Episode 290- Season Seven, New Bridges. With Rich Helppie

Season seven opens with a clear promise: fewer teams, more truth. We look straight at the incentives that keep America mad—legacy media chasing rage clicks, politicians swapping positions to score points, and a culture that treats every topic like a loyalty test—and we choose a different path. From the first minute, we ask whether the country is truly more divided or just more performative, and why the quiet middle is still hungry for facts, fairness, and practical wins that improve daily life.

We dig into the government shutdown without the typical theater, separate health policy myths from the calendar realities of ACA subsidies, and interrogate the state of media trust as CBS signals an editorial reset toward “news that reflects reality.” That flows into a wider conversation about borders and enforcement: rejecting both open-border slogans and heavy-handed raids, and arguing for humane, targeted systems with firm limits on executive tools. We revisit the lawfare spiral through the Comey saga and shifting intelligence narratives, making the case that equal standards and transparent testimony are the only route back to shared legitimacy. The same principle guides our take on the Epstein files: protect victims, release evidence, and be accountable—whoever it touches.

On the economy, we challenge the conflation of stock market highs and real wellbeing. AI enthusiasm may rhyme with past bubbles, while families still measure success by affordability, stability, and opportunity. We get specific about tariffs, rule certainty, and how dull-seeming policy architecture—like Canadian provincial liquor monopolies—can shape trade far more than speeches. Finally, we map the identity problems facing both parties: a GOP still orbiting Trump and Democrats stuck on questions many voters want answered in plain English. The answer isn’t new labels; it’s consistent principles. Defend civil liberties for everyone, talk policy over personality, and reward leaders who trade heat for light.

Join us as we build on a fiercely nonpartisan mission with sharper reporting, deeper policy focus, and a growing community that keeps us honest. Subscribe on Substack or your favorite app, share this episode with a friend who’s tired of outrage-as-a-service, and leave a review to help more listeners find the bridge.

Transcript

Season Seven Kickoff & Mission

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to season seven of the Common Bridge, hosted by Richard Helpie, a leading analyst, philanthropist, and entrepreneur. Now expanded with healthcare, education, finance, science, and world affairs bridges, the podcast now in its seventh season, with an audience of over seven million worldwide, explores issues in a fiercely nonpartisan way. Find us at the Common Bridge at Substack.com, YouTube, and wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

Well, hello, Rich. How are you? Welcome to season seven, episode 290. We've been at this since the fall of 2019, pre-COVID. What are your thoughts on the thing as a whole?

Audience Growth & Media Shifts

SPEAKER_02 0:43

Brian, it's been an amazing run. And you know, the audience keeps growing, which is kind of cool. But now people are stopping me and going, hey, I caught your episode on this or on that. And uh, you know, I was at a party, a neighborhood party last Friday, and people are saying, Oh, I heard you on the radio and I saw this. And have you ever thought about this guest? And have I got a good guest for it? And I ran into people on Saturday at the Michigan football game, people of note that everybody would recognize, and they're saying, Hey, you know, I've listened to your show and I follow you. And I'm like, awesome.

SPEAKER_01 1:16

That's cool. We didn't anticipate this when we started, but it really comes at a time where legacy media is changing right in front of us.

SPEAKER_02 1:23

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:23

And um, so it's it's kind of fun to be in this place. Just for giggles, I got online and asked one of the AI engines to summarize uh the Common Bridge. Oh. And I just I just well, right. I thought, yeah, I put a helmet on. No, I I asked them just to summarize it for the last year. And here's what this particular AI engine said. It said, over the past year, the Common Bridge podcast continued its fiercely nonpartisan approach, covering pivotal issues in policy, society, and media. Highlights included discussions on healthcare's frontier, education, global affairs, democracy, media trust, and high-profile news like the Charlie Kirk assassination. And then it talks about some of the guests we've had, like Dr. James Baker, Dr. David Harlan, Professor Rick Geddes, Jenna McCarthy, we thought was great, as well as Dean Phillips. And Dean Phillips was on a few times at a very critical time. And it's interesting to look at that in retrospect. Anyway, it says the show expanded its format with segments like the healthcare bridge, and we're going to expand that even more this year, which is exciting, or this season, which is exciting, delved into financial education and world affairs topics. And it says through season six, the common bridge addressed the need for truth and shared understanding, tackling the erosion of media trust, partisan violence, health policy, college sports economics, and global landscape, all while steadily growing its leadership up to around 7 million now, which is great. So congratulations to you, Rich.

SPEAKER_02 2:50

It's just amazing that these uh AI engines can go pick all that stuff out. Yeah, we're kicking off season seven here. Very excited about that.

SPEAKER_01 2:57

Yeah. Let me ask you a few things and kind of go back through through last season, but more so frame what's going on now and what's going in in the future. So let's take a look at why we're even here in the first place. We talked about being a divided country, but we can fix it. Are we more or less divided today than we were in 2019?

AI Summary of Season Six

SPEAKER_02 3:16

Uh it's it's interesting, Brian, because the people that criticize me from one side, they're 100% convinced the problem's the other side, and vice versa. And they can all stand on that. So I like what the AI engine said about us covering it. I think that we are more dug in on the fringes. I do believe that there is a hunger for people to come together in the middle. And as an optimist, I'm always hoping to play to that audience. And the problem has been that if you're not an extremist, you've been kind of cowed about speaking up because you might be deemed one of them or one of those. So my sense, again, is that we're we are about ready to break through, but that could be my optimism. But look, on the periphery, you know, we used to all agree, hey, murder's wrong, but now people actually want to say, well, maybe, you know, that's a good way to settle disagreements. And that to me is very extreme. And then over the weekend, I read from one side of it a fellow by the name of Jonathan Alpert in the New York Post says that he's trying to get over this victim mentality and trying to tell people that violence justified by a fantasy that the world would be better off with a certain person out of it. And he says, if you people hear family members talking like that, don't let it slide. Ask them if it's violence is okay against someone they disagree with. And then on the far left side is uh Robert Reich. He fesses up. He says, Most of us are suffering a trauma of a different sort. From a and and very moderate man said, from an abusive president and his lapdogs, and from the dark shadows of fear and hate they cast. Now remember, this guy's got an audience. We're disoriented, vulnerable, and anxious. This is Rice talking to his own people. He says, Trump apologists call it the Trump derangement syndrome. But then in a classic pivot and projection, he says, but the actual derangement is in and around the Oval Office. Now, look, I would never want anybody to say, hey, you're deranged. I would say, well, okay, wait a minute. If I'm deranged, pull me back. But the first comment says, at 70, I'm angry that Trump is taking up so much bandwidth in my life. Like, yep, I got what people call TDS. And then an magnificent cell phone in the comments. My youngest son voted for him, this writer's writing, and not my young son. And although we are once close, not anymore, and I told my son I would respect a heaping mound of dog excrement more than I would Donald Trump and T U M P all caps. I am not afraid and do not feel helpless, as Professor Wright said in this post. I feel intense anger and hate toward President Trump. So the question are we more or less divided? There's folks that are dug in, but I hope that they're on the fringes. And I hope we can bring them back in. I think we can do better.

Are We More Divided?

SPEAKER_01 6:19

I think so too. But I also think a lot of this is being driven by third parties out there that want to keep us really mad at each other because it drives ratings.

SPEAKER_02 6:27

So I think that trade is getting long.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

All right, let's move on a little bit. Let's take something that's really kind of topical now, or very topical now. It depends on how you look at it. Anyway, government shutdown. What's your thought about the government shutdown now? How does it impact Americans now and how will it impact them going forward?

SPEAKER_02 6:46

I think the reaction to the government shutdown has been really interesting because basically nobody cares. Who cares? You're in New York, you're in Washington, you're trying to publish something to blame one side or the other. And it's like, look, you got one job, keep the doors open. And they're saying, well, this side won't do it, and they've got more numbers, and this side won't do it. Well, in the Senate, you need both. In any case, it's a continuing resolution, and you've got people on both sides of the aisle recorded taking a position 180 degrees different than the one they're taking today. And that's why I think that we're reaching this peak of it doesn't matter what someone's saying or doing, it matters who it is. Right. It's crazy beyond belief.

SPEAKER_01 7:35

This sounds like more of a summary, but we'll go back to it. Are you optimistic? You've always been optimistic in the last few years. I know there's been some crazy stuff that's going on, and you've been opinionated and you've gone after both parties pretty strong, I think. Are you optimistic?

SPEAKER_02 7:50

Look, I'm an entrepreneur, right? We always have one more idea. You know, I'm a philanthropist. It's like, is that a spot we can help? So yeah, I always look for is there a place we can be optimistic? Yeah, let me talk a little bit about the government shutdown and a little bit about a really positive event, or again, I'll say a hopeful event, right? So in the government shutdown, you hear the sound bites. Oh, they're taking Medicaid away from people. Well, guess what? There's enough news sources saying, yeah, that's not true. Oh, they're gonna cut Obamacare subsidies. Really, what's behind that, and I think most people know this, is that in the Inflation Reduction Act, get us through the back end of COVID, the subsidies for the health insurance exchanges got extended to the end of 2025. They're due to expire. Okay, they're gonna expire, but that's a new legislation, and let's hold the government hostage. Why don't people believe it? Well, remember, this is the same group that told you that you can keep your doctor and you're gonna save 2,500 bucks. And as you know, we've talked on the on this what actually needs to be done with healthcare. So both parties are to blame there. But anyway, Barry Weiss is going to take control of CBS News's editorial vision. Her company, the Free Press, has been acquired. And the Free Press was a pioneer in new media. Barry Weiss, a left of center writer, extensive credentials with the New York Times and elsewhere, finally threw in the towel said traditional media has failed in its message. But now you look at the reporting coming out of CBS. This is the actual words, Brian. They're gonna aim, aim for quote, news that reflects reality.

SPEAKER_01 9:35

They're gonna aim for that article.

SPEAKER_02 9:37

Right, right, which is a tacit admission. You know, this unrealistic thing we've been doing and lying isn't working. And in fact, their new CBS news president, new guy named Tom Sabrowski, said the status quo just doesn't work. And he said that Barry Weiss coming in shows how important news is to the company, and we're going to take full advantage of that.

SPEAKER_01 10:03

Do you think Edward R. Murray stopped spinning in his grave yet?

Government Shutdown Reality Check

SPEAKER_02 10:06

Right. Like, hey, like, can you imagine the meeting? Guys, what if we just reported the news instead of trying to like cover up stuff? And someone says, that'll never work. But look, the risk here, Brian, is this we can't go backward. This notion, like, well, back in the day we had this. Yesterday's over. We got to go from where we are to like what makes sense in today's times, politically, technology-wise, communication-wise, and also be wary because one of the other elements of this uh story is that if people can connect dots, you can call them conspiracy theorists if you want, but they're saying, Well, wait a minute, did this promotion of Barry Wise and the acquisition of her firm by Paramount CBS? Was that because of some business deal that the Trump administration wanted to do with Larry Ellison? All right. And again, I think that's worth reporting on. We need to keep an eye on this, but I just like the idea that maybe we don't politicize the news. That might be very helpful if we had places people could go not to get mad about stuff.

SPEAKER_01 11:15

Just tell us what's going on.

SPEAKER_02 11:17

Yeah, exactly. Right.

SPEAKER_01 11:18

Yeah. You want to talk a little bit about ICE and migration?

SPEAKER_02 11:21

Look, we're not a country that should have federal troops coming out. We're not a country that should have armed agents going in looking for people. It's ugly, it's sad. And if one party gets away with it, another party's gonna get away with it on some other pretense. First of all, how do we get into this? Might be a better question. It's that we have this widely rejected and wildly unpopular policy of open borders and let everybody come in. And guess what? With the people that are just trying to get to a better place, we got bad apples, we got violent criminals that are here. And what did they do? They embedded with good people because they want to use those folks as shields. All right, now, how do you go about getting them? Well, you've got to go get them, and and they're embedded with other folks, and you got to sort them out. And then when the Trump administration said they're going to rectify that wildly unpopular policy, they picked the wrong metric. They said, Well, how many people that are here illegally are we going to deport? And so, who are the easiest people to get to and deport? Nonviolent criminals. They don't know how to disappear into the woodwork, they don't have armed units protecting them. So we've got uh abuse of law enforcement in an attempt to rectify a policy. Now, by the way, this is not just in the Trump administration, because in the administration between the two Trump administrations, we had Tulsi Gabbard being tailed by federal marshals. And now it's coming out that there were at least two Congress people also being tailed. What we all need to come together on is this with the tools that are available technology-wise, the digital footprint we put down, we need to tell everybody in power you've got limits. And I want everybody, no matter what political persuasion you are, to understand that abuses of power lead to other abuses of power, and it's not okay if your team's doing it. We need to find our way out of this.

SPEAKER_01 13:34

Was reading in the last few weeks about Comey being indicted, and there's a lot of uh calls of hypocrisy and reverse hypocrisy. What are your thoughts about this and about Comey? And maybe you can go back and do a recap of what happened at first with Comey and what's happening to him now.

Optimism, Health Policy, and Media Trust

SPEAKER_02 13:54

First of all, one of the policies that were rejected that in my estimation caused the election of Donald Trump in 2024 is that lawfare was rejected. And I can tell you personally, that's what did it for me. I'm like, okay, that's enough. And I find it interesting that the nomenclature says, well, Trump's out for revenge and retribution. And I'd encourage people go find your favorite three dictionaries, look up revenge and retribution. And in a hundred percent of the cases, it's doing something to someone that caused you harm. Now look at the data that's been revealed. Matt Taibe's done some really good reporting on this. It's in the records of the people doing it that they had an intelligence committee assessment that says there's no Russian influence. There was a meeting in the office of President Obama with Joe Biden, with Hillary Clinton, with James Clapper, with John Brennan, with James Comey. And after that, the intelligence community assessment changed. And there's memos from Clapper saying, hey, this is the story we're going with, and we're all going to stick together on this story. And just for grins, I went back to one of our early episodes. It was 46, 47, 48. We interviewed Barbara McQuaid, who is a MSNBC legal analyst today. And at that time, Roger Stone had been arrested. And basically, it's like, well, we have the goods on the guy, and when you lay it side by side with Comey, it's like, oh, there it is. Same thing. Except they didn't use 24 armed people, a helicopter, and an armored vehicle to bring Comey in. So it's a dangerous situation. Also, by the way, I asked her on that podcast, was Adam Schiff saying that they had, you know, ourals of information or proof evidence that Donald Trump was commuting with the Russians. I said, is that a crime? And she said, it's not necessarily a crime. She said, but Trump could sue Schiff for defamation. So I only went back and looked because I just thought it was instructive that who's doing it versus what's being done. And again, I don't want James Comey to be unfairly prosecuted at all. I want him to have his day in court. And I also think he needs to testify under oath about what he did. And someone's going to have to be accountable because this stuff didn't just fall out of the sky.

SPEAKER_01 16:26

Right. And it would be nice if the government could get out of the business of weaponizing the Department of Justice. Seems like that's been going on for 16 years now or 20 years. It just I don't I don't know why that. Well, I kind of don't know why it started.

SPEAKER_02 16:41

Well, we got to speak up. Every citizen needs to be speaking up. And when you're speaking up, please be like the common bridge. Don't say, well, it's because of this guy, and we're gonna go get that guy's a bad guy. Nobody cares. Is the government abusing its power? And is there a justification for it? And this country is founded on the notion that the powers of government are restricted. You can't just do what you want, you can't just spy on us, you can't take our stuff, you can't stop us from talking, you can't stop us from defending ourselves, you can't make us self-incriminate, you can't come into our house, you can't make us quarter soldiers. These are things that are very precious, and if we don't defend them for everybody, then they will be defended for nobody. And don't let them divide us.

SPEAKER_01 17:32

What are your thoughts about how that applies with the Epstein case going forward?

SPEAKER_02 17:37

Well, it's not who you are, it's when you are, because the players have changed positions. Hey, hey, keep that data locked up now. Hey, where is it? Where is it? You mean the stuff that you asked to be, you know, and they've completely flip-flop positions. So I'm of the mind, get it all out there in a way that protects the victim. I don't care who you are. If you were involved in the trafficking of women or men, I guess, or boys or girls, whatever, you need to be held accountable for it. We need, as a society, to say that is wrong. You will be accountable, we are going to find you, and you need to stop doing that. And uh, just today, by the way, the Supreme Court ruled that Jelaine Maxwell will not be granted any kind of relief on appeal. She's got to serve her 20-year sentence. I look at that and say, okay, so she was trafficking all these young women and trafficking them to one guy? Okay, bud, you did all that evil by yourself. I find that hard to believe. Now, without you asking the question, this will, I know, enrage half my audience, but I gotta say it. Is Donald Trump involved in a nefarious way? And all signs point to no, and I'll say it on the following basis. First of all, the victims have all said they never saw anything that involved Donald Trump, period, full stop. They were looking for it. Number two, imagine in the 2016 election that you're the Democratic Party, you're the Hillary Clinton campaign, and you've got all that. Remember, it was Obama's FBI, and they had all this data on Epstein. Yep. And you had Donald Trump dead to rights on trafficking, rape, whatever. You had it. And you said, you know what? Let's not go with that. Let's make up this story about Russian collusion and P tapes instead. It makes no sense. If they had something on Trump, we would have heard about it years ago and Donald Trump never be president today.

Barry Weiss, CBS, and “Just Report News”

SPEAKER_01 19:41

All right, moving on. When Trump was elected, there was a lot of folks, half the country said that democracy was over and the economy would collapse. And uh now you've forgotten more about finance than I'll ever know. Why is the stock market doing so well? And do you think that there's any parallel of the stock market doing really well in September of 1929 and what happened in October of 1929? I read something about that recently, so that's not my idea. But why is the stock market up?

SPEAKER_02 20:13

Well, I like the quote from a fellow named Jonathan Bush that was running a company called Athena Health, and he said a butterfly can fart in South America and change the stock market. And he's right about that. So any administration saying, hey, that's us that made that happen, that's not it. Time does not afford us. But look, the stock market's not the economy. Where we get away from this is what are we measuring? And so, for example, Brian, if we produced poisonous foods and a lot of them, okay, with chemicals and dyes in them, and we sold a bunch, hey, GDP's up, employment's up, etc. Oh, guess what? And farmers now up too, because we got to produce a drug to deal with the effects of that. Well, the economy really is about is can a family or an individual person go to work, trade in their hours, and get a decent standard of living? Can they be educated? Can they have some recreation? Can they have clean water, clean food, et cetera? It's all about affordability, it's all about employment. And right now, the stock market you mentioned 1929, I'd say 1999. In every cycle that there is a new technology, most recently 1999, first internet, it gets overhyped. Happened with automotive 100 years before this, right? Um, and there's too many players in the game, and then it gets sorted out to a few players. So AI right now is driving this. People are making assumptions about AI's impact, and they're wildly aggressive. It reminds me of the days when mobile phones were new, and you looked at what was going on with those stocks, and then you look at the analysis of wait a minute, this says every man, woman, child, newborn on the planet is going to have a smartphone because that's what was baked into the stock market. And having spent time there, I can tell you the fear that they run on exceeds the greed that is reported. And the fear is being the last one into a trade or the last one out of the trade. So they're all egging each other on right now. We've got exuberance. I don't think we've thought this through. Again, everybody should have their own individual investment advice. My sense is the following stay diversified, hang on. If you're just starting out, live on less than you make, find a way to do that. And so you either got to start making more, you got to start spending less. Every generation's had to do that. Those will go. What you didn't ask about, Brian, which I'm surprised, or maybe you were going to is tariffs. And if you notice the news cycle, that's all quieted down, right? Couple of things here. One is that tariffs had to get digested. Every source I've been able to talk to said, just tell me what the rules are and we'll play the game. But you can't be changing the rules. So a big deal's been made out of, for example, exports of U.S. liquor, and particularly to Canada. Canada's not drinking our booze anymore. Well, first of all, they make really good stuff themselves. All right. Maybe in bourbon, but they're good at this stuff. But also in their largest province, you can't buy liquor except through a provincial store. And in most of the other provinces, that's also true. Now, some have public-private. So the Canadian government can literally shut down American imports of liquor by deciding what to put on the shelf. And they're doing that. And no, we're not bootlegging this stuff across the Detroit River in a reverse of prohibition times. That will not happen on our watch. And I am not doing winkety wink at you.

Borders, Enforcement, and Limits on Power

SPEAKER_01 23:58

From where I live, I can see the Hiram Walker factory across the lake. Can you smell it though? That's the point. All right, let's get back into uh and into politics. I'm reminded of the Tea Party 25 years ago or so, and it was the extreme side of the Republican Party was said to have been the demise of the Republican Party at the time. Now they're saying that the extreme side of the Democratic Party, and even the Democrats are talking about how that's going to be the end of the Democratic Party. We all know this is cyclical at some point. But which of the two parties do you think at this point are most in trouble?

SPEAKER_02 24:34

Oh, clearly it's the Republicans and the Democrats. I mean, you know, they're they're um the the Republicans are a little easier to explain because we're no longer right and left, we're no longer conservative, liberal at all. It's either it's kind of Trump and not Trump. And frankly, Trump likes it that way. You've heard me off say in the run up to 2016, the only good thing about Trump getting nominated, which I didn't think would happen, would be he would destroy the establishment of the Republican Party. Then I said, Oh, the only good thing about him getting elected, which I did not think was going to happen, is that he would destroy the establishment of the Democratic Party.

SPEAKER_01 25:13

Right.

SPEAKER_02 25:14

And it took longer than I thought for the second part of that to come true. But here we are. So if you're the GOP right now, your biggest challenge is what comes after Trump? Because there's you're basically rallying around a transformational president, whether you like him or don't like him, but you're gonna have to answer that question at some point. And I guarantee you, they're all politicians, they're all gonna try to find a way to parse that about you know, they didn't like his personality, but they liked his trade policy. I don't know how they're gonna do it, but they've got a real problem with an identity. The Democrats have got a more basic problem. They need to find answers to things like is an open border that we had and promoted a good policy? Are we going back to that? And they could also even try. You've got a party that can't answer the question, what is a woman? Like start there and explain to American voters why it's okay to have children taken away from their homes if they don't affirm their gender distress. That's where the Democrats are stuck. How far into that muck can they come out without losing it? Now, by the way, I'm very optimistic for them because the attack plan that they've had, you know what they are, Brian, racist, misogynist, transphobe, homophobe, fascist, literally Hitler, all the stuff that they run until it exhausts itself and then they reload, whatever they pick isn't gonna get subjected to that. But there's got to be a voice of sanity rising up out of the Democrats that are willing to say, guys, let's get back to reality. And where my optimism comes in in the fiercely nonpartisan way is this if you take a guy trying to escape the lunacy that's become the fringe on the Democrats, and you look for a guy that's trying to define the Republican Party post-Trump, maybe they have middle ground, and maybe it's not about Washington, D.C. games. It's about the people that are just trying to make a living in the Midwest of the United States.

SPEAKER_01 27:42

I want to take this otherworldly and we'll wrap it up on the otherworldly worldly. And then I'm not UFOs.

SPEAKER_02 27:50

Don't I don't want the UFOs?

SPEAKER_01 27:52

We've all agreed that they're they've been around for a long time now. Nobody seems to be worried about that. NASA warns that in 2032 there's going to be an asteroid impact risk that's much higher than we're all comfortable with, raising debates on planetary defense. I'm always of the opinion that if that was actually true and it really was going to be a problem, we'd never know about it because everything, the society would break down. There'd be no point. Any thoughts how that might play out seven years from now in 2032?

SPEAKER_02 28:20

Here's how it'd be played, Brian, in the beacon of the free world, the United States of America. If Trump wants to stop that asteroid, there's going to be a I'm going to the streets with the same formula as Palestine's gotta be free, uh, queers for Palestine. I'm saying ending asteroid abuse that Trump's gonna put on it.

SPEAKER_01 28:45

Oh, that's fun. That's fun.

Lawfare, Comey, and Equal Standards

SPEAKER_02 28:47

I'm sure that the uh uh the Republicans would say blue states have invited an asteroid in to the country and it's their fault and their problem, or it's some stupid thing like that. So well, okay, all right. I hope it doesn't hit us, and I but if the news comes out, that's how it would be. Can we blame Trump for this or can we blame the other side for it? That's how it'd be played.

SPEAKER_01 29:20

Well, Trump will be long gone by then, but it's funny. That's funny.

SPEAKER_02 29:24

Or we or or will he? Or will he really? Yeah. You know, you know, he's po he's poking people with the I I I want to kick him in the crotch, frankly, when it's like you know, his you know, the Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf of Mexico. It's the def Department of Defense. I don't want to call my president a dumbass, but um, you know, like just knock it off and quit twisting tails and act like an adult, Mr. President, please, and uh, you know, try to bring the temperature down so.

SPEAKER_01 30:00

So you don't think you should go all FDR and go not for a third term, but go for a third term and a fourth term and just keep running and Brian, it would divide the country horribly.

SPEAKER_02 30:10

I would be opposed to it. You got your two terms. When he says stuff like that, people need to recognize don't take the bait.

SPEAKER_01 30:17

Even if you don't like the guy, he's got a hell of a sense of humor. And sometimes I swear that guy says stuff just to see it hit the news cycle that night. And he probably sits there and eats junk food and laughs at it.

SPEAKER_02 30:27

Yeah, exactly. Right. Well, actually, I think he's I think he's more strategic about that. I think his first term, I think it was everything off the seat of his pants, whatever popped into his head. Yeah. Um, but now he seems to be uh, you know, a little bit more disciplined. Again, I'm not saying that that means you need to like him because you know he's a sharply divisive person. I I think people need to step back and let's talk about the what, not the who. Are tariffs a good trade policy or are they not? You know, have we been on the wrong side of them for a long time or have we not? Is what we're applying the good the right thing or the not right thing? You know, and you can do that policy by policy. But when you're in the opposition, all of a sudden you want to paint yourself as you're this high moral ground person, you're not. And that really cracks me up when they try to say, well, you can't be a Christian if you believe this. Or like, no, you like you you suck at politics and you're worse at theology. So just shut up, you know. Argue the policy.

SPEAKER_01 31:28

That's right. That's right. All right. Any uh, we'll wrap this up. Any words of wisdom going into season seven that you can impart upon uh or to our audience of viewers, listeners, and readers, and especially of our Substack audience. And I think now's a really good time to remind our audience too. Thank you for all the comments you have coming in. Let's see, in in season seven, to steer them at uh Substack because Substack's growing and all the tools are really cool. You can get your voice heard through our Common Bridge Substack page by commenting there. And once a quarter, as a lot of you know who've been with us for a long time, we do a mailbag and we'll pick a lot of the things that our uh viewers, listeners, and readers have said, and we bring them up in the podcast. So, Rich, is there anything you'd like to say to your audience as we go into our seventh season?

SPEAKER_02 32:16

Yes, two things. Number one, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. And number two, please tell your friends and family to sign up for the Common Bridge, free or paid. Paid would be nice, but free is great. Also, maybe a third thing would be let's meet each other in the middle. Nobody wins in the tribalism, nobody wins in the polar division. And I'll do the sign-off, Brian. And with our producer, Brian Krueger, this is your host, Rich Helpe, signing off at the beginning of season seven on the common bridge.

SPEAKER_00 32:45

Thank you for joining us on the Common Bridge, where we continue to seek clarity across divided lines. Subscribe and support the Common Bridge on Substack, YouTube, and wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Until next time, we invite you to stay informed, stay engaged, and help build a bridge of common understanding.