Sam Stein and Talmon Smith: Brain Drain

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Speaker 36 Hello and welcome to the Bulwark podcast.

Speaker 37 I'm your host, Tim Miller. We have a double header today.

Speaker 24 I had Talman Smith, who's a New Orleanian who writes about economics, on to talk about the purges at the Fed, the attempted purge of Lisa Cook at the Fed.

Speaker 41 But there's been so much news, so much dark news.

Speaker 37 I like to bring on this guest for comedic news, but in this case,

Speaker 49 we're going to find his sensitive side.

Speaker 51 It's the managing editor of of the bulwark, Sam Stein.

Speaker 49 How you doing, man?

Speaker 1 I'm good, man. How are you?

Speaker 30 I am well, all things considered.

Speaker 36 We got a bunch of news we got to get to.

Speaker 53 So, yesterday, a shooter opened fire during morning mass at a Catholic school in Minneapolis, killed two children, injured 17 others.

Speaker 51 The shooter is identified as a 23-year-old, likely trans or trans-identifying person, Robin Westman, who killed themselves.

Speaker 49 They left behind a trail of insane conspiracy, theory-addled videos, and writings don't don't really map on any ideological spectrum.

Speaker 55 I know you did a video on this yesterday, but just kind of after 24 hours, just wondering what your reactions are or if you have anything new to say about this American Groundhog Day tragedy.

Speaker 7 I mean, that's it.

Speaker 60 It's that it's Groundhog Day.

Speaker 60 It's so customary in our social fabric at this point that its lack of extraordinariness is like the defining feature for me.

Speaker 60 I I mean, I just, I've been through this so many times journalistically now that, you know, I remember the first time or one of the first times that, you know, you kind of hustle in the newsroom.

Speaker 60 It's shocking. You get into order and you write on it and then you try to think of, you know, how to process it.
And now it's just, it processes itself.

Speaker 60 I guess the thing that's, you know, different for me is my kids are now of age where they are going through the process of, you know, preparing for things like this at their own schools.

Speaker 60 And that obviously takes it to a different personal level.

Speaker 61 That kid, that video of that kid saying, we did the shooting, we've done these drills in the classroom.

Speaker 64 We've never done it at church.

Speaker 55 It's just like so gutting.

Speaker 62 I don't know.

Speaker 39 I'm kind of against the drills.

Speaker 60 That and the way the kid talked about it, which was, it was so methodical, so routine, almost like

Speaker 60 this was not a big deal. It was almost like he was describing like a basketball shooting drill.
And you're like, I'm in. This is just, this is just part of their life.

Speaker 60 The other thing that stood out, and I think Andrew Eger did a good job tackling this this morning for morning shots, is just, I hate this.

Speaker 60 I really hate how right in the immediate aftermath of these things, it's so typical, but everyone's just sort of like looking for little chestnuts of news or bio or something from the manifesto that can just allow them to say, oh,

Speaker 60 this shooter was a Republican or this shooter was a Democrat or this shooter like took some, you know, medication that, you know, trans kids take, or this shooter, you know, read some sort of

Speaker 60 anti-Muslim propaganda. It's like

Speaker 60 the natural instinct to try to use this to further your political agenda. I find it sickening.
I find it really grotesque, and I can't deal with it.

Speaker 65 I forget which this tells you all you need to know.

Speaker 39 I forget which school shooting I wrote about this after, but I think it's like maybe the prime example of kind of the darkening of

Speaker 53 this human spirit in the country that we all have, and I have it.

Speaker 39 So I like, this is not a finger-pointing thing. There seems to be like this natural instinct inside you that immediately goes to, I hope it was the other guys that did this one.

Speaker 63 You know, and like we have to re-deprogram ourselves from all of that.

Speaker 45 And like, it starts by acknowledging it.

Speaker 13 And, um, and it doesn't mean that you don't,

Speaker 41 you know, want to look at potentially underlying issues and trends and like that, you know, and if you're at DHS, you know, Elizabeth Newman, who's a friend of mine, this was her job at DHS, like looking at trends and trying to figure out domestic terror and other things you know sure i this is not to let people off the hook for their ideological extremism if they have it but it's just like as a culture it just is a sign of a broken culture oh totally totally and i think you had a really good tweet which means you probably uh outsourced it to someone else but uh it was about how like they were looking into oh you know

Speaker 49 trends in trans violence and you're like well you know in Japan what was it like in Japan they've in Japan there was one so this guy here's what happened this guy this was a this chart was going around and i saw it like three times before i tweeted it which was like these right-wing guys putting up this chart about like it was like an analysis of the the percentage of a community that had that had committed a mass shooting a shooting with more than four deaths or something and it was like you know 0.07% of trans people have done it but 0.05 percent of asian men have done it and 0.04 of white men or whatever i don't have in front of me but it's like my point was like and it was just looking at the last 10 years of data.

Speaker 83 My point was like, in Japan, they've had one mass shooting in the last 10 years of data.

Speaker 13 In America, we're like trying to slice and dice the statistics to see if a group that we hate is more complicit in these than another group.

Speaker 83 And I feel like it kind of is missing the points.

Speaker 60 You think, yeah, and it's just like, there is one underlying feature through all of this, easy access to guns. Easy access to guns.

Speaker 60 And it's just like, I'm at the place now where it's like, you want to, you know, fortify schools?

Speaker 36 Cool.

Speaker 23 This guy shot through the window.

Speaker 37 Hannity was doing this thing last night about how we need metal detectors at every door.

Speaker 85 He didn't even go in the fucking door of the church.

Speaker 7 He didn't go in the door.

Speaker 60 Didn't go in the door, dude. You got it.
You got to, I mean, fortify the, I don't even care. Let them fortify the schools.

Speaker 5 Arm the priests.

Speaker 60 Arm the nuns, whatever you want to do. But if it doesn't take into account easy access to firearms by deranged people, then it's pointless.
And

Speaker 60 go holistic. Do whatever you want, but it has to take that into account.
And I don't know.

Speaker 60 I'm so burnt out about this stuff. And I find it so depressing.

Speaker 60 And I honestly do, you know, you try to compartmentalize it, but then you send your kid off to school and you're like, you know, in the back of your mind, you're just sort of like, don't want to get that call.

Speaker 60 Don't want to get that call. And it goes away and you go through the day, but I feel it.
I do.

Speaker 82 All right.

Speaker 65 So maybe this is me not listening to our own advice, but I, because I do have one crazy hot take about this that appealed to me.

Speaker 65 And so I want you to take me off the, off the, you know, I don't want to be, I don't want to be an inverse Hannity here.

Speaker 45 So, look, talk me off the ledge if I need to be talked off the ledge.

Speaker 22 Fellow YouTuber Defined wrote this.

Speaker 39 Crazy that this guy was literally talking about his plans to shoot up this church for a month on the open internet, but Cash and Bondi are too busy going after imaginary MS-13 Home Depot workers.

Speaker 39 If only they were doing their jobs instead.

Speaker 13 Now, I want to say, I don't.

Speaker 88 Like the exact specifics of that claim that

Speaker 5 Cash and Bondi could have stopped this, i i don't want to endorse but this guy was posting on this thing called skibbity farms which is uh i'm not going down that route skiwi farms you don't you don't want to know about this if you're a boomer you don't want to know about this but it's essentially an updated 4chan but the point is not wrong at the broad sense

Speaker 53 that like we have a risk here in this country that like we have we have totally de-emphasized like this government has totally de-emphasized interest in looking at domestic terror and the fbi is now you know, we're reorienting that towards, you know, all immigration stuff, immigration only.

Speaker 39 And we're firing people with expertise if they've said a mean thing about Donald Trump.

Speaker 88 And maybe any individual case can't be blamed on that, but at scale, it feels bad.

Speaker 24 It feels wrong.

Speaker 56 And I don't know.

Speaker 88 Shouldn't that be something they have to answer for?

Speaker 60 Yeah, I suppose. I mean, like any law enforcement agency, it's, you know, much of what you do is prioritization of resources and what you think is, you know, the most important threat.

Speaker 60 And they've obviously torqued it in a direction towards immigration. And

Speaker 60 just like in the Bush era, it was towards terrorism, right? And like

Speaker 60 that being said, and I just, you know.

Speaker 60 Gun violence is so pervasive that even if you were to put all your resources towards preventing it, I'm not sure, I mean, you obviously make progress, but like people have to understand, this was the second shooting in as many days in minneapolis at a catholic school there was a shooting the day before outside a catholic school in minneapolis i don't know if you were serious so let's just play this out though if you were serious if you were actually serious about this serious about law and order and protecting the streets and all this stuff i don't know like We have fucking AI.

Speaker 47 We've had Palantir has access to the entire government now.

Speaker 37 If like, we have AI tools now.

Speaker 47 If somebody posts on Skibbity Farms, I'm going to shoot up a church, shouldn't they at least get a call from somebody?

Speaker 60 That's what red flag laws are for. And they have worked and there's evidence that they do work.
And

Speaker 60 you would like to think that we would try to

Speaker 60 extrapolate on that success and adopt it more nationally. And I'm all supportive for that.
Ultimately, there's always going to be nut jobs who fall through the cracks. And the real common denominator.

Speaker 60 through all this is not necessarily personality or gender or religion or anything like that. It's easy access to firearms.
It's easy access to firearms. It's easy access to firearms.

Speaker 60 And until we grapple with that, like you're going to have these instances. But yes, of course, you're right.

Speaker 60 Like you should be focusing and our law enforcement should be focusing on clearly troubled people who are posting on these forums. Like that's an obvious place to look.

Speaker 65 I'm sorry, I do have to push back on you, though, because the Secretary of Health and Human Services was on Fox News this morning.

Speaker 43 And we're not going to play this audio because we have a different audio of him later. And

Speaker 61 people can only listen to this man's voice.

Speaker 30 We can only take it.

Speaker 53 This is an audi medium, as I said to you in Slack, and he is the most unappealing voice I've ever heard, I think.

Speaker 91 And so

Speaker 49 having to hear it more than once in a podcast is torture, so we won't do it.

Speaker 42 But essentially, what happens is Brian Killmees trying to blame this on trans people, obviously.

Speaker 60 T to run up for the guy.

Speaker 73 And

Speaker 44 so, yes, RFK, if he's going to investigate that, I don't know what RFK's role is really as HHS secretary, but.

Speaker 54 Okay.

Speaker 51 RFK doesn't really address it, but he kind of does by saying, no, actually, what we're really going to look into is SSRIs, antidepressants, things of this nature.

Speaker 76 And we think that that is the problem here.

Speaker 7 What a quack.

Speaker 60 I think like 10% of the country is on SSRIs.

Speaker 11 Are there SSRIs in Japan? I don't know. I know.

Speaker 7 Can we look into that? Have they made it?

Speaker 88 Is anyone in Japan on SSRIs?

Speaker 60 Country is forbidding them. No, this is so ridiculous.
The thing was,

Speaker 60 if we're not playing the clip, but it was, you know, Fox News literally just like begging him to just go off on trans kids.

Speaker 60 And he's just like, actually,

Speaker 60 sorry, that's my bobby. It just went off for SSRIs because that's what he cared about, because he's a lunatic who believes that antidepressants are causing people to be violent.

Speaker 60 And I'm sure he has some like crazed study that he's going to point to and be like, you know,

Speaker 60 the

Speaker 60 mitochondrial challenges that our people are facing. And

Speaker 60 I can't even deal with it.

Speaker 64 Let's not shoot our load on the mitochondrial challenges before we get to it.

Speaker 7 Sorry.

Speaker 60 Did I get ahead of it?

Speaker 94 All right, you got a little, you got a little bit ahead of us.

Speaker 7 We'll get to it.

Speaker 12 I mean, it's okay.

Speaker 83 Mitochondrial challenges, let's be fair, are kind of implicit in everything that's happening in our society.

Speaker 47 Yes.

Speaker 48 So you can bring it up on any topic.

Speaker 3 Hey, y'all, I warned you.

Speaker 37 I warned you.

Speaker 10 Our Toronto show has sold out.

Speaker 86 The Canadians love Sam Stein so much that, you know, there are lines around the block to get tickets to it.

Speaker 10 But the good news is we still have tickets left for our live shows in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 21 and in New York coming up in early October.

Speaker 13 So go get those tickets now now at thebulwark.com/slash events.

Speaker 44 I'm missing LSU versus South Carolina for you guys.

Speaker 42 I'm going to be in New York for that.

Speaker 75 And so assuming that's an afternoon game, I might have a couple bourbons in me by the time we get on stage on Saturday night.

Speaker 13 So that one could be a rowdy one.

Speaker 26 So if you're looking for an excuse to go to the Big Apple, go see a show Friday night.

Speaker 73 Come see us Saturday night.

Speaker 86 Could be a fun little weekend.

Speaker 54 Go get tickets.

Speaker 36 Like I said, thebork.com slash events.

Speaker 24 Thebulwark.com slash events.

Speaker 22 See y'all soon.

Speaker 69 So, the other news that you have been on your Brooklyn News on this yesterday, and our colleague Jonathan Cohen has a good, a great summary of this in the morning shots newsletter.

Speaker 49 This morning, people should sign up for if they haven't got, if they're not getting it at thebork.com.

Speaker 69 But

Speaker 10 the CDC, I don't know if we're calling this a

Speaker 79 little bit of a purge and a little bit of a self-deportation, and

Speaker 9 it's craziness.

Speaker 25 But at the top of the Center for Disease Control, just total

Speaker 66 what? Lunacy?

Speaker 66 What would you call it?

Speaker 60 Chaos? I don't even know how to describe it. What would you describe it if like the top, you know, four or five officials at an agency just were like, you know what?

Speaker 60 We're done. And then like mass resignation like that.
The good news is that the CDC is not really that big a deal and they don't really matter them.

Speaker 60 No, this is a calamity.

Speaker 60 People who have decades of subject matter expertise in infectious disease and other critical health issues just yesterday, I were like, we are resigning.

Speaker 60 And the backstory, as far as we understand it, is that the CDC director, who's only been on the job for a couple of weeks, was essentially told by Kennedy, you need to like get on board with my anti-vax crusade because he's been restricting COVID vaccine booster vaccines, as well as preparing to, we expect in the month ahead, say that autism is caused by vaccinations.

Speaker 60 So you got to get on board or you're gone. And I want you to fire these people anyway.
And she said no. And then these people resigned in protest anyway.

Speaker 60 Now, the scariest thing for me came as we were reporting it out. I was talking to a source of mine who knows some of the people who resigned.

Speaker 60 And this person was like, you know, they had told me that they were going to stick around at the CDC, and I'm going to read this, to protect science until they were.

Speaker 60 quote, asked to do something that could hurt people, end quote. So the implication is that they believed they were asked to do something that would hurt people.
And at that point, they resigned.

Speaker 60 We're at a place where our trusted public health officials, just think about this, our trusted public health officials, people who have worked on these issues more critically and aggressively than anyone else in our country, where they believe that our leadership is actively hurting the population.

Speaker 60 And wrapping your head around that is really hard. But I think that's where we're at.

Speaker 83 And tying it to the first story, like

Speaker 13 you can't kind of disentangle all this stuff.

Speaker 72 It's just, it's worth mentioning that it was, what, two weeks ago, August 12th, maybe August 11th, a couple of weeks ago, that a man fired hundreds of rounds of ammunition

Speaker 22 at the CDC

Speaker 22 headquarters.

Speaker 48 And he said part of it was over the fact that he expressed distrust of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Speaker 48 So you have like quacks at the top forcing scientists and experts to put out information they know is or they think is harmful.

Speaker 53 And so you have experts leaving the government. And then you have quacks outside trying to intimidate, threaten

Speaker 86 these folks.

Speaker 77 Well, who would want to work there?

Speaker 74 Like, honestly, honestly, like, why, who, who, why would you want to work there?

Speaker 1 And it's not like this is a lucrative

Speaker 61 position.

Speaker 60 Well, that's what Cohen and I were talking about this last night. I was like, well, who's going to take these jobs now? Right.
Like, so you have people who are running like.

Speaker 36 What are some of the jobs of the people that?

Speaker 60 So, like, okay, just to go through it, the one that I know most was run by a guy named Dimitri Daskalakis.

Speaker 60 And I'm not going to get his actual title right, but essentially he was the point person for two big issues, monkeypox and COVID.

Speaker 56 Appreciate his work on monkeypox.

Speaker 7 That was important for my community. Yeah.

Speaker 60 Look, I don't want to get monkeypox.

Speaker 7 You were earlier.

Speaker 59 How many Charlie XCX songs can you name?

Speaker 93 We're going to move on.

Speaker 7 Less than three.

Speaker 70 I don't think you're at any risk of monkeypox.

Speaker 66 We've continued. I appreciate that.

Speaker 60 Anyway, so that's one.

Speaker 60 And then there was others. There's Dr.
Dan Jerrigan, who's been a zoonotic infectious disease expert. He's been there for decades.

Speaker 60 The other person was Jen Layden. I'm unfamiliar with.
She was at the Office of Public Health Data. And then there was Deborah Howery, who was the chief medical officer there.

Speaker 49 Seems like an important job.

Speaker 60 Yeah, kind of, kind of significant. These are big, big positions.
And they're going to be okay. Like they'll find work.
They'll be fine. They're going to continue to

Speaker 60 operate in this field. I have no doubt about it.
But if you are a scientist with any credibility, like, why the hell would you go into the CDC at this point?

Speaker 60 There's just no real reason to do it, right? Like, you would be forced to, you know, defend quackery.

Speaker 69 I have an idea of why you might go.

Speaker 43 Let's say you've been walking through the airport and you've been looking at the children and you think and you see a problem.

Speaker 89 And I don't want to play an audio about what that problem might be.

Speaker 97 And I know what a healthy child is supposed to look like.

Speaker 97 I'm looking at kids as I walk through the airports today, as I walk down the street, and I see these kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, with inflammation.

Speaker 97 You can tell from their faces, from their body movements,

Speaker 97 and from their lack of social connection.

Speaker 97 And I know that that's not how our children are supposed to look.

Speaker 98 What the fuck is this guy talking about?

Speaker 7 He's in the airport.

Speaker 85 He sees a child. He's like, you have a lack of social connection.

Speaker 23 You have too much mitochondrial DNA.

Speaker 85 Like you're in, you have inflammation.

Speaker 98 But you're not a fucking doctor. What the fuck are you talking about?

Speaker 98 He doesn't know anything. This person,

Speaker 15 we're sticking with this person at the head of HHS and we're losing the people that were running the COVID and monkeypox programs.

Speaker 36 We're going to trust the mitochondrial guy who self-diagnosed somebody at O'Hare because he saw a seven-year-old who was eating some ice cream and he thought he looked like he was socially disconnected and inflamed.

Speaker 60 I just have this vision of Bobby sitting there at the Einstein bagels,

Speaker 60 staring at an eight-year-old kid being like, he's moving funny.

Speaker 7 His mitochondrials all off.

Speaker 60 Why is he not talking to another eight-year-old?

Speaker 4 Stop talking about other people's kids, too.

Speaker 85 Have you ever heard of the story where he's in L.A.?

Speaker 74 What's the path everybody goes walking on in L.A.?

Speaker 65 Katie's going to kill me.

Speaker 65 I I

Speaker 2 can't think of the name.

Speaker 73 Anyway, whatever that hiking path is, everybody walks on in LA.

Speaker 66 And he goes up to the mom with the baby and the baby Bjorn, and he's like, don't vaccinate that child.

Speaker 24 It's like, stop talking about other people's children. You cannot

Speaker 67 make any determinations about their health status based on a glance.

Speaker 59 No,

Speaker 60 it's inherently weird. What is he talking about?

Speaker 7 Runyon Canyon.

Speaker 60 He also, this is a man who said in a deposition, I believe that he is a brain worm. I just want to remind people of that.

Speaker 39 What does the brain worm do to your mitochondria?

Speaker 7 Yeah, I was going to wonder,

Speaker 60 does the brain worm help the mitochondria?

Speaker 7 Or does it hurt?

Speaker 60 Can Bobby get on that? Well, on a serious note, I mean, this is all very serious, but like, this guy is so dogmatic about his worldview. And like, he's full of it.

Speaker 60 And he's just now setting the tone for our entire country's health system. And it's really scary.
Have you come around to my, this is, now I need to make it about you and me.

Speaker 60 Have you come around to my belief that he's the number one danger cabinet member? Are you still on the fence here?

Speaker 15 Well,

Speaker 93 I'm still on the fence. I think that there are a lot of risks out there.

Speaker 7 He's going up.

Speaker 7 He's going up the charts.

Speaker 85 He's going up the charts. Okay.
He's definitely going up the list.

Speaker 99 I underestimated it. I'll give you that.

Speaker 73 That's a win I'll give you.

Speaker 9 But, you know, we'll see.

Speaker 76 We'll see where things go with the DOJ.

Speaker 9 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 60 We just need a couple. We need an outbreak.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 73 You're really, you're really thrilled by the performance of the DOD and

Speaker 78 Justice Department heads so far?

Speaker 7 I want one win here.

Speaker 30 Give me one win. How about Nutlick?

Speaker 30 Okay.

Speaker 5 I'm looking here.

Speaker 3 I googled mitochondrial diseases, like some symptoms.

Speaker 60 Can you see it by just scanning a child's face?

Speaker 85 Well, a couple of things is muscle weakness and low muscle tone.

Speaker 85 So I just, I see Bobby looking at the nine-year-olds walking through and be like, can we get this guy, can we get this guy down to golds?

Speaker 85 Let's get this kid down to golds. He's got to do a couple of shoulder presses before his mitochondrial

Speaker 60 when you look at bobby's when you look at bobby do you think that's a guy with good mitochondrial no mitochondrial he's got muscle tone

Speaker 73 yeah his shape is weird oh my god um okay there are other purges happening a friend of the show stan voyger over at aei uh posted this yesterday i thought this was very insightful.

Speaker 25 He writes, the deputy treasury secretary, the CDC director, and the Defense Intelligence Agency director all got fired suddenly this week.

Speaker 46 And I think only the most committed news consumers noticed.

Speaker 74 That's a true statement, but it also kind of barely scratches the surface.

Speaker 76 The Fed governor.

Speaker 80 The Fed Ford governor, the head of the BLS, the chief of staff of the Air Force, like 31 Intel officials, including one CIA agent that Tulsi accidentally outed by including on the list of fired officials.

Speaker 7 Well,

Speaker 60 they lost their clearance, but yeah.

Speaker 7 Oh, yeah, you're right.

Speaker 26 They only lost their clearance.

Speaker 74 Well, isn't that not firing?

Speaker 82 Can you maintain your job?

Speaker 78 Is it

Speaker 78 the intelligencies?

Speaker 60 I think they get a paycheck, but they aren't doing their job. And then you had the FEMA officials who wrote the open letter being like, we are so severely understaffed.

Speaker 60 Yeah, it's awful.

Speaker 20 What do you want me to say?

Speaker 24 Readers of the Morning Shots newsletter noticed.

Speaker 7 It is.

Speaker 82 I don't really know what to do about that, but it is.

Speaker 45 And it's just kind of one of those things where it's just like, it's important sometimes to step back.

Speaker 74 It's like, this would be.

Speaker 86 Had Obama put some hack in charge of some, you know, whatever, and like one of the top people resigned in protests.

Speaker 56 Like, that's like the leading news story of the night, you know, for a couple of days until something else happens, right?

Speaker 15 Until there's a shooting or something.

Speaker 60 But well, it's just like the fail government's going to fail on a profound level on multiple fronts, right?

Speaker 60 Like, I mean, I found it just a sort of small irony here, but like the National Guard cleaning up Washington, D.C. this week and picking up trash and all the custodial work.

Speaker 60 They're doing it because the National Park Service has been gutted. Like, there's little ways in which this stuff matters, and then there's big ways in which this stuff matters.

Speaker 60 And God forbid, like some pandemic happens in the next, you know, six months. God forbid.
What are we going to do with a CDC that's completely gutted?

Speaker 60 Like that's, that's going to be really problematic for obvious reasons.

Speaker 63 I think die is what people are going to do.

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Speaker 100 She'd throw things, wander, and started hoarding. Mom's Alzheimer's was already so hard.

Speaker 100 But then we found out she had something called agitation that may happen with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. And that was a different kind of difficult.
So we asked her doctor for more help.

Speaker 96 Seeing symptoms like these in a loved one, it could be time to ask their doctor about Rexulte, Rexpiprazole 2 milligrams, the only FDA-approved treatment proven to reduce the symptoms of this condition.

Speaker 96 Rexulti should not be used as an as-needed treatment.

Speaker 96 Elderly people with dementia-related psychosis have increased risk of death or stroke, report fever, stiff muscles, and confusion, which can be life-threatening, or uncontrolled muscle movements, which may be permanent.

Speaker 96 High blood sugar can lead to coma or death. Weight gain, increased cholesterol, unusual urges, dizziness on standing, falls, seizures, trouble swallowing, or sleepiness may occur.

Speaker 96 Learn more about these and other side effects at Rexulte.com. Tap Ad for PI.

Speaker 100 I'm glad her doctor recommended Rick Sulti.

Speaker 101 Talk to your loved ones, doctor.

Speaker 96 Moments matter.

Speaker 38 I do a little kind of foreign policy kind of Dem party talk here.

Speaker 57 Before we get to the Dem stuff, one other news item since I think massive that

Speaker 59 I think a lot of places are just bored with covering because it's just like another day in Ukraine. But

Speaker 59 today, I guess, in Ukraine, during the day, in the afternoon, Russia targeted central Kyiv with 32 missiles and about 600 drones.

Speaker 56 Death toll, as we're taping, is at least 18 people, including four children.

Speaker 2 The British consulate is wrecked.

Speaker 44 This is two weeks after we rolled out the red carpet for Putin in Alaska.

Speaker 64 This is just a monumental

Speaker 72 disaster for this administration's strategy towards Russia, which was obvious for anyone who listens to us, but it's worth saying plainly.

Speaker 60 I mean, just how did it go? I'm trying to remember the sequence of it. He was supposed to, Trump had unveiled that he was going to come down harder on Putin.
There's going to be sanctions.

Speaker 60 And Putin says, you know what?

Speaker 5 It looks like a 90 days.

Speaker 60 Oh, yeah, yeah. Let's delay it.
Then Putin's like, oh, let's meet. And then he meets.
And then suddenly the sanctions are off the table. And in fact, now it's on Ukraine to come to the table.

Speaker 60 And like, it's, it was so predictable. It's so predictable.
And we're just going to, are we going to continue the cycle again?

Speaker 60 Is Trump going to feign discuss with Putin or should we just skip that step? I mean, because that's what's happening, right?

Speaker 69 In some ways, it's even more humiliating for him, I think, you would think, for anybody who pays attention and cares about this, because, like, at some level, what we were worried about when he first came in, we being people who care about Ukraine, was that he was just going to say, take his ball and go home, you know, and just be like, this is not our problem, you know, kind of Homer Simpson into the bushes on this thing and whatever, Europe, you figure it out.

Speaker 74 And like, that hasn't really happened, right?

Speaker 95 Like, we continue to like sell weapons to Europe that gives it to Ukraine and stuff.

Speaker 39 And like, we're still kind of doing these negotiations and all that.

Speaker 72 So, uh, but to what end, right? It's like, I mean,

Speaker 50 you know, Putin is just like, is just basically saying, fuck you, you know, like you're like, haha, he's laughing in his face.

Speaker 27 Putin's laughing in his face.

Speaker 57 Like, we met, you know, and you talked about how we were going to get a, we're going to skip the ceasefire, move straight to peace deal.

Speaker 49 There's no plans for even a meeting about a peace deal.

Speaker 53 And meanwhile, Putin's killing children in Kyiv.

Speaker 93 Yeah.

Speaker 60 I mean, they're supposed to meet within hours and then days and now weeks. And now there's no plans for another meeting, trilateral meeting.

Speaker 60 And, you know, then we roll out the literal red carpet and then Putin tells him that mail-in voting is fraudulent. So we got that.
It looks ridiculous. It looks weak.

Speaker 60 I mean, I obviously think we're, I'm personally glad that we're not completely abandoning Ukraine, but this current stasis is terrible.

Speaker 60 Unless Trump does a totally unexpected 180 and decides to actually come down a little bit tougher on Russia for real, I don't see where we go from here. Like, what's the next step?

Speaker 60 Are we just going to continue in this limbo?

Speaker 70 I think we might know what the next step is.

Speaker 39 I want to give the counter view from the the administration.

Speaker 57 Could we please

Speaker 56 play Trump's lead negotiator on the Russia-Ukraine situation?

Speaker 7 Oh, God.

Speaker 102 And there's only one thing I wish for, that that Noble committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since the Noble Peace Beach Melbourne Award was ever talked about to receive that reward.

Speaker 102 Beyond your success is game-changing out in the world today. And I hope everybody one day day wakes up and realizes that.

Speaker 60 Amen. Amen.

Speaker 72 That's Steve Witkoff, the Outerboro real estate man who's been negotiating all this.

Speaker 71 What do you think the four dead children in Kyiv today think about the application for the Nobel? The Noble?

Speaker 60 I'm sure they could give two shits. I do, I will note, I make Andrew Edgar say these things to me about my editing skills.

Speaker 60 My only wish is that you could get five Pulitzers for the way you've edited this market. There's actually, they've taken this

Speaker 60 obsequiousness to a different level.

Speaker 60 I don't know if you saw this, the ambassador nominee for Poland put out some statement the other day. He's like, you know what? He's too good for the Nobel Peace Press.

Speaker 60 He's like, he doesn't deserve.

Speaker 8 It's just an ornament.

Speaker 3 I like that intimate.

Speaker 67 It's just an ornament.

Speaker 85 It's like, have you met Donald Trump?

Speaker 11 Does anybody like ornaments more than Donald Trump?

Speaker 93 I've seen the Oval recently.

Speaker 7 There's gold ornaments everywhere.

Speaker 8 Donald Trump would give all of Ukraine to Russia in a second if he could have that ornament.

Speaker 85 One second.

Speaker 12 You wouldn't even think about it.

Speaker 60 He does have the, he's got a World Cup trophy and he's got that gold thing from,

Speaker 60 what's his face, Tim Cook? Yeah.

Speaker 5 He'd like to go.

Speaker 73 He'd throw in Lithuania.

Speaker 74 Just like, give me an ornament and I'll hand it over.

Speaker 19 Let's talk about the Democrats' response.

Speaker 24 I had Jake Sullivan on yesterday who was Biden's national security advisor.

Speaker 57 I was, I don't know, there's really much to say about the Ukraine stuff.

Speaker 56 I kind of, you know, gave him up the neocon business a little bit about maybe we should have done a no-fly zone, but I thought his answers on all that were, I disagreed with him a little bit on the Ukraine stuff.

Speaker 49 They were, they were understandable.

Speaker 37 I can at least understand the perspective that, you know, we don't want to be in a shooting war with Russia.

Speaker 81 Yeah.

Speaker 85 You know, some of us, some of us, 80s, 80s children

Speaker 20 are still a little chomping at the bit for that, actually.

Speaker 44 But I understand his perspective.

Speaker 11 I was interested more.

Speaker 19 A lot of the commenters were interested in our exchange about his old boss's age.

Speaker 99 I think we can set that aside.

Speaker 56 I think the most actually relevant part of the discussion was about Israel and how somebody who was really the

Speaker 49 not the point person, McGurk, maybe or some others, but a point person for the Biden strategy in Israel now saying that the dynamics have changed enough that he's actively telling Democratic politicians that it is defensible to have a position they should no longer provide weapons to Israel.

Speaker 60 Wow. Yeah.
I mean, he was really, I think it's fair to say he was the point person.

Speaker 60 He's a little late to the party, I would argue, and I think he's getting criticized for that.

Speaker 60 I think the fact is, is that those people in the Biden administration increasingly look back at how they handled that conflict and

Speaker 85 feel,

Speaker 60 you know, bits of regret, honestly, that they didn't try to leverage U.S.

Speaker 60 weaponry in a more effective way. And I think they also really hate Bibby.
They really hate Bibby.

Speaker 60 And I think one of the things that you heard of real anger was either yesterday or two days ago where Bibby was out there and being like, you know, October 7th never would have happened if Donald Trump was president.

Speaker 60 I mean, that just really, really agitated them because they bent over backwards for the guy. They, you know, they really did.
They gave him almost everything he wanted except for.

Speaker 60 For nothing, honestly.

Speaker 89 They got in kind of a sour spot on it, which is something I brought up.

Speaker 60 Exactly. And I think they're upset about that.
But, you know,

Speaker 60 not to their credit. They should have recognized that this was always where it was going to end up.
And

Speaker 60 I find it interesting to see the evolution, but it's also tragic, right? Like, how many deaths could have been prevented if they had recognized that sooner? Who knows?

Speaker 74 I think that his point that...

Speaker 41 you know, that the environment is different now than it was when you have Hamas having just committed the worst terrorist attack in decades, and then you have Hezbollah on your other border, you have Iran, right?

Speaker 82 Like they've had success in the campaign against Hezbollah and Iran, and that success should have led them to a place where this could be, where you could have a more humanitarian response in Kazoo because you have stability.

Speaker 15 And that's the opposite has happened.

Speaker 27 And I think that that is a defensible point he's making.

Speaker 61 Mostly, I just think that his point about forward-looking, about how, like, if Israel doesn't change its government, the U.S.

Speaker 26 should change their posture towards them.

Speaker 41 It's been a really notable sea change among Democrats in a month.

Speaker 91 Oh, my God.

Speaker 60 And

Speaker 57 to me, it's like the writing is on the wall about this, good, bad, or otherwise, for 2027, about that's where things are going.

Speaker 60 And I think that's, you know, to change focus a tiny bit, but if you're Netanyahu or if you're an Israeli politician, I mean, you have to recognize that you are in, I mean, you have a very short window here, right?

Speaker 60 Like, if Democrats were ever to retake power, and who knows if there's ever going to be elections again.

Speaker 56 There'll be elections, but, you know.

Speaker 60 Who knows if they're going to be whatever. A future Democratic Party is not going to have.
similar relations like the Biden administration towards the Israeli government.

Speaker 60 It just will never happen again.

Speaker 66 Unless it's a different government, which is what Jake said, unless it's a totally different government.

Speaker 60 Yeah, but Israeli domestic politics are all kinds of fucked up. And

Speaker 60 I think there's genuine anger, distrust, and a sea change is one way to describe it. I mean, it is a monumental shift.

Speaker 60 And I think for Jake Sullivan, who is just like the ultimate establishment foreign policy type of the Democratic Party to say, yeah, we're at a place where you can condition weaponry to Israel.

Speaker 60 And that would have been unthinkable, unthinkable two or three years ago. That's like, you know,

Speaker 60 that was a 10% proposition within Democratic politics. And now you have the Bernie Sanders resolution and it's got like something close to 30 or so co-sponsors.

Speaker 86 My other big reaction to Jake, I just wanted to say, and I appreciate him coming on, was

Speaker 44 he had a very aggressive posture towards China.

Speaker 75 And I know that, you know, we have some Democrats who listen to this.

Speaker 48 And I just think that that's a winner for Democrats.

Speaker 53 I'm not saying that they should, you know, be Cold War Ronald Reagan, what Tim Miller would really want, saber rattling against China, but just how many people do you want to bomb, Tim?

Speaker 38 I don't want to bomb China.

Speaker 39 I want to make the point that Trump has strengthened China and make it explicitly.

Speaker 73 And I don't feel like it gets made that explicitly all that much.

Speaker 71 And Jake

Speaker 71 made it very explicitly.

Speaker 56 And I think that even if people, regular people, don't care that much about like the details of China policy, they do put like the vibes of it.

Speaker 48 Like it is, it is one area where the Democrats could conceivably take back some like alpha vibes from

Speaker 78 Trump and be like, Trump has been weak and Trump has

Speaker 57 given all these gifts to China and it's hurting our country.

Speaker 61 And I think that that's a worthwhile vein to explore.

Speaker 7 Completely agree.

Speaker 60 Completely agree. And you can just make the, I mean, it's like backward and micro, right? It's like China's eating our lunch.
Trump has lost the air race to them.

Speaker 60 Trump has pushed every other country into China's arms because of his tariffs.

Speaker 60 I think I saw some graphic about trade with Africa where it's just like a complete, you know, Chinese exports to Africa are shooting through the roof because of the tariffs.

Speaker 60 And then you can make it on the micro level, which is, and Will Summers got his false flag coming up on this, but it's like, it's causing a real uproar in the MAGA movement, which is this pledge to give 600,000 student visas to Chinese students.

Speaker 60 I mean, they're freaking out. Laura Inger has a lot of people.

Speaker 7 I think they should be.

Speaker 7 That's a little crazy.

Speaker 7 I'm as liberal on immigration as that comes. And it's like 600,000 Chinese student visas.

Speaker 9 That feels like a lot.

Speaker 60 and they're and their argument for it is so

Speaker 60 it's almost hard to fathom that this is the best they came up with but like I think their argument for it is like well we need them in the Ivy Leagues

Speaker 60 because if all the Americans went up to the Ivy Leagues then the the lesser academic institutions would not have enough students to operate and so it's like basically if you boil it down to they're saying we need to bring in these Chinese students to keep the American students at the lesser cost if we need more students in the Ivy Leagues maybe we shouldn't be deporting people over op-eds and scaring them about their green cards.

Speaker 39 That might be a better thing to think about than just giving the Chinese impunity.

Speaker 36 Well, final topic. Dems butch up on that a little bit.

Speaker 88 I liked that.

Speaker 73 And Trump's, I mean, I think it's a big opportunity.

Speaker 27 There's one final thing about maybe a sign of concern

Speaker 57 about whether Democrats are going to butch up on that.

Speaker 15 Sam, is

Speaker 73 your friend of mine, Dave Weigel, is covering the DNC meeting. We covered this at length on the next level.

Speaker 83 If people want to to listen to that, but I did not get into, we missed one key element.

Speaker 77 Oh, God.

Speaker 38 Which is that they released a fight song.

Speaker 60 I saw this.

Speaker 8 It goes, D-E-M-S, we rise. Stronger together, blue skies.

Speaker 9 Lift your voice. We are bold and true.

Speaker 19 Onward, Democrats, we shine blue.

Speaker 60 I looked in their faces when they were writing that and I detected some mitochondrial challenges.

Speaker 94 Yeah. It's not exactly like playing neck in Tiger Stadium, I wouldn't say.

Speaker 30 All right.

Speaker 60 Wait, wait, just make one quick point. Go ahead.
They have one job or two. Raise money, build a party.
Like, stop making songs.

Speaker 7 Win elections. Stop making songs.
Raise money.

Speaker 3 Register voters.

Speaker 23 You're getting your ass kicked.

Speaker 3 Shit on Donald Trump.

Speaker 78 That's it.

Speaker 7 Simplify the mission.

Speaker 60 Simplify the mission. Let's talk.
Let's. I don't care about like, you know, land, you know, being usurped.
I don't care about five songs. Just do those three things.

Speaker 7 Like, how hard can this be?

Speaker 73 That's Sam Steinies, our managing editor.

Speaker 86 Up next, we've got Talman Smith do some econ and some Fed talk.

Speaker 103 It'll be good.

Speaker 13 Stick around for that.

Speaker 2 We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.

Speaker 4 These words are more than just the opening of the Constitution.

Speaker 6 They're a reminder of who this country belongs to and what we can be at our best.

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Speaker 13 Whether it's breaking news, exclusive reporting, election coverage, or in-depth analysis, MS Now keeps the people at the heart of everything they do.

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Speaker 31 Learn more at MS.now.

Speaker 100 She'd throw things, wander, and started hoarding.

Speaker 100 Mom's Alzheimer's was already so hard, but then we found out she had something called agitation that may happen with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. And that was a different kind of difficult.

Speaker 100 So we asked our doctor for more help.

Speaker 96 Seeing symptoms like these in a loved one, it could be time to ask their doctor about Rexulti, Rexpiprazole 2 milligrams, the only FDA-approved treatment proven to reduce the symptoms of this condition.

Speaker 96 Rexulte should not be used as an as-needed treatment.

Speaker 96 Elderly people with dementia-related psychosis have increased risk of death or stroke, report fever, stiff muscles, and confusion, which can be life-threatening, or uncontrolled muscle movements, which may be permanent.

Speaker 96 High blood sugar can lead to coma or death. Weight gain, increased cholesterol, unusual urges, dizziness on standing, falls, seizures, trouble swallowing, or sleepiness may occur.

Speaker 96 Learn more about these and other side effects at RickSulty.com. Tap ad for PI.

Speaker 100 I'm glad her doctor recommended Rick Sulti.

Speaker 101 Talk to your loved ones, doctor.

Speaker 96 Moments matter.

Speaker 13 All right, welcome back.

Speaker 47 He's an economics reporter in the business section of the New York Times.

Speaker 82 He's currently on book leave for a forthcoming Clouton Capital, which I'm looking forward to.

Speaker 37 He's born and raised, and I just found out is hanging out right here at his parents' house in New Orleans, Louisiana. It's Talman Smith.

Speaker 36 Hey, Tal, what's up, man?

Speaker 93 Hey, what's up, Tim? Glad to be here. And yeah, like you were saying, it's a shame we didn't do this in the studio.
I think we found out too late that we were in the same place.

Speaker 5 But next time.

Speaker 82 Well, I'm in my Kingpin t-shirt.

Speaker 64 We can do a beer at Kingpin next weekend.

Speaker 6 Yeah, we'll definitely grab a beer and figure it out.

Speaker 37 And since you're at your folks' house, you can let them know.

Speaker 39 I think you have another distinction.

Speaker 64 I think this is the first sibling duo to have been on the Bulwark podcast.

Speaker 7 Oh, that's cool.

Speaker 37 I talked to your brother Clinton like a year or two ago about his book of poems.

Speaker 80 So a big moment for your mother.

Speaker 6 I'm sure she's very, very proud.

Speaker 10 I wanted to grab you after the Lisa Cook News earlier this week and just do some Fed talk, you know, what's happening with the economy broadly.

Speaker 44 Maybe a little Katrina anniversary stuff at the end.

Speaker 47 Just at the top for listeners, like Econ 101.

Speaker 71 And on the one hand, it's like, obviously, it's a big deal if anybody, you know, in a significant position is being targeted by the president and his minions based on like spurious allocations and getting pushed out extra illegally, you know, from a job that should be independent.

Speaker 68 But, like, I really don't, I get it.

Speaker 71 Like, why is the Fed Board of Governors important?

Speaker 64 Like, what matters about this?

Speaker 93 The Fed Board of Governors is the heart of the Federal Open Market Committee, the FOMC, which is the voting body of the Federal Reserve, which controls interest rates, the money supply, helps regulate the banks, and has a mandate from Congress since about the 1970s to explicitly keep inflation stable and to also try to maximize full full employment as well as financial market stability.

Speaker 93 What the Board of Governors is, is a firm seven-person committee that sits at the heart of the FOMC and therefore has a lot of power over interest rates that banks and that we all experience as households and consumers.

Speaker 93 The New York Federal Reserve, because New York is special in all things, also has a seat, the president of the New York Fed.

Speaker 93 And then there's a rotating cast of the 11, I believe, regional Fed presidents who are dispersed throughout the country at regional Federal Reserve Banks.

Speaker 93 But they're rotating, and only four of them at a time sit there. So the Fed Board of Governors is this sort of central firmament in the institution.

Speaker 93 And that's why, you know, they're also appointed for 14-year staggered terms in order to protect them from political volatility.

Speaker 93 And so

Speaker 93 Trump and his, you call them minions, I'll call them, you know, folks in his administration, right? You know, so my editors don't get mad at me. They are

Speaker 93 being really aggressive in an unprecedented way in trying to fire Miss Cook for cause because, regardless of the details.

Speaker 63 Traditionally, the head of the Federalist Housing Finance Agency, you know, does not have oversight over hiring, firing of the board of governors.

Speaker 7 Right.

Speaker 93 And apparently, I didn't know about this.

Speaker 93 You know, I was talking with some folks that are, that really spend a lot of their life and spend their careers focusing on you know good governance and malfeasance nobody that i've spoken to really would have expected fhfa being involved in digging into the mortgage documents of of powerful people throughout the the government you would have expected if you were going to weaponize the government in this way you would expect it to maybe come from the irs so i mean it's just it's weird to use a euphemism there in in several ways yeah so what is what are like the risks i guess like dumb talk to us right it's like okay, well, the Fed board of governors losing independence, Trump pushing out people he doesn't like, putting in, who knows, maybe potentially hacks.

Speaker 44 Like, let's talk about a worst case scenario.

Speaker 54 You don't exactly know

Speaker 58 who he'd replace her with, but let's assume it'd be a loyalist, like kind of like he's done in other parts of the government.

Speaker 71 Like, what are the risks associated with that, you know, just specifically on the economic side, like beyond the broader kind of autocracy discussion?

Speaker 93 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 93 No, I mean, you say dumb talk, and like, I think that that's a

Speaker 93 half-joking tip to what I think is far too common, which is this idea that econ and the world of

Speaker 93 high finance are these things that are just, you know, it's hieroglyphics that nobody could possibly understand them.

Speaker 93 But I mean, the way that they function and the way that they find or lose stability is very similar to other institutions in our life and society.

Speaker 93 And so, to hop into it, we can just go into the very recent past where we've seen the upsides of Fed independence, of the Fed Board of Governors being to operate independently.

Speaker 93 We saw inflation in the very recent past hit the high single digits.

Speaker 93 And yet when you look at market-based measures of inflation expectations, which are everything in financial markets and in public finance, because it essentially determines the price and yield, the interest rates on bonds, which then determine borrowing costs for everything.

Speaker 54 Yeah, houses, cars.

Speaker 93 Exactly. Houses, cars, the whole shebang, credit cards.

Speaker 93 Because inflation expectations through these market measures that that people actually vote on with their feet, with their money and their clients' money, did not really budge. And they went up a bit.

Speaker 93 I think in 2022, it got into the high two.

Speaker 93 So basically expecting over a certain time period, whether you're talking five years or 10 years, inflation expectations on an annual basis got up to the high two percent.

Speaker 93 But then they, maybe a bit over three, but then they pretty quickly came back down. Why?

Speaker 93 Well, in part because even though there are plenty of people in financial markets around the world and there are plenty of people in financial markets in America, that had no love for Joe Biden or his regulatory policies or what Lena Kahn was doing, or this, that, or the other, or that thought they overstimulated the economy.

Speaker 93 The idea was: come what may, we have people appointed by both Democrats and Republicans that are insulated from politics at the Fed that are just calling balls and strikes.

Speaker 93 And that undeniably is a linchpin of our system. And it is, you know, actively under threat by people who are actively loyalists.

Speaker 93 Stephen Myron, he is a Harvard-trained economist who over the past few years has

Speaker 93 become very Trumpy in a way that has surprised and certainly upset some of the more, I don't even want to say moderate, but just like traditionalists in the priesthood of economics. And he,

Speaker 93 along with sort of actively helping Trump not tell the truth about certain things like tariff policy, he's also become more powerful and more trusted within Trump's orbit.

Speaker 93 And Trump is now trying to get him onto the Fed, onto the board of governors.

Speaker 93 And so this is not an

Speaker 93 empty threat.

Speaker 93 It's an active threat because it is very hard to believe that if Trump said jump, Myron at this point wouldn't say how high when it comes to interest rate policy and potentially even things like using the Fed balance sheet for the administration's own political goals.

Speaker 12 So let's talk about like practical risks here.

Speaker 65 You know, so let's say this goes through, obviously, Lisa Cook is challenging this.

Speaker 54 So her lawsuit was filed a couple hours ago.

Speaker 49 I was, I'm just kind of scanning it, targeting Trump.

Speaker 44 If he's able to replace her, maybe fires Powell, like catastrophize with me a little bit.

Speaker 66 Like,

Speaker 62 what are the potential negative impacts that would affect regular people?

Speaker 48 And we saw, you know, on this news, the dollar tanked initially and then kind of rebounded some.

Speaker 25 Like, what, like, what are, what are some things to be worried about?

Speaker 76 Yeah.

Speaker 93 so let's start with um the muddle through and then we can get to worst case scenario which like is not

Speaker 93 it's not like a meteor hitting the earth sort of probabilities like i think a worst case scenario is not that far-fetched but let's start with the muddle through which tends to be what the giant 30 trillion dollar American economy does is muddle through even when annoying things happen, even when there's inequality, even when there's all sorts of things to complain about.

Speaker 93 So one thing that might happen is that there are other people that have been in the Federal Reserve Reserve system that have had to step down because, in their own words, they felt like they became a distraction from the FOMC's work.

Speaker 93 That usually had more to do with allegations of insider trading,

Speaker 93 yada, yada.

Speaker 93 Part of the reason I feel like markets have not freaked out as much as some feared is this idea of like, well, you know, Trump just seems to not like this woman and has a bone to pick with her.

Speaker 93 And well, she does seem to have maybe, again, maybe done something sketchy with her mortgage applications. And it's just one board member, you know, patriots in control.

Speaker 93 Whether they got, you know, there's this very well-respected, relatively dovish Fed head, Waller, who may be next in line to be chair after Powell.

Speaker 93 So there are a lot of people betting on him bringing stability when Powell's term is up in spring of next year. So there's just this like

Speaker 93 maybe frog in the boiling water or maybe accurate idea that,

Speaker 93 okay, well, like Trump has a bone to pick with somebody else and government.

Speaker 93 He does something a little outside bounds or outside the usual bounds, but you know, we keep all chugging and we watch for NVIDIA earnings and we track

Speaker 93 tariffs for inflation risk and let's all move along here. Don't pay attention to the Trump show.
So

Speaker 93 there's a possibility that those folks are right. Here's the worst case scenario.
The Fed has a meeting in September, mid-September, to decide on rate policy.

Speaker 93 Right now, I think markets are betting slightly in favor of a rate cut because even though inflation is picking up a bit in large part due to tariffs, the labor market's also slowing down quite a bit.

Speaker 93 So, just on the merits, like there are outside of the trumpiness, you know, extravaganza, there are reasons for uncertainty there.

Speaker 27 Economic slowing.

Speaker 19 The fact that the economy is getting worse is a case for Trump getting what he wants in a kind of a weird way.

Speaker 93 Yeah, yeah, which is weirdly a replay of like the 2018 situation where Powell was a new Fed chair and Trump was violating norms in that case.

Speaker 93 And then, but then, like, weirdly enough, the merits actually made sense that the Fed did cut rates on the merits. But it's funny how that might happen again.
So, let's get back to Cook.

Speaker 93 So, maybe she decides to show up for work because, like she has said and her lawyers have said, no, you cannot do this. You can't fire me by tweet.
And, okay, well, then let's say Trump sends the U.S.

Speaker 93 Marshals to remove remove her.

Speaker 93 That's not necessarily unimaginable. And then

Speaker 93 what do the courts do? Because that's so soon, right? It's August 28th when we're talking.

Speaker 93 Is this going to be resolved? Are we going to have a court injunction or a ruling of some sort by mid-September? We don't know.

Speaker 93 And then let's say there is a ruling that's, you know, forgive me, I'm not a lawyer. Maybe the word is it's stayed.
Like

Speaker 93 stayed. Yeah.
So

Speaker 93 she's able to,

Speaker 93 at least for now, be in the role. But then Trump says, I don't care about that lower court.
You know, I have my pals on the Supreme Court.

Speaker 93 And no, we're still going to either try to remove her from her office or block her from her office or even just a truth social that says, hey, Lisa Cook, if you dare come into your office at the Fed at the Eccles building in Washington, you know, I will try to see to it that you.

Speaker 93 don't get in. That's a real constitutional limbo with also kind of violent adjacent implications, right?

Speaker 65 There's also like a step down from that.

Speaker 73 That's like, I'm not sending in the U.S.

Speaker 44 Marshals, but it's just like, you showed up to this.

Speaker 65 Let's say she shows up and they don't lower the rates.

Speaker 57 You know, because like you said, it's a close call.

Speaker 62 And he's like, okay, fuck it.

Speaker 39 Nope.

Speaker 44 Fowl's fired too.

Speaker 53 You know what I mean? Like, that's another.

Speaker 93 Yeah. Yeah.
We are, we are not very far off from even further escalation. And I would not downplay the stakes.

Speaker 36 Okay, so play game out.

Speaker 79 We're the bulwark love.

Speaker 45 We love catastrophizing here.

Speaker 27 So game out the worst.

Speaker 39 You know, unfortunately, it's come to fruition a few too many times.

Speaker 73 So we got to play it out now.

Speaker 26 So, that happens.

Speaker 49 Some version of the worst case scenario happens. Yeah.

Speaker 17 What do we see as economic impact?

Speaker 27 It's like I mentioned earlier, like

Speaker 38 when this happened, like the dollar tanked initially,

Speaker 13 but then kind of rebounded.

Speaker 80 You know, the market's been pretty resilient.

Speaker 13 The bond market looks a little spooked, right?

Speaker 75 Like, interest rates are high.

Speaker 37 Like, what are some

Speaker 50 real economic impacts that people would feel?

Speaker 93 Let's say that tariff-induced inflation is a little bit worse than we thought, right? When Biden left office, inflation was

Speaker 93 tilting back down towards the 2% target by some measures that leave out this thing called owner's equivalent rent, which neither here nor there, but it has to do with housing costs.

Speaker 93 But by some measures, it was mission accomplished, right? Like we had the Fed's target price stability back.

Speaker 93 The Fed had already cut in, I believe, September of last year and was essentially projecting that there would be room for further rate cuts down the road.

Speaker 93 And again, this is where we get to the then versus now the idea then was that the the what's called the long end of the treasury curve the 10-year especially that's the benchmark right and the idea was well because the fed is working on the merits the 10-year would flow down along with the front end which the fed has you know a lot of control over whereas the 10-year again this benchmark interest rate that determines mortgage rates which people are understandably very upset about because they're quite high car loan rates which you know same story as well as credit card rates same story everybody would like those to be going back down.

Speaker 93 The thing is, you know, the cost of money is the biggest way that the Federal Reserve and all central banks, it's the biggest way that they exert downward pressure on the economy.

Speaker 93 If they're bringing rates down, if they're

Speaker 93 cheapening the cost of credit on the merits, because, hey, inflation is coming down. We can let the economy flow a little bit more.
We can let people have... you know, borrow more cheaply.

Speaker 93 Let's let this thing run a bit hot. If you're doing that on the merits, well, then markets won't won't be skeptical and sell off assets that determine the price of longer-term borrowing.

Speaker 93 They'll go along right with the Fed because the Fed is working off of merits. That makes sense.
Inflation is going this way. Growth is going this way.

Speaker 93 It's all the parts of the system are working as they should.

Speaker 93 If Stephen Myron and potentially somebody that replaces Powell, who is, you know, let's just be blunt here, seen by markets, right?

Speaker 93 Which is ultimately what matters, not you or me or political podcast or columnist at any given newspaper.

Speaker 93 If markets think that Trump is putting a hack and then he already has a loyalist that he's trying to put in, and then suddenly the FOMC starts voting in favor of what Trump would like rather than based on the merits of the economy, well, then you can see a drop in the dollar that isn't just an overnight flinch based out of fear, but based on an active decrease in central bank independence.

Speaker 93 Well, then you might see the selling off not just of U.S. Treasury bonds, but also a weakening of the dollar itself.

Speaker 93 And beyond the fact that that would make mortgages more expensive again, buying a car more expensive again, on and on, then you're also getting to like really funky geopolitical questions.

Speaker 93 Because part of the reason people even listen to the United States and the global political system is because of the strength of the dollar and the strength of our financial markets.

Speaker 93 It's not because they liked us. In fact, I think I haven't checked the international polls, but I don't think we're doing too well in that department right now.

Speaker 93 If in addition to not being liked, so that's, I guess, our soft power, we lose what is actually quietly one of the biggest sources of our hard power, which is our currency, which enables us to issue sanctions and to block people from being under our military umbrella or to include them in our military umbrella.

Speaker 93 All that is backed by dollar dominance. And if that slips, then

Speaker 93 Trump, who cares so much about strength, actually would end up having this master plan of his completely backfire. And, you know, putting Trump aside, I think what matters, you know, is

Speaker 93 the people. It would terribly impact the people who put this guy back in because of

Speaker 93 sort of rose-colored lenses of having an idea that 2019, 2018, for all of its cultural war was more stable. And so

Speaker 93 he's actively undermining potentially the exact reason that he got back into office. I don't think people put Trump back into office because you know, they wanted him to take over the Fed.

Speaker 74 Yeah.

Speaker 56 I mean, like you're singing from my hymn book, which is the, you know, risk to the U.S., you know, global stability and how that trickles down.

Speaker 41 But I mean, even at just a more, more micro level, there's some dark irony in the fact that like he could do all of this to get interest rates down.

Speaker 90 And it does actually nothing meaningfully for people that are, that have, you know, mortgages or more middle long-term rates because of the reaction of the bond market.

Speaker 92 That seems like a pretty

Speaker 92 like, that does not, that seems like a decently likely kind of outcome, frankly, of the situation.

Speaker 55 Yeah.

Speaker 93 Yeah. I mean, like I said, we could easily just muddle through.
It's frustrating for people that operate in the take sphere because,

Speaker 93 like, in a textbook way, when there are certain bad policies enacted, you would expect there to be consequences. But, you know, it's a $30 trillion economy.
70% of it is services.

Speaker 93 70% of it is consumption. And a lot of the economy is just people paying their bills on time.

Speaker 93 And, you know, two guys like us, you know, chatting over the phone or on Zoom or whatever, and then going to get a beer, like, you know, or you're buying your kids shoes because it's the start of school.

Speaker 93 Like, that's what's so odd about these moments is, and why I mentioned the idea of a frog boiling, like, it will,

Speaker 93 by the time any of this gets to the point where it's disrupting daily life, it could be too late.

Speaker 2 We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, these words are more than just the opening of the Constitution.

Speaker 6 They're a reminder of who this country belongs to and what we can be at our best.

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Speaker 100 She'd throw things, wander, and started hoarding.

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Speaker 100 I'm glad her doctor recommended Rick Sulti.

Speaker 101 Talk to your loved ones, doctor.

Speaker 96 Moments matter.

Speaker 95 All right. Any other broad like state of the economy thoughts?

Speaker 65 And we had about 229,000 jobless claims this morning.

Speaker 73 Some market, which was about expectations.

Speaker 62 Yeah.

Speaker 44 Job market is a little tight, but not catastrophic.

Speaker 57 Stock market's kind of resilient.

Speaker 56 A lot of other bad signs kind of in macro of weakening economy.

Speaker 69 Does that sound about right?

Speaker 93 Yeah, it's a very like meh economy, you know, and one of the things that would help is, you know, we actually would have probably been in a similar situation.

Speaker 93 Let's say, to go back to the previous hypothetical, let's say Harris won. A Harris administration is probably looking at an economy that after

Speaker 93 the boom, the booming job market of 2021 through 2023 was slowing down and that probably needed lower interest rates in order to keep the business cycle going right and while there would have been disagreements about uh how she approached housing right which has been very hot this year and this that other you know regulations which you have kept leaning on yada yet at a base level and let's let's take harris out of it a replacement level republican that wouldn't have been obsessed with well there wouldn't have been tariffs yeah yeah that wouldn't have been obsessed with the global tariff campaign there are some things happening in our economy right now that are structural whether it's inequality which is just god-awful And I know it's not sexy to talk about inequality anymore because that feels like so 2010s, but I mean, it's, it's like, it's a, it's a real awful problem and the lack of socioeconomic mobility in this country.

Speaker 93 There's also the threat of AI and it, the really scary fact that, you know, for a lot of entry-level college educated folks, like some of these models are just as good as them, which, which is kind of cold list to say, but I mean, like, you, you, I spent a good amount of my time talking to employers and they actively are just like, why would I hire an analyst or a research assistant?

Speaker 73 Maybe because the models still need, I mean, I guess humans make bad mistakes too.

Speaker 39 The models still make some mistakes. You know, I play a song.

Speaker 93 You need to hold their hand.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I play a song at the end of every episode.

Speaker 73 I had Gary Kasparov on last week, and I was like, where has he been mentioned in music?

Speaker 41 Because I wanted to play one of the songs that mentioned Gary and ChatGPT was like, oh, and LCD sound system's losing my edge.

Speaker 76 And I was like, whoa, you're in my wheelhouse now.

Speaker 7 I was like, that's not true. It's like, I know every word to that song.

Speaker 8 So, you know, I mean, maybe that's what what hallucinations are wild.

Speaker 93 And yes, no, I'm not, I'm not, you know, we're not at iRobot, like for sure. But like, there, there are structural things that would have happened regardless.
But, like, it is really crazy.

Speaker 93 I know you know Joe Wisenthal. He's a pal of mine.
And, like, I was talking with him and some folks recently who are also kind of in like the macro and finance world.

Speaker 93 And we were just talking about how, like,

Speaker 93 you know, it's, it's so insane that, like,

Speaker 93 this Trump 2.0 group could have come in and like done all their culture war stuff and probably done like some pretty gross level of xenophobic mass deportation and still had polls going okay for them and just done like nothing otherwise and just let the economy cool down as it was cooling down and then let the Fed do its job and then mortgage rates fall and then people are potentially back in that 2019 mood where everybody in MSNBC is tearing their hair out, but the rest of the country is like, ah, well, like he's kind of an asshole, but the economy is doing okay.

Speaker 74 doing nothing would obviously be better.

Speaker 2 I know it was just this combo.

Speaker 65 And all the things, I mean, obviously, the tariffs are causing the light inflation.

Speaker 53 And then you have the BBB, which we haven't really mentioned, but that, you know, the debt bomb there also is negatively impacting interest rates in the bond market.

Speaker 7 I would disagree.

Speaker 82 And then to your inequality point, it's just like a big transfer.

Speaker 25 Like, all he's doing is a big wealth transfer.

Speaker 45 It's like a tax cut for rich people.

Speaker 62 And then tariffs are affecting

Speaker 54 working class and middle class people.

Speaker 93 Whereas last time you just cut taxes mostly for the rich and corporations, but he didn't really touch the entitlements.

Speaker 93 This time, you know, he, you know, whacked the bottom and sprayed more gifts at the top and then, you know, did a little bit of, you know, comparatively little on no tax on tips and

Speaker 93 no tax and overtime. But

Speaker 93 yeah, it's just, I guess I shouldn't be surprised because so much of what is...

Speaker 93 what seems to be powering this Trump 2.0 administration is not rationality, but it's just like, if I, if I was on that side and I was ever involved in politics, I'd just be like, do do nothing.

Speaker 93 Do golf.

Speaker 93 Yeah, golf, bro. Literally, yeah, which is, it's like

Speaker 36 change the name of Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America, which takes us to our final topic.

Speaker 73 I guess maybe you wouldn't have,

Speaker 80 do we want America's name on the Gulf?

Speaker 53 Who knows what kind of torment it might cause going forward?

Speaker 95 But

Speaker 39 yeah, I mean, had you just done some name changes, and I think he would have been better off.

Speaker 94 Let's do the Katrina thing real quick.

Speaker 37 So tomorrow's a 20-year anniversary.

Speaker 66 When I had your brother on like a year and a half ago, he talked about how how formative it was for him.

Speaker 56 And I meant to go back and listen to it, but I forgot.

Speaker 13 I'm kind of going from memory.

Speaker 83 I think he was a senior in high school or junior, and I guess you're younger, so it was maybe a little less.

Speaker 93 Yeah, he's six years older than me.

Speaker 57 Yeah, so less. So you were pretty young.

Speaker 76 I was 11.

Speaker 78 Yeah.

Speaker 43 So I'm just wondering what kind of like memories you have of that, like whether, what, you know, sort of the significance you think of it is now two decades on.

Speaker 41 If you have any other deep thoughts or ruminations.

Speaker 93 Yeah, well, no, no, I don't, I don't have deep thoughts. My brother does deep.

Speaker 93 But I do have thoughts. Yeah,

Speaker 93 it was awful. You know, for

Speaker 93 it was speaking of inequality, it was really,

Speaker 93 yeah, I had a very Disney channel childhood, you know, like.

Speaker 86 Sweet life with Jet, with Cody and Tal.

Speaker 93 Yeah, except like imagine just oak trees and the bayou and just, and like, you know, Vietnamese and white and black friends were all frolicking and having pool parties. Like I, I.

Speaker 93 like any 11-year-old, I didn't think about the deep inequality in my city and in the country that much. I was a fucking kid.

Speaker 93 And then I just saw how, you know, we had the money and sort of means and social capital to just go over to my uncle's place and basically have vacation.

Speaker 93 Then there were other 11-year-olds that were on their roofs or at the superdome because either they couldn't afford to evacuate or maybe they could.

Speaker 93 But the idea of, okay, well, then how are we going to get back?

Speaker 93 And you also have to keep in mind, August 29th is the end of the month and the first first and 15th, if you're a person that is quite dependent on government assistance, once you get to the end of the month, you're running pretty thin.

Speaker 93 So there are a lot of people that would have left if this happened like in early and mid-August, but that were not able to.

Speaker 93 And so that was, though I only learned the economic numbers there later on, I could just see, you know, I was on my uncle's couch in Houston watching, you know, on CNN all the awfulness that was happening, you know, Anderson Cooper and all the folks that were reporting it down there, which is, I think, part of when I look back at it, why I ended up being interested in journalism.

Speaker 93 But yeah,

Speaker 93 the like, oh, wow, I'm here and I'm comfortable with my, with my family, and there are all these kids just like me that weren't able to escape. That really haunted me for quite some time.

Speaker 93 And then I guess thinking about New Orleans now, the doomerism

Speaker 93 around climate change is

Speaker 93 sometimes appropriate. But like, I really disdain, as we talked about regarding a certain article, we'll just say it.

Speaker 9 We'll say it.

Speaker 99 You don't have to pick it up.

Speaker 74 I'll pick it on.

Speaker 73 These articles happen like every other year or so, but this is the latest is The Economist.

Speaker 81 The headline is, it's very, it's really, a really sensitive headline for the 20-year Katrina anniversary.

Speaker 39 Does it make sense for the U.S. to keep subsidizing a sinking city?

Speaker 58 You always have all these.

Speaker 73 As if there's like some alternative, some alternative, I guess, maybe mass evacuate everybody to Baton Rouge would be the plan.

Speaker 93 Well, no, well, I mean, the plan, the implicit plan, and it's kind of, you know, I've been an editor and I've been a reporter, so I know how one structures news stories.

Speaker 93 And so they don't, it gets quite explicit, but it's mostly implicit. The implied message through using the voices of other characters, shall we say, is that,

Speaker 93 you know, well, it could be worth it to save New Orleans if it had the GDP of Miami, which is under threat, or the GDP of New York, which is obviously under threat.

Speaker 93 Anybody that's lived in Brooklyn knows how much the flooding risk of low-lying parts of that area and the subway is always flooding these days, right? We could go on and on.

Speaker 93 There's the majority of the population or something like that, near the majority of the population lives near the coast, and a lot of people live in underlying areas. But you know what?

Speaker 93 That there's also people, you know, at or below sea level in places like Amsterdam, right, and

Speaker 93 places throughout the world. You know what happens? The government values the lives of those people.

Speaker 93 And unless there is actually a low population area, there are low population areas that are also facing climate risk.

Speaker 93 Okay, yeah, that makes sense to make some of those really bloodless or even cold-blooded calculations, but there's a million plus people in the greater New Orleans metro area.

Speaker 93 And to openly say in a always fact-checked and usually carefully reported magazine that like,

Speaker 93 well, you know, the human capital folks down there is pretty low. And GDP is low.

Speaker 81 It's just low human capital.

Speaker 3 It's just tourism.

Speaker 85 It's just tourism because this stuff doesn't matter.

Speaker 37 It's just tourism, restaurants, music, food.

Speaker 11 It's all this is low capital.

Speaker 7 Yeah,

Speaker 93 I don't imagine. I know some folks that have that are at The Economist now or that have worked there before who are okay eggs.

Speaker 93 But yeah, if we're going to, since they're being mean about my city, we can be a little bit mean to them.

Speaker 93 I don't know of too many people that likely work at The Economist that would be as fun to get a beer with down here in New Orleans compared with you.

Speaker 93 They're probably not the life of the party. So maybe that's part of why they don't understand why New Orleans is so great.

Speaker 93 You know, culture matters and people matter and you can't value them purely in, you know, their ability to consume or the likelihood of them filing a patent and being an inventor and keeping that human capital in the metro area.

Speaker 93 Like it's just.

Speaker 64 We're doing high capital things like market timing.

Speaker 59 Right. You know, very high critic things.

Speaker 93 Yeah, you know,

Speaker 93 I love economics. I think it's a really important way of analyzing the world.
It's part of why I'm employed is trying to understand it myself and then explain it to people.

Speaker 93 But there is a certain social Darwinism to it if you analyze it without context and without humanism. And ultimately, we are humans in a society, and I think that matters most.
So, hopefully, we,

Speaker 93 you know, that's the last of those sorts of articles from The Economist for

Speaker 93 a little while.

Speaker 86 How do you feel being back?

Speaker 89 Just a little bit.

Speaker 43 I mean, you were young, obviously, so like the differences and stuff.

Speaker 29 Yeah.

Speaker 93 But weirdly, like, I mean, I definitely don't remember five and under very well, but maybe this is just me. I have like a pretty good memory of five to 11.

Speaker 93 There are certain things of pre-Katrina New Orleans that I'll always miss and that, you know, aren't ever going to quite be the same. But

Speaker 93 there are things that are improving in New Orleans and that I think are great. And I think we have the possibility to recognize that with like a

Speaker 93 proper, dare I say, Green New Deal style investment in places like New Orleans, we can fortify our wetlands and and learn how to live better with the water, you know, desalinate the water.

Speaker 93 What I really like about my colleague Ezra Klein's new book with Derek Thompson Abundance is like, it takes these things that could be

Speaker 93 really awful seeming and like these challenges that are so large and

Speaker 93 kind of goes JFK style and says like, no, because it's hard, because it can sometimes feel overwhelming, like let's

Speaker 93 Like, let's put our brains together and learn how to solve these things. And then hopefully between

Speaker 93 technology and democracy and this, that, and the other, like, hopefully, we have, you know, shorter work weeks and healthier coast and better water.

Speaker 93 And, like, we all can spend more time like reading and acting and dancing and like, you know, and chatting about politics, right?

Speaker 93 Like, this is, you know, we'll always have things to argue about, but I don't think we need to argue about whether, you know, certain cities should exist or not. So, I'm going to go over to

Speaker 93 some of the memorials because there were lives lost. And I grew up in my family, my mother's side is very Catholic.

Speaker 93 So even though I'm not really a practicing Catholic anymore, I do still kind of consider myself a spiritual person. So definitely want to pay my respects.

Speaker 93 And then I'm sure in New Orleans fashion, there'll be like a bunch of really fun. celebratory stuff going on this weekend too.
So maybe I'll see you at one or two of them.

Speaker 42 You'll see me around, man. It's good to see you.

Speaker 103 It's good to meet you and um appreciate you very much we'll be talking seeing you around town all right see you thanks y'all thanks to my buddy sam stein for jumping on and going over the breaking news at the top also if you're not if you're just a podcast listener you're not a youtube viewer and you're just looking for some laughs this weekend i do have to say our fingering trio materials with me and sam and will summer have been pretty good and you might want to

Speaker 27 google those or avail yourself of those over on youtube and um obviously i appreciate uh tal a bunch for coming on and giving us some New Orleans memories, talking about the economy.

Speaker 24 I'll be back tomorrow.

Speaker 88 I'm treating myself to something tonight, so we'll see if I'm at 100%.

Speaker 15 But the good news is we've got a great guest who can carry me if I'm not.

Speaker 55 So, we'll see you all then. Peace.

Speaker 84 home.

Speaker 93 The old man down in the water

Speaker 93 slowly turned his head.

Speaker 7 He took another sip from his whiskey bottle and looked at me and he said,

Speaker 7 I was born in the rain by the puncher train underneath the Louisiana moon.

Speaker 7 I don't mind the strain of a hurricane. They come around every June.

Speaker 7 I black water, a devil's daughter. She's hot and she's cold and she's mean.

Speaker 7 But nobody's taught her that it takes a lot of water to wash away New Orleans.

Speaker 7 A man come down from Chicago, gonna set that lily right.

Speaker 7 It's gotta be up about three feet higher, won't make it through the end of the night.

Speaker 7 The old man down in Nick Water

Speaker 7 said, Don't you listen to that boy?

Speaker 7 The water will be down by morning sun, and he'll be back on his way to Illinois.

Speaker 7 Cause I was born in the rain by the punching train, underneath the Louisiana moon.

Speaker 7 I don't mind the strain of a hurricane, they come around every June.

Speaker 7 High black water, a devil's daughter. She's hot and she's cold and she's lean.

Speaker 7 But we finally taught her that it takes a lot of water to wash away in New Orleans.

Speaker 99 The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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