Brian Beutler: Vibe Shift

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Speaker 9 Hello and welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Speaker 9 Welcoming back, the co-host of the Politics Pod with Matt Iglesias, the author of Off Message on Substack, a former editor of mine, Brian Boitler. What's happening, Brian? Not a whole lot.

Speaker 10 Podcasting with you, which is fun.

Speaker 9 I kind of forgot that you'd edited me until I was looking at our text history. You're a good editor.
I'm easy to edit because I like editors that make things better and you like to make things better.

Speaker 9 I don't like editors that make things worse, you know?

Speaker 10 There's a lot of editors in my line of work, our line of work now, I guess. They're like, you know, this is actually true across professions and vocations.

Speaker 10 It's like, my job is this, ergo, when confronted with something, that's what I'm going to do. And sometimes it's just not necessary, right? Or like maybe only a little bit.

Speaker 9 Don't take out my pulp fiction references.

Speaker 9 Don't take them out. They're in there for a fucking reason.
Don't try to turn me into Richard Cohen.

Speaker 10 Now I can't even remember, but there was somebody who made like an oblique reference to something that happened in the TV show 24 in the piece. And I'm like, I know I'm.

Speaker 10 I know I'm like of a certain age and don't get a lot of pop culture references, but that's a reference I should get. And the fact that I don't means that nobody's gonna.

Speaker 10 And so I had to cut that one. But yeah, whatever, man.
If you're trying to signal to your nerdy Simpsons friends and want to throw a reference to that in there, I'm good with it.

Speaker 9 I'm good with it. Yeah.
Come on. All right.
You had a column in your sub-sect this week.

Speaker 9 You're like the chief vibesologist out there, arguing that the Democrats should focus more about making the vibes good and a little less on policy, despite the fact that you are significantly to my left policy-wise.

Speaker 9 So we're going to argue about policy. We're going to argue about vibes.
But before that, you know, we got to talk about the news.

Speaker 9 Donald Trump last night, in all of his genius, had some remarks in front of a group that included Miriam Adelson, Sheldon Adelson's late wife, who's a huge donor.

Speaker 10 The late Sheldon Adelson's wife.

Speaker 9 What did I say?

Speaker 10 You said Sheldon Adelson's late wife.

Speaker 9 What do you mean?

Speaker 9 No, leave it in. She's late.

Speaker 9 Maybe she's behind,

Speaker 9 like Cleopatra. I don't need to set it up.
Let's just listen.

Speaker 11 I have to say, Miriam, I watched Sheldon sitting so proud in the White House when we gave Miriam the Presidential Medal of Freedom. That's the highest award you can get as a civilian.

Speaker 11 It's the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor, but civilian version. It's actually much better because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor.
That's soldiers.

Speaker 11 They're either in very bad shape because they've been hit so many times by bullets or they're dead.

Speaker 11 She gets it, and she's a healthy, beautiful woman.

Speaker 11 and they're rated equal

Speaker 9 they're rated equal they're rated equal but not really actually the medal of freedom that you get for being a rich person that gives money to donald trump is actually superior to the medal of honor because you don't have war injuries and you're not dead you're not a sucker or a loser what do you think about that Yeah, you just need to have billions of dollars of your own or your inheritance needs to be large and Donald Trump will give you the highest civilian honor in the land.

Speaker 10 It's wonderful. Like, what did she ever do to deserve a medal of any kind?

Speaker 9 I don't think anything. She was a doctor.
Maybe she did some good doctoring before

Speaker 9 she started donating to really noxious causes. The interesting thing about this, Bill Crystal wrote about it at length in morning shots this morning.
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Speaker 9 There's the John Kelly controversy, right?

Speaker 9 Where John Kelly says that Donald Trump told him that, you know, the people that died, they're visiting the soldiers' gravestones, said they were suckers and losers what did they get out of this and uh you know john kelly's son had was a veteran who died in war and so you know it was maybe an insensitive comment in the micro and in the macro uh in that instance but trump's been denying this right for years he also john kelly also reported that trump did not want to have amputees people that had been injured in war to be photographed with him because you know it messes with the juju people don't want to like to look at that we have to you know make those people lepers and put them far away And so, Trump has been denying this for years.

Speaker 9 He denied it, I believe, in the first debate. It was one of the overshadowed moments of the first debate, but he denied it and said he never said that.
That's a lie.

Speaker 9 And here he is honoring Miriam Adelson, basically saying that, right?

Speaker 9 Like, you can get the, you can get the medals that these losers get, but without the injuries, you know, as long as you're just nice to the president and give him money. Yeah.

Speaker 10 He did this in public with John McCain in 2015 2015 or 2016 when he said, like, I'd like people who weren't shot down, right?

Speaker 10 I mean, that's why when John Kelly came forward with this one, John Kelly has more credibility than Donald Trump, which is like very low bar to clear.

Speaker 10 But B, he was saying something that was consistent with what we knew about Donald Trump already at that point. And so now it's like re-re-confirmed.
And,

Speaker 10 you know, I think that this

Speaker 10 works in two ways. Or like, we're seeing the immediate effect, which is that everyone's kind of desensitized to it.

Speaker 10 And so it's not like generating front page headlines or leading the Bullwork podcast. Well, yeah, but it's going to be out of the news cycle in a day or two, probably, right?

Speaker 10 Where if, you know, Kamala Harris said something like this, it would dominate the news cycle for a long time.

Speaker 10 And that's frustrating because there should be one standard for everyone who wants to be president, right?

Speaker 10 But I think separately, I think we're seeing Joe Biden's theory of the election being vindicated.

Speaker 10 And he was basically like, when people remember the things they didn't like about Trump, I will pull ahead and then Democrats will win the election.

Speaker 10 And it just required Joe Biden to drop out so that he and his baggage could get out of the way.

Speaker 9 That was just one flaw with that theory of the election. One thing.

Speaker 10 But so that people could be reminded of the Trump they hated instead of only seeing the Trump that they could kind of like hold their nose and tolerate.

Speaker 10 And so because we're not going to get days and days and days of like roadblock news coverage of this event, I don't think it's going to have an enormous impact on his polling.

Speaker 10 Like, and the bottom basically never falls out from under Trump's approval.

Speaker 10 I guess like maybe after January 6th, it dipped a lot, and then he was out of office, so people stopped measuring approval ratings.

Speaker 10 But even absent an insurrection, he can get like plumb 40, 39, 38% on the basis of just being an asshole. He's at what, like 46, 45 now.
It's kind of like the high watermark for him.

Speaker 9 You know, he's got room to go down. It was interesting.
That New York Times Sienna poll, that Fraser is right. He was at his high watermark in the New York Times Sienna poll history.

Speaker 9 It was the highest favorability rating he'd had.

Speaker 10 Yeah. And these are the sorts of things where, like, you know, you'd like to think that he says something like this, and it's over.
The Trump problem is solved because he just discredited himself.

Speaker 10 And everyone's like, wait, what a gross person. How could I have ever supported him? It doesn't work like that, unfortunately.
But these are the sorts of things that add up.

Speaker 10 And that you could imagine dragging Trump from an August high of 45, 46% approval down to a hopefully like a November, you know, reversion to the mean of 40, 41%.

Speaker 10 And that's where he needs to be to really be creamed in this election. And obviously, that would be good for the country.

Speaker 9 What did you think about his press conference yesterday? Take it any way you want, or the media coverage of it.

Speaker 9 I mean, the media showed, CNN showed about 30 minutes of him rambling before cutting away and then cutting back to the questions.

Speaker 9 Most of the questions were from like MAGA media outlets, so it wasn't exactly like he was taking any hard questions yesterday either. But he drives no message.
He's rambling.

Speaker 9 He's obviously aggrieved about Kamala. I have some notes here.
He made fun of the fact that people don't know her last name. He's still obsessed over how she looked too pretty on the Time cover.

Speaker 9 He said she complains too much. It's a little bit of projection, maybe.
Said very strong communist lean. And then said, way beyond socialism.
He's mad. She called him weird.

Speaker 9 I think the Trump theory of the case is that he wants attention back from her. And so he's going to have these rambling things and get attention.
But to what end, I guess?

Speaker 10 First, it's interesting to me because I tuned out after those 30 minutes and everyone started cutting away. And I'm just like, what's the point of this?

Speaker 10 Is his new thing now that he holds quote-unquote press conferences, but he makes sure that MAGA media outlets are among the press pool and then he just selects them so that he can pretend he had a like a real press conference, but it's really just like a, okay, that's clever, I guess.

Speaker 9 There were one or two hard questions. If we're going to just be fair,

Speaker 9 we call it straight here, Brian. I think that Garrett Haik got a question in.
There were one or two normals that got questions in, but there was also,

Speaker 9 why has God chosen you? I believe was a question. And,

Speaker 9 you know, there were a couple on why the Biden-Harris economy is so terrible.

Speaker 10 Yeah, but like, no questions about did you take a $10 million bribe from Egypt and cover it up? Or that wasn't, yeah, that didn't make the cut.

Speaker 10 I think the higher purpose, like the thing that allows him and Chris Lasavita, and maybe now Corey Lewandowski to be of one mind about this is that Trump wants the attention.

Speaker 10 Trump wants to reassert control over the narrative of the election because he's been unable to do it since Harris got in.

Speaker 10 They want Harris to have more media scrutiny. And so putting Trump out there to do a quote-unquote press conference allows him to say, Donald Trump's done two press conferences in two weeks.

Speaker 10 Where's Kamala, right?

Speaker 9 Is any of that working though?

Speaker 10 They have, no, it's not working. Like, she keeps going up in the polls.
I think eventually she will do a regular press conference. Like, there's no template for this.

Speaker 10 She took over a campaign with little notice in July and had to

Speaker 10 pick and choose a running mate and redesign the whole convention that's next week. So it's like, it's 21 days.
Well, the last time this happened, it was 19 days. No, there was no last time, right?

Speaker 10 Like

Speaker 10 we're just making this up on the fly.

Speaker 10 But I think that they think, or they hope at least, that the caricature they've drawn of Harris as somebody who can only be articulate and compelling when on teleprompter, she'll be forced to do an interview or a press conference or both, and she'll melt down.

Speaker 10 And then they'll be able to like

Speaker 10 reset the narrative of the race again in a place that's more favorable to them or less favorable to her.

Speaker 10 I feel like she, through campaign aids or whoever, could easily just explain, like, all this stuff happened kind of out of nowhere.

Speaker 10 We need to run the campaign, get it set up and prepared for September and October. As soon as that's done, we'll do a press conference.

Speaker 10 But also like when we do the press conference, you can take my answers to the bank.

Speaker 10 It is easy for somebody who doesn't care about being honest or factual or whether he misleads people to have a press conference every day of the week

Speaker 10 because there's no preparation is required.

Speaker 9 There won't be a long rant about how I didn't jail Hillary Clinton when I could have because

Speaker 9 for some reason I believe that the president is indistinguishable from the dictator of Belarus and I can just jail political opponents or not based on my mercy and whims. That was

Speaker 9 like an eight-minute aside during yesterday's quote-unquote press conference about

Speaker 9 his imaginary jailing powers that he didn't use.

Speaker 10 Well, and like, you know, she is not going to just make wild assertions about him that aren't true or about her record that aren't true. You know, she will spin because she's a politician.

Speaker 10 But the casual slander that comes with Trump and his campaign just isn't a part of democratic politics, at least not at the level of presidential elections.

Speaker 10 And so it will be a substantive press conference.

Speaker 10 Like the people who attend it or who cover it will be able to mine her answers for whatever they're interested in and have at least some confidence that what she says is corresponds to reality in some way.

Speaker 10 If I were her, I would just want that idea out there in the discourse that like what you're getting from Donald Trump are sort of Potemkin press conferences.

Speaker 10 Everyone kind of rolls their eyes at the lies he tells and the random bizarre things that he says. And they pluck the one kind of normal thing that he said out.

Speaker 10 And that becomes the headline to like my eternal frustration and she should want in the discourse like if you want me to hold a press conference to do that i'm happy to do it i could do that every day of the week but i i think what you really want is honest informed answers from somebody who who can be entrusted to the presidency and

Speaker 10 I will fit that into my schedule when I can.

Speaker 9 Yeah, right. One other related to Donald Trump giving answers that

Speaker 9 do not correspond with the reality of his plans. There was a secret video.

Speaker 9 Yeah, I'm of mixed views about secret audios and sometimes, you know, I get a little weak knee sometimes about the secret audio, but we do have some secret audio of Russ Vought,

Speaker 9 who is the

Speaker 9 guy that has been bestowed upon as, you know, the policy heavyweight of MAGA world.

Speaker 9 And he's the person that's like, I guess everybody points to, that is in charge of backfilling Donald Trump's rambling rants and creating some kind of policy apparatus around them.

Speaker 9 Bannon always talks about Russ Vought as kind of the intellectual heavyweight of MAGA. He was deeply involved in Project 2025.

Speaker 9 He got tricked by some Brits and here he is talking about Trump and abortion policy.

Speaker 9 The president has actually come up with a strategy that works so long as you are giving people like me in the government the ability to block funding for Planned Parenthood, block funding for fetal tissue research.

Speaker 9 What I've told people is

Speaker 9 he had the most pro-life record ever. I've never seen him take it to stand in the way of a pro-life initiative that actually was real politically and with momentum.

Speaker 9 It's a great plan, as long as you just don't say it out loud.

Speaker 9 She's like, let Donald Trump pretend he's basically pro-choice and then put a bunch of weirdo Russ Vaughn people in HHS and let them use every arcane lever possible to block any access to women's reproductive care.

Speaker 10 I love how this whole Project 2025 thing has played out. It's like, you know,

Speaker 10 it's not that much different from how Republicans assemble their agenda in more normal times. It's just been outsourced to think tanks and stuff.

Speaker 10 It's never been uncommon for Republicans to have like a policy like guidebook that's, you know, several hundred pages long filled with stuff that they really rather not talk about that much.

Speaker 10 And then Democrats say, oh, look, this is your plan to push Granny off a cliff or whatever. And Republicans say, no, no, no, that's not really what we're about.
And then it's this kind of tussle.

Speaker 10 Like, the Trump's main insight was if you outsource that to heritage, then you can create some distance from it.

Speaker 9 His insight was in 2020, it didn't work in the end, but the insight was like, Why do we have a platform at all? That was the right thing, right?

Speaker 10 We'll just say that it's whatever Donald Trump wants, right?

Speaker 10 And but I love that, like, so Democrats and liberals, and just anyone who like has the correct read on Trump's character is like, this is bullshit. This is this is your transition and governing plan.

Speaker 10 You don't have anything else that you can work with, and so it's obviously going to be this. And Trump says, no, no, no.
And then Russell

Speaker 10 gets a camera in front of him. He's like, no, that's actually literally the plan.

Speaker 9 Yeah, that's the plan. What the Libs have been saying, what the media has been saying, like, that's the truth.

Speaker 9 Yeah, that's right. And it's actually really smart.
It's actually really smart that we're talking like this.

Speaker 10 You know, they have been so ham-handed about this because, like, I feel like there's two viable options if this is your agenda and it's so unpopular.

Speaker 10 One is to just own it and just be like, these principles are important and we are not going to run away from them.

Speaker 10 And like, even if you don't agree with them, at least you can trust us to do what we say and say what we, whatever.

Speaker 9 Things were great. Or just say it is like, what are you talking about? All of that stuff is why things were so great when I was president.

Speaker 9 You know, do all of that and why things have gone so terrible under Joe Biden. And like that, and you know, we'll take care of it.

Speaker 10 But if you're not going to do that, then I think the thing to do is to just completely lie.

Speaker 10 Like, if Donald Trump says, I reject the proposals of Project 2025, except for like these handful that I think are okay and like, these are them. They're not, nothing to be scared of there.

Speaker 10 And I will not appoint to my administration anyone who participated in the con job that is Project 2025, period. Yes.
And then he wins the election. He just does it anyways.
Like Psych, right?

Speaker 10 I mean, he doesn't care about the truth. So why wouldn't he do that?

Speaker 10 That would at least fool a lot of people into thinking that he actually had like. found this agenda to be alarming.
And then he could just spring the reality on people after it was too late.

Speaker 10 Like at least that would throw more people off the scent. Instead, they're doing this Streissend effect thing where he's like, Project 2025, never heard of it.

Speaker 10 It's like everyone in your administration works for Project 2025.

Speaker 10 And then these secret videos come out, and the Trump campaign spokesperson who's denying that there's any affiliation between the Trump campaign and Project 2025 worked for Project 2025.

Speaker 10 She's in those videos too.

Speaker 10 And the method that they've chosen to try to dodge political heat for this thing just forces

Speaker 10 people who work in ambush journalism and traditional journalism and activism and whatever to relay the whole thing there.

Speaker 10 And it's just dragging it out so much longer and so much more painfully than it would be if he either just owned it or completely lied about it, like completely lied about it.

Speaker 9 We also talk about the benefit of luck. And I just, you almost don't want to jinx these things because Trump had this insane run of good luck.

Speaker 9 And then it does feel like that, you know, the horseshoes flipped a little bit on this stuff.

Speaker 9 Like the whole Project 2025 thing, I was deeply skeptical was going to be a successful political strategy because

Speaker 9 at the beginning, the Democrats were rightly, and not less the Democrats, like journalists were rightly talking about the fact that the biggest threat here is the Schedule F and kind of the way that he wants to put his own Goombas into what used to be career government jobs for experts.

Speaker 9 Like that's like the thrust of this thing. And that's like a very arcane thing to run on in a campaign, right? Most people think that presidents can just pick whoever they want, right?

Speaker 9 So I guess you have to educate people before you tell them why it's bad.

Speaker 9 And then what happens is Biden has this disastrous debate and the Biden team is just like grasping around for anything to talk about.

Speaker 9 And it's like, don't talk about the debate, talk about Project 2025, you know, talk about Project 2025. And it was, it was kind of a desperate ploy, let's just be honest.

Speaker 9 But it worked because, you know, that's how you get stuff into the news environment as campaigns. This is a Brian, this is a Brian Boydler hobby horse by talking about things a lot.

Speaker 9 And so they get it into the, they get it in the news environment. And then Donald Trump and Chris Lacevita just fucking walk right into the trap by being like, oh, that's not us.

Speaker 9 And then Biden leaves anyway.

Speaker 9 And now Harris comes in to this environment where she can like run on, hey, this is their extreme policy book that you all have heard about now because we talked about it the last three weeks.

Speaker 9 And like things just really fell into place. Like this was not a master plan.
It's just like, things just fell into place.

Speaker 10 On the point about homing in on the Project 2025 Schedule F plan,

Speaker 10 I agree with you that most people aren't going to Schedule F. What the fuck is that? Who cares?

Speaker 10 It is, I think, a good way to get elites on the broad center left, people who have worked in government, who do work in government, who, and just like they know that that's important.

Speaker 10 And that gets them really concerned about what's going to happen if Trump wins. And then they go out and scare up votes however they can.

Speaker 9 The heads of all these various activist groups and like, you know,

Speaker 10 like if they're like, holy shit, they're going to use the Comstock Act. Is that what it's called?

Speaker 10 That's motivating to a class of people who have a lot of influence.

Speaker 9 And so then you get the Vox videos with 3 million views. They're like, what's the Comstock Act? Right.
Like,

Speaker 9 this is something that really works on the center left much more than on the center right.

Speaker 10 Here's where Project 2025 really does validate vibesology or vibes theory, whatever you want to call it, is that they called it Project 2025.

Speaker 10 Like when you were working in Republican politics, the Paul Ryan budgets were called things like the pathway to prosperity and the roadmap to America's future.

Speaker 10 You know, like clichéd, hackney, like lame, but the Inflation Reduction Act. That sounds pleasant.

Speaker 9 Contract with America.

Speaker 10 I like the idea of an American future. I love prosperity.
Like who's to like who is going to look askance at this? But they're like, let's call it Project 2025.

Speaker 10 And it's like, it sounds sinister, you know, like intelligence agents.

Speaker 9 They made, they made merch, you know, it's like they're the videos, people are like pictures of people at Reagan Airport, like these center left people you're talking about they're like look at this this guy's got a project 2025 briefcase they made videos that were basically like under project 2025 don't write any emails

Speaker 10 go meet in private to discuss your plans to do illegal things and then just do them so that there is no paper trail that's project 2025 and it's like of course that's going to go viral of course it's going to go right and Like, I honestly feel like this election could look a lot different.

Speaker 10 I mean, probably by one or two points or something, but that's the ballgame, maybe, if they had called called it, you know, something that like a replacement level Republican operative working in Mike Johnson's office could have come up with

Speaker 10 roadmap to his success. Done, you know? But no, they called it like this like bond bond villain thing, and now they're fucked.

Speaker 9 And it is like the weirdest people.

Speaker 9 There is a, this is like something that I try to educate my lefty friends about, you know, because there's a theory of the case is like all these Republicans have always been weird and crazy and extreme.

Speaker 9 And there's, you know, whatever. There's something to all that.
But like, there's this self-selecting Adam Smith nature of what's happening now, nine years into the Trump world, right?

Speaker 9 Where like the type of person that would be in the room, they'd be like, let's call this, you know, Project to Prosperity. Like, they've self-selected out.
It's our buddy Brendan Buck.

Speaker 9 You know, he works at a, he works at a corporate PR firm now

Speaker 9 doing public affairs. Like these guys, my buddy Michael Steele, these guys, the smart operative types, they've self over nine years, they've been like, we've self-selected out.

Speaker 9 And the weirdest people in the entire conservative ecosystem have now risen to the top, right?

Speaker 9 Because they're like, hell yeah, like they can either get more power now because all the smart people are gone or because they were always extremists and like now I can get my like race science hobby horse into the document, right?

Speaker 9 Like, and so that is another thing that happened. Like the Project 2025 crew is very strange.

Speaker 10 The new Republican like operative class, like they love cosplaying. They're like from the internet, right?

Speaker 10 Do you remember when the Snowden disclosures started rolling out and they detailed like NSA programs like PRISM, you know, and like,

Speaker 10 you know, when you get into the details, you can like or dislike the plans. You can question their legal footing.
You can think that they represent some shady activity that the U.S.

Speaker 10 government is up to. But like PRISM was just, you know, some internal term to describe a program.

Speaker 10 If they were devising that plan or designing that plan for public release, they would have called it something normal, like protecting America from whatever.

Speaker 10 And so it leaks and it's called prism and it sounds super cloak and dagger and the people who run Republican messaging now think that that shit is cool, you know, they're like they want to pretend like they're in some sort of like scheme Yeah, right to To you know to dismantle the administrative state

Speaker 9 unironically like without any without they don't do the doctor evil finger when they say it like that's just kind of what they say it's like the JD Vance video we played yesterday with Mikey Sheryl of him and that guy that are on the podcast.

Speaker 9 And instead of just being like, hey, we love when our in-laws come and help with the kids, it's like it has to be about how like post-menstrual women of Indian descent are particularly well suited to this task.

Speaker 9 You know, it's like that guy that J.D. Vance was interviewing with, he's in the, you know, he's the type of person that's in Project 2025.

Speaker 10 Yeah. I mean, I could do a whole episode with you about like

Speaker 10 how J.D. Vance is like what you get when the Republican Party tent polls are like low taxes, no, no money for social services, Christian conservatism.

Speaker 10 And then the third one, instead of being like military stuff, national defense spending stuff, it's anti-immigration stuff, right? When you assemble all of that, you get somebody like J.D.

Speaker 10 Vance, who's like, we need to replenish the American population after we kick out the immigrants by turning like women into baby makers, but we don't want the wrong kinds of people having babies.

Speaker 10 So there's not going to be any money for them. And you're going to have to bring your grandma in to help raise the kids, right?

Speaker 9 Like,

Speaker 10 that's the vision, but like, but it attracts people like Vance who believe in all of it, and then they have a really weird way of talking about because it's gross.

Speaker 10 Like, the vision for the country that it represents is unappealing. But, like, it turns out it's also very hard to talk about in a way that is attractive to people who aren't already bought in.
Yeah.

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Speaker 1 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 1 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 1 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal. Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

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Speaker 9 Let's get to your vibesology theory of the case. I want to just set the table for people who are not deep listeners of your podcast with Matt Iglesias Politics, which they should be.

Speaker 9 You are on this vibe side of politics, that the Democrats should care more about trying to control the media battle space.

Speaker 9 Matt is more on the side of actually, no, policy positions really matter. Voter behavior is a lot based on policy positions.

Speaker 9 You wrote earlier this week, Kamala Harris's rise refutes an influential democratic theory of politics, which is the map theory.

Speaker 9 You highlight in particular, what we can now see clearly is that economic sentiment among voters, to some important extent, forms downstream of political optimism, which in turn is a function of mass psychology.

Speaker 9 So your argument is that the polling showing not just that Kamala Harris is doing better, but that people feel better about the economy, despite the fact that she hasn't actually changed any policy views on anything, is evidence that it's more about vibes than policy.

Speaker 9 Is that a good summary?

Speaker 10 Yeah, that's a good summary. I would say like two small things, not really as correctives, but just as addenda.
As Matt and I have done the show for longer, we don't exactly disagree with each other.

Speaker 10 It's just a question of emphasis. Like I think that the right policy approach for Democrats to take when trying to win campaigns is don't do stupid shit.

Speaker 10 It's like the old Obama line about foreign policy. It's like, as long as you are not touching third rails constantly, you're fine.
Like people are not going to delve into the details that much.

Speaker 10 They want to know what your values are and what direction that points policy-wise in a vague sense.

Speaker 10 You can say you support a higher minimum wage, and then that can mean, you know, literally the minimum wage goes up or you support various other, you know, full employment to pressure wages up, whatever, right?

Speaker 10 Like you don't need to write it all down. And if you do write it all down, it's not going to change your polling because people are just not tuned in at that level in general.

Speaker 9 This is the anti-let's just say, because I'm sure you like your policies and I don't. So this is nothing about the policies, but this is the anti-Elizabeth Warren, right?

Speaker 9 This is the anti-I have a plan for that theory.

Speaker 10 Well, I think it's the anti-2008 primary.

Speaker 10 Like in 2008, you had John Edwards, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, all and others all trying to out-compete each other for policy detail and to outflank each other in ambition.

Speaker 10 And it was demanded by people like Matt. Like they wanted to see these details.
And now I think that like...

Speaker 9 It was true. The only thing that mattered was that Barack Obama was hopey changey and he seemed cool.
And it was like, that was it. That was what really matters.

Speaker 10 Yes. It got reinterpreted as like good policy is good politics.
Therefore, really like master your policy, be super detailed about it, and the good politics will follow.

Speaker 10 And I think that that's basically wrong.

Speaker 9 Yeah, it's like, quick quiz. Who is for the individual mandate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama? Like only people.

Speaker 9 Only people that were in the blogosphere in 2008 know the answer to that. But that was like the prime debate question.

Speaker 9 And it ended up mattering like basically zero and did not actually impact the policy that Obamacare ended up being.

Speaker 10 And on the on the flip side of that, like obviously Matt agrees that controlling the information space with things that are favorable to your side, like Donald Trump's corruption or whatever, are better than the, you know, the alternatives.

Speaker 10 So like we, it's not like we think that each other has

Speaker 10 directionally incorrect views about this stuff, just that like, what should Democrats be spending their efforts on to maximize the, and I think it's this like aesthetic stuff, this, like, like the impressions people form, right?

Speaker 10 So, the second caveat I want to offer is that the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index should be updated today.

Speaker 10 And it will either like, I'll either have a little bit of egg on my face or I will be, I'll be vindicated. I think it's the expectations are it's not going to come in too hot.

Speaker 10 And if it comes in, if it spikes, I think it's, it's another data point in my favor.

Speaker 9 But before you talked about the data that might not turn out in your favor, what was the data that premised the article? Yes.

Speaker 10 So Kamala Harris takes over from Biden. Economic policy does not change.
The underlying economy does not change. It does maybe a little bit, like it seems like it's weakening a little bit.

Speaker 10 So you would expect that to correlate, if anything, to Democrats doing worse. But then

Speaker 10 she takes over and she gets an immediate spike in the polls based on just being a different person.

Speaker 10 And then another thing happens. She overtakes Donald Trump in the Financial Times survey of like, who do you trust more in the economy?

Speaker 10 And like Biden had been trailing like the whole way through his campaign. Nobody knew what her, like what changes she was going to make to the Biden policy agenda.

Speaker 10 And Biden had not changed policy from the White House and the underlying economy hadn't changed. People just were like, I am more comfortable with this lady than I was with the other old guy.

Speaker 10 And I'm more comfortable with her than I am with the alternative, the orange-faced old guy, right? Like that was it.

Speaker 10 And then there was a separate consumer sentiment index that it's one month of data, but it spiked faster in July than any month in the history of the survey.

Speaker 10 So there was just a radical change in perception on the part of a subset of the population about the economy where they had been saying that their sentiment was weak and now they're saying it's strong.

Speaker 10 And I just feel like you don't need to be a super empathic person to imagine why that might be, right? Like, like you are, I'm guessing, familiar with being in a bad mood,

Speaker 10 right?

Speaker 10 Like, and it could be the environment is making you in a bad mood and you can't quite put your finger on it, or it could be like something in particular that just, it's just been a bad day of of individual things happening that's but it can make everything seem worse right like the like you're in a bad mood and your food tastes worse even if it's the same food if like 20 or 30 or 50 percent of democratic voters are despondent about biden probably losing the election and maybe being too old to be president and now suddenly you swap him out for harris and she's young and exciting and they're excited that could easily make lots of people feel better about all kinds of things, right?

Speaker 10 Like people's relationships with their families might have gotten better because they're less depressed about politics.

Speaker 10 I have no psychological training, but I've been a human for 41 years and I know how

Speaker 10 seemingly disconnected things can change my perspective on totally different things.

Speaker 10 And that's why like when I noticed her overtake Trump and I noticed this consumer sentiment index spike, I'm like, it's that. That's what's happening.

Speaker 9 Now, is it also just possible that this is an outlier?

Speaker 9 My pushback to you is this, is that this is an outlier situation, that the Democrats didn't really do anything besides like she gave a couple good speeches and really what was happening was there was a some subset of people maybe 10 maybe 30 of the country and i'm not talking about the mega people like some subset of either soft republicans soft democrats independents some subset of people that just looked to joe biden and was like this guy can't be in charge of anything effectively i refuse to believe that he is and so when i'm getting asked if things are going well in the country i am just saying no, because I just don't believe that this person is capable of making things go well in the country.

Speaker 9 That might be irrational or whatever, but like, might it just have been that? As simple as that, an outlier? They're just, it was just people reflecting.

Speaker 9 Like, I do not trust that the government is being run well right now.

Speaker 10 I mean, that is a vibes theory that you just articulated.

Speaker 9 But in a really extreme one, I guess is what I'm saying.

Speaker 10 Yeah, well, look, like, what I would say is that an incumbent president winning a basically uncontested primary and then declining the nomination after that's all over because he's losing and people have lost confidence in him.

Speaker 10 And, like, offering his support to his much younger vice president is such a like extreme development. Never seen it before, and we'll probably never see it again in our lifetimes, right?

Speaker 10 And so, it takes something of that magnitude to create this abrupt difference. You know, shooting up six to eight percent in polls doesn't typically happen in a campaign.

Speaker 10 And consumer sentiment spiking this fast doesn't typically happen except in periods of like serious economic turmoil, right?

Speaker 10 But there was just this radical change.

Speaker 10 And like what happened is what, how you described it: 10, 20% of the population came off the sidelines, stopped being double haters, and just started feeling better about the direction of things.

Speaker 10 Where before they were using any question about whether they approved of Biden or how they felt about the economy as like a proxy for like, are things with this president going well?

Speaker 10 And like their impression was no,

Speaker 10 because he's so old, he can't campaign. But it was not a material assessment of economic reality, right? They weren't like, man, you know, I like, I do feel pinched.

Speaker 10 I am pinched. I can't afford my shit anymore.
That wasn't what was happening.

Speaker 10 Like, what was happening is they were despondent about Biden's vibe, his likelihood of winning, his ability to serve four terms, and it bled into their economic sentiment.

Speaker 10 And I wish the world worked in the sort of mechanistic way that

Speaker 10 my co-host and many other Democratic people who work in Democratic strategy do. It would make winning elections easy and meritorious.
You just do a good job and you win. But

Speaker 10 it's not how anything really works.

Speaker 9 By the way, I should have answered my own hypothetical for listeners who are annoyed. It was Hillary Clinton that was for the individual mandate, Debarack Obama's for a public option.

Speaker 9 Obama did it right. Obama did it right.

Speaker 10 Obama did what I'm saying Trump should do. He said, we don't need an individual mandate and I don't support one all the way through the election and then won the presidency and was like, sleep.

Speaker 9 Okay. well i can't approve of that i test my friend

Speaker 9 no it's bad but he won

Speaker 9 uh so okay my other pushback to you on this vibes theory is again this is kind of like why i got annoyed at alan lichtman with the 13 keys where he's like 13 and i'm like dude the n here is like two right of times where presidents left right so the n here is like one right i what is happening right now might support your theory, but it might not, right?

Speaker 9 Like household incomes are up, gas prices are down, mortgage mortgage rates are going down.

Speaker 9 People always said, you know, I've had economic experts on this podcast for months that they're going to be lagging. People are going to have a lagging reaction to inflation coming down.

Speaker 9 They're not going to realize it for a while. It takes time for people to get used to their prices.
So, like, that happens.

Speaker 9 That is happening at the same time that there's this dramatic shift in the presidential race. Like, I don't, you know, if Biden had switched to Harris at a time when

Speaker 9 that one-day stock market tank had actually been persistent persistent for three weeks or gas prices are skyrocketing, the vibes probably couldn't have been able to overcome that, right?

Speaker 10 Well, maybe not. I mean, like he flunked a debate in front of 50 million people, right? Like it was a very traumatic episode.

Speaker 9 It was.

Speaker 10 Look, I think that what happens is in like liberal political analysis is

Speaker 10 there's a change in public opinion. Joe Biden's approval rating is going down when it should be going up based on fundamentals.
Economy's been growing for a long time, et cetera.

Speaker 10 And so then people go back, sift through the data and try to look for how to make the curve fit, right? And so they're like, oh, gas prices were up a little bit or real estate.

Speaker 9 Inflation was persistently a little higher. That was then the target number.

Speaker 10 Even this idea that there's a lag effect where people remain mad about inflation is like, it's just an assertion. You know, it's like it's a way to try to make sense of something on the basis of

Speaker 10 intuition about how people might think about the economy.

Speaker 10 But basically, you're, you're trying to, after the fact, reformulate what the fundamental, yeah, backfill, like reformulate what the fundamentals are to match what Biden's approval rating is.

Speaker 10 And I just think that that's a bad approach. And

Speaker 10 the Alan Lichtman stuff, even though it sounds like

Speaker 10 it's prescriptivist, right? It's like, if these 12 things fall into place, the incumbent party candidate wins or something like that.

Speaker 10 And like, that's prescriptivist in much the same way that good policies, good politics theory is prescriptivist.

Speaker 10 It's just like, do these things right, and the politics will fall into place, the elections will fall into place.

Speaker 10 And a cornerstone of vibes theory is that there's no set of things that you can predictably do that will predictably deliver you election victories.

Speaker 9 You got to either try to make your vibes better or their vibes worse.

Speaker 10 It's the year 2024. People have rumor mills in their pockets that they check dozens of times a day for updates on what's happening in the world.

Speaker 10 And you need to fill that rumor mill with stuff that's good for you so that they feel a way that makes them inclined to vote for you.

Speaker 10 And I can't tell you day by day what the right way to do that is, let alone like write up a plan that's going to work election after election. And like

Speaker 10 nothing that I'm saying here should make convincing like

Speaker 10 mislead anyone listening into thinking that I don't care about whether policy is well implemented or well designed. I do.

Speaker 10 And like if you are a re if you are really bad at policy and governing, you are going to suffer politically from it. You should like, but those are like the table stakes.

Speaker 10 You should get into politics because you want to govern well. And then you should govern well because it's the right thing to do.
And because if you govern poorly, you'll lose. But that's that.

Speaker 10 That's governing. And then separately over here, there's politics.
And it's, it's like trying to figure out whether Trump took a bribe from Cece is like good for accountability.

Speaker 10 There's a substantive reason to do it. But it's because if people are thinking about Donald Trump takes bribes from

Speaker 10 Gulf State dictators or Arab dictators, like that's valuable politics for Democrats. And they shouldn't sit on stuff like that, but they choose to.

Speaker 9 I agree.

Speaker 9 Well, the one thing we won't go into this because it's boring, because we agree, which is both of us are like leading the flag waving of where is the Democratic Senate investigative and oversight committees.

Speaker 9 What the fuck are they doing? Why are not like random Egyptian intelligence officials being called before our Congress so that we can have news about this? We totally agree on this.

Speaker 9 I think it's been a total abdication of Democrats on this point, like across 20 verticals.

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Speaker 9 Let's just talk about governing for one second, though, because we have to. Let's just be serious for one second.
Because Kamala's rolling out her econ policy today. It includes

Speaker 9 Nicaraguan style price controls, apparently.

Speaker 9 We'll see. We'll see what the details are.

Speaker 9 It also includes giving people cash to buy a home as if really the right solution to our housing crisis and the high cost of homes is to give people more money that they can then use to pay for homes.

Speaker 9 That's somehow going to lower the price of housing for people. Unclear exactly how that works.
Why are we doing this? Like, why do we have to do this?

Speaker 9 Can you explain to me the progressive mind that forces us to do this? Can't we just do? She has a couple good things in there, I should say. 3 million more housing units.

Speaker 9 awesome child tax credit awesome why do we have to do the socialist stuff

Speaker 10 um i think you should see this as a recognition from the democratic brain trust yeah that the stakes of the election are too great to get bogged down in like internecine policy spats because if this if she put out these plans during a primary a democratic primary somebody else in the primary would be like the the economics don't work or or like these are bad ideas and then she'd have to defend them and whatever I think what she's done, and I'm cribbing from Julian Sanchez, who's now on Substack.

Speaker 10 It's called Non-Content is the name of his newsletter.

Speaker 10 But he analogized what she's doing to vaccination, where you take like a tiny amount of something that's harmful and you inoculate a body against it.

Speaker 10 And so it doesn't do any harm itself, but it's protective, is that these are not full socialism plans.

Speaker 10 These are like carefully selected policy nostrums that are very popular, but designed in a way not to do any damage so that you gain all of the popular appeal of doing things that pull well without committing yourself to a course of action that's going to actually cause a lot of damage.

Speaker 9 You know what else is really popular? That's never going to happen? Balancing the budget. So why don't we do that too?

Speaker 9 Why don't you throw the Paul Ryan, you know, Atlanta suburbs voters a little something? We'll do a little popular socialism. We'll do some price controls.

Speaker 9 We'll do some balanced budgeting and whatever. I mean, like, where's the end game to this?

Speaker 10 Because

Speaker 10 Kamala Harris isn't a Republican, right? Like, if she's going to, if she's going to lock herself into a- Is she a socialist?

Speaker 10 No, but what she, like, I think what she wants to signal is, I have some policy ideas that will help bring costs of stuff down.

Speaker 10 And then she's going to put herself onto a trajectory to do those in ways that are acceptable to liberals, people from the center.

Speaker 9 to the left.

Speaker 10 And she doesn't want to lock herself into something like, I support a balanced budget that will get her locked into a policy direction that's like, well, now I've got to cut Medicare and also raise taxes.

Speaker 10 Like she does, you know.

Speaker 9 But we're not really going to have price controls. We're not like, there's not going to be somebody at the FTC like calling the Kroger, letting them know that their oatmeal is a little overpriced.

Speaker 9 Like that's not happening.

Speaker 10 Even if she tried, like she is not going to pack that Supreme Court fast enough to do anything like what you're talking about, right?

Speaker 10 It would be great if elections were really just like contests of ideas and then Harris put out a detailed plan and Trump put out a detailed plan and you just showed that to voters and you let them pick.

Speaker 10 But that's not obviously a model that works.

Speaker 10 I don't think you're going to see a whole infrastructure of like liberal or left-wing economists and policymakers developing new think tanks and stuff so that they can talk about how wonderful these ideas are and how they fit into a philosophy called heresism, right?

Speaker 10 You are going to have plenty of elite liberals like us kind of saying, yeah, these are not like

Speaker 10 super well-crafted ideas, but they're also devised in a way to do little harm and they're popular.

Speaker 10 So let's just give her space to run her campaign because at the moment, Pika Yun spats about policy are just not that important.

Speaker 10 She needs to win because Trump needs to be stopped, because democracy needs to be saved. And

Speaker 10 the fact that this is basically going to get a thumbs up or a like thumbs sideways from everyone in

Speaker 10 like the liberal elite is just a testament to the fact that we all are on, I think, the same page about that.

Speaker 10 Let's have a little bit of grace here and not bog her down in our like intellectual vanity because there are things more important right now than whether your housing policy design is going to cause prices to be warped by subsidizing blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 10 Like, who cares?

Speaker 9 Subsidized. We're just going to subsidize demand, subsidize demand, subsidize demand, subsidize demand, subsidize demand.
It'll keep working. Just keep doing it.
Eventually, it'll work.

Speaker 9 Okay, it's fine. It's fine.
I'm just, I'm going to take a deep breath today during your speech.

Speaker 10 It's fine.

Speaker 10 I will say that this is like not ideal, and it may not even be an optimal way to go about policy under these extremely weird circumstances, but I think it's closer to the mark than the approach we talked about a few minutes ago, where Democrats, essentially alone, are expected to offer insane levels of specificity about things that they can't credibly promise because the details are Congress's job.

Speaker 10 I agree with that.

Speaker 10 And so like, I think it's fine to gesture in the direction of the things you want to do and to be clear about your values and then say that the details will be sorted out with your elected representatives.

Speaker 10 And like ideally, the starting point of that are values and ideas where we're not talking about, well, this sounds like price controls and that's bad.

Speaker 10 It's like, it's ideas that from the from the kernel

Speaker 10 we can get behind.

Speaker 9 It's fine. We're just going after the gougers.
We're just, we don't know who they are. We're not saying who they are.
We're just saying if you're gouging, Top Cop Kamala's coming for you.

Speaker 10 It is sort of like an economic populist version of saying of what Republicans are doing with like, we're going to illegalize immigrants from voting.

Speaker 10 It's like, that's already illegal, but they're just, you know, like, it's just a, it's just a way of signaling that this is something that you care about.

Speaker 10 Unfortunately, what they're doing is signaling that you should try to overturn the 2024 election if Trump loses. But like, that is as a template for where policy fits into the elections firmament.

Speaker 10 It's like, just give them a morsel that tells them what your values are and like let them persuade you that they're credible people who aren't trying to mislead you.

Speaker 10 And if they give you those things and, you know, you support that direction, then that's your candidate. It's not much more than that, I don't think.

Speaker 9 Well, I'm not going to make too big of a stink out of it, but I've got a side eye on it. Okay, last thing before I lose you.

Speaker 9 Amanda Carpenter was talking on this podcast on Tuesday about how she thinks Donald Trump has PTSD. It's part of the reason why he's so grumpy and his press conferences.

Speaker 9 So just putting aside all the insanity of the content, just like as a close Trump watcher, his performance is as bad as it's ever been. It's a low ebb.
It could be his old, could be PTSD.

Speaker 9 Neither me nor Amanda have ever been shot. You have been shot.
And so I'm just wondering if you have any insights into

Speaker 9 what's happening in Donald Trump's brain.

Speaker 10 I don't for two reasons.

Speaker 10 One is that...

Speaker 9 Maybe you should just tell people really quick what happened. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 10 It was like an aborted mugging, like 2008, however many years ago that was, 16? Good lord.

Speaker 10 So I ended up getting shot three times by like a street mugger who wanted to steal my phone and then they ran away. I survived.
I lost my spleen, but I basically made a full recovery.

Speaker 9 Do you need a spleen?

Speaker 10 You don't need it. No.
It confers some immunity to various encapsulated bacteria. It's a totally different conversation.
So I have to get like pneumonia vaccines, but that's basically it.

Speaker 10 So it was such an out-of-sample event and it was so abrupt. And I was young.
I was 25. And so I recovered quickly.

Speaker 10 So it didn't traumatize me in the way that made me scared to just keep living my life. And I'm not like trying to say that I'm like super resilient or immune to PTSD.

Speaker 9 There's nothing walking down the the street. I guess I was kind of cheeky.

Speaker 9 More specific question is the news is that today that he's going to start doing outdoor rallies again with bulletproof vests, with bulletproof glass in front of him.

Speaker 9 He's been in his home, weirdly, for two weeks. Like he's only had like one event outside of one of his homes.
So I do wonder, was that like a thing? Like walking down streets?

Speaker 9 Did you avoid certain streets? Nothing.

Speaker 10 I definitely had like anger toward the kid who did it to me and his, he was with a friend.

Speaker 10 And like, you know, I like, I would indulge these like revenge fantasies when I was feeling down, but I never, when I got out of the hospital, hospital, I was just like, that was like being struck by lightning.

Speaker 10 And if you're struck by lightning, you can live the rest of your life in a Faraday cage or you can just get back to it. And I, I resolved to get back to it.

Speaker 10 And I'd never had flashbacks or nightmares or anything like that. So I'm lucky in that regard.

Speaker 10 I would assume total armchair psychology, but like Trump is such a narcissistic sociopath that like, as long as it didn't really hurt him, let alone kill him, you would think he'd be like, oh, that was weird.

Speaker 10 And then he's just back to it because all that matters is like whether he's present and alive in the moment.

Speaker 10 And because he's the center of the world, even though I have no personal experience with PTSD over my shooting, and like the actual bullets pierced my body on, like, whatever the fuck happened to Donald Trump, but his ear was pierced.

Speaker 10 This is scraped by a fragment. I don't know.
Who knows? I'm going to be a conspiracy theorist about this till I see a report from his physicians.

Speaker 10 But I am aware that people who go through what I went through, it really does

Speaker 10 like force them to make major changes in how they live their lives. And that's totally reasonable.
And

Speaker 10 maybe I'm wrong about like how that impacts somebody with Trump's weird psychological disposition.

Speaker 10 But if it turns out that he really has been at home for the last month and a half because he's traumatized by it, like

Speaker 10 would fit the facts very well. I think it's a good theory.
The problem with Trump is that like he he'll never tell us. He thinks that's a good thing.

Speaker 9 He's also brought in the final thing is he's brought in his buddies.

Speaker 9 You mentioned it earlier: Corey Lewandowski, the bad-breathed one that one time bragged that he murdered two people when he was trying to pick up a married woman at an addiction awareness fundraiser at a Benny Hana.

Speaker 9 You know, he likes to talk shop with Trump, and Trump's brought him and a couple of other buddies in. I don't know, maybe they're trauma blankets.

Speaker 10 I just feel like, look, Trump is never going to tell us because he thinks Trump is weakness. He's not transparent about any of his health issues.
And he also just doesn't understand how to appeal

Speaker 10 to like regular people on a soft basis. Everything has to be aggression, right?

Speaker 10 And like if he was able to be honest with himself about what's happening, and if he told himself, I have trauma from this attempted assassination and went and talked publicly about it in human terms.

Speaker 10 This has been really hard. It's been harder than I expected.
I've been slow to get back on the campaign trail because I've wanted to be sure that I'm safe. It'd probably help him.

Speaker 10 That's the thing that people thought was going to happen. Like when people were like, oh, he got shot.
He's going to be a Marty. Like his polos are going to rise.

Speaker 10 Like the assumption was that people were going to have sympathy for him, but you have to be a sympathetic person and he's not.

Speaker 10 And like Corey Lewandowski isn't going to tell him, hey, go tell people the truth about what's going on with you.

Speaker 9 Soften it up your feelings.

Speaker 10 And like there will be a non-trivial number of middle-of-the-road voters who are just like, man, that guy is toughened out. And I respect that.

Speaker 10 Instead of whatever it is he's doing, like I, I don't want to give Donald Trump advice that he might follow that might help him in the election, but like.

Speaker 9 No, no, I don't think he's listening to the 58-minute mark of this podcast. Uh, Brian Boytler, you gotta, I gotta let you go.
Thank you for you toughing it out 16 years ago.

Speaker 9 I'm glad you're here, and um, you know, thank you for being our head vibesologist. Thanks, buddy.
And we'll be back on the podcast soon, all right?

Speaker 10 All right, man.

Speaker 9 Thanks to my friend Brian Boytler. We will be back on Monday.
It's DNC Convention Week next week. We've got Bill Crystal on Monday plus a Ukraine update.

Speaker 9 And then, you know, we're going to have some Democrats next week. So get ready for it.
It's going to be great. Have a wonderful weekend.
We'll see you all then. Peace.

Speaker 9 I'm in the funky way. I'm, I'm in the funky way.

Speaker 9 I'm, I'm in the funky way.

Speaker 9 I'm in a funky way.

Speaker 9 I'll give it that.

Speaker 9 I'm in a funky way.

Speaker 9 I'll give it that.

Speaker 9 I'm in a funky way.

Speaker 9 I'll give it a

Speaker 9 biology.

Speaker 9 Biology. By body.
Now you ask what does it mean? Why, it's the study of the chemistry between you and me. You got the biology.
There's the beaky ology. Your body is tough next to me.

Speaker 9 You got that sensuality. And no one knows what you do when you do what you do.
You got me tall in the groove. When you move,

Speaker 9 I'm in a funky way.

Speaker 9 I'm, I'm in a funky way.

Speaker 9 The Board Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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Speaker 13 Baphortis is a prescription medicine used to help prevent serious lung disease caused by RSV or respiratory syncytial virus in babies under age one born during or entering their first RSV season and children up to 24 months who remain at risk of severe RSV disease through their second RSV season.

Speaker 13 Your baby shouldn't receive Baphortis if they have a history of serious allergic reactions to Baphortis, nursevimab ALIP, or any of its ingredients.

Speaker 13 Tell your baby's doctor about any medicines they're taking and all their medical conditions, including bleeding or bruising problems. Serious allergic reactions have happened.

Speaker 13 Get medical help right away if your child has any of the following signs or symptoms of a serious allergic reaction, such as swelling of the face, mouth, or tongue, difficulty swallowing or breathing, unresponsiveness, bluish color of skin, lips, or underfingernails, muscle weakness, severe rash, hives, or itching.

Speaker 13 Most common side effects include rash and pain, swelling, or hardness at their injection site. Individual results may vary.
Ask your baby's doctor about Bayfortis.

Speaker 13 Visit Bayfortis.com or call 1-855-BEFORTIS.