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The conversation opens midway, on reports that the United States may not keep sending weapons to Ukraine indefinitely and is urging negotiation. A host presents this as a small vindication for Sacks, who had been pushing the idea and, by one host's account, took heat for it, and asks what the end game is.

Sacks's answer is that he has spent months arguing for openness to diplomacy because total defeat for Russia carries a risk of nuclear war. He calls this the paradox of the war: a Russia facing total defeat is, in his telling, the most likely to escalate into something "much, much worse". He adds that he was accused of being a Putin sympathizer for saying what administration officials have now said, and jokes that the administration must be full of them. These are his own characterizations of the debate, not established facts.

Instead of just reading the administration remarks aloud, Sacks turns them into a guessing game: he reads four or five quotes and the others must say whether General Milley or Sacks said each. The other hosts agree and add game-show touches.

The first quote says a lesson of World War 1 should have been that European powers' refusal to negotiate compounded human suffering and led to millions more dead. A host guesses Sacks, citing the historical flavor, but Milley is named as the source. The second says a regional war became the first world war because all parties made maximalist demands and assumed others were bluffing; the hosts guess Sacks because of the word "bluffing", and that one was indeed Sacks.

The remaining quotes split the same way. "Whether there's opportunity to negotiate when peace can be achieved, seize it" is guessed as Milley for being pithy, and is Milley. The line calling it "deeply irresponsible" not to try diplomacy when the stakes are so high is read by the hosts as an emotional statement and is Sacks. A long passage about military victory possibly being unachievable by military means is dismissed as word salad and correctly assigned to Milley.

The last quote says the objective must now be to help achieve a cease fire and a negotiated peace. The hosts find it too formal for a podcast and guess Milley, but it is Sacks, who ends up drawing the conclusion that you can't tell Milley from Sacks. The point of the exercise, as framed by the speaker, is that the administration's language is close to his own; the game does not itself show who is right on policy.

A second game, "Bernie Madoff or SBF", is announced, and the show proper begins with the usual welcome and introductions. The host introduced as the dictator is teased about a purple sweater, and the banter turns into mock outrage over what the suede might be made of, with escalating jokes about a white rhino hide, ivory buttons and baby seal fur. None of this is meant seriously.

Friedberg arrives from the airport and is ribbed about paying for a $1200 upgrade to JetBlue Mint, a claim made by a host and answered with "No comment". Friedberg then describes Mint as a coast-to-coast premium cabin with sleeper seats and a small wall between passengers, something like a private plane, and the others tease him about the cost and about flying commercial.

The host announces a surprise guest who will jump in partway through, without naming them, says little else is going on this week, and then moves the show to the elections.

The talk turns to the midterms. One host says DeSantis won Florida by double digits, while several high-profile Trump-backed candidates, including Oz and Dan Cox, lost badly. He jokes that the "red wave" shrank to a puddle, though a few Trump-backed candidates won, as did Vance, whom he links to Peter Teal (as transcribed).

A back-and-forth follows over whether Vance counts as a Trump candidate, with the claim that Trump once forgot his name while campaigning for him. The host argues that anyone Trump truly cared about flopped, while those who only tolerated him did decently, calls Trump a weight on the Republican party, and asks Sacks what happened to his red wave. These are his opinions.

Sacks says he got the call wrong and that admitting a mistake is the way to improve. His first error, he says, was relying on the RCP polling average, which added an adjustment for pollsters having underweighted Republicans last cycle. In his view the pollsters corrected well, so the adjustment overshot.

His second error was leaning on fundamentals: by his account three quarters of Americans think the country is on the wrong track, the economy is in a recession, and Biden's popularity sits around 41 to 42 percent, with the out-of-power party usually winning midterms. Everything, he says, looked teed up for Republicans.

He then offers two causes. First, Trump all but announced his candidacy two days before the vote, which fed the Democratic framing of the election as a choice between Biden and Trump. Sacks says exit polling showed Trump even less popular than Biden, so it hurt at the margin. Second, Dobbs mattered more than he expected: about 15 percent of likely voters named abortion their top issue before the election, versus 28 percent in exit polling, by his figures.

Sacks recalls an earlier episode where he said the shrewd Republican move was the Roberts compromise: allow a 15-week restriction without the headline of overturning Roe v. Wade. He says DeSantis effectively did this in Florida, and that most of the country will end up at this purple-state middle, so the sooner Republicans accept it the better.

A host cuts in to ask who deliberately stacked the Supreme Court to overturn Roe, and says Trump said he would do it and did, making the result doubly Trump's fault. Sacks replies that both parties nominate justices who match their values and that this was a long-term priority. The exchange is quick and partly overlapping, and the speakers talk over one another.

Sacks adds that Dobbs sent the question back to the states, and points to pro-life ballot initiatives that lost in red states, naming Kansas and Kentucky. He reads this as Republicans overreaching with total bans. He says most Americans want abortion safe, legal, rare and early, and would back it in the first 15 weeks with limits afterwards.