75. Vaudeville Kafka

AlexThis is Do By Friday, a weekly challenge podcast with Merlin Mann, Alex Cox and Max Temkin. This week's challenge, pimp your drink.

Is that Merlin on the line? Is Merlin here? Yes, I am here.

MerlinChallenge.

AlexI don't, are you making fun of the Midwest accent, the Chicago accent?

MerlinI'm making fun of your accent. Yeah, you and Max both have a silly accent.

AlexIt's sweet.

MerlinOh, big news, big news. My sport peppers arrive soon.

AlexYour sport?

MerlinSport peppers. So I can make a slightly more legit Chicago dog.

AlexOh, okay, cool. Oh, Max is here.

MerlinHi, Max. Turn me up.

AlexJust so you know, Max is pacing and cannot hear you.

MerlinThat's fine We can gossip about him He likes that

AlexI know

MerlinWhy is he on speakerphone? What's happening? Why can't people just talk on the phone Like a person, Alex?

AlexMillennials

MerlinI'll answer the question It's millennium It's millenniums And I think it's because God damn it, that's so loud It's because of reality TV Where people talk into their phone Like it's a slice of pizza

Speaker BChicago pizza

MaxLeave my package at the door

Speaker BGo back Go back. I'm sorry. I didn't get that.

MaxLeave my package and my door.

MerlinTry talking into the phone like a person.

Speaker BYell the F word lots of times.

MaxNo, but then you actually have to talk to a person. 1-0-4-9-5-9-3-5-9-8-2-7-7-4-6-9. Nice.

Speaker BI found your status. This package is out for delivery today. Drivers typically deliver between 9 a.m. and 8 p.m. Unless the service selected guarantees delivery. She's talking to him like he's had a head injury. Are you okay? Do you want to hear this again? Please say yes or no.

MaxPlease leave my package at the door.

Speaker BI still didn't get that. Would you like to hear about your package again? Press 1 for yes or 2 for no.

MaxPlease leave my package at the door. Leave it at the door.

Speaker BOne moment. I'll connect you to an agent.

MerlinOh. Oh. Finally. Hello. You're speaking with Robert UPS. No, Mr. UPS is my father.

MaxAll right. Well, welcome to Dubai Friday. My friend Renato Mariotti, media personality, former federal prosecutor, expert on the possible emerging criminal conspiracy of the Donald Trump organization.

MerlinAnd also next gifted Twitter threader. He's really good at threading his tweets.

MaxYes. How did we meet? Oh, through, we met, we have a weird, we have a whole weird connection before you got into politics.

Speaker AThat is very true. I had dinner with you, and I remember you and my friend were both talking about Twitter, and you guys were discussing all the crazy stuff you did on Twitter. This was back when you bought the multi-gallon drum of lube, and I'm like, God, that's so weird that these two guys are spending so much time on Twitter. and obviously now i'm the guy who said who is a dinner buried in my phone and everyone's like what are you doing why are you why are they more interesting than us uh yeah i remember that because

Maxthat was when the those um the militia guys had like were squatting in that nature preserve and where where was that in oregon and they they what they did was they were like it was a clevin clevin bundy that sounds right and they were like they were like uh we forgot to pack snacks and we're hungry um so here's an address please send treats and so i just went on amazon and i found the most funny unwieldy like large like thing to that i could buy which was this industrial barrel of lubricant and i had it and i had it delivered to them personal lubricant and then it and then

it popped up again in um um some sort of federal filing of like evidence collected from the site and they were like recovered like one barrel of like lubricant.

Speaker AWow.

MaxSo that was funny. And then tell us about, a little bit about for our listeners who may not know you. First of all, Renato is a proud member, founding member of Max's political Twitter list at Renato Mariotti on Twitter. Is that right?

Speaker AYeah, not that anyone could spell that, but yes. You'll figure it out.

MaxAnd tell us a little bit about your story. Tell us about how you became a federal prosecutor. Wow.

Speaker AYeah. So I was like this guy who kind of came from nowhere. My parents didn't even go to college. My dad didn't even graduate from high school. Went to University of Chicago, Yale Law School. Went to a big law firm, partially to help out my parents for a while. And I just didn't feel passionate about what I was doing at the time. Decided to become a federal prosecutor. Did that for a decade here in Chicago, or almost a decade. And I left. I figured, oh, I'll do something different. I was going to be turning 40. And I did not think

that I was going to be on Twitter or on television or doing podcasts. I thought I'd be in my office practicing law or in court. And I still do that. I'm a partner at a law firm here in Chicago, Thompson Coburn. But in my, quote, spare time, unquote, I talk a lot about political and legal issues all the time. What is a federal prosecutor? Federal prosecutor is a lawyer who represents the United States in not only in court, but you actually you lead investigations. So you work with FBI agents, DEA agents, et cetera, to investigate crimes. You help them get search

warrants and wiretaps and things like that. And then after that, you obtain indictments from grand juries and then you ultimately go to court and you go to trial if you need to and you handle the

Alexcase in court. So what you handle is basically white collar crime, right? Well, now or then?

Speaker AThen, I suppose. So then I handled all different types of crime. So when you're a baby prosecutor, they give you stuff that if you screwed up, it wouldn't be the end of the world. Although those simple, easy crimes are like bank robbery. So they're kind of like hard. The normal ones. But in all seriousness, those are crimes where it's harder to screw up or They're more straightforward. And I did handle everything. I mean, I went after drug cartels and kidnapping and child exploitation. But I was best known as a white collar prosecutor.

That's what I did for the bulk of my time there and where I really got my expertise.

AlexCan you sort of explain what exactly, where's the barrier between bank robbing and white collar crime? I feel like that should be an easy question to answer, but I'm an internet ding-a-ling and couldn't figure it out on Google.

MaxBank robbing is the one that you get in trouble for in America.

Speaker AWell, white collar is like a loose term that describes a variety of crimes. And typically the idea there is there are crimes that are involved essentially with paper and words. They're not there tend to be nonviolent crimes. There are some that are fuzzy. OK, I'll put in a fuzzy area where, you know, is child pornography. You know, I would consider that not a white collar crime, even though that involves. That's the people's crime. Anyone can do that. Yeah, well, it's very accessible.

MaxWow. I'm not going to comment on that. Well, my other question was going to be, nope, nope. You just simply download the Tor browser, and it's one search away. We're backing up.

Speaker AWe're backing up. Okay, moving on. Moving on, but my point is, to give you an obvious example, a bank robbery is not a white-collar crime. That's something, it's a crime of violence. You're scaring these tellers, putting them in fear for their life. embezzling money from a bank is white collar crime. And you get less time for that, usually, ostensibly because of that lack of violence. But on the other hand, obviously, there's a racial disparity and economic disparity in terms of the type of people who commit those different types

Maxof crimes. So I think we I think everyone has about I mean, so typically, I know you're a big Dubai Friday listener, so I don't need to tell you this. But typically, we kind of like have we kind of go through the week's news, and we make fun of Trump a little bit. So I think we have some

Speaker Alike current events we want to touch on. I would never make fun of Trump or criticize him in any

Maxway. I'm really offended. I'm offended. Yeah. But yes, and then I know, you know, personally, like the news is moving too fast for me to understand it right now. This is the thing I'm most excited to ask you about. So I am a little bit of, I don't know if you and I have really ever gotten into this. I'm a little skeptical of the sort of legal remedy to Trump. Like I'm a big believer and that we really need a political victory here and that i don't know that the i don't know that i believe that the legal remedy is going to come through i don't really know if it's going to stick i i'm a little i don't know it just it just i mean i'm glad it's happening but

it it's uh it's not a sure thing to me so okay so here's the first thing i want to know can you kind of explain the legal case against trump at the so not the state stuff which is which we do i think we do want to ask about but like what is the federal what is the federal case against trump Because like collusion with the Russians is not a charge, right? I mean, it's a bad thing that happened. It's politically problematic. But you can't charge someone with collusion. That's why Trump can say there's no collusion because it's a it's it's like not disprovable.

Speaker ACollusion is whatever anyone wants it to be. It's in the eye of the beholder, right? There's no definition of collusion out there.

MaxSo what what is the what is what are they going to charge with? What is the charge here? Like, what's the legal case? Like, can you walk us through some some scenarios there?

Speaker AYes. But before I get to your question, one thing I'm just going to note for people listening is there is a very big legal debate about whether a sitting president could be charged with anything at all. And to me, the bigger part of the bigger sense of skepticism that that that I have, which is maybe a little different than yours, is I am not convinced at all that Bob Mueller, even if he was absolutely sure that Donald Trump committed a crime, would indict him. I think he would present it to Congress and Congress, you know, you can decide whether the Republican Congress to do anything about it.

It's outside of my area of expertise. But I will just say I will just say that, you know, for that reason, I am skeptical about a legal solution. But it's different than what you're saying. So I'll address your question now.

MaxWell, well, and, you know, yeah, that's it. Maybe we can get into can a president be charged with a crime? Because it seems to me like from the Clinton. It seems like Democratic presidents can be charged with crimes, but not Republican presidents.

Speaker AWell, it's not like Bill Clinton was indicted. He was brought – there was a report that was made to the House of Representatives. And actually Kenneth Starr had a memo that he –

MaxBut the Supreme Court said if it's not related to his duties as president, there's no – what is it? There's no –

Speaker ATalking about Jones versus Clinton.

MaxYeah, Jones versus Clinton. But that's a civil lawsuit. What's that thing called? The Nixon defense. There's no immunity, right?

Speaker AYeah, but that's different. It's not that – those are all different questions. When Jones, what the question was is whether Clinton could get sued while he's in office. That's been decided. Then there's the question of whether or not executive privilege gives the president a shield from being subpoenaed, et cetera. It doesn't do that. The question that has never been addressed by court because it's never come up is can a sitting president be indicted? And it's really a question that would never be brought before a court or could never be brought before a court until a president was indicted.

And the Justice Department has, for years now, had the conclusion, internal conclusion, that a sitting president can't be indicted. It's something that's hotly debated in legal circles. I'd say the majority of people think a sitting president can't. But their only real support for that, just to be clear, is the fact that the Constitution says a president can be impeached and doesn't talk at all about indictment or anything else. There's nothing magic.

MaxWell, the Constitution doesn't say I can be indicted. Does that mean I can't be indicted?

Speaker ARight, exactly. My point is that what I'm trying to explain to everybody is there's not like there's some secret document out there like, you know, George Washington penned some document that's in a safe that that says that the president can't be. It's just it's just what we infer from the Constitution itself. So that for that reason, I'm skeptical that there's going to be an indictment in this case. And I've and I've talked a little bit about that publicly already. But let's get to your question, which is, is there any there there? One thing that I am convinced and I've written a long piece about this and a few months ago is that there is an obstruction case against Donald Trump.

If if if the if not for this issue that I just raised about could a sitting president be indicted, I would be absolutely convinced that that Mueller would would bring on would obtain an obstruction indictment because the evidence of Donald Trump's corrupt intent is just so vast. and what I mean by the reason I'm using the word corrupt intent is not in the sense that I'm passing judgment on him being corrupt or not corrupt but what I'm there's a statute that

prohibits you from taking actions with in that literally the word in there is to act corruptly and doing that and what that means is that you have the intent to obstruct the investigation so ordinary things you could do like firing Comey which he certainly has the authority to do if he thinks Comey's doing a bad job. If he's doing it with the intent to obstruct the investigation,

Maxthat's against the law. Right. What was that, Merlin? You had a great example on the podcast a couple of weeks ago where you were like, it's not illegal to shred a piece of paper, but it becomes illegal if the piece of paper is evidence in a criminal conspiracy.

MerlinRight, right. It seems like there's all kinds of things. What's the phrase? I think you just used corrupt intent. There's all kinds of things that are illegal to do unless you're doing it to

Speaker Acover something up. Right. It's not even merely you can even shred it if it is evidence. The question is what you're intent when doing it. And by the way, that's what that that gives you a window into why white collar crimes are so hard to prove. How do you prove what's going on inside someone's brain? I mean, it's like you have a magic telescope that sees inside their brain. All these white collar cases involved using documents and emails and stuff to try to peer into somebody's mind. Now, so let's move back to your question. It's like some sort of like It's like an HP Lovecraft thing, if they could do that to Trump.

MaxIt's like you'd go insane. It's like gazing into the eyes of the old ones. That would be scary. You'd go insane. You'd come out like a bumbling moron. Just mumbling eldritch horror.

Speaker AOh, God. Oh, God. One thing that brings up an important point in science fiction, they never seem to use these empaths or telepaths in trials. Have you noticed that? Right. Thank you. There you go. We had Star Trek The Next Generation. We had these big trials, famous trials. It's not like they had Counselor Troy kind of off to the side, you know, sitting there, like, telling us whether or not the witnesses were telling the truth. So under and underutilized.

MaxIt's a particular kind of nerd who watches Next Gen and then looks at all the science fiction and goes, I wonder how this would affect the court proceedings. They do have a crazy, like, martial form of law. Like, whenever you see a court case in Star Trek, it makes no sense. There's like total miscarriage of justice for dramatic purposes in every trial that they have in the Federation.

Speaker AWell, I will say I can't watch any legal kind of TV show without just – it's totally ruined for me. I cringe when I watch it because it's ruined for me because I'm sitting there pointing out all the flaws. I mean even The Wire is an amazing television show. It's one of the best I've ever seen. But I had already obtained wiretaps before I watched The Wire. I had already investigated narcotics cases, much bigger scale ones. It's more like the guys who are the Greek guys are bringing it off the boat than the people that were being investigated in the wire. But nonetheless—

Business.

MaxAlways business.

Speaker AYeah, there you go. But nonetheless, I'd be watching and I'd be like, oh, that's not right. Or what about this or that? It's inevitable. But you feel it's fair to say Data didn't really get a fair trial.

Hey, you know what? It went in his favor, right? Is this what is known as poker face?

Maxare we gonna talk about let's all go around and see our favorite next generation episodes oh i like the moment where he goes he goes away and learns to play the flute all right well all right i mean yeah let's just get into the fun stuff now so uh merlin do you we ate our legal vegetables yeah yeah counselor do you want to uh well i think my distinguished

MerlinI wish to call it from Chicago. I just have so many questions. I mean, some of my questions are just so quotidian. But the whole Michael Cohen thing, all the salaciousness aside, is so fascinating. And just, oh, God, what was I listening to this morning? Oh, it was the ProPublica Trump Inc. podcast this morning was just talking about his past and how, I mean, in I think a fair way, they're basically saying it's funny how he's just surrounded by all these people who get disbarred and jailed. He's got this taxi medallion industry and these kind of strange characters around him.

I mean, can I jump straight to a question about, this is pretty specific, but about the Stormy Daniels NDA?

Speaker ANo, you can't.

MerlinI can't? Yeah, you can't.

Speaker AKnock yourself out.

MerlinFirst of all, all the NDAs I've been exposed to mostly have been like, okay, if you're going to take a tour of Google, you have to sign this thing. Or if sometimes you work with a large company and they demand something, and my legal advice I've gotten was that's fine as long as you get a basic mutual NDA. Just, you know, along the lines of let's both be gentlemen about this. But I'm curious about what you think about what's been reported so far about the Stormy Daniels and related NDAs, which seem – this is a word I use maybe once a year.

They are truly Kafkaesque, the way they're described, almost like a FISA word. So I've heard it reported that you sign this NDA, this kind of a Luca Brasi situation, like something's going to go on this paper, you need to sign this NDA. And part of this NDA, some of these NDAs reportedly are that you cannot acknowledge, first of all, this never happened. We've done an existential annulment. Something that happened now hasn't happened. You have to agree that this didn't happen. You have to agree that you won't acknowledge that this NDA for the thing that didn't exist happened.

And I've heard it reported, and you can tell me if this is true, that there are NDAs that exist in which someone agrees to even law enforcement and judges. They will say that this thing didn't happen.

I just think the whole idea—and then, of course, on top of it all, then you've got like, and if anything happens for any reason, it goes into private arbitration. So nobody finds out the thing that didn't happen didn't happen. And you agree that it didn't happen. I'm just I mean, is that kind of thing conventional? Is this am I getting the facts of this right? Have you heard these things reported? And how enforceable are these NDAs?

Speaker AAll right. That's like about 14 questions. So let me. Basically, what I'm saying is I guess I could try and summarize it a little bit. No, that's fine.

MerlinThat's fine. It sounds like it sounds like what they've tried to do here is get people so scared from so many angles that I'm setting aside the sloppiness about how some of this was put together. But it's funny because it seems like he's kind of Cohen kind of locked his own keys in his own car with some of these things, like not getting it signed and all this banana stuff where now you're in a position where the president is saying, like, I don't have to, I don't need to go to court for this thing that didn't happen. And the thing that I didn't sign, it just it all seems like, like, almost like vaudeville Kafka at this point. And I don't know, I just want to know your general

feeling about what is the role of NDAs in this and what's likely to happen and how enforceable

Speaker Aare these things? All right. Let me start with the easiest question that you posed in there, which is this idea that you can contract away. I can make a contract with somebody that says you can't go to the law enforcement of the courts. That's totally not enforceable. Now, sometimes people can put language in contracts that's not enforceable. What I mean by not enforceable is it wouldn't hold up in court. So you can put language in a contract that wouldn't hold up in court, and it might scare the other side or give the other side the impression that they are bound

by that. Now, typically, particularly here where the other side's advised by a lawyer, the lawyer is going to say, you know, this isn't enforceable, so it doesn't really mean it's not worth the paper it's printed on, but occasionally that can be used to silence people. I'll give you an example of that is Sinclair had, you know, Sinclair Broadcasting, the right-wing local broadcasting network, has their reporter signed to these contracts that says that if you leave, you're going to have to pay us like 40 percent of one-year salary times some multiplier. That's not enforceable either,

but it certainly did scare some Sinclair journalists. So that part of it is not enforceable. Now, the rest of it, the fact that some people can enter into NDAs, there's a lot of question as to whether or not we should be limiting NDAs, whether or not NDAs should exist, particularly in the context of Me Too and all the allegations there, whether, for example, women are coerced into signing NDAs. But the concept of an NDA in and of itself

is pretty commonplace and not problematic. So I'll give you an example. You know, I recently ran for office. I think every politician who anybody who runs for office has their staff sign NDAs so that this way, when they leave, yeah, true.

MaxAbsolutely false. I've never signed an NDA in a political campaign. Interesting. I think it's pretty... I mean, I know Trump made his staff sign NDAs.

Speaker AI think it's pretty common. And the idea being that you can't go, You can't have somebody leave and go to somebody else who's got a different political agenda and say, hey, here's everything I know about what's going on in the X campaign.

MaxInteresting. Maybe that's because I've had consulting and not staff.

MerlinIt's also – but it's – there's so much stuff, like you say, that relies on this kind of like keeping somebody so scared that it would never come up. But it also seems like as with so many of these things, in order – it feels like – I'm not an attorney – but it feels like in order for these to be enforceable, you'd have to be fairly specific about what's not allowed. Like if you – I mean you can't just say don't talk about anything that happened here because how enforceable would that be? And in the case of something like the Stormy Daniels case or these other cases, it seems like for them to stand up in whatever functions as a court, you would have to be fairly specific and lawyerly about describing what it is that you're not allowed to talk about, which by the very nature of the NDA does the thing the NDA is trying to cover up.

It seems perplexing to me.

Speaker AYou know, whatever issues there are with – and there are a number of them with the NDA contract, the lack of specificity I don't think is the issue. I mean there are lots of specifics about what she can't do in that agreement. So, for example, there's some sort of – I think they're called the protected material, the covered material, which are these various – whatever they are, text messages, photos or whatever. She can't distribute them to anyone and she has to retrieve them from all these people. There's lots of specific things she could or couldn't do and you could imagine. Let's just say all the P's and Q's reminded here.

MaxAnd what is that, if you had to guess? The covered material?

Speaker AProbably photos and text messages between her and Trump. Now, it could be, I'll just say this.

MaxDo you think she has a picture of the president's hog?

Speaker AI don't know.

MerlinI mean, one thing I will say is it could just be a selfie of them in a room, right? It could just be something that shows that they were together on a date certain.

Speaker ACorrect. And one thing I'd also say, too, is, you know, Cohen clearly did not. He did not take extreme care in drafting these. He was not a careful draftsman. So you could imagine that he's got the same form agreement that he uses for everybody. Like, in other words, a word document.

MerlinHe keeps using the David Dennison with everybody. He just he just makes a clone. Right.

Speaker ASo my point is to be very to actually be fair to try.

MaxI wrote college papers. You just right click. Find synonym. Wow.

MerlinSo Webster's defines existentialism.

Speaker AI've been learning a lot about Max during this. podcast. But anyway, plagiarism. So, but the crime, the list of crimes goes on for Max. But in any event, what I would say, though, is just to be fair to him, maybe there aren't any text messages or anything here. And he just kind of copied it from an old form. But I will say he did include the names of specific people that she had to retrieve the quote covered material, protected material I forget now from. And one of them was like a photographer, you know, who was involved

in the adult film industry. So it seems like there's something there. I mean, there's certainly some specifics. I mean, you could imagine a deal where she's like, look, I'm going to sell my story to Magazine X. And he's like, well, you know what? I'll pay you $1 more than Magazine X to sell it to me. And that could be an arm's length deal between two people that it's like, okay, I don't

Maxreally care. I just want money. Now, the Stormy Daniels thing is not a federal issue. It's in New York state? No, it got removed to federal court. Oh, is that a new development? No,

Speaker Athat was, well, that happened at one point and her attorney, I mean, I've met Michael Avenatti in television studios. You know, he's a very crafty lawyer, also extremely great at getting publicity for himself and for his client. Very handsome. I feel like I've seen him on two channels at once. I've been told that. I've been told he's very handsome, but in any event, And he talked about that publicly because it actually helps them in certain ways because they get certain discovery under the Federal Arbitration Act. So in any event, there's a lot of issues with it.

But the mere fact – like the mere concept of an NDA to me is not like unusual. It's all of the bizarre things around it. And like you mentioned the arbitration clause. I mean one of the most important things that's going on here is Trump and Cohen are trying to force this in arbitration. Daniels doesn't want an arbitration. And one major problem that I've talked a lot about on Twitter and on television is that Trump said publicly and Cohen said publicly and Cohen's attorney said publicly that Trump didn't know anything about this agreement.

And the arbitration clause says, look, both Stormy Daniels and Donald Trump, using their pseudonyms, agree to have arbitration clauses with each other in exchange for the other person agreeing to have an arbitration clause and a number of other things. There's no way you can have a deal if the other person's like, I didn't know about it.

MerlinWell, there's one thing I learned from Judge Wapner. I learned that when you drop off your car, it doesn't create a bailment, whatever that means. And I learned that you can't have a contract without the meeting of the minds.

Speaker AThat is, there you go. Wow. There you go. RIP.

MerlinRIP Judge Wadman.

MaxSo from Night Court. Yeah, exactly. What was his name? Big loss. All right. So, okay. So now I'm confused about the various levels of legal proceedings against Trump and the inner circle. So there's this sort of- Do we have enough time to go through all of that? Give us the 10,000 foot, like, just like, can you explain all the different jurisdictions and like what kind of things they're looking at? So you have Mueller on the federal issue, and now you have Stormy Daniels on the federal. By the way, can the president do a private arbitration in his capacity as a public figure?

MerlinWell, I mean, also, aren't we talking about a distinction here between the defamation suit from Avenatti and Stormy Daniels versus the SDNY stuff, which has been incidental to that? That's brought up the—there's really kind of two separate Stormy angles, right?

Speaker AOkay, yeah. So hold on for a second. So there's the Mueller investigation, and we call it, and I'm putting quotes around, air quotes, the Mueller investigation is really a group of related investigations. And what I mean by that is this. There's nothing logically that connects what Paul Manafort was doing to, like, these Russians on Facebook necessarily. OK, he can be laundering money or whatever separately from what they're doing. It's just that Mueller happens to be the guy investigating all these different things, and we group them together and call them the Mueller investigation.

So there's all these different court cases that Mueller's got. Papadopoulos, there's some guy in Florida who was selling fake bank accounts to the Russians and all these various things that he's investing.

MaxProud DePaul alumni, by the way. Did you know that?

Speaker AWho? Papadopoulos? Yeah, you know, he's a Chicagoan. Actually, I know his defense attorney. So another Chicagoan. That's a great gig. Busy guy. Yeah, exactly right. Not a coffee boy. So anyway, so you got all those cases, right? Then you've got, and then you have some ongoing investigations we don't even know. that Mueller's got. Then you've got the Southern District of New York. And that's all at the federal level. All federal.

AlexWait, so what kicks up the Stormy Daniels case just because it involves people on the federal level? Like how did that become, instead of a civil suit, a federal case?

Speaker AThe defendants in that case, which was the LLC that Cohen created and Cohen and Trump, just moved it to federal court. I think based on the fact that you can have any, I don't recall, because I haven't looked at it recently, but you can move any case to federal court if, For example, there's people in different states that are involved in the amount. It issues over $50,000. I just don't know.

MaxI think I have this in my con law notes.

Speaker AThere you are. Okay. Or civil procedure or something. But I don't know. I just don't know offhand how they removed it. So it's like super common. It's not. Yeah. It's not an uncommon thing.

MaxBasically, defendants can pick. It's usually defendants just decide where they like the jurisdiction better, and then they get to pick the venue. And it's pretty. That makes sense. There's many factors. It's like not hard to remove it if you. in those cases, if that's what you want.

Speaker AYeah, if you're, you know, the problem will be for you, the main ways that a federal court has jurisdiction is either if it involves federal law, the lawsuit involves federal, or if there are people in different states that are parties, like plaintiff defendant parties, and the amount, we call it the amount in controversy, and the amount of money the lawsuit's about is over 50K. Well, if everybody's in the same, like if I sue Max, we're both in Illinois, and that can be a problem. Like it can destroy, what's called destroying diversity, that we're all both in the same state. But anyway, that's an aside. But getting back to the,

so we have the Stormy Daniels lawsuit. That's just a civil lawsuit. There's also another woman who filed a lawsuit. A similar type of situation. Then you also have in the Southern District of New York, a criminal investigation of Michael Cohen, which I will note that the federal prosecutor there described as a run-of-the-mill fraud case, essentially, against Cohen. I mean, And he was not – he made it sound like this is not some grand conspiracy involving Trump and all these other people. It's just Cohen was committing fraud on the side or something.

So you have that going on. It's a hobby. There you go. You have that going on. And then – so that's what – that proceeding there. You have this – what we saw this week was there's a civil proceeding that Cohen started to get a restraining order to stop the government in the underlying criminal case. And then we also potentially have various potential state investigations, which we don't know exactly what is going on there in terms of state investigations of the stuff that Mueller is working on.

MaxOK. Merlin, did you have some Michael Cohn questions? Because I know we were kind of getting into the taxi medallions and stuff last week. I don't know if you had anything on that. I really want to ask about the passport thing. I mean, that's the burning question that I have.

MerlinYeah, I got a feeling we might have gotten gaslit on that. Gaslit? I think that's still, well, I mean, supposedly now there's still the one source reporting on that that has not been confirmed by many other places.

MaxYeah, could you explain the passport?

MerlinWe call it the Prague stuff.

MaxYeah, could you explain the Prague stuff, the passport issue? And I don't know, what does that mean? That seems to have some implications for the dossier.

MerlinThe dossier, like we talked about on the after show that was recently released to the public. was that I was just mentioning that it seemed interesting that when Carter Page calls it the dodgy dossier, when this dossier first came out, there were a lot of things that seemed plausible, some things that could be proven, but there were two giant things in there that seemed one very salacious and the other super interesting, one of those being that supposedly... What's happening?

AlexI think Max is doing a bit, and it's a very good bit, and I like it. Oh, he's doing the bit.

MerlinOh, jeez, man.

Alexwe got an attorney here max oh i want it so bad i just keep it keep it in the glass anyway let's

Merlinset that one aside but the other one was that supposedly michael cohen as the in his role as the fitzer had gone to prague to meet with russians or russian cutouts in order to smooth over what had been happening with manafort and that was one thing that immediately cohen popped out of the wallpaper to say i've never been to prague here's a photo of my passport apparently legally the cover of the passport the front of his passport yeah yeah that just seemed real interesting because you know i mean obviously i'm not i'm not trying to make the same joke uh max did i'm just

curious because because it does say though it would seem to say that you know these two pieces one of these remaining pieces in the dossier might have some basis do you have any thoughts on on what we know about that and what that would mean there's a lot yeah a lot there so let's

Speaker Athe biggest implication that it's not really a legal implication although there is a legal implication as well. But the bigger implication is this. The Republicans and Trump supporters have made a lot of very unfair and over-the-top allegations regarding Mueller and his investigation. And perhaps the biggest allegation that they've made is the whole thing is resting on like a foundation of quicksand because it was based entirely upon this, what they call,

quote, unverified dossier, unquote. Funded by Crooked Hillary. There you go. Funded by. And the reality of that dossier, the 32nd or 22nd version is there was a dossier that was that was created by a man who is a former British intelligence officer who was hired by the hired by a firm that was paid for by Republican opposition to Trump, you know, So his opponent, essentially opponents to Trump, anti-Trump Republicans.

Then after Trump won the primary. The Jeb Bush pack, right? I don't know exactly, but some opponent to Trump. And then it was picked up by Democrats later. There was a Democrat, a law firm that represents the DNC or Democrats who was paying for this work to continue. that British intelligence officer who has been a source for the FBI and has worked with U.S. intelligence for a number of years put out this dossier. It's got many claims, not just salacious, but actually very important and troubling claims in it. And some of those claims have been verified,

but some of the most explosive claims have not. The centerpiece of it was one of the things that the right was using to claim, and Trump and his allies were using to claim that the dossier could not be trusted was this claim that Cohen was in Prague because it's very much a yes or no thing either he knows it's in Prague or either he was in Prague or not and he you know not only did he put that that photo of the passport on Twitter but apparently he showed it to journalists and said hey there's no stamp in here there was lit you know a number of journalists pointed out you don't

Maxneed a stamp from an evidentiary like point of view though that's like nothing right because like I travel all the time and I don't get a stamp well it's something Manafort Manafort had three

Speaker Apassports. It's something, but yeah, it doesn't necessarily, it's not dispositive, but it's something. I mean, it's certainly, it would be, it would be evidence you could point to. So there was certainly a big claim there and he came out very hard on that point. And one thing I would say on their side of it is typically when somebody comes that forcefully on a point, that means that they feel, have a level of confidence on it. Because obviously, if you're, if, if there, if you believe there might be evidence out there to the contrary, you're going to look really stupid. Now, we have seen Michael Cohen is not afraid to take,

say things that ultimately later on turn out to be not true or there is evidence of the contrary. But I'm just saying that people, that caused some pause from journalists, because I think journalists are concerned about being accurate, rightfully so, that that was like, OK, well, this guy seems pretty, be pretty damn sure he wasn't in Prague. He's got at least some evidence to back it up. We need to be cautious about that. So this report suggested what it said, and I want to be very careful about it. What it said was that Mueller has evidence that

Cohen was in Prague. Now, what that could be, for example, is it could be phone records showing, well, his phone was hitting off cell towers in Prague, for example. Doesn't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he was there, but it's very strong evidence.

MaxThat kid from cereal.

Speaker AWell, it's strong evidence. Oh, it's very strong. I use that evidence all the time when I was a federal prosecutor. It's very strong evidence. So, you know, it could be something like that. We don't know, but it hasn't been reported by anyone else. A number of journalists have been exercising caution on it. And I will say one thing that I find very interesting as I've gotten to know a lot of journalists over the last year and a half or so is there's very much like a sort of secret, under the underground knowledge that journalists have about things that they don't

print. Everyone, you know, like for instance, that guy, and was it the New Yorker that, or who was it that published that piece that you were talking about earlier you thought was the Adam Davidson one? Yeah.

MaxOh, yeah, I think New Yorker.

Speaker ANew Yorker. You know, he's really, the only there there that is underlying what he's saying is like, we're kind of, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of stuff here and there's not a lot of stuff

Maxthere. And he doesn't really say what it is. That's the strongest point he made in that whole piece to me, which is he said, you know, in 2003, the president, President Bush landed on that aircraft carrying it as a mission accomplished and support for the war was at 70% at home, but he was on the ground in Iraq and he was looking at the disaster of the operation there. And he was like, these guys can say what they want at home, but the truth will come out. And To your point, like, it was hard at the time for journalists to say Bush is a liar because the case wasn't there. But in enough time, the case was made and the people turned on it.

He made the same point for the financial collapse. Like, in 2007, most financial journalists, like, knew that there was this house of cards and that the banks were overleveraged and that there was this looming crisis. And, again, it was like – like you said, it's this underlying knowledge that people paying attention have. But it's hard to, like – breaking news in the New York Times, like, it's not –

Speaker AThey don't have enough there yet.

MaxYeah, but eventually the truth came out. And I think that was his point with Trump of like there is this – like the people paying attention, there is this preponderance of evidence accumulating, but it's not – it's like it's going to take time for the public to learn it and catch up.

Speaker AIt's more than that. I mean what I would say is there is not – I mean I follow this stuff very closely. There is not evidence to support, for example, what he's necessarily saying. That's in the public knowledge for what he's saying in that column or whatever – your opinion piece or whatever it was. But journalists have – seem to have – kind of know certain things or not know certain things. And they're not all – they're not all bad for Trump. Some of them are helpful to Trump. Like there's journalists who've told me off the record that Trump was told by his people that firing Comey was going to lengthen the Mueller investigation.

It was going to lengthen the Russia investigation. It was going to be a problem for him. That's good for Trump because it shows that he potentially wasn't firing Comey with that corrupt intent because he didn't care.

MaxHe could have had – if he was smart enough to have corrupt intent, he could have had it. But the problem is he's too incompetent to take the advice of his cronies and pull off a conspiracy. So it truly was he was just mad on Twitter, right? That's a great Trump defense. It's like, actually, Your Honor, I'm too incompetent to execute a conspiracy.

Speaker AYou know, it's funny because we all can laugh.

MerlinIs there an amendment for that?

Speaker AWe can all laugh about it. But, you know, one of the most common ways that you defend white collar cases that defense counsel defend them is they say, look, my guy is just he's either too busy to be paying attention or he wasn't on top of things. I mean, they don't say come out and say my guy was stupid or foolish or incompetent. But there's this element like this guy was just not the criminal mastermind that the government believes. He's just like a guy who's reactionary or mean or this or that. But he's not that guy. And that's that. You know, if there were a trial, I think that would very much be the type of defense you'd bring for Trump.

So anyways, my point is just that I find it interesting because I see it from when I talk to journalists like, well, you know, I'm hearing this. But, you know, so they definitely have a kind of a level of knowledge that's underneath the surface, which I didn't I didn't realize as honestly as a person who read newspapers. I figured when they had knowledge about things, I was generally reading it in print. But that's not the case.

MaxWell, I think most serious publications, they wait for triple confirmation. Maybe the standards are looser now, but you want it from three independents. Well, if you've seen All the President's Men, they can't go on a lot of the Watergate stuff because they don't have their third source. That's a big plot point in the movie. I wonder if the standards have slipped since then, but you do hope that they can source it from a couple of different directions.

Speaker AWell, there's certainly that case amongst a lot of serious journalists. I've had, for example, a New York Times reporter talk to me and say, you know, when I was commenting on reports from other very respected publications that like if you read their story, you'll see that it's not well sourced enough. You need to be a more educated media consumer. And I'm like, well, it's the X newspaper that's very widely respected. And it's like, well, yeah, but read the piece. And it's like, you know, you really have to be a pretty sophisticated media consumer to really look at these things and see how well sourced.

So a lot of people, when they saw that McClatchy thing about Cohen, like, well, what kind of sourcing did they have? And they were really asking a lot of details. And, you know, it seems like there's some caution around him.

MaxAll right. So I have two questions for you on that topic. Number one. So these are questions I have as just a consumer of news. Like, I'm just a guy trying to just follow this story enough to get what I need to get. So my first question is, how do you read the news personally? Just, like, what is your news consumption like? And then also, like, do you have any advice for me or for our audience on, like, I don't know how do I say it. Do you have, like, any heuristics of, like, this is how you, like, think about a story critically to, you know, to understand whether you should get excited about it or not?

Wow.

Speaker AThose are big questions. I mean, the first one, I'll tell you what I do because that's an easy one. I subscribe to multiple newspapers. I subscribe to the Chicago Sun-Times and the New York Times and the Washington Post and so on. But I don't, like, pull up the app and read the paper every day. What I do is I certainly I have certain stories that are emailed to me. Like, for instance, I read Natasha Karecki's Paul Illinois Politics email every day. I read other that I give I'm on various other email lists that call that call sort of the articles.

MaxGive us some. I mean, I think this is the exact kind of nerdy stuff that our audience is going to be crazy about.

AlexThe underlying question Max is asking, hopefully, for me, is how do we not go crazy? And we're so anxious. And what is something useful to consume?

Speaker AI will tell you, I don't have a magic answer for that because I often feel like the news cycle has gotten so crazy. As somebody who's trying to comment on the news, it's very difficult for me to keep up. And it is affected in my life in many ways because trying to keep up with that is really an extra job. And I have multiple jobs at this point. And it is very, very challenging to keep up with all of it. And I don't – if I wasn't this motivated to do it just because I know I will be asked questions like here.

I'm being asked questions right now. And I still don't know every detail of every contract. I don't know how I could do it. The news cycle is moving so quickly right now. What I do is – so like some of the things I was talking about, I mentioned Natasha's email, but there's also groups I'm on. Like for instance, there's a whole group of – just a private listserv of people who are concerned about the issues relating to the Russia investigation, and I get emails from them. I get emails from – Do you guys do like a Google group? Yeah, we have like a Google group. Exactly. We have like a on America, you know, I'm a member of the American Constitution Society and they'll send me, you know, things that I should be looking at or care about.

The, you know, fun, relevant time for them. It is a very, it is. It is a relevant, very relevant time. I do a lot with that organization and they're very, I think, underappreciated. But I so I do I do that stuff. I read Twitter a lot as you gather.

MaxThat's a fun feeling, lying in bed at 1045 at night, just refreshing Twitter over and over, just watching a story break, just a pit of anxiety in your stomach. You're like, well, no way I'm going to sleep now.

Speaker AWell, I will tell you, one thing that's amazing is several times a day there are stories that are breaking that are important and interesting enough to comment on. And it just depends on whether I have time to look at my phone. I mean, I'm here on this podcast for all we know, whatever. There's been major indictments brought by Robert Mueller, and we're not even talking about them. I'm monitoring that in real time.

MaxIsn't that a fun part of it?

AlexNow I'm on Twitter.

MaxDo you guys find that that's part of the fun movie-going experience now? So you go see your Marvel movie. You stay for the after shot where they have the shawarma at the end of the credits. And then you take your phone out, and you're like, I wonder if Trump is still president.

Alexto all during ready player one my phone was going off and i'm like what's going on what's going on

Speaker Ai i tell you i do feel like this almost a sense of responsibility because there's a lot of people i've to follow me on twitter who are like if i don't comment on something for a few hours they're like i get all these tweets they're like what do you think of this or that or what's happening and oh my god you haven't said anything what does this mean and it's like my god people you know i whatever i was watching a movie or you know i was at dinner um you know getting a filling leave me And I'm like, I really care. I mean, look, I care about, I appreciate these people and I want them to, I want to be able to help them because that's what I do is a lot of what you're saying, you know, how can

we do it? A lot of it is on my Twitter feed. I literally try to digest everything.

MerlinThat's been just not to, not to shine your butt too hard here, but like, that's one thing I really value that you do on Twitter is when something happens, you very quickly hop in and we'll do a, do a thread. I'm not generally such a huge fan of threads, but I think you do a real nice job of summarizing the what this means right now part of it.

MaxBut part of it is also that... I'll just add also, like, I don't think, you know, Renato did not, like, invent this genre because there were these kind of lunatics on Twitter who were doing these threads and they were like, who's that with Sarah Kenzior? And there's that other dude. And they're like, the Marshal of the Supreme Court has sealed indictments. There's going to be a coup. They're going to, at midnight, they're going to converge on the White House and, you know, they're going to serve the president. And it's like...

AlexWhen you're reading Twitter, is this the voice that's happening?

MaxYes, all these people, All these people are little gremlins. They're all little wizards waving their staffs around. They're just furiously banging out. The velocity is happening so fast. What's up with Patriot Biotics? And it's like they're like – they're all like cold readers. They're like mind readers, right? It's like if you make – if you have every possible prediction in a sealed envelope, then whatever happens, you're like, I predicted it.

Speaker AOne thing I will say that is very hard that I try to do is I try to be this like cold voice of reality for everybody. Sober. And yeah, and I think it's really hard. You know, very quickly, I started doing this in like May or June of last year. And so it hasn't even been a year yet. And a month or two in, people, a lot of my followers at the time, I don't know, there's only a couple thousand of them at that point, were like, they're like, oh, this is a bummer. Because all these people are telling us like everyone's going down and being let out in chains. And you're like, well, I don't know.

I'm not so sure about whether the criminal justice system is going to achieve all this stuff. and I did this whole thread for them about the limits of the criminal justice system and how they need to get off their butts and vote and organize and do stuff because they should not sit back and wait for Bob Mueller to save America for them because it's not going to happen. He's not like some magic man who's going to come from the clouds and wave a wand. That's just not how the criminal justice system works.

MaxIt's not Wakanda. He can't challenge the president to single combat and then the physically strongest male becomes the new president. You're ruining the movie for me, man. Oh, sorry. Spoilers. um let's see what did uh i had a um you well i i have a question let me know if i'm getting ahead

Alexuh like ahead of this um you answered basically most of the questions i had thank you so much but what what does the sean hannity stuff mean like i personally hate the the man um and i just i i want to get excited about it but i don't really know why i should be excited and why it's bad that uh like does that make sense like yeah i mean it's really what happened it's very it really

Speaker Apains me to say um anything favorable towards sean handy because i don't i don't have very favorable feelings towards the man myself given that i think he's you know often lying to people on television but there's there's a lot less to the story than i think it was very shocking when it happened. And really, I think Michael Cohen and his counsel, if they really wanted to keep this a secret, did a very bad job of it. Like they literally are like, here's a court filing

where we lay out who his clients are and there's one secret one and we're going to explain in detail about this guy, but not mention his name and like build up this anticipation, knowing that at some point this was going to come out. It was just building this. what i think really may have happened there i don't know but one thing that i that gives me a little caution about this is cohen had an incentive to make himself seem like and i'm going to put this in air quotes here a real lawyer in other words i mean yes michael cohen is a lawyer he's got a law license but like he doesn't appear to have been practicing law much the government said

as much they literally said this guy does zero to zero to one clients as far as we know they're And the governor was like, this guy is not really practicing law. And he's like, no, I am practicing law. And he's like searching.

MerlinHe turns his pockets inside out and three clients fall out.

Speaker AWell, essentially, it was like he's trying to squint and say who are his clients. And here's the thing. You know, if you ask me who are my clients, I mean, I wouldn't tell you. But there are a limited number of people who have like engagement letters at my law firm who I actually represent in lawsuits. You can search my name in federal court and see, okay, he's listed as the counsel in these suits. But then there's a variety of people who ask me about legal topics. And I'll say, well, I don't really think you've got a case or you should really consider X or Y. And then I never hear from them again because I didn't tell them what they wanted to hear or they don't have the money to bring a suit or they just don't feel like it at that time.

And I don't go chasing down all these people because if they really want to bring a suit or do something, they'll come back to me.

MaxAre you subtweeting me right now?

Speaker AI'm just wondering. I'm not revealing anything about anything.

MaxAttorney-client privilege. Exactly. Let me slide you a dollar. Hang on.

Speaker AActually, no, this is actually an important point because those conversations are privileged because if you go to somebody seeking legal advice, even if you don't hire that person, you still have attorney-client privilege. Could you imagine if you didn't? You go to a lawyer and you're like, I'd like to consider hiring your firm for my lawsuit. You end up not going with that person because you don't think they're a good lawyer. and they tell the world everything that you told us. Or they go to the opposition, right?

MaxRight.

Speaker AThey have info. Yeah, or whatever. So you do have attorney-client privilege. So people do approach me, and do I technically have some relationship with them? Yeah, sort of technically, but they're not formally. We haven't formally developed an attorney-client relationship, but there is privilege there. So technically speaking, could Cohen have had one or two conversations with Hannity and had some, technically speaking, an attorney-client privilege conversation with them? Yes. Did he have any reason to believe that it was in those boxes of documents seized by the government?

I don't know. And there's a number of different ways it could go. Either maybe there's more to this than Hannity's letting on and there's some box of documents that has 50 pieces of correspondence between him and Cohen. Perhaps. On the other hand, it's also possible that Hannity and Cohen had two conversations, never were written down, or two brief emails about a nothing thing, and Cohen's blowing it up into more than it is. Who knows? Because neither of these people have a really great relationship with the truth, either Hannity or Cohen. So who knows which one is telling the truth?

But certainly there's all sorts of possibilities in there.

AlexAnother question I had that it feels like you have answered was just, is Cohen super bad at his job? But it wasn't until a few days ago that I realized, oh, he's not doing lawyer things. He's a fixer. He's a big taxi man. And so is he doing a good job as a fixer or is he fuck that up too?

Speaker AWell, he hasn't. I mean, he hasn't done. There's a number of very obvious mistakes that Michael Cohen has made. OK. And one of them I already pointed out is, you know, what he was doing with that NDA does does appear to be legal work, or at least resembles it, which is here's a contract. He's presenting it to another party and saying, you know, who has a lawyer and saying, hey, sign this deal with my client. But the way he structured the deal was all screwed up. If he really wanted to keep Trump out of it, he wouldn't have had Trump in the agreement

under a pseudonym, making all these promises, releasing claims, forming, you know, it would have been strictly between the LLC and Daniels and Trump wouldn't have been a part of it. Instead, he includes Trump and has Trump make a bunch of promises, but not sign it. And even that might have been okay if Trump knew about it, but just didn't affix his signature, but was part of the deal or was understood in some other sense, or at least you could make some argument there. But then he comes out and says through his spokesman at first, but then I believe he confirms himself that Trump knew nothing about the agreement.

So that is all really bad lawyering if he wants the agreement to hold up. Another thing that he's made a big mistake about is we know he's somebody under criminal investigation. And that should have been apparent to him a long time ago when he's being interviewed by Bob Mueller and so on. And yet he's on the record to the press talking about Donald Trump as if he's like a guy who's going to take a fall for Trump or has some deep seated loyalty for the guy. It just didn't move anything forward for him at all other than potentially sending a signal to Trump that I am going to be loyal to you.

But you think he could have done that privately from his attorney to Trump's attorney without telling the New Yorker that.

MaxSo what's Mueller's role in this? Mueller is he turned the Cohen case over to a state prosecutor in New York.

Speaker AWell, my understanding is, and if I'm wrong about this, I apologize, but I'm pretty sure that Mueller interviewed Cohen. I'm almost positive that there was press reports that that had happened. So Cohen was originally a witness. Then in the course of his investigation, reportedly, I think this was according to Bloomberg, Mueller found these apparently unrelated crimes in New York by Cohen, went to Rosenstein, and Rosenstein is the deputy attorney general who oversees the Mueller investigation,

said these are more appropriately handled by federal prosecutors in New York.

MaxThat may not be true on Friday when this comes out, by the way. But as of recording, that's who Rod Rosenstein was. Okay, yeah. As of Wednesday the 18th.

AlexFair enough. I always wonder, like, will the president be impeached by the time the show comes out?

MaxI think we need to give Renato an escape hatch here if you need to take off. So just to view what you have gone above and beyond here. But I'll pose this to you as my—this is at least my last question. Could you tell us a little bit about there's been two sort of I'll call them political big news pardons of the Trump presidency. There's Sheriff Arpaio and there's Scooter Libby. Can you talk a little bit about what what happened with those pardons? And do you think that's is that is that a signal? Is it a test balloon?

Like what do you what do you take from that?

Speaker AWell, they're really unusual pardons. So the president has very broad powers to pardon under the Constitution. But typically there's a process that there's file. You can literally Google it and you'll find you can go to the office of the pardon attorney. There's a person called the pardon attorney that's part of the Justice Department. It has a whole office of people who collect petitions for pardons and they have various requirements of what you should put in your petition. And they examine these petitions. They send them back to they actually send them to the prosecutorial office that originally prosecuted you.

I handled some of those when I was a federal prosecutor on behalf of my office, cases that had been prosecuted by my former office.

MaxAnd there's – Meaning – sorry, meaning your office put someone in jail. Right. And then the governor or the – I guess the president in the course of investigating a pardon consulted with you as the prosecutor to say, what do you think of this move?

Speaker ASo what happened is people who are prosecuted by my former office here in Chicago made a petition for pardon or clemency. As part of that process, they said, we want the United States Attorney's Office in Chicago to weigh in because you were the office that prosecuted. These were all cases that were before my time because they were people who were sitting in prison from years earlier. This is the sort of thing a baby prosecutor does. And I would go and I'd look and I'd write, you know, look at the evidence and look at the various factors and write a memo saying, here is what we, our position is one way or the other as to this.

MaxYou say, no, this this black kid had one gram of marijuana, so he should spend his life in prison. No clemency. No comment.

Speaker AClemency denied. I will tell you, actually, one thing I'm going to I'm going to use this as a chance to say something that people aren't very aware of, but they should be. is President Obama had a program in which he invited people who were convicted of nonviolent drug offenses to seek clemency. And he got thousands of petitions. A historic number. Yes. Thousands of petitions for clemency. And U.S. attorneys' offices were overwhelmed. And before I left, there was a high-ranking person in the office who spent the majority of her time looking at all of those,

trying to get as many done as she possibly could during her time there. And I will say, I went, you know, the American Constitution Society organized an event in D.C. that I went to and spoke to senators and their staff about clemency. And I think they wanted me to talk about pardon, Trump pardoning Arpaio and other things like that. But I talked about that program and how I think we should do the same thing at the state level. I think that's something that could be a really important way that we can reform the criminal justice system. So that plug for that. Now, Moving to the Arpaio and Libby pardons, those pardons did not go through that process, which is really interesting and different.

They went, you know, in the Arpaio pardon, it didn't seem to go through any process. You know, there were some press reports that Libby's attorneys were somehow reaching out to the White House.

MaxSome old vampire from the Bush administration had a meeting with Trump, right? Someone was in the White House. You guys know who I'm talking about?

Speaker AWell, my understanding was that Libby's lawyer was seeking to be the lawyer for Trump, right? Is that what you're thinking of, that person?

MaxWas it Dick Cheney or something? Merlin, do you know what I'm talking about?

MerlinNo.

MaxSomeone from the Bush administration met with Trump. Can you just look in your crystal ball, man? Yeah, hang on. Let me pull it up. That was for Merlin, not for you.

Speaker AOh, oh. No, you go. But anyways, okay, it's a little too lame of a joke for this crew.

MerlinIt's a camera, man.

Speaker AOkay, but in any event, the point that I'm making is—

MaxThat's what we call a gateway joke, but now on this podcast we're into the harder stuff. So we're doing—yeah. We're freebasing. We're freebasing humor over here. Wow.

Speaker ABut in any event, it's unusual. Those cards were unusual for that reason, and it suggests that there was some more political motivation there because they didn't go through the typical process. they weren't you know for example one component of the pardon process is that the person who's

Maxbeing oh the dersh oh dershowitz you mean trump met with the dersh like the day before the scooter

Speaker Alibby pardon went down okay um you know i don't know which way that that go that that uh that cuts for for dershowitz or for libby but but the point i was going to make is you usually have to To seek, for example, you have to express remorse as part of one of the factors. You know, certainly Joe Arpaio did not express any remorse and was defiant and said that he had been railroaded. Trump was essentially sending a signal there. I mean, at least that was my argument, and I wrote a piece about it at the time and talked about it. He was sending a signal that, you know, what Arpaio did, by the way, was he counterfeited judicial order.

And essentially he was sending a signal that you can do that and that's OK. And I'm going to side with the guy doing what advances my agenda, which was – our pilot's agenda was very anti-immigrant, even if it means that you're violating judicial orders. It was quite a signal, I think, to be sending potentially to people who are in the Mueller investigation. And the Libby, I think the Libby pardon was much more of a signal because what he was saying when he when he that same day when when he issued that pardon, you know, Kellyanne Conway was saying that he was essentially mistreated by the former the former special counsel, the previous special counsel, my former boss, Pat Fitzgerald, who has a very sterling reputation, I would say, not only here in Illinois, but elsewhere.

and was somebody you can imagine being a stand-in for Mueller. And what he's essentially saying, I took it to be a message to the Republican base saying special counsels are bad. Don't you remember you guys all hated Fitzgerald and what he did to Libby? We should make the case that all special counsels are bad. And you've seen this recently. I've seen it recently. National Review ran a piece this past week saying all special counsels are bad. We need to curtail all special counsels. Come on, Democrats. As soon as you remember, you hated Kenneth Starr when he was an independent counsel.

And really what it's a masquerade for, let's let Trump off, but for high-minded reasons. And to me personally, what Trump has done is underscored why we need special counsels. And really we need them to be the independent counsel that Starr was, because you cannot have a situation where a president can undermine the person investigating him.

MaxAnd that's the difference between an independent prosecutor and a special prosecutor.

Speaker AThe independent counsel is essentially created by statute and often has their own independent authority and can't easily be removed. The special counsel also supposedly can't be easily removed. They can only be removed for cause. But they haven't – the attorney general can remove them for good cause. But, of course, Trump could fire attorney generals until he gets the one that was willing to do it. Or he could just get rid of the regulations. And that's another thing. get rid of the regulations, or have, excuse me, Sessions, get rid of the regulations,

and then just fire Mueller himself. And it's something I think we all have to be concerned

Maxabout. What happens, I mean, I've heard people talk about this on Twitter a lot, but like, what actually happens if there's a constitutional crisis in this country? I mean, my guess is

Speaker Anothing, but do you have any? Well, you know, it's uncharted. It really can be uncharted territory. In the past, what's happened when we've had constitutional crises is there's enough institutions and high-minded people around that are like, hey, hey, hey, we need to do something about this. Like when Richard Nixon was essentially trying to defy, had his own purge of an independent council, it was like, hey, hey, hey, we can't stand for this.

Now, obviously, one thing I'll note is that Congress there was controlled by Democrats at the time. So it was the opposition party. But there was very much the sense that, you know, we can't let Nixon, you know, go against what this country is all about. You know, what's scary now is that number of people seems to be very small. And it tends to be Republicans who are not seeking reelection and a very small number of Republicans who feel like there's a bigger, something bigger at stake, like Lindsey Graham. There was another gentleman who just co-sponsored a Mueller

protection bill, and to his credit. But then the leadership, you saw Mitch McConnell yesterday, I know that for podcast listeners, that'll be days ago now, but just yesterday, Mitch McConnell said, I'm not going to let that to the floor. I'm not going to let this bill protecting Mueller to the floor. There's very much a consensus, I think, within the Republican Party that they don't really care about these broader concerns as long as Trump stays in office.

MaxI, in fact, I think that's when you, so you've seen a couple of things of like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell have said to Trump, and this has been in the press, don't fire Mueller. It's going to make everything worse. And, or other Republican leadership have said that to him. And I think actually people have celebrated that and said, oh, finally the civic, high minded civic spirit has returned to America. But I think actually what's implicit in that is saying, if you fire Mueller, it's going to add fuel to this fire. Whereas if you just let this thing burn out, we're not going to do anything about it and it will go nowhere. That's what's really dark and scary about that is they're saying to Trump, just let this thing run its course.

And ultimately, you know, like you said, like worst case scenario gets referred to the House for impeachment. And that's a nonstarter.

Speaker AYeah, I will tell you this whole concern about a constitutional crisis is one of the things that really had an impact on me in my in my life. You know, I left, you know, typically people who are former federal prosecutors don't like tweet out and go on television and stuff like that. And I started doing some of that after Comey got fired. And I still kept it like pretty much very just, you know, hey, here I'm informative. I'm not really taking political positions. But then Charlottesville happened and there started to be this crisis about Mueller. And I just felt like I couldn't be silent and just be somebody who's just explaining things.

And I started expressing my views more, for better or for worse. I'm not that blank slate that a lot of times I think lawyers want to present themselves to be. But honestly, I think to me, as somebody who is a lawyer and has been around the criminal justice system, I mean, you can have whatever criticisms you want about the criminal justice system. I think we all can agree that we need a criminal justice system, that people shouldn't be able to just fire everyone that's investigating them. It's a very dangerous thing for this country. I'm really concerned about it. And I have been organizing with those people who are organizing those protests across the country.

I've been working with them for a long time because I think if I don't have the ability to do anything personally about this, but I think we need to put as much pressure as we can on our elected officials if this sort of constitutional crisis happens.

MaxWell, I think you do have the ability. I mean you can and you have run for public office, which I thought was an incredible public service. And you brought brought up all of these great federal issues and made the attorney general's race really exciting in Illinois. And I was I was very happy to vote for you.

Speaker AWell, thanks a lot. I mean, it's you know, I will tell you this past week when Rosenstein looked like he was going to be fired. You know, I was talking to some of these these folks who are organizing this and like, what can we do? And I'm like, well, we're going to go out. We're going to peacefully protest and do whatever we can. And I tried with that run to do what I could to, you know, you know, bring these issues out there. But there's only so much. I'm not the attorney general. I'm not in Congress or anything where I. But even there, I mean, you know, the reality is the Democrats in Congress essentially are, you know, they're just protesting themselves.

They could do filibusters or do other things. But ultimately, every organ of our federal government right now is controlled by the Republicans. And until there's a change there, nothing is going to be done about this.

MaxWell, if you do want to get into the more traditional work of a prosecutor post prosecutorial career, I'm thinking of licensing my name to some hotel developments in North Korea. So if you want to represent me on that deal, it's going to be very lucrative, I think, for both of us.

Speaker AWow. I'll tell you, I've drummed up a lot of business. My law firm is going to be very pleased. I've drummed up a lot of business over the course of this podcast. I thought we could help.

MaxAnyone else? So I think we should probably get to our challenge. You're welcome to stick around if you want to talk about.

MerlinOh, we should let this man go.

MaxWhat is the challenge? I'm just curious. The challenge is what? God, Jesus Christ.

AlexHold up. Merlin, do you have any more questions?

MerlinNo, no, no.

AlexWe've kept him.

MerlinThank you so much. Thank you so much for being here.

MaxYeah, this was this was really this was really nice. Thank you for thanks for your time. Thanks for joining us.

MerlinAnd thanks for what you do. I mean, I think it's really helpful amidst all of the all the noise and stuff. You've been real helpful to me in getting some clarity on stuff that feels very chaotic. So I just want to say thanks for that. I appreciate it. Absolutely.

MaxYeah. The challenge this week was to mix a bunch of sodas together from a soda machine and make a suicide. So just in case you are. Renato looks very concerned right now. Yeah, just in case there was any ambiguity about the kind of podcast that you were on.

Speaker AWow. If I knew this in advance, I would not be here.

MaxYeah, I soft played that. I soft peddled that in my email.

AlexWe're a pop culture podcast. It's like, yes.

Speaker AWe are talking about pop culture today.

MerlinWe also know words like exculpatory.

Speaker AWe're real brainy. Wow. Well, you're the one who brought off Kafka. I mean, you're more brainy than I am, man. So anyway. All right. Well, I will head out and let you guys mix sodas. It's your delight. Thank you so much. Thank you again.

MaxThanks for your time. I owe you a drink. All right.

Speaker AOkay.

MaxJust as long as it's not a suicide.

MerlinJazz break. I have an entire collection of drill Boy you're doing a meme

MaxYou know this was like a big meme Of like you tweet like a Trump thing and a drill thing Side by side It works for so many things It makes me so happy That you're get your toes in the water here.

MerlinI spent probably 15 minutes this morning trying to find, because Kanye's having a hell of a day, and I was trying to find the right one for his thing about how everything he's doing is for his book that no one will publish. And it just felt so drill. It was so perfect. I love the ones about my followers. You know, the ones, yes, trolls, unlike you, I have a brain. It's called a job.

Hang on. Hear this, trolls. Hear this, trolls. This is your favorite, Max. Hear this, trolls. I've been secretly respecting the flag and the privacy of my garage for 12 hours a day, maxing out its power to insane levels.

MaxThere is something about that drill voice that is just perfectly suited for this moment. It was a little ahead of its time, and now it's really come into its own.

MerlinI would love to lift all of my pathetic, frail followers by the ankles and huck them like tomahawks.

AlexGood God.

MerlinI have proof that the women on here Are forming quote tweet gangs To freak out and intimidate uncircumcised guys I despise the toilet I'd love nothing more than to kick it through the wall And shatter it into a hundred shards of wet porcelain But I need it

AlexI mean for logistics reasons Why don't we just address quickly What the challenge was We knew that we'd have a special Can I just do one more? Yes please

MerlinGetting pissed off imagining my trolls and dissenters Crawling around my house in little butler outfits And expecting tips but it's like it ends up being so perfect for people like jordan peterson yes or or eric garland it's like so it's like eric garland constantly i mean do you do i i don't follow him i don't even but occasionally he'll pop up with this like you have no idea what it's like all the all the women

I'm protecting and I'm being threatened all the time.

MaxA lot of the people that I follow on Twitter imagine themselves to be like Eric Garland's interlocutor. They're going to nail him when he tweets. I see a lot of quote retweets where someone says something stupid and they're like, now hear me, sir. You have finally crossed the line or making fun of him or whatever it is. He released the Kraken.

MerlinI don't know. The whole thing is... Twitter fucking sucks. This is a great one. The website, lioncomey.com, is registered out of Panama. No, no, it's an anonymous domain registration front in Panama, Pennsylvania. To which I responded, just put my elbow through the monitor because I thought the cursor was a bug again. Nevertheless, this setback will not slow down my post.

MaxOkay. I've learned nothing from my air.

Alexthe entire time this discussion was going on max was wielding a box cutter and i'm like what

Maxoh i just have treats listen i'm gonna open all these i have a big old pile of packages i don't

Merlinknow what they are i have some theories as to what they are um is this this is this is it this is the day we're gonna break the record i'm not gonna get my thaw before one o'clock am i uh and um i'm

MaxI'm going to open these packages on the after show for our new listeners of Dubai Friday. We actually record a whole second episode every week, and you can get it if you give us your money. Because that's the thing is you have money, and we want your money. So you can go to giveusyourfuckingmoney.com. You give us $5 a month, and you get access to a whole second episode of Dubai Friday every week. On this week's bonus episode, I have this huge pile of boxes. It's taller than I am. I'm going to open all this stuff up, and we're going to find out what secrets lie within. Could be anything. I'm just finding lots of pictures of data from this trial. From all of our iTunes reviews, I can tell that people really enjoy when we eat on the show.

MerlinFirst of all, never look at the reviews. And second of all, no, I have to do the pho at home because I have a special method. And I can't do it here at the office. I want some pho. That sounds delicious.

AlexI'm going to include your method in the show notes because that was fascinating.

MaxI order two different phoas. I wonder if my UPS package got delivered yet. Please, God.

AlexAll right. The challenge this week was to make what... Cheelenge. Cheelenge. I don't know What about pan and panel

MerlinYou say pan and panel

AlexSay car I'm not like car Max I got sport peppers coming

MaxOh shit dog Let me bring up something that I learned on Twitter this week I wrote a little list of my I have this little database I'm a fucking Don't make fun of me No one could loathe me more than myself But I have a little spreadsheet of my favorite restaurants in Chicago And I put it on my website so I could share this information with the people. And then you said to people, send me comments about this. Yeah, you can find my website. It's expectations.management. I'm getting some wonderful, I actually, what's cool is people are sending me their favorite restaurants in Chicago that I've never even heard of,

and I'm learning about all these great street food places, and they're going on the list. But anyhow, something occurred to me when I started sharing this list with an audience of people outside of Chicago. At a number of places, I recommended that people get a sandwich, and they put something on it called Jardinera, or sometimes people will say Jardinera. And it occurred to me that most people in the country So according to my poll about 60% of americans do not know what giardiniera or giardiniera is And even among the 40% that know what it is most of them Have a what I would describe as sort of a bastardized version of it that i'm scared

I said I did know what it is. Yeah, i'm scared So what I learned what I thought it was like pickled vegetables Okay, yes, it is italian kimchi. It is pickled peppers onions veg olives vegetables and it's kind of a chunky spread. You put out, oh, holy shit. You put it on.

MerlinOh, you can get this Mazzetta. Mazzetta is the maker of my sport peppers. You put it on a little,

Maxyou put it on an Italian sandwich. You put it on an Italian beef. Oh my goodness. You put it on. You know what they would say? They'd say on TV shows, it adds nice acid. Oh, it's, it's, it's, it's kind of like ketchup. It's like, sure. It's like, you get a little sweetness, acid. It brings it alive. Oh my God. It's an amazing condiment. You put, now listen to me. You put a little bit of this on a cheese pizza. next level. You get a thin crust pizza from Mulanadis who pull a little giardiniera on there. Oh, baby, you got a stew going. But on the East Coast, what people call giardiniera is what I would call hots,

which is a different condiment. It's a different condiment. It's a red pepper sauce, almost like a sambal. It's almost like an Italian sambal.

MerlinIt's a little bit, not exactly like a sriracha, but like a spicy sauce.

MaxIt's like a, but you can see the whole pepper seeds in it. you know and it's sort of goopy it's more goopy and and yeah it's not pickled it is not a sort of spoonable pickled vegetable medley i love condiments anyway here's my point this is the most boring thing i've ever heard in my life if you live in chicago please eat the jardinere and if you're not from chicago stop don't think that eating hots at the at the diner at the you know the sandwich shop or whatever is the same as jardinere you gotta come to chicago you go to

bar you get an italian sandwich you put the jardinier on there people think i'm bored when

Alexyou guys talk politics no no no no no no no no yeah we're just describing things that have flavor

Maxalex anyway what was your challenge this week could you describe your challenge to us that you

Alexpicked the challenge that was proposed was uh make a suicide and i'm like uh no what but it it is uh when you just mix a bunch of sodas together or pop or Coke or whatever, uh, like you go to a rest restaurant that has a bunch of fountain drinks that are accessible, which is hard to do in Chicago. They now in McDonald's, they keep like everything behind the counter because there's weirdos like me who will do this. Um, but there's, I'm sure people have seen this now.

We're okay. The challenge we're, we're calling it pimp your drink. So whatever,

Maxwhatever suicide, uh, no,

AlexNo, it's weird. I didn't know what it was. It sounds weird. All right. So actually, I'm curious, Merlin. Have you ever seen this? It kind of looks like an old style pop machine where you get a fountain drink, but there is a touch screen.

MaxYou're talking about the Coke freestyle?

AlexI guess that's what you could call it. Oh, shit dog. Yeah. The very first one in Chicago.

MaxDesigner Amy and I tried to get one for our office.

AlexYeah. Oh, it's so hard.

MaxThey're very expensive and hard to maintain.

AlexYeah. It's crazy.

MaxI bet that's a lot of maintenance.

AlexYeah, because there's a million like sacks of sugar in it. Then you have to make the proper mix.

MerlinCan you imagine those nozzles must get so jammed up.

AlexOh, well, the touch screen is, it's not pleasant. I mean, I'm sure like the traditional touching. Look how filthy that thing is.

MaxOne time my buddy Joe was talking to a crackhead in Baltimore and he was like, he like lived on his block and well, lived, habitated on his block. And he said to the crackhead, he was like, how you doing, man? And the guy went, man, I'm all jammed up. I just thought that was funny when you see this, like it's all jammed up. I think of that in my head, man, I'm all jammed up. We say that to each other all the time. How are you doing, man? Man, I'm all jammed up.

AlexWell, before I get into my very compelling results, did either of you actually do this challenge? Absolutely.

MaxI'm going to do it live on air. I'm also going to do part of it live on air. Jeez, I didn't realize we were doing a little three ring circus here.

AlexThe problem is there was no, the only one.

MaxWe're going to talk about drinks? I mean, you've got to make a drink. All right. Well, I'm not doing mine on air, so I'm going to go first. Go ahead. I brought up scientific instruments. So I went to, I traveled to Chicago's premier startup incubator, 1871.

AlexOh, God.

MaxAnd there I sampled, I went with my friend Chris Deutsch, who is an investor in this thing called T-Bot. T-Bot. And I'm going to.

AlexThis sounds like a stupid thing that's in my wheelhouse.

MaxI'm going to send you a little picture of this guy.

AlexOh, I already like that.

MaxThey're interested. They had some interest. He was like, oh, I should hook up the T-Bot people with your office. And I was like, Alex would probably be into this. So basically what it is, hang on, I'm putting it in our super secret channel.

You can go to our show notes. Where do people find this picture in the show notes?

AlexDubaiFriday.fm slash 77. FM? I think so. It's DubaiFriday.com, guys. Oh, sorry. I'm sorry. I'm thinking of the Simplecast one. Dubai.

MerlinOkay. Are you guys okay there? Is everything all right? You guys seem a little off your game today. Is everything all right?

MaxAlex has lost her mind.

MerlinMeanwhile, I was just finding this picture. So check this thing out.

MaxT-Bot. Oh, look at that. Oh, my goodness. So basically, you order on this.

MerlinYou know it's a live photo, Max. Uh-oh. Are my balls in this?

MaxNo, you can see Chris's hand.

MerlinOh, this is so cool.

MaxYou can see Chris's hand. It's your new name. Oh, man, T-Balls is all jammed up. I'm all jammed up. You can see Chris gesturing at this thing. All right, so basically what happens, you order off this touchscreen, and up top there's a hopper with I think like 12 or 16 different teas, and you can either just have it make a tea for you, or you can have it mix the teas. So in the spirit of our challenge, I mixed a tea, which was gunpowder green tea with a herbal mint.

MerlinOh, with mint? Interesting. I was going to say like a jasmine with that.

MaxOkay. That would be good too. But I don't know. I wanted to go a little crazy with it. I can powder green. I'll set you straight, man, especially if you're all damn bad. And now basically the tea comes out of this big funnel contraption in the top. And then there's that little spigot on the bottom and it pipes in water at the appropriate temperature. Now where I felt that this – and you pay. You swipe your card and you pay. Now where I felt that the experience was a little lacking is basically what happens is you put your paper cup under these nozzles. and it actually just dumps the loose tea into your cup and then pours the water onto it.

AlexNo, no, no.

MaxSo what I was hoping was that it would actually hold the tea in a chamber, brew it, and then give you the finished filtered tea after it had brewed for the appropriate amount of time. But it just sort of dumps everything into your cup. And then I said to –

MerlinIt's more like the bulk cereal thing at your cafeteria in college. Exactly.

MaxThe little trough of cereal.

Speaker BYeah, yeah.

MaxAnd I was like, well, how do you not drink the tea leaves? And actually, they have these special filtered lids that you put on your paper cup. So it's like a plastic solo cup, like, like lid, basically. But it has a little.

MerlinBut it just sits in there. Doesn't it get bitter sitting in there that whole time?

MaxYeah. So that was my other question I asked to Chris. I was like, well, doesn't this, isn't it going to overextract and get bitter if it's just loose hanging out in this hot pot of tea? And so basically what he recommends is you use the filtered lid to pour it into a second cup. So you brew your tea and then you pour into a second cup and then you drink the second cup. and and i was like no i don't think shark tank would invest in this well just the design of that

Alexaside like i i used to be a big tea nerd and that you can't just throw it all in and brew it at the same time it just i mean maybe they have like what's up to you to control the time of the of the brew but but that's the thing is like what if you want to make a suicide tea and uh you can't you can't mix your matcha and also i think mark would not mark would not invest in this because

Merlinyou have burn issues. Couldn't you burn yourself on this?

AlexUh, interesting.

MaxOh, yeah. There is probably some sort of consumer safety issue. I mean, to me, where it's a great business is that they do the consumables, too, so they, like, source the tea and send them to you and all that. That's cool. I don't know. And there is like a recipe functionality, so, like, you can actually, like, I could save my suicide on the machine and call it up next time. Like, there is some sort of cool stuff that unlocks. I just think that they'll, like, fully... I was... What I was hoping in my heart would happen is that it would brew the tea give me the brewed tea that was like made exactly right for like a true tea nerd, you know, standard.

But that did not occur.

AlexWas it good in any way?

MaxIt was delicious. No, I actually, let me just say, like the tea in the machine was very high quality. I made a great cup of tea and I really enjoyed it and it was fun to use. I do feel like if you know a little bit less about tea than I do, that you would, like you said, Alex, you would just leave it in the cup and it would over extract. so I'm sort of glad that I knew that you had to do a little procedure but I just wonder like in a cafeteria setting would most people sort of know enough to like pour it from one cup into the other

Alexoh heck no this is a very interesting little machine I wish it had a face

Maxthey make a mini one and I did they said maybe they would bring it like demo at our office or something like that

Merlinshould I get my materials?

Alexyes please Please. All right. And I did a double ender as they, I don't know. I just like that word. I went to this fountain thing and I had my friend start putting beverages in. So they started with a Diet Coke and I was drinking the Diet Coke. I'm like, okay, add another beverage. And then I would guess what sort of flavor they had put in. So then it was Diet Coke, Coke, then Cherry Coke, then Fanta, then Grape Fanta.

But it seems like after five flavors, I can no longer tell what is in a suicide. And then my drink was almost no longer pimped. It was just a big, watery, sugary mess. So I'm wondering what the threshold for your flavors will be, Merlin. What's happening over there?

Merlinthere's a lot going on I'm responding to Kevin who's Kevin? make sure make sure she's adorable okay it's very important that if we do the cat the cat has to be adorable

Alexwell did he I said what cat? why don't like Ellie gets the final say you instructed me

Merlinto send things to our design boy

MaxI'm working with our design boy

Alexoh I understand

Maxwhat you're okay I'm with you now alright well we don't want to don't talk about it on the show Merlin

Alexwe're cutting I'm editing this very heavy

Maxeverything that happens on the show is in the show

AlexWell, I'm using my clicking keyboard because I had to move everything aside to make my goddamn drink you guys made me make. God, God. All right. God damn it.

MerlinI got a lot going on. Now I'm going to send you a photo of my desk with my materials, my dark materials on it. Could you stream it to us?

MaxCould you do some sort of Apple video call? No. Why not? Why not? Can't do it.

MerlinPerhaps enliven the photo? No. There can't be too much of a visual component to this show. People need to wonder. People need to be more curious.

MaxI'll paint a picture with words, Merlin. Do a FaceTime. I want to FaceTime you.

AlexNo.

MaxFaceTime.

AlexFaceTime. No. No. No, no, no, no, no. So you see what I have before me.

MerlinI'm going to take my classic suicide. Trigger warning for food. I'm going to take my classic suicide and I'm... What?

AlexNo. No. No. No FaceTime.

MaxI want to watch the drinks get poured.

AlexYou can watch me pour my drinks. It's going to be more exciting. Really? Oh, the people.

MerlinMerlin looks so cranky Happy now, bitch Okay, so what I have in front of me is the materials for

MaxMerlin picked up his phone and just looked so cranky

MerlinMy hair's all in disarray I haven't done my hair and makeup Okay, so I have before me

I have a Ziploc bag of ice. I have a 12-ounce can of Coke. I have a 7.5-fluid-ounce can of Dr. Pepper. I have some lemon wedges. I have a 250-milliliter beaker and a pint glass, a British pint glass. And I'm going to make my classic suicide, trigger warning for food, but I'm going to try jazzing it up. Oh, I also got to get some seltzer. So here's what I do. I'm filling it to the top with ice. Now, I'm taking my beaker.

Alexcool i'm gonna start hold up hold back oh i see there is indeed a real beaker wow okay i'm gonna

Merlinstart with 150 milliliters of classic coca-cola i'm going to add to that to start can you hear me okay yes yes about 50 ish milliliters of dr pepper what was in the baggie ice. And then lemon wedges.

MaxLemon wedges. Now, this is part of the magic. Do you have a giant Coke can and a tiny Dr. Pepper

Merlincan? Isn't it adorable?

AlexI like the Coke cute size. Isn't it adorable? Oh, it's a little

Merlinmini Dr. Pepper. It's the perfect size. It's an old man size. Now, I'm going to add, this might over top it, but I'm going to put in just under 100 milliliters of sparkling water.

AlexOh, wow. Now, what does that do?

MerlinGives it extra zazz. and then I'm going to squirt in

Maxjust a tiny bit of lemon.

AlexI mean, you're going above and beyond.

MaxIs this a drink you've had before or did you sort of invent this for the podcast?

MerlinWell, there's probably a name for the Coke and Dr. Pepper. When I go to the movies, and sometimes it's fucking Mr. Pibb because these are different people, but what I'll do is I'll do two-thirds of the way Coke. What's funny, Alexandra?

AlexNo, Mr. Pibb is just a funny concept to me. Hello.

MerlinMy father's Mr. Pibb. I will stir this with a Palomino Blackwing pencil.

MaxEraser down? What are you going to drink? The eraser taste or the lead taste?

MerlinOkay, good. And now here's my taste. Okay. It's pretty good. It needs more Coke. Anyway. Oh, yeah. So when I go to the movies, I'll get a large drink, especially if they do free refills on a large. And I'll do about two-thirds Coke and about, depending if they have cherry Coke, I'll then top it off with half of the remainder will be Dr. Pepper, and about half will be Cherry Coke. And that's a good-ass drink.

MaxMy big movie drink is I'll fill it about 90. Well, so first of all, you put about three ice cubes in there. Oh, that's how they get you. Just about three. Just the smallest number of ice cubes, just to give it a little extra coldness. Then I'm going to fill it about 98% with Diet Coke. and then with 1%, you're just going to quickly tap it, just bop, just tap it right on the Lipton iced tea. You're going to get just a little bit of that lemony. Just a little bit of a lemon. Just a sweetened? Yeah, a little bit of a sweet lemon tea. Just a little lemon in the Diet Coke.

Just bop, just one little blast of the lemon. I know a lot of people that once, they say once you go,

MerlinI'm personally not a Diet Coke person, I've tried, but I've heard people say that if you're a Diet Coke person, you start putting lemon in, you never go back. That's what I heard.

MaxDiet Coke and lemon is one of the great, well, So my true passion in life is Diet Coke and lime, but that's not usually available. But God damn it.

AlexIt is at the Temkin households.

MaxIf I have to choose a juice, I'll always choose a lime over a lemon. Diet Coke and lime is one of the great drinks.

AlexIt's a fascinating flavor. Well, and what's interesting is the can, it tastes like if there is actual lime in it, which kind of blew me away. And it's, how do they? It doesn't taste a flavor. It does not.

MerlinThere's a few fake flavors that humanity has just made our bitch.

MaxAnd lemon's our bitch. We can make anything taste like lemon. Banana's another one. I think we've really dominated banana. We're really pegging these fruits. We can make anything taste like banana. Lime. The time they drag these fruits is everything. Lime is definitely our bitch. I think a lot of the other berries, not really there. I love a raspberry candy. does not have any relationship to the fruit that you eat.

AlexOh, yeah, like blue raspberry? That flavor is blue. The flavor is indeed blue.

MaxThe flavor is called tangy. No one's more excited to eat a raspberry candy than I am, but it has no bearing on it. Coconut's another one. Boy, the gulf between a coconut sweet and eating a coconut is quite wide. Lightning and a lightning bug, all the difference.

AlexI'm going to proceed with my— I'm not a huge LaCroix person, but I've gathered every flavor of LaCroix we have in the office and gonna mix them all together just cause I'm curious what why is oh my god

Maxcontinental breakfast sketch

Merlincontinental breakfast

Maxwhen he eats the banana is one of the great moments it's one of the great moments of comedy

Merlinlook at you tiny plum

Speaker Boh danish it's so good the food's coming out of his mouth he's just crying it's so good

Merlinevery time i hear the phrase continental breakfast i think of this

Maxalex this is very wasteful alex has opened six cans of la croix in front of us so it's going to

Merlinbe a combination of six kinds of things that don't really taste like anything yeah well i've

Alexalready assigned each of these cans to somebody who's going to drink it later so it's not a waste Although I didn't realize there was a flavor. There's natural orange and natural tangerine.

MaxTangerine is better.

AlexI'm aware that there's a difference between the fruits. But all right. So this is just one big clear glop. Do you like LaCroix? I do. It has flavor. That's the thing. Why wouldn't I just drink regular water or regular sparkling water? Yeah, why wouldn't anyone have anything with flavor? That's my main opinion about LaCroix.

MerlinWhy wouldn't you just drink plain water? Flavor is not necessary to nutrition for Alex Bot.

AlexOh, this is interesting. it kind of mutes all the flavors a little plug yourself into charge every night you don't you

Maxthere's no flavor involved in that there are no hesitation marks in my charge porch

Merlin80 power

Show notes

Transcript

75. Vaudeville Kafka

Show notes

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