How Long Can the American Economy Hold? — with Kai Ryssdal

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Episode 368, 368 is the Eric Code serving Alberta, Canada.

1968, doctors performed the first heart transplant surgery in the U.S.

True Story.

My partner recently had surgery and ever since has had absolutely no interest in sex.

The surgery?

Cataracts.

Go, go, go!

Welcome to the 368th episode of the Prop GPod.

Speaking of cataracts, I'm going to put on my glasses.

I've always had outstanding vision in one of the many ways I'm resisting aging, other than NAD treatments, vitamin A, vitamin D, testosterone, a lower facelift,

halo surgeries, Botox fillers, a Pico laser, and fractal laser.

Other than that, it's all genetics, folks.

You know what?

It's not easy being a four.

It's not easy.

Do you think it's easy being mediocre looking?

I think it's super easy to be fucking ugly.

Like, I could be ugly so easily.

I just lean into the ugly.

I'm ready.

And then when I was younger, it was super easy to be good looking.

See above younger.

It's being mediocre looking that's difficult because you're trying to like stay out of the ugly, but you don't have the blessings of being good looking.

It's very difficult for us mediocre looking people.

Anyways,

I am

wearing glasses for the first time and and I have amazing vision.

My father used to take me golfing with him, not to play golf with him, because that would cost $12 at North Ranch Country Club just outside of Westlake, where I would visit him every other weekend.

But I would walk around the course with him and was happy to do it because my dad was scarce.

He was like a luxury brand, so I wanted to hang out with him.

And my job, he would point to a bush where he sensed a lot of errant golf balls would go, and he would send me in with a five-iron, and I couldn't come out until I had five or six balls or saw a snake.

And I remember the prize, you know, the

lost arc would be a Molotar golf ball.

So these little spherical things wrapped in some sort of porcelain casing would go for $2 or $3.

Anyways, I had such amazing eyes I could follow his golf ball in the afternoon sun.

And now that's no longer true.

Now I find I actually need glasses and it's getting in the way of my podcasting and other things.

And that is I refuse to wear glasses or I forget them.

I'm one of those guys that if my dick wasn't attached, we'd find it on a card table next to a script of Goodfellas

and original vinyl of Nirvana's smells like teen spirit on a table in Soho or on a blanket.

Anyways, my eyes are going.

What I thought I'd talk about today is a little bit about what's happened with the Trump administrations

trying to position themselves as continuing or offering a compact or preferential treatment to compliant colleges saying they're going to take away their federal funding if they don't agree or don't sign up for this compact of several things.

And I'm of mixed view on this, mostly negative.

And that is, first off, it's bullshit.

I think primarily the Trump administration has decided that they want to be less supportive or attack universities.

Why?

Universities have this terrible habit of training young people to do something terrible, and that is they ask why.

Having said that, it sort of indicates or embodies embodies what I think is the algorithm or pattern in American politics for the last 50 years, and that is their well-intentioned progressive ideals that go way too fucking far.

And then the right wing comes in with an overvicious, mendacious correction and false flag.

Oh, there's anti-Semitism on campus.

Yeah, that's true.

So under a false flag of anti-Semitism, we'll cut funding.

I don't think these people really give a flying fuck about anti-Semitism.

They just want an excuse to hit back on universities and punch them very hard.

So what is in this compact?

It's a bunch of things.

Some of the things they're asking for, one, admissions, universities agree to be, or agree to not consider sex, ethnicity, race, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious associations or proxies for those factors.

Now, this is basically saying we're going to end affirmative action.

I'm a beneficiary of affirmative action, and I've said this.

I got Pellgrams, and I believe in affirmative action.

I believe it played an important role, race-based affirmative action, 60 years ago when there were only 12 black people at Princeton, Harvard, and Yale.

But now things have changed.

But doing away with kind of gender or race-based admissions policies, one, it's sort of already been decided.

This is really just asking them to comply with the law.

The Supreme Court has said that you can no longer do this.

Two, a marketplace of ideas and civil discourse.

Institutions would have to commit to fostering a vibrant marketplace of ideas on campus, requiring an intellectually open campus environment with a broad spectrum of ideological viewpoints present and no single ideology dominant, both along political and other relevant lines.

This is basically saying we want more conservative viewpoints.

Now, I'm of two minds on this, and that is it's hard to have a DEI department, diversity, equity, inclusion in Michigan that consists of 200 people when essentially your entire faculty are progressive and left-leaning.

Okay, something's wrong.

At the same time, this feels a little bit like thought control.

And that is, well, maybe, you know, maybe the military over-indexes or the police

force over-indexes and conservative viewpoints, but are we going to pass laws forcing more woke and liberal and progressive ideology in the police force or among our military?

So it just feels strange to me, any sort of legislative government

using a blunt instrument to force a viewpoint around what level of political doctrine they should have or political ideology.

So I just don't think that works.

Non-discrimination in hiring

institutions would not be allowed to consider factors such as sex, ethnicity, race, national origin, disability, or religion in the employment advancement or reappointment of academic administrators or support staff.

Actually, quite frankly, the bigger problem is tenure, because about the time these people stop adding any value, we give them tenure, and we actually have to put aside $2 or $3 million in an escrow account, which is an acknowledgement they're not going to pull their weight economically.

And you end up with a faculty that just never fucking leaves.

And they become obstructionists and a pain in the ass and unproductive and just want to get some sort of relevance by causing problems.

I think tenure in some schools is probably needed, the law school of the humanities in a business school.

You know, gap one versus gap two accounting just isn't that controversial.

I don't think they need the protection of a guild or a union that is totally unproductive.

So I would argue that there is a problem here.

Things have gone too far.

Student learning, universities must commit to combating grade inflation.

Signatories acknowledge that a grade must not be inflated or deflated for any non-academic reasons.

I don't even know what the fuck that means.

Student equality.

Students must commit to defining and otherwise interpreting male, female, woman, and man according to reproductive function.

Jesus Christ.

Who the fuck cares?

Why do we care?

Financial responsibility, number seven, because universities have a duty to control their costs.

Signatories to the compact would have to commit to freezing the effective tuition rates charged to American students for the next five years.

Okay, this is a populist move.

Don't raise your tuition.

But here's the thing: the current administration has their head up their ass regarding actual fucking economics.

Oh, maybe they should get an economic advisor who writes books citing economists who do not exist, who believes in tariffs.

This is how fucking stupid these people are with respect to economics.

Okay, it doesn't work.

Price controls don't work because all you do is figure out a way to charge prices through another non-economic means.

If you wanted to lower the price of colleges, you would file antitrust suits against them.

They are cartels.

We all raise our prices the exact same amount.

Isn't it amazing how we're all charging pretty much the same goddamn price that like every other industry, unlike every other industry, we don't compete on price?

By the way, I'm going through this process right now.

There's something called early decision, where you say, all right, I want my son is applying to a school early decision.

And in exchange for that, they say, all right.

You have to commit.

Everybody signs, including the parents, a thing saying, if I'm admitted here, my kid is going here in exchange for that they offer you the carrot of greater admissions rates but what happens if you get in boom you're going there which means they get to plan their yield and by the way you have no leverage to negotiate the price there's this nobility we hind by behind at universities that we're good people watching pbs petting our labrador and that we're good people no we're capitalists like anyone else and if you give us the opportunity we will molest our consumers specifically students and middle-class families such that we can reduce our accountability while increasing our compensation.

But how do you get there?

Not through fucking price controls.

That's like rent control.

It doesn't work.

Well, how you get there is by getting rid of early decision, getting rid of this cartel of pricing, antitrust suits.

Also, also any university, I'd be down with this, that doesn't grow its freshman class faster than population growth and has over a million dollars billion dollars in endowment, they lose their tax-free status because you're no longer a public servant warranting tax-free status.

You're a hedge fund with classes.

But price controls, that doesn't work.

This is antitrust, create greater competition, foreign entanglements.

Among the lists of conditions applying to transactions with foreign countries, the compact requires that no more than 15% of university undergraduate student population shall be participants in the student visa exchange program.

This is basically, I don't know, xenophobia.

No more than 15% can be foreign students.

Look, that actually won't affect undergraduate admissions that much because that's about where it is right now.

Who it will have a big impact on is graduate schools that oftentimes let in a lot more than 15%.

So let me sum this up.

This is fucking stupid.

And guess why we love foreign students?

Is it for diversity?

No, it's not for diversity.

It's for fucking Benjamins.

And they pay for a lot of jobs and people.

By the way, I am up for C Above, increasing freshman class size such that there's more room for domestic students.

But for God's sakes, if we can take talented young people whose parents are willing to pay us a quarter of a million dollars, but a quarter of a million dollars, more like a half a million dollars into our economy, why on earth would we send that away?

I mean, that's

okay, see above, just stupid.

And then enforcement, a university president, provost, and admissions director would be required annually to certify the university's adherence to the compact.

Okay, this is just fucking stupid.

Because guess what, folks?

In about three years and two months, this is going to be reversed, or a lot of it's going to be reversed.

We need structural systemic change that Congress looks at and we pass laws that say, okay,

maybe affirmative action should continue, but it should be based on need.

America is not about identifying a superclass of freakishly smart or the children of rich people and turning them into billionaires.

America is about finding as many unremarkable kids as possible and giving them a shot at being millionaires.

Okay, that was a rant.

Here's our conversation with Kai Risdahl.

Kai, where's this podcast find you?

I am in St.

Paul, Minnesota, corporate headquarters of the company that owns marketplace, American Public Media.

All right.

Well, listen, we very much appreciate you being here, and we have a bunch to get to.

So let's start off with the government shutdown.

We're in the midst of a shutdown, which means we're kind of flying blind in terms of economic data.

Can you paint us a picture of what you're worried about or paying attention to right now?

Yeah, I'm worried about two things.

Three things.

The first thing I'm worried about is,

obviously, and most importantly, the data, right?

We're not getting the government data that's helping the Federal Reserve figure out which way this economy is going to go.

And this is an interesting and a critical moment for the Fed, right?

I mean, the New York Fed came out this morning in its monthly survey and said consumer expectations for inflation are actually going up.

And as we know, inflation expectations can actually drive what inflation does.

So the idea idea that consumers think inflation a year out is going to be 3.5% or better is really challenging.

So this is a perilous moment for the Fed, just data-wise, setting aside the politics of it.

And

we can get into that if you want to.

So that's the first thing I'm worried about.

Second thing I'm worried about now with this shutdown,

of course, federal workers, but federal workers who are on the lower end of the income spectrum, right?

Because they're the ones who've been getting whacked.

Low-income consumers have been getting whacked by the tariff pass-throughs that have happened already.

They're the ones who are in the foulest mood.

They're the ones who have the least disposable income.

And they're the ones, you know, let's call it the bottom like 60% in the income spectrum whose spending is falling off, right?

And those

in the top end are, you know, inflation's a pain in the ass for everybody, but most of us can bear it if you're in the top end.

If you're not, that's a real, real challenge.

And then finally, and most importantly, I think,

on a macro scale, is what it says about the

just complete inability of the government of the United States to run itself and to manage what is for now the most important economy in the world.

And it's, I mean, it's just, it's beyond parody.

Aaron Ross Powell, what I find potentially more fragile is that data where the top 10% are now responsible for half of consumer spending.

And if there's a bit of a shock or a slowdown or AI begins to unwind and the 10 companies driving 70% of the earnings gains, if there's just a not even call it chill, but it goes from 74 and breezy and sunny to 72 for the top 10 percent, they can easily take their spending down 10, 20, 30 percent.

Whereas the bottom 90, you know, they can't cut their spending that much because they're kind of spending money on essentials.

Do you worry?

I worry that we're increasingly fragile because a small number of people are essentially holding propping up the economy right now.

Your thoughts?

Yeah, look, that's actually been the way for a long time now.

Consumers overall, as anybody who listens to Marketplace and probably listens to you knows, consumers spending by or on behalf of consumers drives 70% of everything that happens in this economy.

And you're right that that spending now is being concentrated in the top part because the lower half has to buy food, has to make its car payments, has to do all of those things.

And when it's that concentrated and we are on this cusp of tariff impacts now finally starting to leak through and consumers saying,

I don't know, then where does that leave us?

You know, I

think this is a more perilous moment than a lot of forecasters are guessing.

What are the data blind spots that matter most for the Fed or investors or for the average person?

Where, you know, we're flying without instruments right now.

What do you think is the most valuable data that we're not seeing?

Yeah, look, I think always it's the jobs data and then for the Fed, secondarily, PCU, right?

Personal consumption expenditures and what inflation is.

And look, there are a thousand PhD economists who work for the Fed, and they've got all kinds of private data.

But the catch is twofold.

One is private data is proprietary and not everybody's willing to share it.

But number two, a lot of times that private data is based on the public data that the government puts out.

And so when we don't have that foundational information of what's happening, then that renders the Fed,

okay, soft landing.

We had that whole thing, you know, a number of months ago, a year ago, whatever.

The Fed's finally going to do it.

Let's conflate the analogy here, right?

The Fed had this economy on final.

Tariffs came in, and then the weather went to shit, right?

And when the weather goes to hell and your instruments aren't reliable, which is where the Fed is right now, what can you do?

And my guess would be, and I don't know, I haven't spoken to Chair Powell in a very long time.

I've had Fed presidents on the program from time to time.

My guess is that they're kind of hanging on by their fingernails.

You're, I think, loosely, my generation.

Yeah, I think we're like the same age, actually.

Yeah, I think we are.

Let's just say we're 50, Kai.

Let's say that.

So, a word that I find people under the age of 50 are not familiar with and that I think is we may be on the precipice of is stagflation.

So, I see inflation

going up, core inflation, I think, hit 3.5 or 3.7.

And meanwhile, it looks as if the jobs market is shaky.

And so, this chocolate or this, not chocolate and peanut butter, which is a good thing, but this nitro and glycerin, which is a bad thing, of low growth and inflation, stagflation, which is this the worst of all worlds.

Do you share my fears around that?

I agree with you, but the most recent indicators for GDP growth are like 3% plus.

The Atlanta Fed does this GDP now tracker, which has it like at 3.8% for the current quarter, which is really high.

Now, is that sustainable?

I'm not sure, but we're not in stagflation yet.

A lot of the indicators are happening.

Inflation, as you said, the labor market being really jittery, right?

We're in this low hiring,

firing labor market environment, right?

There's not a lot of churn.

Not a lot of people are getting laid off, but not a lot of people are getting hired either, which makes it tougher to find a job now.

So we've got two out of three.

And I think the real question is what happens with economic growth in this quarter and then first quarter of next year and where that winds up sticking.

Do you worry, and I asked this, I really don't know the answer to this question.

Is that 3.8 number juiced because imports are taken out

of GDP growth and because imports have dramatically decreased that number is somewhat artificially inflated, if you will?

Aaron Powell, yeah, I think that GDP number is actually challengeable because, if that's even a word challengeable, because of that exact formulation, right?

C plus I plus G plus net exports, right?

And the problem is that tariffs have pulled all those imports forward now,

and the numbers are not skewed, but they're a little bit, hmm, what's going on, you you know?

Aaron Powell, let's talk about tariffs and trade.

There's been talk of a potential bailout for American soybean farmers who've been completely thrown under the bus by Trump's tariffs.

Hill Republicans estimate Trump could need to send as much as $50 billion to farmers hit by his own tariffs, roughly half the revenue raised from those tariffs so far.

Can you walk us through the economics here and what's actually happening to farmers?

Yeah, they've actually gotten shafted.

That's the economics of it.

Look, we've got a soybean farmer out in in Iowa that we talk to not infrequently, and I had her on about two weeks ago.

She has zero orders.

She's fine sort of corn-wise, right?

Because there's lots of other uses.

But the American soybean farmers have had zero Chinese orders.

It used to be the biggest market, right?

And now, because of the president's trade war, the Chinese are not buying American soybeans anymore.

They're going to Brazil and other places.

So all these soybean farmers now are looking at a market catastrophe, truly, because their largest market has disappeared because of the president's policies.

So here's what's happening.

We have now a heavily tariffed environment.

Let's all remember that tariffs are taxes on American consumers and businesses.

It's not China that's paying the tariffs.

It's not Canada that's paying the tariffs.

American consumers and businesses are paying the tariffs.

It is a tax.

So all that money is going into the treasury.

Without congressional authorization, by the way, it is taxation almost literally without representation.

So that money is now in the treasury.

The president is going to, and in ordinary times of which we are not in, the president would need congressional authorization to get these bailouts to the farmers.

The president's going to take some of that tariff money and redirect it to farmers so that we don't have that American farming catastrophe.

It is a crisis completely induced by the president, the pain being borne by American farmers who are now being subsidized by the taxes that are the president's tariffs.

It's the most bizarre circular logic you're ever going to find.

Jr.: And my sense is, I mean, this is sort of starting a fire and then charging taxpayers for the cost to put it out, right?

It's just a circular, it doesn't make any sense.

Did these farmers ever have viable businesses?

I mean, have we not been propping up these farmers?

And also on the back end, my sense is this business is not coming back.

Even if we were to restore or do away with the tariffs, China has established secure supply routes or sourcing from Argentina and Brazil, as you referenced.

The bottom line is the American soybean farmer is going to be a thing of the past.

Yeah, so look, American farm policy for the past 80 years is a conversation for a whole different podcast, and I'm not well-versed enough.

But I can tell you those markets are, as you say, never ever coming back.

And my corn and soybean farmer in Iowa knows it.

I talked to a corn farmer in South Dakota.

He knows it.

So now

they're looking for these markets.

I mean, you know, April Hemis is woman I've been talking to for, honest to God, it's been 10 years.

She's been on this land since she was a little girl, and now what's she going to do with it?

You know, and American farming is challenging in the very best of times, right?

It's brutal, and it's hard, and

you are at the mercy of so many elements, and now they're at the mercy of the president of the United States.

Trump announced new tariffs on movies, furniture, and other imported goods.

How far do you think he has to go before he totally alienates his base here?

So you forgot trucks, by the way.

He came out like yesterday, medium-heavy trucks now, 25%.

This is the question I've been asking almost since the beginning, and it's twofold.

One is, what's it going to take to make people realize what is happening, right?

And the corollary of that is for our leaders and for our elites in academia, law, business, take your pick.

How long will it take them to realize they are on the wrong side of history?

Because

this,

we're less than a year in, and one imagines that it will end because it has to.

The question is, what's the forcing function?

What's it going to take for people to understand what is happening here?

And this is a much larger conversation than just the economy, right?

But I bring it up because the institutions of this economy, All of them, depend on the institutions of this democracy.

Rule of law, transparency, fair regulation, the right of recourse when wronged, all of those things.

And if people don't understand that that's what's under threat,

right, there was a statistic out this morning.

Foreign-born students are, it's just cratered this fall because of the president's immigration policies and for his conversations and,

well, conversations is putting it very charitably.

what he's doing to higher education.

You know, immigrants to this country, look, immigration is a labor market problem, but it's also a source of innovation and dynamism and intellectual vigor that we are now not getting because the institutions of this democracy are under fire.

And

I don't know about you.

I've actually been struck at how

resilient the economy has been.

I would have thought if someone had laid out these policies, I would have said, wow, that recession, here we come.

And it appears that, I must think of that analogy that two-thirds of

an iceberg's mass is below the water.

The reality is that the American economy is this juggernaut that, quite frankly, it's like, don't bother me.

I'm just going to continue to grind on.

And have you been surprised at how resilient the American economy has been?

I am completely surprised.

But there's a couple of warning signs, right?

First of all, I'm obliged to say here, and as you know, the stock market is not the economy.

And the stock market is not being driven by economic fundamentals right now.

It's being driven by AI spending to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

And whether or not that's sustainable is, I think, very much up in the air.

You're far more versed in that than I am.

The American economy is a $29.9-ish trillion dollar beast.

And so the tariff impact so far has been relatively small.

It's the uncertainty, I think, that's actually been driving the small businesses saying, I don't know if we can do this.

We're going to have to raise prices.

And then that trickles down to the consumers.

But I think there's another thing that's happening here.

And the president and his cabinet officials will tell you the presidents,

they give three excuses for the tariffs, right?

One is to revitalize American manufacturing.

I want us to generate revenue.

And they want us to protect American jobs.

The problem is that you can't do all three of those things at the same time.

Because if you revitalize American manufacturing, then we're going to start importing less and you're going to have less revenue.

We haven't got the workforce that wants to do a lot of the jobs that the president is trying to protect.

He announced furniture tariffs like 10 days, two weeks ago.

I was was talking to a furniture guy a week ago in North Carolina, which used to be the hub of American furniture manufacturing.

And he said,

There are not 5,000 woodworkers that I can hire to make my high-end furniture.

They just don't exist in this country anymore.

And so the president is trying, and this is not my original thought by any means, the president is trying to take us back to an economy of the 50s, 60s, and 70s.

And the world isn't that anymore.

It's just not.

We'll be right back after a quick break.

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I'd love to get your thoughts on the recent

Secretary of War summit.

You spent eight years in the Navy, and I'd love to get your reaction to Secretary Hegseth's speech to roughly, I think it was about 800 admirals and generals at Quantico, where he told them essentially to

I saw it as embrace MAGA or quit.

What were your reactions when you saw that speech?

It was disgraceful, it was laughable, and it was an embarrassment to the Armed Forces of the United States.

And people need to understand, you know, I've been in journalism now for 25-ish years, but the most important thing to know about me is that I'm a veteran and how that shapes

how I see the world.

Secretary Hagseth is unqualified.

Full stop.

I am as qualified as he is to be the Secretary of Defense, and

I'm not qualified, right?

I was heartened in that speech to see all those flag and general officers sitting on their hands

and doing exactly what one would expect of them.

I feel badly for them because they're going to have to go back to the troops and explain what the hell happened and what the marching instructions are.

And they're going to have to do it in a way that maintains unit cohesion and the viability of the force.

And that's going to be really challenging because of the way the secretary and also the president treat the military as if it's...

Here's the quote, they are his generals, which of course they are not.

I think, honestly, a more troubling speech was the the thing that the president did this past weekend down in Norfolk

to celebrate the Navy's 250th anniversary.

And he had behind him

enlisted and a couple of officer members of the Navy.

And he walked out and he said, hey, this is a rally.

I mean, this is literally what he said.

He said, it's a rally.

Who are we kidding?

And the crowd behind him, all active duty military, went crazy.

They were applauding, jumping up and down, just cheering him on, all of this.

And that to me is just, it's, I don't understand

how the commanding officers of these sailors let that happen.

If professionalism in the service means anything to you, it means that you are a political and that you, as the flag and general officers did at that speech in Quantago, you sit on your hands.

Now, of course, that's not why those guys were chosen.

And there is some measure of the American military, probably sizable, that is in favor of the president, but that ain't it.

That can't be it.

And it's deeply, deeply damaging.

Talk a little bit about your service.

What was the motivation for joining the Navy?

And I assume you were in it longer than you were commissioned or obligated to.

You're in for eight years.

Give us some color around your service.

So when I went to college, I thought I was going to be a lawyer.

And I took all those pre-law courses in this and that.

And then when I was a freshman, I had a very good friend of mine who was a, no, I was a sophomore.

She was a senior.

She was five-bit of Kappa, you know, maxed out or LSATs, all this jazz, applied to all the top law schools and got into none of them.

And I said, well, you know, screw this.

I don't need to go to law school.

So I

farted around for a couple of years.

And then, and then when I was a senior, a guy who had been a fraternity brother of mine a year ahead of me came back

on leave from Navy flight school.

And that,

it just, it appealed to me.

It's my father father served.

My father got his citizenship by serving back in the

50s.

And it appealed to me.

So I took the entrance exams.

I went down to Officer Canada School in Pensacola,

got my wings and then went to the fleet.

I flew E2C Hawkeyes off the USS Theodore Roosevelt for three years.

You were a pilot.

Yeah, I flew.

I did not know that.

I would have thought you were too tall to be a pilot.

No, you know, that's so interesting.

That's the second time in a couple of days somebody has said that.

No, when I was in the recruiting station, you had to do all kinds of anthropometric measurements.

They sit you in the seat and they measure your, you know, your tibial length and your upper body and all this jazz, and I fit.

So, so, you know,

anyway, I flew E2C Hawkeyes, which they're now E2Ds.

They've been upgraded, but they're large turboprop aircraft, carrier-based, that have the big RADOM on top.

So the mission is command control and airspace, battle space management.

So I did that for three and a half years, rolled out of my fleet squadron on August the 1st, 1990, which if August the 2nd, 1990 rings a bell, that's when Saddam Hussein went into Kuwait.

So I rolled out of my fleet squadron right before they got alerted to go to the Gulf.

I wound up in the Pentagon on the Joint Chiefs of Staff for, I guess, the rest of my service.

So it was like two and a half more years, right?

Flight training was two.

Yeah.

So I was in eight years soup to nuts the last couple of years on staff duty at the Pentagon.

It defines me to this day.

It is a sense sense of obligation and gratitude for what the military and this nation has given me.

And that's why, honestly, that's why what's going on now is just so

disturbing and horrible.

Do you think we'd benefit from mandatory national service?

Oh, yeah.

I've advocated for that forever.

I think we would be a different country.

We don't know each other anymore.

Right?

We don't and look, it's a generational thing.

And, you know, even my own kids, I try to get them to understand this.

And, you know, my service,

I imagine they're proud of it, but I don't think it resonates with them in a, this is what I want to do kind of thing.

You know?

And do you think that type of national service

would just be the military or different options around senior care?

No, look, there are a zillion ways to serve.

Teach for America, AmeriCorps, what have you, right?

In fact, we don't have the capacity to do all, to accept all the national service volunteers that we have.

Our programs are not big enough.

We have more volunteers than we can take, right?

Setting aside the military.

Let's not make it a draft, right?

Because that just complicates the issue in a zillion different ways.

But if you're just looking at national service, we don't have the infrastructure to support all the volunteers who want to do something for this country.

So obviously, we would have to spend money, and Congress would have to appropriate, and we'd have to get all the programs up and running.

But I believe it's a worthwhile national goal.

Because, as I said, the gap in our knowledge of each other is enormous.

And that changes who we are as a society.

And look, I don't think you have to look any farther than the current political environment to see that.

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We're back with more from Kai Rizdoff.

Just to pivot back to the

economy right now.

It feels like we have a new era or we're in a new era of financial markets where the government is literally taking equity stakes in private companies.

The

Trump administration now holds positions in Intel, MP Materials, Lithium Americas, trilogy metals, and even a new golden share in U.S.

steel.

What do you make of this kind of state capitalism, Kai?

It's state capitalism.

I don't understand how the party of free markets and smaller government suddenly became, under Donald Trump, the party of state capitalism.

And we all know that had Biden or Obama done it,

Washington would have exploded.

It would have just been, he would have been impeached like three days ago.

It is,

in my opinion, not a healthy thing for corporate America.

I'm not sure it's a healthy thing for the general economy.

And I know it's not a healthy thing.

for the government of the United States to be so heavily vested in state capitalism.

It just, it's, look, there are a zillion problems with American capitalism.

Two zillion problems.

But the government taking actual equity stakes or taking profits from NVIDIA for sales of certain chips to China,

how does that help or fix anything?

I don't understand it.

Look, this goes to a much larger conversation about what has happened to our

political elites who see these things happening, Republicans specifically, who have the power, all the power in Washington,

and are

in private saying one thing and then in public saying, I'm sorry I didn't see the tweet.

You know?

I don't know.

So it feels as if we have two, and I like what you said before and I agree, that the stock market is not the economy.

But within the stock market, you have 10 companies responsible for 70% of the gain.

So there's

I think it's a misnomer to say the S ⁇ P 500.

I feel like there's the S S P 490 and the S P 10.

And you're talking about just two totally different universes.

The S P 10 is largely driven on, you know, AI or optimism and expectations around AI right now.

As someone covers these stories every day, what does your gut tell you about where we are with not only with AI, but it's the expectations in the run-up in these stocks?

My disclaimer here is that I'm not a financial analyst.

I'm I'm not a market specialist.

I'm a guy who's been covering the general economy for 25 years.

I don't actually control any of my own investments.

My wife,

because number one, she's better at it.

Number two, she's more interested in it, is in charge of all of our money.

And the other reason is because I should not have a platform that I have and be talking about these companies with a stake in them.

So just to get that on the table.

Look, that which cannot go up forever will not.

And the rate at which AI spending has been exploding seems to me to be unsustainable.

The other catch, of course, is that all of these data centers and all of these tools that are being built out aren't actually going to employ a whole lot of people.

And in point of fact, what AI is going to do is make a whole lot of jobs in this economy not necessary anymore.

And that, I think, is the economic flip side of this explosion.

At some point, the lack of returns in real economy terms

from this AI investment is going to land.

And that, I think, is going to be a real challenge because the economy has been built now on the S ⁇ P 10.

We've been writing or I've been thinking a lot about how AI is going to impact Hollywood and the creative community in Southern California.

It just, it feels as if I went to,

my kids are a little bit younger than yours, Kai.

So I have to go to, I have to endure superhero films.

And I went to see the Fantastic Four.

And the thing that just blew me away was the credits were seven minutes long.

And I did some research.

3,400 people worked on this film, which is more people than

work at Reddit or Lyft.

And all I could see was the greed glands of Sam Altman.

going,

oh my God, wait until I launch.

Have you guys done any stories?

Do you have any observations around

there's we make this general assumption, and I think it's probably correct, that there's going to be some labor force destruction at the hands of AI.

Have you done any stories or do you have any thoughts specifically around AI as it relates to kind of the creative community in Hollywood?

Yeah, let's preface this by saying even before AI really hit, the Hollywood community, movie making in Southern California was really challenged, right?

Other places are offering tax incentives, Georgia, right?

So that's really part of the problem.

So we do have folks who do AI stories.

The thing about AI that gets me every time is that the hype around AI coming from Sam Altman and the like

is what's driving all the hype around AI,

right?

Altman is going out there saying we're going to create this.

I mean, this new video platform that they have, Sora, whatever the hell it is.

I mean,

what are we even doing

that we are taking a video platform and making it produce or letting people produce just completely fantastical videos that we are now going to just watch like we watch Instagram and actual people?

So the destruction of the creative class, I think,

is very real.

And then the extension, of course, is, you know, creativity is what makes us people.

And consuming the arts, cinema, movies, TV, actual art, is what makes us humanity.

And if that becomes machine-driven, machine

then

where do we go?

Speaking of which, or the media community, obviously you're a key figure in the media and in the news media.

I'm curious if you're giving me too much credit, but thank you.

What's funny?

I'm sort of

you're a little I think the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Kai Risdahl are some of my early

prompts around being interested in business.

What I'm curious, any thoughts on the Ellisons acquiring free press and Barry Weiss being appointed editor-in-chief of

CBS?

Look,

there's a whole rant to be had on the media and what it means in this moment.

Consolidation of media power is in and of itself challenging to a democracy, right?

Look at Jeff Bezos and his personal ownership of the Washington Post and what it has meant for that once great paper.

The idea that Ellison now controls a major movie studio and one of the big three broadcast networks, even though broadcast television is in secular decline, and he's appointed

Barry Weiss, excuse me,

an opinion journalist as it is editor-in-chief.

I mean, I can't imagine what it's like actually inside CVS News right now.

I imagine, you know, she gave this speech this morning.

I don't know when you guys are going to drop this pod, but she gave this speech this morning introducing herself to the CVS News staff.

And I have to imagine, eyes were rolling all all over the place.

Because this is such a perilous moment for this democracy,

the importance of accurate, fact-based, not afraid to use actual words for what's happening journalism is critical.

And you see the New York Times slowly turning the corner from false claims to lies, just for instance.

A credulous media will be the death of this republic.

It really will.

Because unless we're actually willing to say what is happening, and as a federal judge said the other day, the president's position is untethered from the facts, speaking about Portland,

unless we're willing to say that

in our journalism,

we are failing this democracy.

So

just a couple,

or I'll put forward a couple theses and you respond to them.

I think a lot of people see the free press as

being a necessary counterweight to what has become an increasingly progressive media complexion that sometimes

has

its own issues with the, quote-unquote, the truth, because the truth sometimes does not, I don't know, fit into a progressive orthodoxy.

Any thoughts on that?

So look, I think the mainstream media, for lack of a better phrase, is generally progressive.

But I think it is also blindered and hindered by its centuries of journalistic invention, which has led it now not to call a lie a lie.

We're slowly making that turn.

And look, this applies to marketplace as well.

But it is incumbent upon us to actually say to our listeners, our viewers, and our readers,

what is factually happening as opposed to some euphemism.

To the point of the free press in particular, look, free press and

small C conservative, traditional conservative media is fine.

But when you have propaganda outlets that are operating under a tenet of, oh, we're just doing journalism from a conservative perspective, that's not

what is happening, right?

You are not actually doing journalism.

You are carrying water for an element of the body politic

that is seeking to deceive and to manipulate the people of this economy and this country.

Would you describe CNN and the New York Times as being propaganda outlets?

I would, no,

they're not propaganda outlets.

That said, I've got problems with some of the things both of them do, as I'm sure they have problems with some of the things I do, right?

It's not

tit for tat here.

But when you have the reach of CNN and when you have the reach of public radio and when you have the reach of the New York Times, you do nobody any service by both sides,

by using euphemisms, by not saying what is actually happening.

You know, we've had this conversation inside marketplace, and I've had it with the corporate bosses.

And sometimes I win and sometimes I lose.

But if I'm not telling people what is happening, then

it's malpractice.

I've been struck by how much attention the acquisition of Free Press has received.

$150 million acquisition.

Well, $150 million, right?

That'll get you.

Well, but there was an $80 billion merger among railroad companies.

There's been five acquisitions of $8 billion or more in the last week, and no one really cares.

I find that, and maybe for a good reason, the media is sort of obsessed with itself.

But I guess my question is the following.

Does CBS even matter anymore?

Does it matter who's running it?

I mean, I don't know anyone that watches CBS.

It feels,

I look at CBS, NBC, and ABC, and I feel like it's 21 minutes of the exact same damn thing, and then a cute story about a bear that a woman's feeding hamburger helper to every night.

It just,

do the, are these guys, are they relevant anymore?

Yeah, I think that's a really good point.

And it's tough to argue.

I will only argue for what it symbolizes, right?

CBS, the Tiffany network, the network of Walter Cronkite and Edward R.

Murrow, and maybe I'm way navel-gazing on journalism history.

But there was a point where those names, and more importantly, what they stood for, right?

Murrow gives the, you know, television just tubes in a box, unless we do it right.

What they stood for.

And I think that's what is now being...

being sacrificed as

opinion journalism goes mainstream.

You know, Barry Weiss won't be able to decide, you know, how many cameras to send on a story, and she probably won't be involved in foreign desk assignments.

But she,

because David Ellison said so, will be able to influence what it is that CBS News does.

And what she does is opinion journalism, for which there is a place.

But at that scale and in that vessel of what CBS News used to be, once was,

I think that's

my mental disconnect on that one.

How are you guys

evaluating you're presenting, you're a key figure in

public media or the public media program marketplace.

How are you guys adapting?

Like, what's working, what isn't?

As you try to

thread the needle between economic viability and thoughtful fact-check journalism, which by the way,

I find is just a shitty business and economically really challenged.

What do you think you guys are doing well and not well?

And how are you adapting to this new environment of media while trying to stay true to the roots of journalism, which sometimes, quite frankly, is just not economically viable?

Yeah, look, so we inside Marketplace and inside the corporate structure that owns Marketplace,

we are

really challenged in how we go from a legacy media outlet, right?

Where

Marketplace used to be appointment listening.

It was drive time, it was people making their dinner, and it used to be on the radio.

And now, right,

that's all gone since the pandemic.

Ain't nobody driving anymore, right?

And podcasts are up and all of that stuff.

So, our challenge now is to meet people where they are and to develop this multi-channel strategy where we're going to do video, we're going to do on-demand, we're going to do broadcast media.

Because, oh, by the way,

for Marketplace, broadcast is where the money is.

So the challenge now for me, and if my corporate bosses hear this, well, we'll see what happens.

But the challenge now for me is, and me and meaning the larger marketplace enterprise, is to convince our parent company that investment in marketplace as we make this transition, for which we are late, by the way, to a multi-channel operation, will pay returns that will make up for the loss of broadcast revenue, right?

Our broadcast revenue is up here, our on-demand revenue is down here, and we clearly need to change that.

We need to stabilize it and equalize it, or it needs to go like this.

And those are the conversations we're having, right?

I mean, I'm on a trip to corporate HQ now to talk about philanthropy and development and donations and all of those things because the public media news model, set aside for a second, the rescission and the withdrawing of funding for the CPB.

Public media right now is in a really challenged space as we make this transition to multi-channel on-demand and video from a legacy broadcast outlet.

Kai, where do you get your, what are your go-tos for information?

I'm always asked this question and I never have a good response because I think I'm a little bit embarrassed about how I have transitioned from the New York Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal to, quite frankly, social media.

I'm now, I have great people on TikTok and on Rails Economists and people I think are really, really smart that no one's ever heard of that inform my viewpoint.

Before you take to the radio, which is is you're obviously going to read the facts, but you're also going to have a spin on, you know, I won't even call it spin.

You're going to have thoughtful color on stuff.

Where do you find color on the economy?

Who are your trusted resources?

Here's, so I do, in essence, I have done, and my, my journey has been the exact same, right?

Going from the Times and The Economist and the Journal and all those to social media.

The thing I spend most of my time on, honestly, in news gathering, is going, finding a thing on social media and digging down on that, finding a nugget, finding a person, right?

I mean, there are so many really interesting people on social media.

Social media is a hellhole in a whole lot of ways, but you find people there and then you follow them and then you read their writing and then you read their sub stacks.

And that's how you gather and you synthesize.

And then by the time Marketplace goes on the air, hopefully I have a coherent view on what is happening that day.

not just from the Times and the Journal, but from people who have, look, and you got to test their credibility and all of those things.

But once you've done that and you realize that they're the go-tos,

then you

use them and you synthesize their information into the way you present whatever we have chosen as our lead story or whatever the future story is.

And just as we wrap up here, you're kind of rounding third in terms of your career.

Have you thought about,

well, you're, you've, you, you're an iconic, whether you like it or not, you're sort of an iconic figure that kind of marks marks the medium or at least the approach to the medium.

Professionally,

well, I'll say, and personally, what I've been thinking, and there's a lot of this as projection because I'm just so fucking freaked out about being 60.

I can't stop thinking about the fact that it's, you know, we're not on the back nine.

We're on the 18th hole is the way I see it.

And

like, what have you, what have you thought about professionally?

What boxes are left for you to check?

And also, if you're comfortable, like personally, I think you guys are now empty nesters, right?

Yeah.

So, our youngest child, our daughter, we just dropped our daughter off at school two weeks ago.

Oh, congrats.

I would love for you.

Let's start there.

What was that like?

So, the good part is it's going really well so far.

So, we dropped her off at school.

We took a long, slow drive down the California coast back to LA.

We had three or four days to just sort of decompress, you know.

She was ready to go.

You know, she was like, okay, see you later.

I'm out.

Right.

And, and my wife and I were like, oh, really?

Okay.

Bye.

Yeah.

And

then we got back home and we kind of slid right in.

The house is quieter.

We are not buying as much food, which makes total sense.

But after, so, you know, we've been parenting kids for 27 years.

Our refrigerator has been stocked.

I have three boys who are, you know, just ginormous eaters.

So the amount of food in the fridge is just shockingly small.

But, but the mental change to the two of us is going really well, I think.

We are rediscovering

how to be a couple again with kids bopping in and out every now and then.

On the professional front,

as I like to say to the kids when they were little, you know, dad, what do you do?

And do you know this?

And are you a celebrity and all that?

I'd be like, you know what?

I'm a pretty big fish in a very small public media pond.

So the next chapter now, I figure I've got one left, maybe two if I play my cards right, is increasingly on my mind.

Where do I go from here?

I am indelibly associated with Marketplace and the Marketplace brand, which to be clear, is a privilege and an honor, right?

I'm super proud of the work I've done at this program for 20 years, 25 in the shop.

Now, where do I go?

What do I do?

And not to, you know, I don't need to blow smoke up your ass, but

I'm always impressed when I listen to you

talk about your career path, about how you bet on yourself.

And that's my challenge now, is to bet on myself and figure out where I'm going to go.

Kai Rizdahl is the host and senior editor of the public media program Marketplace, the nation's most listened-to show on business and the economy.

So anyways, brother, thanks very much and keep on keeping on.

Good to talk to you.

This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez.

Our assistant producer is Laura Janaire.

Drew Burrows is our technical director.

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