Catherine Rampell: Who Are the Socialists Now?

Speaker 4 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovny, and Carise Van Houten.

Speaker 10 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 14 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 19 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 20 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 12 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 23 One thing's for sure: the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 25 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 27 Amazon has everything for everyone on your list, like your uncle Ricky, who ruined your wedding photos because his fly was open.

Speaker 27 Get him underpants and save up to 40% with Amazon Black Friday week starting November 20th. And wear them, Ricky.

Speaker 5 Happy Halloween. Hello, and welcome to the Bullwark podcast.
I'm your host, Tim Miller. Couldn't be more excited to welcome a former syndicated opinion columnist of the Washington Post.

Speaker 5 But she'll be joining us at the Bullwark next week as an economics editor and writing a weekly newsletter called Receipt. She's also a co-host of MSNBC's The Weekend Prime Time and a New Mom.

Speaker 5 Lots happening for Catherine Rampel. Welcome aboard, Catherine.

Speaker 27 Great to be here.

Speaker 5 We're former Republicans, so we are working you before you're getting paid. You know, you start November 1.
I was like, I want, or I'm sorry, it's a Saturday, so I'm making her work a day early.

Speaker 5 Off of maternity leave, the whole thing.

Speaker 27 I'm very excited to start, so it's all right. I'll do some pro bono work for you.

Speaker 5 We're pumped to have you. For the people who don't know Catherine Rampel,

Speaker 5 can you give us a little, you know, just first date penny tour of your life?

Speaker 27 Of my life.

Speaker 5 Yeah, sure.

Speaker 5 I just had a couple highlights. I don't know.
How did you become an economics editor?

Speaker 27 So I knew I wanted to be a journalist from a very, very wee age, which turns out to be an advantage in a shrinking industry.

Speaker 27 So I did the journalism thing, internships and whatnot, like starting in high school.

Speaker 27 I ended up in economics journalism because I worked for an economist in college, Alan Kruger, who passed away a few years ago. And when there was an opening at the New York Times in 2008

Speaker 27 for someone to like start an economics blog, there were not that many people in journalism who knew about Econ. I was about a year out of school.
I had done a couple of different jobs.

Speaker 27 and various internships prior to that, but

Speaker 27 somebody at the Times got my name from this guy I used to work for and said, you might want to check out my former RA.

Speaker 27 She knows something about Econ, which turned out to be really advantageous given that the sky was falling. 2008, for those who may not remember, was the middle of the financial crisis.
So

Speaker 27 yeah, a good time to know about economics. That's always the story with journalism, right? That it's like when the world is going to hell on your beat, it's really good for your career.

Speaker 27 So it creates some perverse incentives, probably, if you had any control over the world.

Speaker 5 And Alan Krueger, I take it, was a neoliberal shill. I'm sure some people would refer to him that way.

Speaker 27 He worked for the Obama administration and the Clinton administration in various capacities. And he was a well-known labor economist who studied the minimum wage, among other things.

Speaker 5 Against or for?

Speaker 27 He did this landmark study. I want to say it was in the early 90s or late 80s with David Card,

Speaker 27 finding that raising the minimum wage actually did not reduce employment.

Speaker 27 Yeah. If you raised it by a little bit, it could actually result in basically more efficient allocation of workers.

Speaker 5 Well, hot damn.

Speaker 27 Yeah, if you.

Speaker 5 Someone should send that study to Jeff Landry, probably. My governor.

Speaker 27 Basically, it is taught in every introductory econ class.

Speaker 27 So, although he was not working on that when I was working for him, he was like working on the economics of rock and roll and the economics of terrorism. So, pretty different stuff.

Speaker 27 But he was a fun guy to work for.

Speaker 5 The other kind of element of this, I mean, look, the Bork is a great place to work. You come in, you're starting.
It's Halloween. I'm in a red beans hat.
You know, it's a little silly.

Speaker 27 We need to talk about that, by the way.

Speaker 5 Yeah, no, I just got to have, I wanted to be, you know, in spirit. My costume, actually, do you have a costume for tonight? Do you have a plan?

Speaker 27 I am guest hosting a show on MSNBC.

Speaker 5 Are you going to be in costume?

Speaker 27 I don't know. I kind of want to get into the spirit, but I also don't want to look ridiculous on air.

Speaker 5 I think you should just get some cat ears or devil ears or something.

Speaker 27 That's what I was thinking.

Speaker 5 That's what I was thinking.

Speaker 27 But if you have other suggestions for me, let me know.

Speaker 5 I'm geese for the Halloween. I'm multiple geese.
There's a hot band right now called Geese. And so I have a tutu and many geese on my body and also a guitar.
It's a

Speaker 5 inside joke. My daughter's a pirate.
Okay. So

Speaker 5 we're thrilled.

Speaker 5 I had a couple of theme ideas for Halloween that she rejected. It sucks.
I mean, just enjoy it while it lasts when they're a baby and they do whatever you want.

Speaker 27 Yeah, I was going to say my daughter is three months old and cannot voice an objection. So she's going to be a chicken whether she wants to.
I love that.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I love that.

Speaker 5 I think Toulouse's first one, she was a fox. But we were three Britneys one year, three different Britney Spears costumes, and it was the best.

Speaker 5 And I'm never going to be able to recreate it until she just accepts that my theme ideas are better. Anywho, we got off track.
You don't have that kind of conversation in the Washington Post.

Speaker 5 Leaving the post for the bulwark, you understand the benefits of here, but I think it does say something about the state of our affairs that you have, like across the board, and we're going to get into this in other areas, like these,

Speaker 5 like the richest people in the world that you would think would have the most FU money have decided in a lot of areas to...

Speaker 5 at least publicly facing, suck up to Trump and do things to get a pat on the head from the aspiring autocrat. And

Speaker 5 to me, that is as much of the story about what happened to this post as anything.

Speaker 5 But Jeff Bezos could have just turned it into a money sink and it could have been something focused on investigations, et cetera. And he is not alone here.

Speaker 5 He's just one of a lot of these guys that have decided sidling up to Trump is the answer. I wonder what you make of that.

Speaker 27 Look, I don't know anything more about what Bezos has in mind for the Post than what he said publicly.

Speaker 27 He says he thinks he's going to win back the trust of audiences by having more conservative voices or whatever they are on the op-ed page.

Speaker 27 If that is his genuine plan, I don't think it's going to work, particularly since I don't think that they're not really conservative voices a lot of the time.

Speaker 27 Some of them are, you know, like Trump administration officials. But I wish them well.
So there are, you know, more charitable and more cynical ways to interpret what's going on over there.

Speaker 27 I still have colleagues who I really respect, both on the opinion side and on the news side. So it was not the right choice for me to stay for a host of reasons.

Speaker 27 But, you know, the Post has been a great institution for many, many years and still does great investigative reporting. They've lost a lot of talent, but they're still getting scoops these days.

Speaker 27 So, you know, for the sake of the people who work there, for the sake of the legacy of that institution, and for the sake of democracy, frankly, I hope that the Post continues to

Speaker 27 do great journalism.

Speaker 5 I hope that as well. My optimism is maybe waning, but you know, it's nice.
It's our game, you know, is the way I'm going to look at it.

Speaker 5 So, let's do like what we're going to do with you for periodically from time to time here, talk about what's happening in the economy and how that's affecting our politics.

Speaker 5 Just at the biggest level, what is your take on kind of the macro state of where we're at economically? Because I do think there's some mixed kind of signals out there.

Speaker 27 Yeah, so I would say the economy is chugging along. We haven't gotten into, as far as we can tell, like the

Speaker 27 dreaded recession that may have come from a lot of the Trump actions, you know, sort of own goals so far this year. But it is fragile.
And I'll give you a few examples of what I mean by that.

Speaker 27 I was talking with a guy who has run a business for about 20 years. It's like probably a $100 million, $200 million revenue business.
He imports a lot of goods from China.

Speaker 27 And he has basically spent the entirety of this year figuring out how to reduce his tariff burden. Like last year, he paid about $1 million

Speaker 27 in tariffs. This year, he's expecting to pay about $15 million in tariffs.
And he has...

Speaker 5 That's a big jump. I'm not a math major.

Speaker 27 Yeah, well, it gets worse.

Speaker 27 He said that he's basically spent all of his time trying to make sure they didn't have a $115 million tariff bill, which they very well could have if they had timed things wrong, right?

Speaker 27 Because tariffs have gone up and down and up and down. Sure.

Speaker 27 And it's been really hard to know, like, if you relocate from one place to another, you go out of China to India or to Colombia or any other country, will it actually help you or not?

Speaker 27 And for the products that he makes,

Speaker 27 he sells artificial Christmas trees.

Speaker 27 This is not a business that can exist in the United States because it's very labor-intensive because they're pre-lit and they have like little light strings that go through them.

Speaker 27 Anyway, the company's called Balsam.

Speaker 5 I don't know. Howard Nutlix has said he's dreaming of America where there's generations of people screwing in little screws on iPhones.
You could screw in the little bulbs on the tree on the facebook.

Speaker 27 Threading little lights on the tree.

Speaker 27 No, I'm not, again, this is more your area of expertise than mine, but generally speaking, as a government, you don't want us to set policy where business owners spend all of their time trying to avoid the various bills that you're charging them yes this is one business obviously but I've talked with others that have kind of voiced similar concerns that companies should be spending their time thinking about new products or new customers how do they get efficiencies where can they invest things like that and not

Speaker 27 make the guy who's in charge of like tariff reduction the main profit center of the company, which is sort of how it works at a lot of places right now because there's so much uncertainty and because it's just it's really it's really hard to plan.

Speaker 27 And

Speaker 27 I go back to thinking about if Trump had just come into office and done nothing, if he had just gone out and played golf every day rather than rage tweeting or truth posting or whatever, truth social posting every three minutes about a new thing he was offended by and therefore it was a national emergency requiring tariffs.

Speaker 27 The economy would probably be doing a lot better by now. And that's not just me speaking.
Economists have said this, essentially, the Federal Reserve has said this.

Speaker 27 But the tariff stuff alone has been really damaging.

Speaker 27 And it's not only tariffs, it's also immigration policies, which are creating uncertainty and potentially soon labor shortages in a fair number of industries.

Speaker 27 Again, not only me saying this, Trump's own Department of Agriculture has said that the fact that they've been going after immigrants in agricultural sites is likely to be raising food prices, produce prices.

Speaker 27 So we're like tariffing the tomatoes when they come over from Mexico, and then we're rounding up the immigrants who are out in the fields or whatever

Speaker 27 getting tomatoes or processing chicken or what have you. And all that's going to contribute to higher prices.

Speaker 27 And one thing that I always like to emphasize when I'm talking about the consequences of these changing immigration policies is that it's not only people who are undocumented who are getting swept up in this dragnet.

Speaker 27 It's lots of people who have documents, who are being effectively de-documented in some cases.

Speaker 27 Like they're people who have various kinds of legal status, now TPS, or they're asylum seekers, or they're on parole, like all of these things that American shouldn't have to care about because it's a really technical, opaque system.

Speaker 27 But the upshot is these are people who have legal ability to work, legal permits to work, and Trump is taking them away.

Speaker 27 And there have been a bunch of things even just this week that will probably make it harder for like doctors to continue working legally in this country.

Speaker 27 Like besides the humanitarian effects of all of this, there are a lot of disruptions to the economy. And I think some of the cracks are showing up from all of that.

Speaker 5 Yeah, one of the areas of those cracks that's kind of related to all those things you just talked about, the labor shortages and tariffs, et cetera.

Speaker 5 There's a Times article early this week that said during the first quarter of 2025, Iowa's GDP contracted at a 1.2% annual rate. I know it was kind of before a lot of this stuff was happening.

Speaker 5 There are definitely some signs that, particularly in rurals and red parts of the country,

Speaker 5 things are worse on balance than it is in other places that are being kind of propped up by AI investment and data centers, et cetera. Like, what is your sense for that?

Speaker 5 Like, are people feeling the pain more at this point in certain pockets of the country?

Speaker 27 Yeah, there are a bunch of things that are affecting people in more rural areas. I mean, and to be fair, rural areas have struggled well before Trump came into office.

Speaker 5 But he also came into office promising to help them in particular.

Speaker 27 Yes, exactly.

Speaker 27 They were more likely to be his people because they were more likely to vote Republican. So

Speaker 27 immigration, SNAP benefits lapsing. There's a school nutrition program that was basically defunded that involved lots of food that came from farmers that were going to schools.

Speaker 27 The shutdown has resulted in problems for people trying to get farm loans.

Speaker 27 Then, if you look at things like other shutdown consequences, Head Starts are today, we're talking on October 31st, Halloween. Tomorrow is November 1st.

Speaker 27 A bunch of Head Starts around the country are going to have a lapse in funding. This is like a pre-K program for low-income families.

Speaker 27 A lot of, like I was talking with the Head Start director for the state of Washington and he said that several of the Head Starts that were going to have a lapse in funding starting tomorrow are in rural areas where there are no other child care options.

Speaker 27 So you'll have the kids who are enrolled in those programs not have care and then their parents won't have the care so that they can work. So there are all of these cascading effects.

Speaker 27 And like I said, some of these affect people in non-rural areas too, but it will be especially felt by those in rural areas. And then you have, like, you know, I was talking about tariffs.

Speaker 27 It's not only that we have tariffs on the stuff that farmers buy, like equipment and fertilizer, for example,

Speaker 27 there are retaliatory actions like China has stopped buying American soybeans, basically entirely.

Speaker 27 Whereas China was, I think, still the biggest customer for American soybean farmers.

Speaker 27 Trump met with President Xi this week and said, oh, they're going to start buying soybeans again. Big victory because Trump is great at like repackaging the prior status quo as victory.

Speaker 27 But the whole reason that they stopped buying was because of his trade wars. So it's, you know, it's again like the arsonists demanding.

Speaker 5 They're buying less, I saw, actually. We've gone from 27 million to 25 million metric tons.
That's the art of the deal. Yeah.

Speaker 27 Yeah. Again, it's the arsonist demanding praise for his firefighting skills.
That's the whole Trump MO.

Speaker 35 There are certain books that don't just give you information, they shift the way you see the world.

Speaker 37 I remember reading one when I was younger that completely changed me.

Speaker 34 Years later, I found myself thinking about that book again.

Speaker 39 I wanted the same edition back.

Speaker 40 Not a reprint, not a different cover, that exact one.

Speaker 34 So I started searching.

Speaker 38 And that's when I found it on eBay. That's what I love about eBay.

Speaker 31 It's not just a marketplace, it's a place where stories live.

Speaker 32 Shop eBay for millions of finds, each with a story.

Speaker 42 eBay, things people love.

Speaker 34 Listen to on purpose on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 4 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 10 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 14 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 19 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 20 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 12 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 23 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 25 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 5 I want to talk about the snap stuff more in a second, but just closing the loop on the tariffs.

Speaker 5 I was reading a Wall Street Journal article that just kind of is an overview of where we're at because there's some new tariffs that come in in November. Like it's hard to keep track.

Speaker 5 It's all really such a whirlwind. It is.
But there's a new round of tariffs that come in November 1st, in addition to some of this shutdown stuff we've been talking about.

Speaker 5 The tariffs on Canada is going to rise, tariffs on China is going to come down a little bit, still really high.

Speaker 5 It's kind of funny. It's like if you would have told people, I think, November of last year after he won that the tariffs on China were going to be whatever 47%.

Speaker 5 I think people would have thought that was catastrophic. Right.

Speaker 5 And like now, it's kind of pitched as, yeah well like he's easing his trade war on china um when overall this is a real overton window shifting yeah exactly yeah so the average rate is pretty high so anyway what like what is your assessment of like where we're at just like on the tariffs like where things are getting worse or or or not well certainly the numbers are not good

Speaker 27 and to your point last year when trump was still running for president i believe he i'm it's been so long it feels so long anyway what did he say he he was gonna have like a 10 global tariff?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I think so. I know.
Somebody said to me yesterday, can you believe it was one year ago that we were in New York for the election? And I was like, that was only one year ago.

Speaker 27 I know. Every day is a year.
But anyway, it was like 10%

Speaker 27 markets did not believe was going to happen because it would be too crazy. And now we are way worse than that all around the world.
So

Speaker 27 not good.

Speaker 27 Again, this comes back to this question of like, why is the economy not in this dire recession that a lot of people had feared or forecast and i think it's partly that companies planned for it to the extent that they could so like christmas tree guy that i mentioned he uh as soon as the election was determined last year he placed an order for christmas trees from china so this is november of last year he got the christmas trees in hopes of getting a bunch of inventory in before trump took office.

Speaker 27 And a lot of other companies did the same thing. Cars, auto companies, for example.
Basically, companies that sell durable goods, things that are not gonna perish.

Speaker 27 So, a lot of companies had inventory that they've been working through, and now they're having to replace it. And they're having to spend all this time figuring out,

Speaker 27 okay, can we move this production from this country to this country? Do we have to have the boats like circle the port for a while? Do we have to have the things go into the warehouse?

Speaker 27 Like, all of this stuff, again, that is just like a complete waste of time, effort, and money when they could be planning on doing more productive things so some firms were able to like tread water for a while and i think you're going to see some of that inventory run out and so they're going to have to they're going to have to deal with the new tariff environment and then other places like other companies if you sell tomatoes for example again we have like a new tariff on mexican tomatoes completely separate from all of these other tariffs that we're talking about for some reason you can't really stock up on those so easily because they go bad so I think we are starting to see some of the price consequences and you can see it in the data although I should say like data is hard to come by right now because there's a shutdown they did have one inflation report that they decided to do during the shutdown but like who knows how long the shutdown will go on and coincidentally it may continue while the numbers start what would have gotten a lot worse and it's not just in prices it's also in other parts of the economy where you're seeing issues.

Speaker 27 So, like

Speaker 27 data centers you mentioned are doing really well. This is like for AI, big, big investment in data centers to support the AI industry.

Speaker 27 That is largely keeping the economy afloat, but other kinds of investment are not doing so well.

Speaker 27 Jobs are, we're not like seeing net losses yet, and no, hopefully, we won't. But there are some big companies that have announced layoffs, Target, Amazon.

Speaker 27 I'm trying to remember who else announced just this week, but a bunch of them. And like, it's

Speaker 27 Paramount.

Speaker 5 Fired a lot of people. UPS.

Speaker 27 Yeah, and so some of this is like it may just be

Speaker 27 like one-off things that are completely unrelated to the overall kind of, maybe they're related to AI, maybe they're related to like a company rearranging its business. Who knows?

Speaker 27 But the more of those you see, that's more concerning. And I don't think at the very least that the trade wars are helping the job market.

Speaker 5 So if the AI data centers are holding this rickety deal up, did you have any hot takes on the AI bubble talk?

Speaker 27 I guess I would say what we're seeing right now is this huge arms race, right?

Speaker 27 Because a lot of companies, I think, assume, maybe correctly, maybe incorrectly, that it's going to be a winner-take-all situation.

Speaker 27 That like they have to get the best possible AI because like a slight advantage in your software or whatever will confer like huge benefits. You're just going to overtake the market.

Speaker 27 Kind of in the same way that like Google had a slightly better algorithm for search and just blew everyone else away. Like being second place didn't do you any good.

Speaker 27 And so you're seeing this huge arms race because everybody feels like there's.

Speaker 5 Bing did pretty good.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 5 It took me a lot. It took me that long to come up with the joke.
It took me that long. I was like, what was Microsoft search called? Bing.
I don't know where it came from in my brain.

Speaker 27 Yeah, speaks very highly of its customer loyalty right there. So anyway, so the so what might happen now?

Speaker 27 Like maybe there'll be a winner-take-all and everybody else is just gonna like pull out and say, screw it, cut our losses, like we're done investing and we give up and we're gonna pursue other things, in which case you would see potentially a big implosion in the economy, or at least in that sector of the economy, which could have knock-on effects.

Speaker 27 Because like, not only is this AI investment keeping up, propping up hard investment in the economy, but also like the stock market.

Speaker 27 Stock market, yeah. So that would be bad.
The question is, we don't really know, like maybe it's not a winner-take-all

Speaker 27 kind of market. And maybe it just continues.
Like it's definitely the case that AI will transform large parts of the economy, including the labor market.

Speaker 27 And there are potentially a lot of gains to be had. A lot of people will get displaced too.

Speaker 27 And again, like that might be part of the reason we're seeing some of these white-collar jobs getting cut recently.

Speaker 27 So there'll be some creative destruction, which is a callous way to say people are going to lose their jobs.

Speaker 27 But it will be pretty transformative, and you'll, you know, potentially see big productivity gains in the economy. We'll see.

Speaker 27 So the question is just like, is the amount of gain that would be expected from whatever this arms race results in bigger or smaller than the amount of money that's being invested into it now.

Speaker 27 And right now, it seems like there's a lot of money chasing after

Speaker 27 maybe not as much gain, but it's, I don't know, this is not really a hot take. This is like a lukewarm.

Speaker 5 It's like hard to produce. Yeah, this is like a lukewarm.
That's a lukewarm take.

Speaker 27 It's a lukewarm take. I think it's really hard to know, but yeah, I think it's not great that this sector is like the only thing or not, or one of the few things growing in this economy.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I don't think that ChatGPT would be rolling out the sex bots if they thought that there were like gains

Speaker 5 productivity gains coming immediately.

Speaker 5 Like, it doesn't seem like the activity of a company that thinks that it's going to totally disrupt the whole economy when they feel like we've got a, we need to roll out a couple new products, including AI sex.

Speaker 5 friends you know well you know there's maybe some big money there too who knows there is money to be made there no doubt but i just you know i mean i think that that's also already kind of baked into the market i mean there's a lot of there's a lot of competitors in the space, etc.

Speaker 28 Some moments in your life stay with you forever.

Speaker 31 In a special segment of On Purpose, I share a story about a book that changed my life early in my journey and how I was able to find the exact same edition on eBay years later.

Speaker 35 There are certain books that don't just give you information, they shift the way you see the world.

Speaker 37 I remember reading one when I was younger that completely changed me.

Speaker 34 Years later, I found myself thinking about that that book again.

Speaker 39 I wanted the same edition back.

Speaker 40 Not a reprint, not a different cover, that exact one.

Speaker 34 So I started searching.

Speaker 38 And that's when I found it on eBay. That's what I love about eBay.

Speaker 31 It's not just a marketplace, it's a place where stories live.

Speaker 32 Shop eBay for millions of finds, each with a story.

Speaker 42 eBay, things people love.

Speaker 34 Listen to on purpose on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 4 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 10 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 14 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 19 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 20 Why is Adam after the the Tanner family?

Speaker 12 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 23 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 25 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 5 Back to the snap stuff.

Speaker 5 So tomorrow is when the...

Speaker 5 It's not actually legally, but like when essentially the Trump administration has said we're going to stop paying SNAP benefits, even though there is a reserve in place.

Speaker 5 They are interpreting that law incorrectly, purposefully, I guess, to try to put pressure on the Democrats, I think, to come to the table. It seems like something that's backfiring to me.

Speaker 5 There's a lawsuit out there, so this might get stopped. But in the meantime, there are going to certainly be some people that are losing access to the EDT cards that they use, or

Speaker 5 it's going to hurt food banks. There's going to be big issues related to SNAP.

Speaker 5 Trump is now out this morning saying that he thinks that the Congress should just break the the filibuster and just go through, which I think has some interesting potential implications.

Speaker 5 So I'm just wondering your view on the whole state of play.

Speaker 27 Again, a lot of people are going to be hurt by this, including a lot of Trump voters in rural areas, among other places. And I would love if they were not pawns in all of these machinations.

Speaker 27 As you point out, it certainly looks like the administration has a way to help people without resorting to either breaking the filibuster or other laws being passed.

Speaker 27 Like there have been bills that have been proposed, including I think at least one sponsored by Republican, by a Republican, to like basically allow SNAP funding to go out as the rest of the government is shut down.

Speaker 27 you don't need to pass a law.

Speaker 27 Trump can do it on his own and he's electing not to. So it feels like this is all a little bit of a fig leaf to do other kinds of institutional damage and maybe

Speaker 27 use hungry people as a, you know, low-income hungry people as a political football in all of this, which again is unfortunate.

Speaker 5 But to me, it seems like a huge political mistake. You know, a lot of times I understand what they're doing.

Speaker 5 I think that like they're doing a lot of stuff on immigration and tariffs that are also politically harmful, but like they're Trump hobby horses. So I can make sense why they're doing that.

Speaker 5 In this case, it's like in addition to a lot of red states using the SNAP program and MAGA voters, which is something people have discussed, like I think ad nauseum, like on top of that, though, a lot of people that just don't pay attention to the news and aren't like engaged that much, like low-income folks who are like just trying to live their life and like parent and how it's like, it's hard.

Speaker 5 Like if you're, if you're like in a situation where you're living paycheck to paycheck or less than that and like you're needing assistance. Trump did well with those

Speaker 5 that like type of voter like i like the one of the things that got missed i think from the uh that deciding to win study that was out there this week about how the democrats can do better was something i don't think has really sunk in with a lot of democrats yet because it's changed from how things used to be it's like depending on whose data you look at like if everybody if there had been forcible voting

Speaker 5 trump would have won by more potentially a lot more again depending on whose data you're going to but like somewhere between four and like 15 points or something like trump would have won by a lot more because the types of folks who are, you know, displaced, not trusting the system, like struck, you know, not engaging in a lot of news, like they moved from being, if they voted likely Democratic voters to if they voted likely Trump voters.

Speaker 5 So I think there are a lot of people who like have like decently positive feelings of Trump who aren't following the news and are going to go to their grocery store and not be able to get the food that they need.

Speaker 5 And they're going to be fucking pissed.

Speaker 27 Yeah. And they're probably not aware of why, because most people who are not, like you and me, paid to follow the news are not paying attention to all of this.
And it is

Speaker 5 like, oh, it's the Schumer shutdown because they only have 53 votes and not 60 and 50.

Speaker 5 Exactly. Like, that's not how those, that's not how folks are going to interpret it.

Speaker 27 Understandably, right? Like, most people don't have the bandwidth for all of this. And I think what's going to happen is they're going to show up at the grocery store.

Speaker 27 They're going to try to swipe their EBT card and it's not going to have any money on it, and they're not going to understand why.

Speaker 27 And the question is,

Speaker 27 how do they interpret that outcome? Like to whom do they attribute blame?

Speaker 27 And I don't know what the answer to that is. It might just be like general ire at

Speaker 27 the system, at the government, and Trump is the head of all of that, but he's also like running it, you know, he's always characterized as like,

Speaker 27 he's not a politician.

Speaker 27 Like he's, he's, he's anti-establishment like he is the establishment now but whatever so I don't exactly know how that'll be mediated I think this is definitely an opportunity for Democrats to try to message what's going on but they have a difficult message to explain to not really on the snap thing though is the other benefit like it's a little bit more challenging on the other stuff than it is on the snap well because they'll say

Speaker 27 I mean, they are the ones effectively preventing the, who have the additional votes that could get a CR passed, right?

Speaker 27 And they are saying we are not going to give those votes unless we get some other things in exchange, including an extension of the enhanced premium tax credits for people who are on Obamacare plans and also some other language that would basically make it harder for Russell Vogt, the OMB director, to continue unilaterally impounding funds and like not spending money that Congress, that's even more complicated for them to message.

Speaker 27 And there's a reason why they're not running on it. They're running on healthcare.
You know, they're messaging on healthcare.

Speaker 5 Which is why, like, to me, the point is the snap thing. It's like they could be paying you, but they're not.
Yes.

Speaker 27 That seems like it should be a clear message, but how it'll be heard, I don't know. Because Republicans are saying, like, oh, it's Democrats who are keeping the government shut down.

Speaker 27 And then you have to explain, well, there are contingency funds. Like, I don't know.
One of my most deeply held beliefs is that complexity rewards demagogues.

Speaker 27 And

Speaker 27 it's true. I mean, it's why I have a job.
There's a lot of complexity in the system and like plenty of things for me to try to translate and explain. But it also means that the

Speaker 27 people who like have ill will, who want to exploit opacity in the system and complexity in the system and just give you their own narrative, like they have an advantage. So

Speaker 27 the question is, like, Again, how do normal people interpret all of this? Do they hear the Trump version of things, which is like Democrats just won't open the government?

Speaker 27 Do they hear the Democratic narrative, which I think is closer to the truth, which is Trump doesn't need to, you know, we don't need to open the government in order for these payments to go out?

Speaker 27 And I don't know.

Speaker 5 Or do they hear none of it?

Speaker 27 Or they hear none of it.

Speaker 5 And just blame, and they're like, well, Trump is in charge.

Speaker 5 And it's his potential.

Speaker 27 I don't know. I don't know.
I mean, there are a lot of things like this where

Speaker 27 predicting where attribution is going to fall is hard.

Speaker 27 It's like, not just with these short-term crises, but with longer-term things, like if there's an investment in a new battery plant that was funded by the Inflation Reduction Act or the infrastructure bill or whatever, but it doesn't happen for a few years and it happens when Trump is president, like who gets credit for the ribbon cutting?

Speaker 5 Oh, that's an easy one. Trump gets credit for that one.
Yeah, that's just our terrible life.

Speaker 5 Imagine how happy like the Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party will be if Trump breaks the filibuster over this.

Speaker 5 Like Like the activist left will be like, this has been the most effective shutdown in history if they end up getting the filibuster scalp out of it. So.

Speaker 27 I guess.

Speaker 27 Well, this is always the reason why Republicans, the last reason why Republicans haven't killed it, right?

Speaker 27 Because it's like they don't want the filibuster to be gone when Democrats are in charge and have a vote to make abortion legal or whatever. So.

Speaker 5 TBD. Okay.
I want to ask you about some other stuff. Like who are the socialists now? Socialism is in the news with

Speaker 5 your potential new mayor, Zoran Mondani, being a Democratic socialist. But there's a news item here.

Speaker 5 The Trump officials unveiled a strategic partnership with Westinghouse and nuclear fuel provider Cameco? Cameco, is that how you say it? An investment giant?

Speaker 5 Anyway, to spur new nuclear plants, which I support. But I was interested to note that the deal gives the U.S.
government a participation interest, entitling it to 20%

Speaker 5 and including a provision for potential future equity. They've done this several times, Intel, NVIDIA.
We have Golden Share now in U.S. Steel.
I could go on and on.

Speaker 5 It all seems kind of China-ish to me.

Speaker 27 Yeah, well, that's because it is.

Speaker 27 I think of what's going on right now as Trump is

Speaker 27 basically privatizing the state and socializing the private sector.

Speaker 27 And the common link between those things is like he has a lot more control of money going into and out of the government and also into and out of private companies.

Speaker 27 It is hard to imagine how apoplectic Republicans would be right now if, like, a President Sanders or President AOC or somebody like that did these things. Presumably,

Speaker 5 reverse Zuccotti Park at the Wall Street Journal offices.

Speaker 5 We reverse Occupy Wall Street. There'd be men in suits living in a park outside the White House, I think.

Speaker 5 Yeah, maybe.

Speaker 27 I don't know.

Speaker 27 It's hard for me to know if this is just like

Speaker 27 Republicans have decided that

Speaker 27 they actually don't care about this stuff anymore. They only care about interventions in the private sector, you know, command and control style economic policies when they're coming from Democrats

Speaker 27 and

Speaker 27 Trump just gets a free pass on everything, or if there actually is, I think, some growing support on the right for the, like, actual support independent of the Trump branding for some of these things.

Speaker 27 I think there is kind of a horseshoe theory happening here

Speaker 27 where you see the far right and the far left more interested in like

Speaker 27 a robust state power, but just used for presumably different ends. It's like hard to find a better example of seizing the means of production

Speaker 27 than what we're talking about here, which is like seizing a share of a company and equity state.

Speaker 5 Going to produce energy

Speaker 5 for the country. I mean, the Trumpism of it is a big part.
Like, these folks don't want to fight it. But I do agree.

Speaker 5 I think that there's a now a wing within the Republican Party that decides it's the way to compete with China and the Democrats are going to be socialists anyway.

Speaker 5 So we might as well do this in a way that we can sell is what I don't know. Who the hell knows? Yeah.

Speaker 27 And again, like there are going to be some unintended consequences from all of this, including, well, some of which could be more opportunities for corruption.

Speaker 5 There's always

Speaker 5 plenty of those already. Those are not in short supply.

Speaker 27 There are plenty of opportunities for corruption, you know, for members of Trump's family or close friends to

Speaker 27 get in on these deals. If you're a competitor with one of these companies that is now partly owned and directed by by the government slash Trump, then you're at a huge disadvantage and potentially,

Speaker 27 you know, you're going to have all sorts of distortions in markets and may end up with worse products and less competitive products as a result.

Speaker 27 Like, I don't know that it's going to be good for the steel industry that

Speaker 27 the government has this golden share in U.S. steel.

Speaker 5 So all we can do to judge what is happening on the supposed free market right is like look at what their public behavior is. And I follow a lot of those folks.
They're a lot of my old friends.

Speaker 5 I kind of laugh thinking back to you were you were around us, our big fights in like the 2010, early 2010s over the XIM bank and how the export import bank was crony capitalism.

Speaker 5 And like they were just, there were so many articles written about this on Breitbart and National Review just like railing against this.

Speaker 5 I haven't seen a ton of railing against the government like actually owning companies instead of backstapping investment.

Speaker 5 But I have seen seen yesterday, the capitalists were mad about something, the traditional capitalist Republicans.

Speaker 5 They were very upset at my colleague Bill Crystal because he said that voting for Cuomo is ridiculous, which to me seems to be, you know, kind of like dog bites man take.

Speaker 5 It is ridiculous to vote for somebody that was run out of office, did a horrible job as a governor and was a Democrat if you're a supposed Republican. But anyway, he said that.

Speaker 5 He said, you know, I would have been for, I wouldn't have ranked Zoron even in the primary, but we are what we are. And I just, I probably would be for Zoron.
That's what Bill Crystal said.

Speaker 27 Woke Bill Crystal. There you go.

Speaker 5 Woke Bill Crystal. The cons are very upset about that.

Speaker 5 They're not upset about the government taking stake in private businesses, but they are upset about the hypothetical socialist grocery store that might come in Queens.

Speaker 5 And so I'm just wondering what you make of socialism in your city. Are you Zoron, meanwhile, is kind of trying to steal some abundancy stuff? You ran a Fox News ad talking about cutting red tape.

Speaker 5 I was like, okay, buddy. So I don't know.
Are you buying abundancy Zoron? What is your socialism threat in New York?

Speaker 27 I think it's really hard to predict how he's actually going to govern because he's kind of taken all sides on, well, not all sides on all issues, but he's, depending on which audience he's speaking to, you get a very different tenor of what his governing philosophy will be and what his priorities will be.

Speaker 5 Which is what we call good politics, by the way.

Speaker 27 Exactly. So it's not exactly that he's like contradicting himself and he's flip-flopping.
It's like he's very adept at reflecting back to people what they want to hear in a way.

Speaker 5 He was still on the bulwark and he had a whole list of things he was ready to pitch about, about how to streamline things in the mayor's office.

Speaker 27 Yeah, and that would be great. That would be great.
And not at all sort of the tear-it-all-down tenor that you've heard from other people in DSA, for example. Yeah, sure.

Speaker 27 So is he going to be a more traditional mayor? Is he going to be like a crazy extreme socialist mayor?

Speaker 27 I don't know. I'm hopeful.
Like, based on the fact that he has said he will reappoint, for example, the NYPD commissioner, Jessica Tisch, who seems like she's done a pretty good job.

Speaker 5 I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
The president says it's a zombie apocalypse in New York right now and that he's going to have to send in the troops soon. Is that not right?

Speaker 27 Well, he's going to send in the troops no matter what, I fear.

Speaker 27 But look, I am not a fan of a lot of Zora Mamdani's policy proposals, not just the grocery store thing, but I think a lot of his other ideas are, well, first of all, they're things that he can't control.

Speaker 27 Like the mayor of New York City does not actually control the revenue base of New York City, and a lot of his plans are contingent on his being able to raise taxes, you know, corporate taxes and personal income taxes and things like that.

Speaker 27 And it's actually Albany that controls all of that for complicated historical reasons, including that.

Speaker 5 Kathy's going to throw him some bones, I think.

Speaker 27 Maybe. She has said she's not going to raise taxes.
She doesn't want everybody to move to Palm Beach. I think she has a quote almost exactly along those lines.
So we'll see.

Speaker 5 I don't know. There was like a mob when she spoke at the Zoron rally the other day.

Speaker 5 There was like everybody shouting tax the rich.

Speaker 5 And then she pretended like she couldn't hear them in the press conference. Yeah, well, I don't know.
There's going to be a lot of pressure to give them, to give them

Speaker 5 a little bit of rope.

Speaker 27 Yeah, the question is

Speaker 27 the people who are chanting tax the rich. My guess is some of them are objectively rich.

Speaker 5 Yeah, so maybe they were happy. Tax me, Daddy.

Speaker 27 I don't think, I think this is the problem with the Democratic Party, that they, you know, historically keep promising a sort of Scandinavian-style welfare state without a Scandinavian-style tax base, and that people always think they're happy to tax the rich when they think rich people are people richer than they are.

Speaker 27 But then you actually look at the math, and that's not how it's going to work out. I mean, that's more of a national.
Democratic critique, but it does apply to New York City, probably, too.

Speaker 27 In any event, look, I have not been a fan of Mom Mom Donnie's policies and my most hopeful interpretation of how he might govern are that he may abandon those policies.

Speaker 27 And maybe he's like, he's incredibly charismatic and charming, and maybe he's charismatic enough that people won't care if he doesn't deliver on like free buses or whatever. I don't know.

Speaker 27 You know, the main jobs of a mayor are not necessarily those big, like transformative things.

Speaker 27 It's making sure the trash gets picked up and the streets get plowed and like the schools are running okay.

Speaker 27 And people will start to notice lapses in those services well before they'll notice if like a government-run grocery store appears somewhere in one of the outer boroughs. So, so I don't know.

Speaker 27 Again, not my first choice, but like so.

Speaker 5 You're a Sliwa voter, is what you're telling me on your first podcast?

Speaker 27 I mean, I do have two cats. So

Speaker 5 maybe you should be in a beret on MSNBC tonight.

Speaker 27 Yes, maybe, maybe I'll dress up as Sliwa.

Speaker 27 It's bizarre to me that in a city of what, 8 million people, these are our choices.

Speaker 27 But such is life. So I think the writing is on the wall that Mom Danny is going to win.
And I am hoping

Speaker 27 for the sake of New York that he is a sort of more moderate, effective mayor and that he what will matter is who he appoints to a lot of these important jobs right does he appoint like die-hard DSA people who have no experience governing or does he appoint people who kind of like know how to work the New York machinery and we don't know yet again encouraging that Jessica Tisch is gonna stick around it looks like but yeah I think what will help him is that

Speaker 5 Trump as soon as he wins is going to start trying to bully him and again maybe troops coming in and other stuff and I think think federal interventions

Speaker 5 will, in a way, help him because it will rally people against, you know, to his side and partisanship.

Speaker 5 I mean, Ted Cruz was calling him, no negative comments to Ted Cruz about our China-style socialist federal government, but he did say that Bill Crystal was sort of supporting a jihadist yesterday on Twitter.

Speaker 5 So I don't know. I think all that stuff helps him, calling him a jihadist.

Speaker 27 Yeah, well, the Islamophobia stuff, obviously, bad.

Speaker 27 And

Speaker 27 it makes him, makes more people rally to his cause. But the idea that like having federal troops invade your city makes the city easier to run, I think.

Speaker 5 It's not easier to run. It's politically in polarizing times.
I think it will maybe align some people who are hesitant towards him.

Speaker 27 I think rhetoric directed against him. will help him, but actually deploying troops to the city would be a challenge for any mayor, right? No matter how experienced and

Speaker 27 adept at working the levers of power. I think that will be really hard.

Speaker 5 And the immigration stuff will be tougher. The truth thing is a little easier.
Like what happens when they really try to, and that is what's coming.

Speaker 5 I mean, they're really going to try to turn up the ICE raids, and that is going to yield, I think, a lot of really

Speaker 5 intense showdowns. In some ways, again, might rally people to his side, but I think it's going to also give a sense of chaos.
And I mean, I think that their plans for immigration are pretty scary.

Speaker 28 Some moments in your life stay with you forever.

Speaker 31 In a special segment of On Purpose, I share a story about a book that changed my life early in my journey and how I was able to find the exact same edition on eBay years later.

Speaker 35 There are certain books that don't just give you information, they shift the way you see the world.

Speaker 37 I remember reading one when I was younger that completely changed me.

Speaker 34 Years later, I found myself thinking about that book again.

Speaker 39 I wanted the same edition back.

Speaker 40 Not a reprint, not a different cover, that exact one.

Speaker 34 So I started searching.

Speaker 38 And that's when I found it on eBay. That's what I love about eBay.

Speaker 31 It's not just a marketplace, it's a place where stories live.

Speaker 32 Shop eBay for millions of finds, each with a story.

Speaker 42 eBay, things people love.

Speaker 34 Listen to on purpose on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 4 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 10 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 14 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 19 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 20 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 12 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 23 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 25 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 5 Just really quick on immigration while we have it. A former Trump golf club worker, 10 years, he worked there.
He's 39. U.S.

Speaker 5 immigration officials shackled him, put him in restraints, and sent him to Mexico.

Speaker 27 Yeah, I mean, the real question is: how many stories like this are there?

Speaker 27 And

Speaker 27 this was a story in the New York Times, right?

Speaker 27 How many stories are not getting caught by intrepid journalists?

Speaker 27 There are, as I mentioned before, like there are deliberate attempts to de-document people who have their papers, essentially, but taking the papers away. There is a lot of

Speaker 27 sloppiness to use the most charitable explanation about ensuring that the people who are being rounded up are, in fact, undocumented.

Speaker 27 Not that, like, the way that they're treating people would be appropriate if, in fact, those who are being rounded up are undocumented, just to be clear.

Speaker 5 He was undocumented. He has family that isn't.
His kid was a Marine, actually. Yeah.
And he was wrongly deported to Mexico because he did not have a deportation order.

Speaker 5 So he was sent to Mexico by mistake.

Speaker 27 By accident, yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Should bear mentioning that, again, there was Donald Trump that was employing him while he was undocumented for 10 years.
And

Speaker 5 I haven't noticed Tom Homan or Greg Bavino heading down to the Trump organization to bring anybody away in shackles because they were also breaking the law, as best I could tell.

Speaker 27 Yeah, well, there are lots of things that Trump himself has done that are at odds with his policies, including complaining about so-called chain migration, right? The idea that

Speaker 27 one immigrant comes here and then brings

Speaker 27 exactly

Speaker 27 his

Speaker 27 current wife, there are lots of questions about whether she was working illegally when she was first in the United States as a model is that going to be your first receipts newsletter for us going back to the immigration filings of Melania because I'm curious you've piqued my interest I'm very curious too well I remember there were stories about this back in probably 2015 or 2016 and Trump said don't worry we'll have a press conference about it in two weeks haven't had it and then nothing ever came of it it's you know it's obviously hard to get that kind of documentation but it certainly looks like it's possible that she was violating the terms of her visa by working.

Speaker 27 And nobody ever cares because I think this is a common issue.

Speaker 5 She's white.

Speaker 27 Well, and it's like she's a good immigrant. Like people separate in their mind.

Speaker 5 I mean, she's the wife of a criminal. So in some ways, she's a quote-unquote good immigrant.

Speaker 5 But we have some other immigrants that came across the Rio Grande that aren't married, that don't have any other crimes besides the border crossing, whereas the Trump family has several.

Speaker 5 On that front, I want to mention to bring up the crypto pardons to you, if you don't mind. Sure.
Chang Peng Zhao.

Speaker 27 CZ.

Speaker 5 CZ, as they call him. He was running a crypto platform that had a lot of crimes on it.

Speaker 5 We have very few rules, actually, governing crypto, but even the few rules that we have, he was not following, allowing a lot of illicit activity to come. There was fraud that he was engaged in.

Speaker 5 He was in jail. I should mention one more time: Chiang Peng a CZ, is a Chinese national.
And he was in prison. And his company, Binance, what, put a couple billy into the Trump stablecoin.

Speaker 5 A great investment. All the investments you can make out there in the world.
You had to grab the Trump stablecoin.

Speaker 27 It's just a coincidence.

Speaker 5 Yeah. And again, the Chinese national that's in business with the Trump family got

Speaker 5 pardoned. A lot of articles on that this week.

Speaker 27 Yeah, he pled guilty. Yeah,

Speaker 27 to emphasize, he pled guilty. And look, it's not like he was laundering laundering money for Hamas.
Oh, wait, he was. Oh, really?

Speaker 27 It's like, yeah, yeah, this is what Binance got in trouble for, was that they were basically allowing like Hamas and maybe ISIS and a bunch of other terrorist groups to use their platform to launder money.

Speaker 5 Have we heard about Ted Cruz is concerned about supposedly jihadist Mamdani weighing in on this? Actual the pardon of somebody that was actually funding real jihadists? I haven't seen anything.

Speaker 27 I am not aware of it. I have not done a deep picture.

Speaker 5 Sarah Cruz, you're welcome to come on and we can chat about that if you want.

Speaker 27 Yeah, I'll do a little LexisNexis search after this to see if he's expressed any reservations about this pardon. I'm not aware of any.
I don't even know what to say about this.

Speaker 27 Again, the guy pled guilty. He was doing really, really bad things, like

Speaker 27 all of the worst case scenario stuff that crypto can be used for. his company was enabling.
And I think that there are even

Speaker 27 like messages from inside the company, like LOL, I guess we're not going to follow the know-your-customer regs. And, you know, but yeah, they did bad stuff.
They did bad stuff.

Speaker 5 And it's just, it's the most blatant corruption in presidential history. And it's insane.
It's not like, you know, somebody is paying the kid for this ugly art or, you know what I mean?

Speaker 5 Like Sphero Agnew, it's like it was like a paper bag with money. It's a billion.

Speaker 27 They invested a billion. Yeah, it's a lot of money and it paid off.
It definitely paid off.

Speaker 5 Did pay off. Do you have a global crypto view? I'm just curious

Speaker 5 what your level of crypto hostility is if you're going to join my berry band of bull workers.

Speaker 27 I am not involved in either drug dealing or kidnapping, so I don't really have much of a use for crypto, personally.

Speaker 27 Yeah, that's sort of my hot take.

Speaker 5 You don't think that it's adding a lot of value, the fart coin and stuff? You don't think that those things are valued accurate, Dogecoin?

Speaker 5 You don't feel like that's valued in accordance with what it's bringing to the economy?

Speaker 27 There is no underlying value. The value is just what other greater fools will pay for it.
And you can make money off of that in the near term.

Speaker 27 As long as there is somebody else willing to look at it, look at the speculative asset and buy it from you, you can make money. But I don't think that there's like any inherent functional value to it.

Speaker 27 At one point, the argument was like, oh, this will displace other forms of transactions, and it'll be so much more convenient. And you don't have to carry cash or whatever.

Speaker 27 You don't have to worry about inflation risks. And in practice, what we see is that these are speculative assets.
And if they are used, it's for like trying to keep illegal activity less traceable.

Speaker 5 Have you seen the stories that Baron Trump has made like a hundred million on insider crypto deals?

Speaker 27 I have not seen this, but I'm not sure.

Speaker 5 I think people should check this out. Like, Baron Trump is cashing in on crypto.
I try my best. I have friends that invest in crypto.

Speaker 5 My brother's really into it. I've got friends who work in crypto and they've called me.
And I try to listen to the bull case. And I think that there are some values to actual Bitcoin itself.

Speaker 5 And like, there are a couple of these stablecoins that have some actual value or use cases that I've heard. But like,

Speaker 5 I get, you know, you go into one of these things. It's like, well, Coinbase or whatever, one of the big platforms.
It's like, well, you know, you can't judge us by the worst product.

Speaker 5 And I'm like, that's not really how things work.

Speaker 5 Like, if you walked into Walmart and like Walmart had like one aisle where it was very useful products that are not scams, that you purchased something and got something of value back.

Speaker 5 And you walk down the next aisle and it was like a cutout for human traffickers. And then you walk down the next aisle and it was somebody just like stealing your money.

Speaker 5 And then like you walk on the next thing and they tell you it's one thing and it ends up being another, like that store would be, would be shut down. Like we would investigate the store, right?

Speaker 5 Like just because there are some products that are not not scams doesn't mean it's not a scam site right or you would have some kind of oversight

Speaker 27 and

Speaker 27 regulation

Speaker 27 to like make sure that to make sure that the human trafficking doesn't happen for example

Speaker 27 and this is a newish industry

Speaker 27 and it's hard for regulations smart regulations to catch up with a rapidly evolving sector and the people who work in the private sector are always going to get paid more than the people who are paid to oversee them so it's going to you know like they're always going to be outgunned yeah so I think it is like a genuinely hard problem to solve however I think there is no interest in solving it right now because they're bribing the government so yeah well yes it's it's not even like that they're trying to get the answer right but they're just like they don't have a level of competence but it's yeah it's like

Speaker 27 they want to just let it rip. And again, more opportunities for corruption.

Speaker 5 And it's like a lot of these other cases where you talk about special interests.

Speaker 5 It's like, yeah, like there are like there are ways that special interests, like whatever your hobby horse is, an NRA or APAC or whatever, like there are ways that they impact like legislature. Sure.

Speaker 5 Like none of none of those cases are the industries like literally bribing the president. Like the president and his family are being bribed.
Not like, oh, we're going to put money in a super PAC.

Speaker 5 Like we're going to give you money and make you extremely, extremely wealthy. And you're selling us and you give us nothing and you're giving us the Melania coins.
Right.

Speaker 27 Well, part of the challenge is you don't even know who's giving the money, right? We don't know who's buying Trump coin or Melania coin or any of these other opportunities.

Speaker 5 Yeah, they don't defile with the Federal Election Committee like the other PACs do. It's truly insane.

Speaker 28 Some moments in your life stay with you forever.

Speaker 31 In a special segment of On Purpose, I share a story about a book that changed my life early in my journey and how I was able to find the exact same edition on eBay years later.

Speaker 35 There are certain books that don't just give you information, they shift the way you see the world.

Speaker 37 I remember reading one when I was younger that completely changed me.

Speaker 34 Years later, I found myself thinking about that book again.

Speaker 39 I wanted the same edition back.

Speaker 40 Not a reprint, not a different cover, that exact one.

Speaker 34 So I started searching.

Speaker 38 And that's when I found it on eBay. That's what I love about eBay.

Speaker 31 It's not just a marketplace, it's a place where stories live.

Speaker 32 Shop eBay for millions of finds, each with a story.

Speaker 42 eBay, things people love.

Speaker 34 Listen to OnPurpose on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 4 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 10 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 14 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 19 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 20 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 12 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 23 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies enemies close.

Speaker 25 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 5 Okay, we're going to close with some happiness. I hear a dog back there.

Speaker 27 No, there's a cat.

Speaker 5 It's a cat? Your cat has a bell on it? Yes.

Speaker 5 Cat bell?

Speaker 27 You've never seen a bell on a cat?

Speaker 5 What's the cat's name?

Speaker 27 I have two. I don't have as many as Curtis Lewa, who has like 16 or something, but I have two.
It's Ernie and Dottie.

Speaker 27 And they were really interested in getting their 15 minutes of fame before.

Speaker 5 Ernie's a good cat name. Okay, well, that's good.
People can now just keep an eye out for Ernie in the background in the future.

Speaker 5 We do have positive feedback. Viewers give positive feedback to the animals they see.
Listeners give negative feedback to Michael Weiss's birds to chirp the whole episode. But I kind of like it.

Speaker 5 I kind of like doing a podcast in an aviary. All right.
The last thing for Joy for everybody is

Speaker 5 we don't call him Howard Nutlick for nothing. The Commerce Secretary was on Fox last night, and

Speaker 5 we're just going to listen. And did he let you sleep on the ride home on Air Force One?

Speaker 5 I slept for an hour. I did.

Speaker 5 I slept for one minute. I slept for one hour.

Speaker 44 He is the strongest. He is the strongest human being that I know.
I mean, you know,

Speaker 44 he can wear me out.

Speaker 5 Yuck.

Speaker 5 Yucky.

Speaker 27 Yeah.

Speaker 27 I haven't even started my job yet, so I am going to refrain from expressing

Speaker 5 to express. You're not HR.
There's no HR oversight right now. You don't actually work for the company.
Let it loose.

Speaker 5 We can talk about Howard Nutlick's gross

Speaker 5 fantasizing about the brawny president.

Speaker 27 They're all kind of like this, though, right?

Speaker 27 Like, whenever they have these cabinet meetings, they go around and try to out-grobble themselves and compete for who can say the grossest, most suck-uppy thing. So, in a way, like this is

Speaker 27 not so outside the pale, beyond the pale of what we've heard before, but it's I mean, we haven't heard any.

Speaker 5 We've heard from a lot of women that say Trump sexually assaulted them. We have not heard from any that said that he wore them out, though, I guess I would say.
So, that would be new.

Speaker 5 I guess that would be a new item. Catherine, that's your hazing.
That's a hazing finish to the podcast. Everybody,

Speaker 5 happy Halloween.

Speaker 5 I'm going to put in the show notes the show playlist of songs, but I also have a great Halloween playlist you can put on while kids are coming by and trick-or-treating tonight.

Speaker 5 So that's my gift to all of you. Catherine, I'm so excited to have you on board.

Speaker 27 You never explained the bean hat.

Speaker 5 Oh, I didn't.

Speaker 5 Well, red beans are very popular here in Louisiana, and there is a parade

Speaker 5 that's like a red bean-themed parade that happens during Mardi Grand season. So my husband made this.

Speaker 5 I don't do arts and crafts. So he made this bean hat.
And I was looking for just kind of masks or something to wear for Halloween on the pod because my geese costume, the goose, is too tall.

Speaker 5 It would go out of frame.

Speaker 5 The goose head is going to go up to the ceiling. And so that wouldn't work.
And I was like, well, we have the bean poster. And so I thought I would do a bean theme.
Okay. Halloween beans.

Speaker 5 It also rhymes. Thank you.
There you go.

Speaker 5 I look forward to seeing what

Speaker 5 you're wearing on TV tonight. Yeah, we'll see.
Everybody else,

Speaker 5 we'll see you back here on Monday with Bill Crystal. Have a great weekend.
Peace.

Speaker 43 So strange.

Speaker 43 It's very strange to me

Speaker 43 You got to pick up every stick with it

Speaker 43 You got to pick up every stitch

Speaker 43 You got to pick up every stitch

Speaker 43 on earth

Speaker 43 Must be the season of the wish

Speaker 43 Must be the season of the wish

Speaker 43 Must be the season of the wish.

Speaker 43 Got it in me.

Speaker 43 When I look over my shoulder,

Speaker 43 what happens to love?

Speaker 43 What do you think I see?

Speaker 43 Some other cat looking over

Speaker 43 Over his shoulder

Speaker 43 And he's strange

Speaker 43 He's very strange to me

Speaker 43 You've got to pick up every stitch

Speaker 43 You've got to pick up every stitch

Speaker 43 Beat Nick's around to make it rich

Speaker 43 must be the season of the witch.

Speaker 43 Must be the season of the witch.

Speaker 43 Must be the season of the witch.

Speaker 5 The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

Speaker 45 In our nation, we don't follow, we lead. Real leadership is about building what nobody else can.
Coding so we can't lose. Making America stronger, safer, faster.
It's in our code.

Speaker 45 Find out more at boozallen.com slash our code.

Speaker 46 I earned my degree online at Arizona State University.

Speaker 46 I chose to get my degree at ASU because I knew that I'd get a quality education, they were recognized for excellence, and that I would be prepared for the workforce upon graduating.

Speaker 46 To be associated with ASU,

Speaker 46 both as a student and alum, it makes me extremely proud and having experienced the program, I know now that I'm set up for success. Learn more at ASUonline.asu.edu.

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Speaker 47 For information about student outcomes, visit Carrington.edu/slash SEI.