I like the local landmark. I like the sports team.

And one of the things he's proving in that book across a huge range of different experiments and research, is it over a long period of time, we used to have much stronger state and local identities. And the reason this is actually important to the polarization story is the American system of government is set up under the idea that our primary attachments are going to be to our local spaces. I think it's Madison who says that the local identity will always and everywhere be the primary identity and the entire system is built like that.

So we have you know, we elect members of Congress who districts the Senate balances different states against each other, which makes sense if you think the key thing you're doing is balancing the powers of big and small states.

But now our primary political identities are nationalized political parties. And the way I always say it is. Yes, imagine that there was a vote tomorrow, as there should be to make D.C. a state.

Will Vermont and Wyoming vote together? Because D.C. is going to be a small state and is going to add to the small state caucus and Texas and New York both together because like they want big states to retain their power? Or will New York and Vermont vote together because there's a liberal blue states and Texas and Wyoming will vote together because they're conservative red ones. And like, obviously, you know what the answer is? So in a million different ways, there was a theory of how American government would work, which is that first and foremost, we would have representatives representing our particularistic geographic interests and that would reduce party polarization and other kinds of factionalism.

But instead, we don't. And over time, we've done everything we possibly can to nationalize politics from the way media has evolved all the way down to getting rid of earmarks, which now may be coming back under the Democrats. But that was just one more way of weakening the local power politics. So everything becomes headline red blue coalition as opposed to this, you know, issue of what your city needs.

So do you see something different playing out right now on this question of party identity over local identity, around covid relief? Obviously, we just had a vote where every single Republican in the House voted against covid relief. Yet they did so in opposition to a lot of local Republican officials, a lot of state officials, a lot of local officials who want this money, who say we need the state and local money. It's not a blue state bailout. We need the money.

So I'd like to hear what you think on this, because I think what the Biden administration is doing here is really interesting.

So what they're saying is that unity is defined as Republicans and Democrats in polling supporting the bill, not Republicans in Congress voting for the bill.

And weirdly, that actually is a way of understanding politics and less polarizing way there is in among political scientists when people say this is huge, endless debate about what they call mass polarization versus elite polarization, how polarized are just voters in terms of what they believe and how they feel versus how polarized are the people in Congress, people in the media, etc.? And you can go a lot of ways with debate, but the simple finding is like elites are way more polarized and the public, particularly on policy of the public, is actually open to a lot of different approaches on policy.

And the thing they do is trust their leaders to tell them what is the right approach. But, you know, Donald Trump can walk out. You know, Paul Ryan was the standard by the Republican Party a couple of years ago. And one day Donald Trump walks out. It's like, actually, we should do two thousand dollar checks in 2006, become a lot more popular among Republicans. There's a lot of movement that is possible among among the mass public in terms of what policies would make sense.

So then the question becomes, who are you trying to make a deal with?

And the Biden administration is basically the way they're trying to frame this is that they are trying to make a deal with what? Republicans want not with what Republican national politicians want and true or not true, like you can sort of argue that almost like semiotics of this, but it's a I think, a more correct way of thinking about the question. What of my like endless frustrations with Washington is centrism is defined as choosing whatever is in the middle of the Senate.

Right. As opposed to what is in the middle of public opinion as opposed to what it is people want. So you endlessly have these like quote unquote, moderates or centrists who have unbelievably unpopular opinions, who are, in fact, much more radical than people who are considered more ideological actors in politics, who have actually come up with popular positions.

And that's, I think, been a very perverting thing on the on the system.

I just saw a report yesterday that every morning, every single morning, Joe Manchin has a staffer text him the number of the national debt that day.

And I think that's supposed to be some centrist aesthetic. That is not how like anybody in this country thinks about politics or their lives.

It's an incredibly extreme and unusual way to think about the national debt, about American politics. Annie Lowrey, my partner, was tweeted about this. She's like, maybe somebody could text him the daily child poverty rate and debt servicing costs. Right. You can imagine other things here, but it's really important not to confuse centrism or political opinion with what members of Congress think or want because they're playing a totally different game with totally weird incentives and like they're beholden to totally different folks.

But those two things are conflated all the time.

Yeah, I mean, I would say that, like, to me, unity becomes a kind of yes. It's like semantics. What is unity? You know, the simple definition of joked about before is argue from a shared set of facts. Treat people with whom you disagree respectfully. Don't burn the Capitol down. Seems like a pretty good set of rules. But what I appreciate about this definition of unity is it doesn't give the power to create it to your opponents.

If bipartisanship is defined as bills passed by the majority in the minority, together you are giving control over unity to people who have a vested interest in not providing you a unity talking point when you run for re-election. So I think that defangs one of their tools, which is to say if you don't find a way to get me involved, this is partisan forever. It's finding a new definition of that, which I think is very good.

Yeah, I have this endless debate with people. I just did an episode of the argument where we're debating the filibuster. You know, that I'm like a filibusters, my endless bugaboo to things I've been thinking a lot about related to that.

Or one, this fetishization of bipartisanship is very peculiarly American.

Like if you follow Canadian politics or British politics or German politics, there isn't this idea that legislation is only credible if it has been passed with the governing party and also the opposition party.

The job of the opposition parties is understood as opposing. And the reason it could be understood that way is it to be in power means you have a governing majority. So you don't need the opposition party. The opposition party criticises you and tries to convince the public they're right and the public judges based on results and these arguments. So that's one thing. This idea of bipartisanship is pretty distinctively American and it comes out of our political institutions, which require very high levels of consensus or at least compromise to get anything done.

We have a lot of veto points, supermajority requirements, etc. But the other thing that gets to this is there is this horrible fear of what I've come to call ricochet legislating, and not only by bad faith actors.

I was just on the I was on a TV show with Jon Tester, the Democratic senator from Montana, and I was ranting about the filibuster. And he said, well, you know, the thing would be really bad for the country is if, you know, Democrats do one thing and the Republicans come in and undo it.

And I have exactly the opposite view. For one thing, if Democrats do something the public hates and they elect Republicans to undo it, then Republicans should be able to undo it.

But conversely, if you can't actually pass things in the first place, then the public can't really decide they like what you did and keep you in power to do more of it or fix it or tweak it.

And so we have in this country, I think, a deeper fear of the costs and consequences of getting things done than up, not getting things done. There is a deep preference for the problems of inaction to the problems of action. And I just think that we're wrong about that. I think the problems of inaction at this point are worse than the problems of action. Songza action is tied to like a reasonable set of small democratic accountability mechanisms.

Yeah, there does seem to be a I'd say two things about that. One, it does seem that there is a kind of fear of small D democracy, as in if we do these things, we cannot rely on the political system to protect them from these kind of vicissitudes. The other piece of this, which I find striking, is we actually now because of the way Congress has basically failed to work as an institution, we do know how that ricochet we have it with executive actions.

We have it with you now, the Iran deal, we have it with the Paris climate accord.

We have it with a host of environmental regulations. We have it dreamer's our government, dreamer's. So we have we do have that ricochet. And by the way. It is very bad to be governed by ricocheting executive orders that you can't rely on, like people's lives hang in the balance.

This is such an important point. But one thing about the ricochet on executive orders is it's a lot harder to ricochet in Congress.

Executive orders are just like one guy with a pen, basically, whereas I don't believe there is any chance at all that if the DREAM Act, which had 59 votes and the Obama, I just want to know that 59 it was a big majority for the DREAM Act.

If that had passed, I don't think there's any chance Republicans would have actually legislatively repealed it.

Under Trump, dreamers were popular even among Republicans. Trump even talked as if he supported Dreamers and wanted to use them as part of a compromise.

And similarly, you know, you get this question from from Democrats on things like Obamacare. Imagine if Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, had been passed without a filibuster in the first place. So it actually had been a better bill with a public option. Better subsidies, better tax structure, I think. And they could have revisited it a number of times along the way.

But so, you know, you have a possibly better Obamacare to start. But but even putting that aside, then Republicans come in and let's imagine that, like John McCain's thumb had gone the other way and they had actually repeal the Affordable Care Act.

It is my view that Americans are not such crap protectors of their own interests.

They wouldn't have noticed 15 or 20 million people losing health insurance. That had nothing to say about it.

One of the things that the way we run the system right now ends up weirdly protecting everybody from is the consequences of their own actions and beliefs.

I don't think Republicans would have in the end repealed Obamacare, but if they did, I think they would have paid for it because I think health insurance is actually important to people. And taking away things that people have and care about and rely on is really bad politics. And when you practice really bad politics, there are consequences from it. The reason the filibuster, which has been around for a very long time in American politics and been maligned in American politics for a very long time is so important right now is it has become a tool of polarized parties, not have upset individuals or even of blocs.

So for a long time, the filibuster is used by individuals. Then it's used by the Dixiecrats as a Southern bloc to stop civil rights and anti lynching laws. It's a terrible, terrible history for that particular bit of senatorial obstruction.

But then is a party's polarized and so very able to act together in a consistent, unified way. The filibuster becomes a tool of parties.

They're trying to make the other party fail at governance. And the filibuster is a way they can. And creating a system where you have, Zero-Sum, electoral incentives and then the party that benefits from the other party failing can make the other party fail is just a really weird way to to run anything.

I was thinking about American exceptionalism in this specific way. It is a strange thing when you hear people that claim to believe in American exceptionalism, talk about it as American exceptionalism. They say, I believe in American exceptionalism. Wait a second. You just believe America is the best people outside of that describe it as American exceptionalism. But you don't actually believe in an ideology of that exceptionalism being not fact based. You believe it's fact based. That's what it would mean to believe America is the best.

And when I was thinking about polarization, I found myself thinking like, you know, talking about Obamacare. Removing the public option made it worse. You wanted a more left wing solution. You want the moderates in the Democratic Party to go along with basically more left wing politics. You want to be a Democratic Party that is fighting harder, that is using their power more effectively. You in some sense want a more polarized Democratic Party, a more active, kind of ideologically consistent Democratic Party.

And what I found myself thinking as I read the book is it's an incredible explanation of what led to this moment, but that the framing makes it around polarization when part of me thinks actually the problem here. Yeah, nationalization of news is a problem. Silos of information are a problem. These are all problems. But actually what we're sort of circling even this filibuster is a problem. But really the issue is we have a radicalized group of Republicans. A half of the polarization story is the crisis.

And everything else is kind of ancillary to it that really like ultimately what you want is a polarized country in which Democrats have one.

Well, yes or no. So I there is a there's a bunch of there's a lot. So, one, I do just want to note that I don't think the public option going back to our talk about centrism, it had 72 percent public support. Not having the public option did not make the bill more moderate. It made it more extreme in a way, again, using sort of the public actually as a barometer as opposed to like weird Washington journalism schools.

So I do just want to note that I don't think all this stuff is polarizing. In fact, I think a lot of things would be less polarizing under under the system, as I imagine it.

That said, the radicalization of the Republican Party is a distinctive and like superimportant phenomenon. Here you can have responsibly polarized parties, which simply means like the parties disagree and you can have irresponsibly polarized parties, which is to say the parties disagree.

And what they disagree about is whether or not to burn down the Capitol and having an irresponsibly polarized party.

Right. A radicalized Republican Party like that. So there's a a bunch of the book about this in particular, like the penultimate chapter, I think it is very, very hard to pin down causally what has happened to the Republican Party in every respect.

But but I would say there are two things here that are really important. One is that the Republican Party, part of the way the parties have polarized is by demography. I talk about this a lot in the book. The Republican Party has become very white in the way that the party, the Democratic Party has become very diverse. It has become very Christian or at least remain very Christian, whereas the Democratic parties become much more secularized. The single largest religious group in the Democratic Party is people without any religious affiliation at all.

But the Democratic Party is a lot of different religious groups in it, and it's become very conservative, the Republican Party. And so one of the things happening is Republican Party feels itself under very profound demographic threat.

The country is becoming less white, so that coalition is losing power and it's becoming less Christian. And so that coalition is losing power. And those are two coalitions, white Christians, that have historically had unquestioned control over American politics. We always talk about identity politics is something that, you know, black Americans have or, you know, indigenous Americans have. But actually, like majority groups have very powerful identity politics. And part of the primal scream on the Republican side is the weakening of the dominance of that form of identity politics.

So that's important.

But then finally, and this goes again to the story of polarization in institutions colliding with each other, the Republican Party could not survive in the way it currently operates.

If it was exposed to actual small democracy, it would be wiped out.

So no party in American history has lost the popular vote in seven of eight presidential elections. That is a hugely bad losing record. If you look in the Senate, the 50 Democrats represent 41 million more people than the 50 Republicans. And the difference is in the at the House over not as wide, but they are why there is still Republican bias in the House.

And something I keep telling people is that one of the issues right now is that the Republican Party does not have to deal with the full consequences of its actions.

If it did, say, in 2016, the Republican Party would have nominated Donald Trump, Donald Trump would have gotten three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump would have lost the election, by the way, as would Senate Republicans and Republicans would have been furious that they lost a winnable election.

And so the Trump faction in the Republican Party, rather than taking over the entire Republican Party, would have been discredited and potentially purged inside the Republican Party.

When you don't force parties to deal with the consequences their actions actually have on public opinion, they can spin off into really weird and radicalized directions. The Republican Party has become based on a vision of minority rule, and everything it is doing is trying to entrench minority rule, is trying to make it harder for majorities, public voting majorities to express themselves.

I mean, Donald Trump in the CPAC speech, Greg Sargent had a good piece on this in The Washington Post, who is very explicitly saying the whole thing we need to do in American politics right now is make it harder to vote or otherwise Republicans won't win in the future.

So one of the reasons actually focus on a lot of these institutional dynamics is that if you can't do anything about the filibuster, you can't pass things like the for the People Act DC statehood, offering statehood to Puerto Rico, etc. That would reduce the anti-democratic dimensions of the system.

Do you feel like we're making enough of an argument, not around H.R. one, not around Republican intransigence, but about the functioning of the Senate itself that like cinema mansion, you care about this body. If you want the Senate to be powerful, you have to abolish the filibuster.

I think that argument is being made aggressively and content.

Let me let me give you the optimistic version of this in the pessimistic version of this exciting you know, how long I've been arguing about the filibuster in the Obama era.

This was a quirky, idiosyncratic feature of my politics that, as far as I could tell, was shared by like three members of the U.S. Senate.

And now, you know, however many years later, it is the majority position of most Democratic senators with like three or four or five holdouts.

I mean, we don't know the exact number of holdouts right now, but but we I think it's pretty reasonable to say that if, you know, Democrats had 55 seats in the Senate, it's a pretty good shot. The filibuster would be gone. I think a lot of people believe that, and I do, too.

And so this conversation has accelerated in a profound way. The fact that Democrats made H.R. one before the People Act the first bill and House business in twenty eighteen and then Senate Democrats did the same with S-1 in 2020. That's a very big deal.

So on the one hand, this has moved extraordinarily rapidly. It's an extraordinary victory for this argument that the Senate is broken and Adam Johnson's killswitch is part of this and there's a lot more discussion about it. I mean, you guys at Crooked have been banging the drum. It's a whole different discourse than it was 10 years ago.

But the issue is that as Democrats get further and further behind the eight ball in the Senate, if they don't take the rare opportunity, they have to actually utilize her power and. Underlying rules are not going to have another option, so on the one hand, I want to say to you, we're probably still like five or six years away from this being like a unanimous view among the among Democratic senators.

But there may not be five or six years. Right. So Democrats after Donald Trump just did a horrible job and got wiped out in 2018 and then, like, wiped out in 2022, they barely got 50 seats there.

Right.

Like, they they barely got a Senate, a working Senate majority. And that's only with Kamala Harris. Odds are in 2022, they're going to lose seats. Right? That's both how the map looks and partisan seats in midterms.

It's going to be hard for them to build power from here. Not impossible, but very hard for them. So by the time, you know, the last five get to the right answer on this, it may be another 12 years before you can do anything on that. And that means that's another 12 years in which America will not have done nearly enough on climate change, another 12 years in which we will not have done more to enshrine the right to vote, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

So I am stunned by how much traction this argument has gotten, and I am unbelievably encouraged by that. But the problem is the interaction between like the map and the timing and the argument. You kind of need to do things when you have the power to do them, because I think Democrats are likely given, you know, in a world where you were we should, I think, assume the Senate has something between a four to seven point Republican advantage.

Democrats just naturally are not going to control the Senate very often and they're not going to control the Senate very often. They're not going to have many opportunities to act on this. So I worry that they're missing an opportunity that's not going to come around for for some time. But in terms of how much this new idea of the Senate has taken hold and this idea that the Senate is broken has taken hold. I am stunned by that. I don't I've rarely seen an argument get this much elite acceptance this rapidly.

It does feel as though we have this last period of time where we have enough democracy to protect democracy. We have this last chance to do it. You know, you talk about sort of steps people can take as individuals. What should people be doing?

Obviously, everyone listening to this is going to do whatever they can to put pressure on Congress to pass H.R. one. They I don't know how many people here in West Virginia, you have a big and Arizona, you have a lot of work to do.

But like what can people be doing to kind of address these underlying conditions that made our politics so broken?

I mean, I think this is this is really hard. So obviously people can, you know, vote for good candidates and can call their senator and can call their member of Congress.

Everybody needs to pay attention to political structure, not just political bills. Like this is a really important thing. A litmus test for whether or not somebody is progressive, for instance, has to be that they want to change structures, not just pass good bills.

And so being clear eyed about what the blockages in politics are is really important because then you don't get into issues like the filibuster is blocking something and you keep yelling at Joe Biden for not leaving hard enough. Like when you misplace blame, you get into a lot of trouble.

I don't have an answer for how everybody listening to this show can fix politics.

But one thing I would say is that in general, going back to something we talked about at the beginning here, one thing that would make a lot of politics healthier is if people did engage himself's locally.

Yeah. And that's not going to change a filibuster in the short term. But one thing that really does matter is it politics like redevelops some of these like local identities. It redevelops. Some of these local pols and people learn how to wield power and political power locally. And there are a lot of people living in places that are not highly democratic listening to this show. And like they have particular possibilities to to sort of just change the map.

And that's not going to come from like elite national politics, like like beaming messages in people who are otherwise watching. Fox News is going to come through local organizing. It's going to come through people running for school board and running for mayor. I am just like an endless proponent of people not being to nationalize, of getting involved where they are. I say in the book that I grew up in Southern California and we got the, you know, L.A. Times and I like cared about local politics.

I'm like, what I want to do with my life is be involved in California politics. And I think now if I were growing up, I was that same kid with the same level of political involvement I'd be listening to to love it or leave it and positive America and, you know, reading Vox and so on. And my California political identity would be a lot smaller and my nationalized political identity would be a lot bigger.

So it is great. Like if you're listening to this show, I hope you listen to my podcast. Yes. Or Clean show.

But if you're not involved and reading like local political news, if you don't know who your state representative is, your state senator, like people doing that and mass is actually an achievable thing that would make not just like national politics healthier, but often local politics healthier, too. And over time, national politics ends up reflecting local politics. You know, a lot of these folks in Congress, like they came from somewhere and they came out of organizing. That happened somewhere.

And so, like being part of that organizing is is important. Like don't just engage yourself and your your, like, mental energy in like the headline collisions in Congress. I actually know what are the fights around you and try to have an effect on those because you can have. A much bigger effect on them. Yeah, that's what I was hoping you would sort of talk about, because I did I found that striking this idea of if we look back on this period and we laugh about how worried we were, it will be because we actually had victories in smaller states, rural places, that we overcame the anti-democratic qualities in our system, not just by reforming it internally, but by winning electorally in the places we'd have to win to build a durable coalition.

And my hope is the combination of this conversation that we're having nationally around the Senate, around the kind of anti-democratic forces in our politics and covid, which I think has had people look to their local leaders and their functioning of their local government in a way that I don't think they have maybe in their lifetimes.

Hopefully one thing that can come out of that is people start paying attention locally where their politics is actually created. Ezra, thank you so much for being here. The book is Why We're Polarized. And the new podcast is The Ezra Klein Show.

Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. When we come back, I quiz some listeners on so-called gender reveal parties gone bad.

Don't go anywhere. There's more. Love it or leave it coming up.

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Love it. And we're back in 2020, we saw two causes of death increasing in frequency. Gender reveal parties and banana bread fires. I don't remember anything else, but even the gender reveal parties that don't end in fatalities are not without issue. They're not even really gender reveal parties at all.

Their sex, reveal parties or gender reveal parties when what we really should do is have gender reveal parties later in life, like just a really fun party. We all get to have like maybe in our 20s when we basically say I'm good with these pronouns for a while and depending on how adventurous you are, we have a bar, a white station and the drug corner with the friend group that doesn't have kids but does have molly and cocaine. Now, gender reveal parties are toxic and deadly and they've gotten so out of hand that there are now dozens of horror stories involving so much mayhem.

We don't think you'll be able to tell whether it happened at a gender reveal party or in an action movie in a game we're calling camera real or gender reveal here to play the game, we have Jamie and her sister Mandy has popped into frame to assist.

Hi. Hi.

Hi. Hi, Jamie. Hi, Mandy. They're in Florida and they're near my parents. That's what we've established in the small talk that took place before we began. So are you familiar with gender reveal parties? Yes. Have people in your family, the gender of your parties? No, no. Interesting said that very emphatically.

Look, I understand. I feel like it's gotten out of hand. I think, you know, anyway, well, here's how it's going to work. I'm going to read about some mishap and you have to tell us if this happened at a so-called gender reveal party or an action movie, if it's a gender reveal party, say gender reveal, it's an action movie, say action movie. OK, Jamie, are you ready? Yes. Mandy, are you ready?

Yes. All right.

A pyrotechnic device ignited a fire that burned over 22000 acres, destroying ten structures and killing a firefighter.

Well, that was Travis's gender reveal party. That was. Got it. Wow. Two points, because it wasn't just a gender reveal party. It was Travis's Travis that he's kicked them off to take them off.

The sex question. Ignore that voice.

A box of explosives was shot with a rifle causing an explosion that was felt over two miles away.

Gender reveal party. You got it. Brightly colored gas seeped out of an inflatable parade float choking onlookers gender reveal party action movie Batman nineteen eighty nine one hundred percent.

Before the two of you were born, a box of explosives detonated on a porch, leveling an entire house. Thankfully, no one was seriously injured.

That's a gender reveal party action movie Furious seven.

OK, a car was transformed into a giant smoke bomb, but the plan went off the rails when it came to a stop and burst into flames. Action movie. Gender reveal party.

OK, man hit a woman in the face with a baseball bat.

Gender reveal party. Correct.

A baseball struck a grandpa in the face action movie gender reveal shrapnel from a pipe bomb killed a grandma action gender.

A man shot a giant tank of propane with a rifle, causing an explosion that filled the sky with smoke.

You say action movie action movie The Bourne Identity. A prop plane stalled in midair, flipped over, then crashed. But both passengers survived with only minor injuries.

Gender reveal you got it.

A home invasion turned into a mass shooting in which eight were injured and one was killed. Action movies tend to reveal a long rolled out of a basement fireplace burning down a house with three kids inside. No charges were filed.

Action movie is Manchester by the Sea. It's Manchester by the Sea. It's awful. I never saw Manchester by the sea.

And it did look sad. And now I see why I don't want to watch Manchester by the Sea.

I didn't want to watch it when I saw the, you know, the Moody poster. And now that I've seen this description, I'm not interested in it.

Yeah, I mean, I'm glad it didn't happen. A gender reveal. So that's a good point. It's a very good point, Jamie.

And oversized taxidermy polar bear was knocked over killing somebody.

Action movie. Yeah, that's roadhouse. A brawl broke out between the customers and the staff at a casual dining restaurant chain action movie.

You feel like it could be called gender. Gender reveal probably could be both your eyes. I see what you're saying to not specific enough. You're saying we could find an action movie without having a man tried to kick a football, but he slipped and fractured his ankle.

Gender reveal. You got it. A bus was rigged so it would explode if its speed dropped below 50 miles per hour.

At that speed, an air cannon malfunctioned, striking a man in the. Testicles, gender reveal. And finally, a housekeeper's breasts were accidentally set on fire, gender feel like, OK, well, movie. It was Mrs. Doubtfire like Jamie.

Mandy, you've won the game. Great job. Very exciting. So nice to see you.

Thank you so much. When we come back, we'll end on a high note.

Don't go anywhere. Love it or leave it. And there's more on the way.

And we're back because we all need it this week. Here it is, the Heino.

Hello it Sebastiani. I'm calling from San Diego, California, for they just want to say it's awesome that there's a great gay voice in politics like you. Thanks for that. And also, I have got my causing obvious good use and started just hours ago. Mutual aid business here. We deliver fresh bread to your door and all of your money goes to the local food bank. So we just had our first weekend and we raised five hundred and eleven dollars, which is going to provide three hundred and twenty meals.

So I'm really excited and thanks for everything you're doing.

Like, hi, what it is they're calling from Minneapolis. I know this week is actually two things. One, I'm able to get my first dose of education, which feels amazing and I cannot wait and help available to everybody. And my second Heinl is I was accepted to graduate school on the same day as kind of a big deal. So I am going to get my master's in social work and I really hope to work with kids and families in schools.

So that is why I don't think so much to you and the whole cricket team for everything you do say, hey, they're all of it.

This is Alicia. I'm calling because my high note of the week is actually your interview with Friendly with her brought a really big smile on my face. I was out shopping while I was listening and tackling the entire time. It's nice to hear someone be revered for being unabashed for themselves as someone who struggles about chronically inspiring. So before you do, thanks for being you and have a great day.

I love it. This is my Miranda calling from Mendocino County in Northern California. And my high note is today my 17 year old son and I went and picked up a decree from the court house, changing legally his name and his gender to match who he really is. This also happens to be the day when there's a lot of really horrific A.N. stuff going on around the nation. And I'm so, so grateful for all of the work and everybody and everything over all the years that made it possible for this to happen for me and my family today.

Thanks.

Thanks to everybody who called in. If you want to leave us a message about something that gave you hope, you can call us at three two three five two one nine four five five. Thank you, Hari Kondabolu, Ezra Klein and everybody who called in. And they're only six hundred and twelve days until the 2022 midterm election. So that's what I look forward to.

Everybody, thanks for listening. Have a great weekend.

Love it or leave it is a crooked media production, it is written and produced by me, Jon Lovett, Lee Eisenberg, our head writer, and the person whose gender reveal party started the fire, Travis Helwig, Jocelyn Koffman, Polygonal and Peter Miller are the writers are assistant producer is Sidney Rapp. Rafil Lance is our editor and Kyle Segment is our sound engineer. Our theme song is written and performed by Shirker, thanks to our designers Jesse McClain and Jamie Skil for creating and running all of our visuals, which you can't see because this is a podcast.

And to our digital producers, Naar Melkonian and Milo Kim for filming and editing video each week so you can.