We are back on normally, So what normally cakes for when the news gets here.

HI ain't marry Katherineham.

I'm Carol Markowitz.

I'm sorry I forgot to announce who I am.

All y'all know they know I had had a big workout this morning.

I might have might have lost part of my brain.

Also, we had a haircutting incident at the house this weekend.

Well incident that doesn't sound good.

The four year old got a hold of scissors and I was informed of it while on a trip to New York on the train.

On the way back, like, how God is it?

How bad is it?

I got one of those calls where my husband was like, everyone's fine, everything's okay.

I'll let you know, and he told me it was not bad, And I thought, not bad on a dad's scale, oddler scale, like And I returned home and indeed was not bad.

She had gone after the ends, okay, and she took off about four inches of one of her pools.

But she had very long hair, so it was like, it's not a big deal.

It needed a trim anyway, So I just gave her a chop yesterday and now she has a stylish new look.

I love it.

I know sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands when you think you need haircut.

I think she was sending me a message.

She was like, I'm done with this, mom, so take me fair.

We get that, mom.

Yeah, well that sounds like an exciting weekend.

I am glad to be back into it with you.

Unfortunately, we are back to talking about Jeffrey Epstein.

Yeah, we are.

I hate talking about Jeffrey Epstein.

You know, Okay, Donald Trump is under political pressure, so he said that the House should release all evidence on Jeffrey Epstein.

He's been kind of cornered into doing this.

I, however, am not on journey political pressure, so I can say I hate this.

I hate this, I hate this.

I hate that every second we spend talking about this is a second we don't spend talking about other things.

And the midterms will be here real fast.

We are right now the party that is dragged down by this Epstein thing and non stop talking about the crazies in our media world.

And you know, the vice president gets asked about Tucker Carlson and that has to be a whole issue.

The President gets asked about Tucker Carlson as well, it's just it's constant insanity over here while we should be focused on doing other things.

And so this Epstein thing is just another thing to me where I understand why Donald Trump has to do it.

I understand the political pressure he is under, but for those of us not under political pressure, I just want to say, this is all stupid.

So I'm like where I've always been on the Epstein thing, which is medium concerned and medium cynical about it.

Right, We're just like, there are real victims here who I don't think got justice for sure, because he got this sweetheart deal the first time around, and we don't really know why that happened, and there are a lot of powerful people involved.

So I am concerned for that reason.

I do not believe.

I feel like the Trump involvement here feels like the Russia Gate story, where everyone's just like, yes, everything's a scoop.

Everything we see is a little piece.

Of the puzzle, and it's like, I don't think it is really I think that they were they were in the same circles, and that it's clear from at least some of these emails that Trump was.

Like knock it off, Giles Lane, Yes, yes.

And didn't have her around.

There are many ways in which I think Trump falls short of, like my moral conduct standard, but I don't think this is what people think it is right.

I do think probably transparency at this point is the better part of valor.

But I think like it's good to have the information out.

I don't think that the information being out is going to solve anything for anyone.

Because all of that we like conspiracy theorists are.

Going to continue to go down whatever road they want to go down.

People who are sent using it against Trump will continue to do that.

And I think.

Whatever was there, if it could have destroyed Trump, would have been released long ago.

So I'm just playing the odds here, yep And.

The emails, as we talked about in an episode last week, mostly read to me like Jeffrey Epstein getting advice on how to hurt Donald Trumps.

Yeah, wells reporters and in scare quotes there Michael wolf is he's a political operative.

And there were also New York Times reporters like hey, heads up.

A lot of people had and I think that's probably the story of the Epstein files, is that people who a lot of powerful people were friends with either were involved were or were adjacent enough that the release of these would be embarrassing even if they didn't do things.

And that's the attempt to keep them under wraps much actually a analogous to the rush of thing too.

I feel like Trump's behavior sometimes signals that he's more involved than he.

Is, right because he never says definitive no to something.

He's always like, maybe I don't know, we'll see, you know, is this on the table?

Like is nuking Canada on the table?

Like everything's on the table.

Everything's always on the table, So it could be anything with him.

It's just.

I think Jeffrey Epstein's a good guy.

Maybe he's a good guy.

He could be a good guy.

He's a bad guy.

Probably a bad guy.

He'll he will cover all the ground.

But I do think the backing the release of this probably he should have done that earlier, and it's the quickest way to get past the news story part of it, even if the conspiracy part of it still exists.

But there is a part of me too where I don't think this is a top issue for very many people, but I do think it's more of a normy issue because once you have a Netflix documentary.

It's a normy person issue.

That's right, yep.

I think it's interesting and not great that Donald Trump isn't pointing out what you and I are pointing out, that reporters and the Michael Wolves and whatever we're giving advice to Jeffrey Epstein about how to destroy Donald Trump.

I feel like somebody should put that in Donald Trump's ear so the next time he's asked about it, he can point to that and say, here's evidence of them trying to destroy me using Jeffrey Epstein.

So this continues to be something that the Democrats and their media buddies, I repeat myself, want to do to me.

And he doesn't say that, and he should.

There's also the added information that Stacey Plaskett, a delegate to the United States House of Representatives from the Virgin Islands who is a Democrat, was getting live help via text from Epstein while she was asking Michael Cohen from his lawyer questions in Congress.

There's a lot of.

Working together going on here that a lot of people are probably going to be embarrassed about.

Right.

So he has the overarching thing, which is that Democrats are using Epstein to hurt him.

He just needs the examples I think when he is talking to the media, and or he could truth it out, but either way, he needs to be pointing out that this has going on in the emails and that it is what is continuing to happen to him.

That they don't have COVID this time, they you know, they don't have Russia Gate.

This is the new that how do we stop Donald Trump's presidency from existing?

Jeffrey Epstein's the answer for them.

Trump says, I don't care all caps.

All I do care about is that Republicans get back on point when you're talking about discussing economic aagings, which yeah, that's that's why.

Yeah, that's it.

And you know, in that same truth he says affordability, he puts it in quotes.

But I think Republicans need to just steal affordability from the Democrats because for so long Democrats like we care about affordability, that they don't do anything to solve affordability, of course, and in fact they often make things worse.

So why don't Republicans talk about affordability more?

I think to drop the quotes, make affordability part of his platform, neutralize it for the Democrats do his best to solve it, but I don't think it's actually a solvable thing from the government.

We won't get into that on this episode.

And that's it.

That's the political message going into the midterms.

Yeah, I think, I mean some of the shifting on tariffs this week is an admission that we're going to do some work on this, even if the work is taking away the things that I did with coffee and bananas my bad.

Well it will.

It may change the actual prices, so maybe that don't matter to people.

We'll be right back with more on Normally and Hunter Biden back again.

We are back on Normally to talk Hunter Biden in the Year of Our Lord twenty twenty five.

What's up with that?

I don't know.

Like, this is the thing about Hunter Biden, and I realized it when he gave those crazy podcast interviews, is that he's like, his personality is perfectly crazy for this moment, an attention economy with a bunch of podcasts, and he's making use of that crazy personality and sort of unhinged vibue.

Yeah, but I will say he's really not saying all that much.

And I'm going to read the quote the smartest man Joe Biden has ever met, said quote, I'm going to get myself in trouble for saying this.

No, we need to turn the temperature up.

We need to turn the temperature up, and we need people to see it for what it is.

And what I mean by that is, I do not believe that we're going to get to the bottom until we get to the bottom, and I want to get to the bottom faster then through this slow kind of process of what just being picked apart a death by a thousand cuts here?

Yeah?

Man, what and then he.

Adds, I one hundred percent do not mean violence.

What I mean by turning the temperature up is we need to speak truth to power.

Sure, it's to power the powers.

What you got, well, I got to say.

So much of the past several months feels like a replay of twenty seventeen, where it's like.

Ooh, huge story.

Yeah, like, let's turn up the temperature when they go no, we go to the gutter.

Right right, Yeah, you've done all this and the gutter don't worry.

You, Like we've been here before.

And it's that's not to say that the president should not be criticized for plenty there's plenty to criticize him on.

It's just all the tactics feel exactly the same.

And if they indeed win the House back, I'm sure they will just like impeach him.

Again, right, question mark?

And then what would that be the fourth time?

Third time?

Third time?

Okay, but yeah, it was an actual third impeachment.

I thought that there was yeah, all.

Right, third time, and you know, he'll make history again and they won't unpresident him.

We will never forget that Donald Trump president.

And then like there will be a ballroom and then he'll go on his way at some point.

Mm hmm.

Yeah, they're going to have to eventually just internalize that Donald Trump is president and will be president, and their great great grandkids will study him in history class.

Well.

One nice thing about Hunter Biden, I guess is that like eventually he's just going to admit to more crimes and more crazy stuff that the Biden administration did.

So I don't mind him having a microphone because yeah, eventually he'll tell me something useful.

Sure.

He also he's going to definitely at some point admit that the cocaine they found in the White House during the Biden administration was his like it was a slip up, like it's funny.

In his latest interview, he went after Jake Tapper for conducting a text interview with Trump, and you know, I have to wonder about these people who probably defended Hunter and made it like, oh, you know, you can't go after the president's son and whatever, and now he's just stabbing them in the back.

There's something to that, for sure.

The Democrats are They're definitely in disarray where this kind of thing is happening in the run up to the midterms.

Again, not that the Republicans are not in disarray.

I think we're at our lowest point right now a blast year plus.

So I don't know.

I think that somebody's going to check Hunter Biden.

I kind of look forward to seeing who that somebody is.

He also went after Scott Jennings, which is ridiculous.

Scott Jennings.

Scott Jennings could not enjoy that more.

Scott Jennings is of course the sanest voice on CNN, and he basically said, Scott Jennings is lying and pitching the party line on CNN and has to constantly be told that he's lying.

And I mean, you're not going to get Scott Jennings.

You're just not You're not You're Hunter Biden, You're you just can't come after Scott, And he's gone after.

He's going after Tapper for doing a text interview.

Look, one of the one of the things you can't go after Trump or the entire administration for is accessibility.

Yeah, they are incredibly accessible.

He has regular text conversations off the record and on the record with various reporters all over the spectrum.

His U Cabinet members sit down for long form interviews regularly.

So like, even when you have complaints, accessibility ain't the complaint.

Right, It's rich for a Biden to be talking about accessibility, ey thing.

It's like, oh, I'm mad about this text interview.

Like my dude, your dad gave like three interviews in four years.

Like this is not this is not.

The ground on which to be fighting.

So I don't know.

It's one of these things where I hate that our current environment incentivizes the Hunter Bidens of the world, and that I wish he would slink away and we would never hear from him again.

Yeah.

And also while he's talking, give me something actionable, right, you idiot?

All right, we're going to be right back with a nice and light culture segment.

See you shortly on Normally.

We are back on normally with a segment about culture.

Let's start off with our friend Bethany Mandel wrote a piece called I Sit in Parks and it's a very good piece.

I really enjoyed it.

I actually made my kids read it.

That's one of the things that we're doing.

But it's about Kelsey Ballerini's new song I Sit in Parks, and the song is about Kelsey wondering if she's missed her window to have kids.

And it's a very sad song, and Bethany does a great job of exploring it.

She says, Bethany writes in just a few lines, she captures the ache of a generation of women who were told to chase freedom, ambition, and self discovery, but never what to do when they found themselves alone, wondering if there ran too far from the very things that would have grounded them.

So, yeah, that's it's the sad story of the feminist kind of conversation that happened with women.

I think that a lot of people would admit that women have been told by the feminists, specifically because I hate the line society tells us, it's not society.

It's never society.

I often think when somebody's like, society tells us, they mean my mom told me.

Yeah, that's interesting, that might.

Be the case, and yeah, so this is not society.

But there it literally was feminists kind of constantly breaking down how pointless and terrible it is for women to get married and have babies, and you see it all the time.

And this is kind of the response to that, did I miss my window to have children?

And she says in the song how she desperately wants a baby, and how she is so into this.

She says, she sings, they lay on a blanket and goddamn it, he loves her.

Sorry for the cursing.

I wonder if she wants my freedom, like I want to be a mother.

And it's like I can tell Kelsey, nobody is coveting her freedom.

It just I've yet to meet a mom who's like, I wish I had freedom instead of these three children over here.

Yeah, it's it's a really a gutting song.

There's the part where she says, is it my fault for chasing things?

A body clock doesn't wait for I did the damn tour.

It's what I wanted, what I got.

I spun around and then I stopped and wonder if I missed the mark, And I think did I miss it?

Is a question that everyone asks.

In their life at some point, like what door did I not go through?

I ache for her because this is a vulnerable and honest way to deal with this, and she's not attacking mothers at all.

A lot of people who deal with this issue go really at the throats of the people who live the different lifestyle.

I don't wish to do that to Kelsey Vallerini, and I'm glad she's not doing it to moms.

Yeah.

I think she's, by the way, I think, in her low thirties, So we will hope that she can she can figure it out.

But I do think it's nice to have this speaking of what society tells you, it's nice to have this as something young women can contemplate.

Wile this woman who really seems to have it all is expressing that what she wants is not at all the very famous pop slash country star path that she's on, and she wants to add this other seemingly mundane kind of dismissed thing to what is going on in her life, and she doesn't, I think really beautifully and sensitively in this song.

Absolutely.

I would also say if I were friends with Kelsey, I would tell her you probably just did not want kids with your ex husband.

And that's she that made me wish.

I wish somebody would tell her that because I was positive I didn't want kids.

And the truth was I just didn't want kids with the boyfriends that I had, who were, by the way, great guys.

I'm always like, they were wonderful people.

It's never like I dated a jerk and that's why I didn't want to have kids with him because he was the bad boy or whatever.

No, I dated good men who were not right for me.

And that could easily be her story too.

She just didn't have the guy, the guy that she wanted to have kids with.

I used to wake up in a cold sweat in literally having a nightmare that I had accidentally gotten married.

That doesn't happen when you're married to the right guy.

And I actually have nightmares now that I didn't marry man, didn't get married.

Yeah, like I somehow missed out on him and I let him marry somebody else.

Yeah, I really I'm very sympathetic to women like Kelsey and to this feeling because they're but for the grace.

Of God, show go.

I yep.

And you know it is confused.

Look, living life is hard and there I think there's a lot of talk these days about having lost the script for how women are supposed to act, for how men are supposed to act, for how relationships form and marriage works.

And I do think we sort of abandoned this default and the default was and it was for me because I watched my mom work and have kids.

In my head, I was just like, oh, yeah, I'm going to get buried and have kids some day.

It didn't even really occur to me until I was like in some of those relationships Carol.

Where I was like, yeah, is that what I'm gonna do?

I don't know.

I don't want your baby my whole life like I had wanted that, so I was sort of prepped for it.

And I don't think that's.

Like internetized and stagny guys.

I think that's just like my mom lived a good life and I watched or live that good life.

So we kind of lost that.

And I think we're struggling with how to rediscover or reimpose the scripts such that they are so.

Brad Wilcox, he is a fellow at the Institute for Family Studies.

He posted a Pew pole that had high school girls interest in marriage had dropped twenty points in the last thirty years.

So in nineteen ninety three, eighty three percent of high school senior girls said that they are likely to choose to get married in the long run.

They're not saying like next year, and seventy six percent of boys at the time said that.

So it was you know, it's always been a little lower for boys, right, So now sixty one percent of girls say that they are likely to get married, while the number for boys has stayed roughly the same.

It went from seventy six to seventy four.

So the funny thing is is that I think that now this might be the low for girls.

I don't know that we get lower than sixty one percent, which is already quite low, but I think the number for boys is going to start dropping because the boys now are getting the influence that girls used to get.

And that brings us to one of the people that I can that are one of the more noxious people in public life.

Andrew Tate.

He tweeted this weekend about how ridiculous it is to want to be with a woman.

He tweeted, once you're rich and famous and can have any girl on the planet, you realize they're all scum and you don't want a single one.

Now.

Most of the comments, what a king?

How Most of the comments are like, you are gay?

Why are you gay?

You know?

And that might be he might be gay, because that is definitely not a straight man thing to say.

But also, you can't get every girl on the planet.

You can only get the girls that would be attracted to an Andrew Tate, And that's really saying something.

And perhaps that the secret to happiness is not getting any girl on the planet and all of them that you want.

His secret to happiness is actually much more narrowly tailored than that.

Isn't that interesting?

He's preaching the opposite, and when he gets to the end of the road of the opposite and it's nothing, he looks interesting.

Yeah, funny that, you know.

With the Bethany article, I when I read when I had my kids read the article and I was discussing it with my twelve year old son.

He said, you know, the article was said, but it didn't concern me.

I'm not going to fall for the feminist messaging of the age.

And I know there people who are gonna be like, yeah, right, your twelve year old son said that.

I swear this is my twelve year old son.

We both have a twelve year old who talks like that.

Yes, they're weirdos.

I don't know where did they get it from.

Yeah, it wasn't how I talked when I was twelve, but okay, but yeah, he you know, so he was like, I'm not going to fall for this feminist messaging.

Don't worry.

And I do worry.

I do worry that the andrew Tates of the world are going to reach him and tell him that all girls are scum.

And that is something that people need to be concerned with, especially on the right, because he is coming for the boys him.

Nick Fuentes another guy who frequently talks about how pointless it is to get my.

Oh women are terrible, yeah, awful.

Women are the worst, and how he remains a single man.

These are all people that you need to worry about them influencing our young boys.

I do think we have sort of lost our way.

Look, there's always been a war between the sexes.

Obviously we're very different mars Venus, et cetera.

Yeah, it's it has always been thus.

But I do think our at least in the political realms, our conversations about these things are just driving men and women apart.

And then you see in other areas.

I notice my Instagram feed is much better at bringing men and women together.

There's a lot of solid like how do you be a better husband?

Content?

How do you be a better wife?

Content?

You should objectify your husband more often wives content like Christian nice dad content, secular nice dad content, Like there's a lot of like let's try not to hate each other content, whereas on X you're like, wow, yeah, a lot of you dislike the opposite right fender a.

Lot not that there are only two genders, I.

Know, or very heteronormative on the show, there are actually only two genders.

But Bill Ackman, I feel like it's trying to give us some tips.

What was his plan for getting the ladies and the guys together?

He says, I hear from many young men that they find it difficult to meet young women in a public setting.

In other words.

The online culture has destroyed the ability to spontaneously meet strangers.

As such, I thought I would share a few words that I used in my youth to meet someone that I found compelling.

I would ask may I meet you before engaging further in a conversation I almost never got to know, and he goes on and on.

But then may I meet you became just an internet meme sensation.

Over the weekend, people mocked it relentlessly.

It is an old fashioned way of time formulation.

You know, may I meet you has very hello dear, which is what scammers say to people on the internet.

Any message that starts hello dear online is somebody trying to steal something from you, and may I meet you just has this old fashioned, not current at all way about it.

Yeah, like you're gonna get the gen z stare for sure after that one.

But I do think there's something too.

My hope for this phrase is that it becomes like a joke for the terminally online, and the terminally online actually take.

It into the real world and they may be between.

Each other about may I meet you, and then all of a sudden we have the lest real marriages of people meeting But I do think if there is a thing where people have lost the ability to speak to each other in public.

I agree a thing that I like.

And who knows how gen Z women would react.

But I always thought it was classy when someone would send the drink across the bar and they would just like, not a lot of expectations, just like just send it off.

And I always thought that was kind of cool.

Gives you a little entry, right, And maybe that would like totally freak out gen Z.

I don't know, but they do.

We do need afraid of what's gonna happen when this comes out and Mary Katherine Ham suggests sending a drink across the bar, May I meet you?

Nice?

May what may I meet you?

Written about it?

Now, there's like again losing the script for how humanity communicates with each other.

I appreciate Bill Ackman's attempt to get us shut to some ways of doing fun.

Fun was had.

Yeah, and our weird twelve year olds can tell everybody how to talk to each other.

Yep, they're nutshy.

They'll they'll they'll definitely be sending drinks and saying, may I meet you?

Men and women, we gotta pull it together.

Y'all, we really do.

Let's fix this.

Thanks for joining us on normally.

Normally airs Tuesdays and Thursdays, and you can subscribe anywhere you get your podcasts.

Get in touch with us at normallythepod at gmail dot com.

Thanks for listening, and when things get weird, act normally