Raging Moderates: Trump’s “Affordability” Agenda—A Masterclass in Backward Economics

Speaker 1 Support for the show comes from Viore Collection. With Viore's Loungewear Collection, the name of the game is Comfort and Versatility.

Speaker 1 From the gym to the office, from one season change to the next, you can dress up, dress down, go in, stay out, and do it all in Viore. I love Viore.

Speaker 1 I actually bought Viore products before they were a sponsor. Viori is an investment in your happiness for our listeners.
They are offering 20% off your first purchase.

Speaker 1 Get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet at Viore.com/slash slash profg. That's vuori.com slash profg.
Exclusions apply.

Speaker 1 Visit the website for full terms and conditions.

Speaker 1 Support for the show comes from Crucible Moments, a podcast from Sequoia Capital.

Speaker 1 Every exceptional company story is defined by those high-stake moments that risk the business but can lead to greatness. That's what Crucible Moments is all about.

Speaker 1 Hosted by Sequoia Capital's managing partner, Roloff Bota, Crucible Moments is returning for a brand new season and they're kicking things off with episodes on Zipline and Volt, two companies with surprising paths to success.

Speaker 1 Crucible Moments is out now and available everywhere you get your podcasts and at cruciblemoments.com. Listen to Crucible Moments today.

Speaker 1 Support for today's show comes from Apollo Global Management. The global industrial renaissance is transforming our world.

Speaker 1 Over the next decade, industries including energy, infrastructure, and technology will need an estimated $75 to $100 trillion to modernize and meet demand.

Speaker 1 Long-term projects need long-duration capital. That's where Apollo steps in.

Speaker 1 With scale flexibility and a focus on growth, we're partnering with companies to drive the future, one innovation at a time.

Speaker 5 Learn more at thinkitnew.com/slash renaissance.

Speaker 5 Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Scott Galloway.

Speaker 6 And I'm Jessica Tarlove.

Speaker 5 Okay, in today's episode of Raging Moderates, we're discussing Trump tries to claw back the affordability message. Governor Newsom takes on America's masculinity crisis.

Speaker 5 And just let James Tallarico look at hot women in peace. Oh my God.

Speaker 6 Figured that'd be your favorite topic.

Speaker 5 Yeah, word. So, JT, my brother, let's roll.
Your rap, your looks, my money.

Speaker 5 Come to new york come to new york my brother uh i'll just i'll show the live women yeah not just the uh the only fans ladies so come to the dark side jam do you want to hear i only have two movie impersonations do you want to hear one yeah definitely

Speaker 5 the first one is starther hold on

Speaker 5 search your things you know this to be true

Speaker 5 So James, search your feelings. You know this to be true.
You want to roll with a dog in New York. You want to go to the dark side.

Speaker 5 out and let's go out and commit a few of those sins damn do you want to hear my other one you want to hear my other one person

Speaker 5 definitely this is this is doctor evil

Speaker 5 how about no

Speaker 5 come on i the kids love it it's they don't like the five-year-olds no my kids roll their eyes my kids freeze what happens when they really love you uh we have

Speaker 6 me a lot they do i'm sure i we have to get into the show but you know your mid-pivot tour, you got to tell me, though, about Curtis Liwa.

Speaker 5 Oh, he was the

Speaker 5 star of the tour. He came out and started calling Cuomo a slithering snake.

Speaker 6 He hates him so much.

Speaker 5 Oh, he hates him. And he also claimed, I think it'll make,

Speaker 5 I wouldn't be surprised if it makes news. He claims that the quote-unquote billionaire class, he may even name names, but I'm not going to name names.
He's on tape, so you can look for yourself.

Speaker 5 He said that he was offered $10 million to drop out, $10 million cash money to drop out.

Speaker 6 And it's, I mean, I guess hat tip to you, or beret tip to you that you didn't, ethically speaking, but also you kind of effed people over, or that's how folks feel about it.

Speaker 5 Did he fuck people over there?

Speaker 6 Well, if he had gotten out, if it was a two-man race, and I'm not saying that these are the ideal men to have been in that race, that it would have been within the margin of error.

Speaker 6 And who knows what people would have thought if they were looking at a ballot with just two names, you know?

Speaker 6 It felt to me like mandami's win was so resolute or he won by i think eight or nine points and sliwa got seven or eight so unless it was a big win in the vibes and the heart and the message of it it was not that big of a electoral win technically um you know usually the mayor gets between 62 and 67 percent of the vote he got you know just over 50 percent and like you said you know with sliwa getting seven percentage points and cuomo losing by you know about eight and a half.

Speaker 6 Um, obviously, it would have been a very different race if Sliwa had dropped out. But also, Cuomo could have like run a better campaign, not taken a month off.

Speaker 6 You know, he could have cared more and actually, you know, looked like he wanted the job versus this is what he was condemned to.

Speaker 6 So there are a lot of reasons that Mom Dani is mayor, but it will be interesting to tease out, you know, the effects of.

Speaker 6 not having that enormous coalition that it feels like because, you know, he's on the cover of New York Mag and all the vibes are going, you know, we're all getting J.

Speaker 6 Crew suits and copying his effortless style. But actually in brass tacks, it wasn't that big of a win.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I still think you would have, I mean, because the assumption, I guess, is that if Sliwa had dropped out,

Speaker 5 all of those votes would have gone to Cuomo, which I don't think is true.

Speaker 5 And it's interesting you say that it was a vibe vote because I felt like Mondame, you know, what's really, it's kind of blown my mind is, did you see the posters around town town of the bus shelters, the digital shelters?

Speaker 5 I think it was from Calci showing the odds,

Speaker 5 the odds of Mondami at 92% and Cuomo at 8%.

Speaker 5 Those just fascinated me because when you see someone is up by that much, if you're voting for Cuomo, it feels to me it really favors the candidate that is portrayed as the person winning, that it just sends like, it just creates momentum.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 5 And I mean, now we have even more excuses for people to gamble because they feel like it's semi-legitimate.

Speaker 5 You know, there's gambling on blackjack, there's gambling on sports where people think, oh, I know what I'm doing.

Speaker 5 And then there's gambling on political outcomes and all sorts of strange stuff that makes some people feel like they're Paul Tudor Jones or a macro investor.

Speaker 5 But what's most interesting is someone did some analysis, and the majority of money being placed on these bets for political campaigns is coming out of the Middle East and China.

Speaker 6 Oh. And I just think that's another way that they're messing with us.

Speaker 5 Exactly.

Speaker 5 I would describe it as election interference. Do you really think that Chinese have a huge interest in the mayoral campaign?

Speaker 5 I would bet that they have run the AI and said, all right, how do we create more division, run these ads, or take the number way up above or below what it should be based on what we think will create more division?

Speaker 5 And I'm not saying

Speaker 5 that Mondami's election would create more division. I actually think it's nice to have young people kind of feel good about something for a while or just for a change, I should say.

Speaker 5 But it just strikes me that if all the money coming or the majority of the bets being placed on these, what I'll call, for lack of a better term, brand campaigns that they know are going to be

Speaker 5 have influence, I just wonder what they're up to.

Speaker 5 I'm very curious, Jess. I'm very curious.

Speaker 6 Let's get them on the line. But no, I think that your assessment is correct.
There's nothing that adversaries like more than us at each other's throats. And good news, we have been since 2016.

Speaker 6 They're winning. So you guys are winning.
We continue to hate each other. But that is very interesting.
I hadn't seen that they were the ones behind those ads. And, you know,

Speaker 6 whatever. The mayoral election we'll be talking about for a very long time, but we have to talk about the news.

Speaker 5 Okay, so let's get into it. President Trump is trying to reclaim the affordability message.
Even his voters say he's lost touch with their economic reality.

Speaker 5 After Democrats won key races last week by hammering the cost of living issue, Trump first dismissed affordability as a con job and then turned around and announced a flurry of pocketbook-friendly policies.

Speaker 5 He's touting $2,000 tariff rebate checks funded by new tariffs, ordering the Justice Department to investigate possible price fixing in the meat industry, cutting deals with drug companies to lower cost of weight loss medications, and even floating 50-year mortgages to bring down monthly payments.

Speaker 5 The White House insists these moves have been in the works for months, not a reaction to last week's losses, but together they paint a picture of a president more focused on affordability than he's publicly willing to admit.

Speaker 5 Still, Trump always finds a way to undercut himself. Here he is on Fox last night.

Speaker 7 Is this a voter perception issue of the economy? Or is there more that needs to be done by Republicans on Capitol Hill or done in terms of policy?

Speaker 9 More than anything else, it's a conjurer by the Democrats. They're saying they just have a second, you know, they put out something.
Say today, costs are up.

Speaker 9 They feed it to the anchors of ABC, CBS, and NBC, and a lot of other, and, you know, CNN, et cetera. And it's like a standard, I'll never forget they had used a word like manufactured.

Speaker 9 Do you remember the word manufactured? It's a manufactured economy. Nobody uses that word.
Every anchor, broken, manufactured, they do exactly what they say. It's such a rigged system.

Speaker 9 So are you ready? Costs are way down.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 5 It's this terrible

Speaker 5 gestalt in our society that unfortunately a lot of people have picked up on, and that is if you repeat a lie long enough, it feels less like a lie.

Speaker 5 And to a certain extent,

Speaker 5 social media has promoted this new,

Speaker 5 the attack on what should be a key component or is a key component of any democracy, and that is that there should be an objective truth. And because social media loves novelty, i.e.

Speaker 5 bullshit misinformation, and elevates it and it circulates more, when you get a message that says, or you see something that says mRNA alter vaccines alter your DNA, you go, oh, that's ridiculous, that's bullshit.

Speaker 5 But when your sister, your cousin, and some stupid blogger are putting it in your feed and you see it over and over, you start to think, well, maybe there is some credibility to that.

Speaker 5 So this has become, you are where you spend your time. And Americans now, two-thirds of Americans now get their news from social media, which loves to spread misinformation.

Speaker 5 And even if you recognize that it's unlikely, it becomes less unlikely the more you see it. And I think politicians have picked up on this.

Speaker 5 And especially Trump thinks if I just repeat a lie over and over long enough, it feels less like a lie.

Speaker 5 And the numbers around inflation, and he's tried to basically neuter the Bureau of Labor Statistics or weaponize it or politicize it, it's pretty clear. Inflation is still pretty sticky.

Speaker 5 It's still up around 3% on a lot of the products that consumers kind of get signals from on.

Speaker 5 on how they think inflation is going, whether it's housing or rents or certain food products.

Speaker 5 It's up more than that. And there's the producer price index, but you want a target of two, and we haven't been able to get there.
Let's talk a little bit about the rebate checks.

Speaker 5 What do you think of this?

Speaker 6 Well, it's bullshit. They don't even have the money from tariff revenue to be able to be sending these $2,000 checks.

Speaker 6 The nonpartisan committee for a responsible federal budget must be the most fun place to work,

Speaker 6 said that the checks would cost $600 billion, and the tariff projections are only around $300 billion in federal revenue by the end of the year.

Speaker 6 So it's another, it's a marketing tool that he's using that's been very effective in the past.

Speaker 6 Remember, he was the one that was signing all the checks and Biden decided not to personally sign the checks.

Speaker 6 And so no one knew that Joe Biden had given them money, but just thinks Donald Trump gave them money. So he's very good at trying to sell that way.

Speaker 6 Looping back to what you were just saying about social media and how if you repeat a lie enough, people start to believe it.

Speaker 6 With what's going on in the economy, it feels like one of the only areas in which it's kind of BS-proofed because we all have to go to the grocery store.

Speaker 6 I guess not the people who are, you know, earning the absolute most, they send somebody who goes to the grocery store for them, or maybe don't even look at a bill like that.

Speaker 6 But you can see right through it when you show up and you're going down the aisles, and your staples now cost more than they ever did before.

Speaker 6 And you see, like the beef prices is obviously a main topic of conversation. And the agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, is getting hammered over it constantly.

Speaker 6 He's talking about, you know, going after the companies, what is it, the price fixing in the meat industry, which remember when Kamala Harris was talking about going after people that are doing price fixing?

Speaker 6 And she was a communist and we were going to have price controls. But when Donald Trump says it, it's fine.

Speaker 6 But the economy is one of those areas where it is very hard to make your lie stick because it is the one thing that you can go and see for yourself, or I should say one of the one things.

Speaker 6 And Donald Trump knows that he's in enormous trouble over the economy, double ditches underwater on how he's handling it, minus 30 on handling inflation.

Speaker 6 And the number that I find most interesting, and you see this over and over again, you know, 65% plus of Americans say he's not focused on bringing costs down.

Speaker 6 And that was the directive when he was elected into office was secure the border. And for some people, deport everybody, but for most people, just get the criminals out.

Speaker 6 So they're not doing so well on that front. But it was to bring down the cost of living.
And that has just been a massive fail.

Speaker 6 And this idea that you could just wake up and say, oh, I'm going to own the affordability message. Affordability.

Speaker 6 is many things, right?

Speaker 6 It's just a proxy for whatever cost of living issue is top of mind for you, whether it's, you know, your prices at the grocery store, at the gas pump, whether you can't afford to buy a home, you know, if you can't afford school for your kids, school supplies, like whatever it is.

Speaker 6 But he can't keep himself on message. I mean, he has these moments of clarity where he shows up after the election and says it was a really bad night for Republicans.

Speaker 6 You know, I think the shutdown really hurt us. We're going to have to talk without the press here about how we're going to handle all of this.

Speaker 6 And then he can't help himself in front of a camera sitting there with Laura Ingram, who I think gave him, you know, the potential to seem like he's actually cognizant of what's going on in the real world and just say, you know, like you, inflation's been a bit sticky.

Speaker 6 These are the things that I think we can do to make it better. Not just I'm going to sign a big check that I have no money for, or what do you say?

Speaker 6 Is it going to give air traffic controllers $10,000 bonuses? She says, Where is the money coming from? Oh, I don't know. I'll find it somewhere.

Speaker 6 Maybe in the big crypto pot or whatever he has going there but you know this uh news that italy might stop sending us their pasta because that they're gonna trump's proposing a hundred and seven percent tariff on italian pasta like these kinds of things make it impossible for everyday americans to live first of all but for you to have any semblance of a platform going into an election um

Speaker 6 also can you imagine if we don't have the italian pasta in the aisles yeah no, that's Armageddon.

Speaker 5 It is.

Speaker 6 And it's Jay's, Scott.

Speaker 5 Just some data here. The government collected about $195 billion in fiscal year 25, an increase of 250 percent over fiscal year 24.

Speaker 5 So if you were to give that money back to Americans and you divided it by the American population, it would be about $573

Speaker 5 per person.

Speaker 5 So a $2,000 payment would only you'd only be able to give it to 97.5 million people, but what he's probably proposing is that he increases the deficit.

Speaker 5 The thing that's just so asinine about this concept is the following: I'm going to raise the prices of your fruits and vegetables, your housing, your lumber, your drywall gypsum, your Toyotas, and everything else that's imported.

Speaker 5 And then I will run it through this administrative complexity or bureaucratic mess, and then I'll distribute checks to you.

Speaker 5 One of the tenets of the GOP and Republican sort of fiscal conservatism is a really really powerful tenet.

Speaker 5 It's the following: that if the government taxes you and then they run all these social programs to try and show you it's worth it, that process of taking that tax revenue and then delivering a service, that it would just be much better to lower taxes and let people figure out their own means of finding housing.

Speaker 5 There is leakage, right?

Speaker 5 This is the biggest criticism of the nonprofit sector, and that is essentially a lot of these nonprofit institutions are there to give ladies of lunch something to do, and then they throw a benefit in a windowless basement room of a nice hotel where they serve bad chicken, and everyone pays $1,000,

Speaker 5 and then about 80 of it ends up actually at the homeless shelter that they're raising money for.

Speaker 5 And there's been real legitimate, rigorous studies showing that foreign aid, they build these huge infrastructures to try and deliver, you know, help women in poverty in a developing nation.

Speaker 5 And what they have found is that, quite frankly, it'd be better off getting rid of the agency, not spending money on all these bureaucrats who are expensive and hard to fire, and just giving money to the people who you want to help instead of layering in the administrative state.

Speaker 5 In addition, the non-economic costs of tariffs are the thing that's really difficult here.

Speaker 5 I have some friends who are in small and medium-sized businesses that six months ago, literally like, I might retire. I'm going out of business.
There's no way I can figure this out.

Speaker 5 I can't transfer my supply chain to Vietnam fast enough. And then they try, and then he levies these huge tariffs on Mexico.

Speaker 5 And he says, well, I'm going to Canada and it's more expensive, but they're a trusted trade. No, oh, he's just implemented 150% tariff on Canada.

Speaker 5 Companies are paralyzed right now.

Speaker 5 And people who should be focused on product market fit and how to retain, attract, and retain the best employees are trying to figure out who the fuck they're waking up next to and how to plan their business.

Speaker 5 So as much as these tariffs are inflationary, inefficient, cost Americans, increase prices, reduce prosperity, reduce our market, size of market for our products overseas, because there's going to be reciprocal tariffs.

Speaker 5 I think the biggest cost is non-economic costs.

Speaker 5 And the notion that he's just going to tariff you, raise your prices, and then give some of that money back to you and propose a rebate check that's just going to raise the deficit.

Speaker 5 It's as if, like, I keep thinking, okay, maybe I keep blaring on stuff for senior year and high school, but it feels like there should be a financial literacy course.

Speaker 5 You know, my kids can do integers and calculus, but they don't understand the interest rate on their credit card. It feels like basic economic theory,

Speaker 5 you know, there's this fairly mendacious conspiracy theory. The Republicans love cutting education because the stupider people get, the more they vote for Republicans.

Speaker 5 And, you know, that, I would argue, is a little bit conspiratorial. It just feels like basic economic theory doesn't take hold.

Speaker 5 And for a newscaster not to push back on a journalist on, well, okay, so why are you charging tariffs in the first place if you're planning just to cut everyone a check?

Speaker 5 Wouldn't it be easier to let people decide where they want to spend their money and have all products slightly less, you know, cost them less rather than having the government get in the middle and then divide it up?

Speaker 5 So anyway,

Speaker 5 Jess, this is going to surprise you, but I don't think this policy is a

Speaker 5 great idea.

Speaker 6 You're blowing my mind, Scott.

Speaker 6 I totally agree with you, though, on basic economics and financial literacy being mandatory when you're young. And, you know, it used to be, do you know how to balance a checkbook?

Speaker 6 The world is much more complicated now. And I even feel as someone who went through PhD level and did a political economy PhD thesis.

Speaker 5 It's not you.

Speaker 6 No, you did. I said as someone who did that there are still.

Speaker 5 I don't.

Speaker 6 No, I don't just know her. I am her.

Speaker 5 I am.

Speaker 6 But that there are even lessons that I should have gotten certainly before I got to the graduate school level, but things that I am even missing on, you know, basic ability with financial planning.

Speaker 6 And it's part of the beauty of being in a relationship that you each bring certain things to the table. And my husband is really good with this stuff.

Speaker 6 But you see this all the time, especially with athletes, right?

Speaker 6 That they show up and they're going to go to the NFL or the NBA or even a college now with NIL deals and they have no financial literacy, literacy, right?

Speaker 6 And they're going to blow all of their money in 20 minutes and not be set up for the rest of their lives when they might only have a few good earning years.

Speaker 6 And I'm not putting them up there on a pedestal as like, oh, woe is you. It's still incredible that you could earn that much money in that little amount of time.
But this is a huge problem.

Speaker 6 I want to ask you, though, quickly, if you think that there is any,

Speaker 6 I don't want to say merit to it, but like, do you think it matters that there are so many Republicans that are pushing Trump or pushing members of the administration about what's going on in the economy.

Speaker 6 Like Laura Ingram last night, you know, she's asking, what's this idea about a 50-year mortgages? I don't know if you saw that they're, you know, proposing that.

Speaker 6 I already mentioned that she brought up the price of beef. She says the Republicans were demolished in the elections last week.
Steve Bannon expressing similar sentiment.

Speaker 6 There's this guy, Sean Davis from the Daily Caller. He wrote, Republicans right now have no accomplishments, no plans, and no vision.

Speaker 6 Why on earth would anyone be excited to go vote for them 12 12 months from now?

Speaker 6 We cannot have a viable country or future when half your country and all its young people are locked out of the economy and locked out of ever owning a home or much of anything beyond next month's streaming subscription.

Speaker 6 Does anyone in Washington care about this? Anyone at all? And those are sentiments that I would not expect someone like Sean Davis, who you probably don't know who he is, but he's very MAGA and...

Speaker 6 usually very much in line, putting that out there. So what do you make of those kinds of pushbacks on the administration?

Speaker 5 They're almost a day late and a dollar short. And that is as we get closer to the midterms, as his popularity goes down, and some as his power decreases, Republicans are finding their testicles.

Speaker 5 It's like when you see a Republican who's left office and goes on MAR and starts talking about how batshit crazy the Republicans are.

Speaker 6 Those are my favorite episodes, but it's so disingenuous.

Speaker 5 Yeah, and it's like, you know what? Where the fuck were you? It's like, you know, they're showing up and warning us about a fire, about fire safety after the house is burned down.

Speaker 5 It's like, you know what?

Speaker 5 That doesn't add any value now. Yeah, all of a sudden you're like hard-hitting truth teller when it doesn't matter.

Speaker 5 So as his popularity goes down, as it becomes clear, he's not going to run again because he's probably going to start babbling even more and he's going to start to look even more infirmed.

Speaker 5 Because again, biology is undefeated. I think you're going to see more of this.
But I just want to go back to the idea of stimulus.

Speaker 5 The greatest intergenerational theft in history was the stimulus for COVID. And I understand what Yellen said and what Biden felt and to a certain extent Trump, that you'd be much,

Speaker 5 you're better off overdoing it than underdoing it. But an analysis of the COVID stimulus checks, the CARES Act, showed that these types of stimulus programs only work when they're means tested.

Speaker 5 The recipients of the stimulus that had over $3,000 in the bank didn't spend a cent of the CARES payments.

Speaker 5 And the analysis I've seen is that the $7 trillion or so of stimulus that was flushed in the economy, somewhere between 70 and 85 percent of it was not spent,

Speaker 5 meaning that the majority of people didn't need it. It wasn't spent on rent.
It wasn't spent on food. But what it did do was flush so much capital in the market that people started thinking,

Speaker 5 in addition to spending more time at home, well, maybe I should upgrade and buy a bigger home. Or I'm going to take this money, this stimulus money, and I'm going to buy Amazon stock.

Speaker 5 So what happened?

Speaker 5 The price of houses went from $290 to $410, which is great for the incumbents and terrible for the people trying to buy houses.

Speaker 5 And because of all this additional deficit spending, the markets got jittery about our ability in the future to pay back our T-bills.

Speaker 5 And you saw interest rates go, mortgage interest rates go from 3% to 6%.

Speaker 5 So, what happens? The average mortgage on an average home pre-COVID, about $1,200, post-COVID, $2,300.

Speaker 5 So, we doubled the price for entrants while increasing the asset base of the incumbents. And then the market skyrocketed.

Speaker 5 And one of the key parts of the economic cycle to transferring capital back from the incumbents to the entrants is to let the natural cycles of capitalism and world events register.

Speaker 5 What do I mean by that? In 2008, we bailed out the banks, but we didn't bail out the economy. $700 billion to bail out the banks.
By the way, they got the money back.

Speaker 5 I think that was the right decision because that could have caused a financial panic. But they let businesses fail.
And then what happened?

Speaker 5 People coming into their prime income earning years, maybe a professor who's starting to finally make some money, can buy Amazon, Apple, and Facebook and a home at a good price and then gets wealthy.

Speaker 5 And unless you let the market burn, all you're doing is entrenching the incumbents.

Speaker 5 When you bail out the baby boomer owner of a restaurant, all you're doing is robbing opportunity from the 26-year-old graduate of the Culinary Academy that wants her shot.

Speaker 5 And so, what we've essentially decided is that the deficit in the full faith and credit of the government isn't there to make forward-leaning investments in technology and education that benefit future generations.

Speaker 5 It's there to bail out the incumbents when a natural part of the cycle, whether it's war, famine, and natural disaster hits.

Speaker 5 That is a natural part of the economic cycle meant to transfer capital back from the incumbents who will always use their power for regulatory capture and get richer and richer and richer.

Speaker 5 So, we've essentially said, sorry, not only are you not going to get get to buy a house or a stock on sale, as we usually do through cycles, we're going to artificially support these prices on your credit card.

Speaker 5 So this stimulus, the best investments from the government are basically long-term investments that help the material and psychological well-being of Americans, whether it's universal childcare or invest big, bold investments in technology like DARPA or vaccine research, putting that money into universities so they can come up with better forms of chemotherapy and then it spills into the private sector, the pharmaceutical sector.

Speaker 5 But the idea of just a straight stimulus outside of a natural disaster, okay, maybe, but you should absolutely means test it because all you really do is take money from future generations, because it's always deficit-fueled, to entrench the incumbents.

Speaker 5 So again, these economic policies are so short-term.

Speaker 5 And it just upsets me that people don't have a basic understanding of economics and deficit spending and inflation such that they would say, no, this is a really bad idea.

Speaker 6 Okay, thank you. Not to mention the massive fraud that gets committed at these moments.

Speaker 6 I mean, the small business fraud,

Speaker 6 you know, all the money that went to public schools that didn't get spent as well. I'm not, I don't want to.
I guess I shouldn't have said it right after because I'm not saying that it's fraud.

Speaker 6 But to your point, they're not using the money for what it was supposed to be allocated for, or we overestimated the threat at that moment, right?

Speaker 6 Because they obviously didn't need to use it in that way.

Speaker 6 But our government is going to be clawing back money that people stole from the United States at a moment of crisis for I don't even know how long.

Speaker 6 I mean, it's disgusting some of the things that people did. And you're right, without like a huge crisis moment, it is very hard to make the case that we should be doing things like that.

Speaker 5 So I never missed an opportunity to virtue signal.

Speaker 6 Let's have it.

Speaker 6 Always got a good guy.

Speaker 5 I know, I know. What a guy.
What a guy.

Speaker 5 Tellerico, call me. I'll show you the dark side.
Anyway, pre-COVID, I started a company called Section. And what Section does is it helps upskill corporations to better adopt and leverage AI.

Speaker 5 These corporations, Nestle, PepsiCo, spend a ton of money on site licenses from OpenAI or Anthropic and then wake up six months later and nobody's actually using it.

Speaker 5 So Section goes in, builds an AI layer, does seminars, courses, and takes different departments and says, this is how you use AI to become more productive and efficient. And we raised,

Speaker 5 in 2019, we raised $37 million. Is that right? Yeah, $37 million.

Speaker 5 And then our board meeting, first COVID board meeting, or second COVID meeting, the CFO comes in and says, I just need you guys to sign here and here. And I'm like, what is this? And it's CARES Act.

Speaker 5 And all we need to do is sign this paperwork, and we're going to get $240,000.

Speaker 5 And all we have to agree to is that we won't lay off anybody for a year. So we just raised $37 million.
We were not only not laying off people, we were hiring like crazy.

Speaker 5 By the way, there was never an audit done.

Speaker 5 There was so much fraud. You could take the money, fire people the next day, right?

Speaker 5 And to my board's credit, we looked at each other and said, okay, everyone around this table is wealthy. We just raised $37 million.

Speaker 6 We don't need this.

Speaker 5 Yeah,

Speaker 5 we don't need this. And a quarter of a million dollars is

Speaker 5 is about what a good public school spends on their entire after-school programming for the year.

Speaker 5 And one of the reasons I'll name-check them, general catalysts. This was not my experience with VCs.

Speaker 5 They looked at each other and looked at me and said, yeah, that makes sense. We shouldn't take the money.
I've never seen VCs act that way.

Speaker 5 I've never seen them give up a nickel for

Speaker 5 the Commonwealth. Anyways, but

Speaker 5 there was so much money. I mean, do you remember Shake Shack was taking tens of millions for their individual restaurants? And they brought the CEO, and he's like, well, we're all in this together.

Speaker 5 And he's like, well, why the fuck is you taking money you don't need mean we're all in this together?

Speaker 5 So these stimulus programs, I feel as if COVID or the CARES Act or the PPP program were essentially nothing but an excuse to transfer money from the young to the old.

Speaker 5 And then it would have been somewhat legitimate if if they'd said, okay, we were in a crisis here. We need to bail some people out.
Fine. We need to overdo it.
Get it.

Speaker 5 But now that the economy is really strong and ripping, 12, 24 months later, we need an incremental, we need kind of a, we need to raise taxes to pay this $7 trillion back.

Speaker 5 Oh, no, but that never happened. Why? Because Congress is so fucking old that as long as they can outlast the 10-year before it crashes, they don't give a shit.

Speaker 5 And the people who are going to actually have to pay this shit back, you know, this is going to come. Anyways,

Speaker 5 Jess, we're going to take a quick break. But if you're watching on YouTube, make sure to hit subscribe.

Speaker 5 Our subscriber growth is great. We're still hoping that we need to get to a certain level to attract a certain quality of advertiser.

Speaker 5 And if you're listening on audio, head over to our YouTube channel for bonus content. Oh my gosh, I'm teasing it right now.
Just look at you.

Speaker 6 David Miso.

Speaker 5 Just did a major interview with one of the most famous senators where he got very emotional.

Speaker 5 Anyways, but please head over to our YouTube channel for bonus content. All right, we'll be right back.
Stay with us.

Speaker 10 Adobe Acrobat Studio, so brand new. Show me all the things PDFs can do.
Do your work with ease and speed. PDF spaces is all you need.
Do hours of research in an instant.

Speaker 10 Key insights from an AI assistant. Pick a template with a click.
Now your preso looks super slick. Close that deal, yeah, you won.
Do that, doing that, did that, done.

Speaker 11 Now you can do that, do that with Acrobat.

Speaker 10 Now you can do that, do that with the all-new Acrobat. It's time to do your best work with the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio.

Speaker 12 Support for this show comes from Shopify. Creating a successful business means you have to be on top of a lot of things.

Speaker 12 You have to have a product that people want to buy, focused brand, and savvy savvy marketing.

Speaker 12 But an often overlooked element in all of this is actually the business behind the business, the one that makes selling things easy. For lots of companies, that business is Shopify.

Speaker 12 According to their data, Shopify can help you boost conversions up 50% with their ShopPay feature.

Speaker 12 That basically means less people abandoning their online shopping carts and more people going through with a sale.

Speaker 12 If you want to grow your business, your commerce platform should be built to sell wherever your customers are: online, in store, in their feed, and everywhere in between.

Speaker 12 Businesses that sell sell more with Shopify. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout Mattel uses.
Sign up for your one dollar per month trial period at shopify.com/slash Voxbusiness.

Speaker 12 All lowercase. Go to shopify.com/slash Voxbusiness.
To upgrade your selling today, shopify.com/slash Voxbusiness.

Speaker 13 What do walking 10,000 steps every day, eating five servings of fruits and veggies, and getting eight hours of sleep have in common?

Speaker 2 They're all healthy choices. But do all healthier choices really pay off?

Speaker 13 With prescription plans from CVS CareMark, they do. Their plan designs give your members more choice, which gives your members more ways to get on, stay on, and manage their meds.

Speaker 13 And that helps your business control your costs because healthier members are better for business. Go to cmk.co slash access to learn more about helping your members stay adherent.

Speaker 13 That's cmk.co slash accome back.

Speaker 5 My man, my man, my my general, my little soldier. Governor Newsom

Speaker 5 is

Speaker 5 calling out his own party for walking away. That's a direct quote, from the masculinity crisis facing men and boys.

Speaker 5 Over the weekend, he said rising suicide rates, school dropouts, and suspensions are, open quote, off the charts, close quote.

Speaker 5 I can confirm that's true, and warned Democrats can't afford morally or politically to ignore it.

Speaker 5 Let's take a listen to what Governor Newsom said on CNN.

Speaker 15 I'm really proud of the work we're doing with Richard Reeves and others. Scott Galloway has been a rock star in this space.
We've leaned in, California, did an executive order.

Speaker 15 We've got a whole team working on the issue of the crisis of men and boys.

Speaker 15 Suicide rates, the dropout rates, the suspension rates are off the charts. You're going to see graduation, almost two to one women in four-year colleges in a few years.
This is a crisis.

Speaker 15 30-year-old young male is doing worse than his parents did, first generation in history.

Speaker 15 And obviously, college graduates now are having the worst employment opportunities in history. So, Trump has done nothing to your question, literally nothing for men and boys.

Speaker 5 So Jess, first of all.

Speaker 6 Is that your favorite voice to hear

Speaker 6 say Scott Galloway? That

Speaker 6 rural gravel?

Speaker 5 I didn't even hear when he called me a rock star. And I just want to acknowledge to our listeners,

Speaker 5 to have to listen to me host a podcast where I cut to an interview where I get name check is literally shavings of shit on a shit salad.

Speaker 5 So I just want you to know, I'm a narcissist, but I am in touch with my narcissism.

Speaker 5 Jess, do you think Governor Newsom or the party more broadly can actually talk about masculinity without it turning into a bit of a, I don't know, a culture war?

Speaker 5 Do you think this is a good strategy?

Speaker 6 I do. I think that last week, the elections were a roadmap back towards this because they weren't actually talking about masculinity.
They talked about affordability without social issues.

Speaker 6 That's the thing.

Speaker 6 during the election or afterwards, the only color that matters to people is green.

Speaker 6 So if you're giving people opportunity, if you're saying, I hear you, I understand what your life is like, these are the things that I'm going to do to make it better.

Speaker 6 I'm going to build more affordable housing. I'm going to cut red tape.
I'm going to make sure there are apprenticeship programs. You need to get your GED.
I'm going to help you do that.

Speaker 6 I'm going to make sure that there are more mentors out in the field. That's what the California, the executive order that he's talking about there was about unleashing.

Speaker 6 mentors and people that folks could look up to out into the general public to make sure that young men felt like they had someone to look up to and who actually cared about them.

Speaker 6 Like you can do all of those things without actually having a conversation where you're explicitly saying, this is my program, you know, for men and boys, right?

Speaker 6 Your program is to get you on your path to having a good life. And that starts with economic opportunity.
And I think that Democrats absolutely nailed that messaging for the elections last week.

Speaker 6 Just want to say, you know, returning to normal levels with black men, which was one of the big swing categories for the 2024 election towards Trump, Latino men, young men coming back, it wasn't as big as the shift, you know, it was like plus 40 with

Speaker 6 young women, but in the mom Donnie election here in New York, it was plus 40 with young men.

Speaker 6 right who showed up uh for him so obviously he was doing something right and that thing that he was doing right was saying new york has to be a place where you can afford to live and to have a decent life um so So I am optimistic on this front, but you are, you know, mid-book tour, talking masculinity all over the place.

Speaker 6 How are you feeling?

Speaker 5 Well, it's definitely, it's better to be lucky than good. And, you know, I'm kind of going into a storm with my sails up in the form of the book, and there's just a lot of wind.
So

Speaker 5 I've gotten lucky here. This is a conversation

Speaker 5 that people were kind of ready to have. And I've gotten some really, I think, thoughtful pushback, you know,

Speaker 5 that these issues are real, but they've been real for women for 3,000 years.

Speaker 5 And is this just another attempt to check back on the progress of women with sort of a thoughtful, you know, argument that basically might arrest the progress of women?

Speaker 5 And I don't believe that's true. I don't believe it's a zero-sum game.
But the reviews of the book

Speaker 5 are generally kind, but there's generally like the driver I saw in the election results was age more than gender or identity. Young people are just fed up and they just want change.

Speaker 5 And Cuomo represented

Speaker 5 the status quo.

Speaker 5 But I've gotten a lot of thoughtful feedback on things like Scott's answer to everything is for men to be economically viable because he is obsessed with money. That's a direct quote.

Speaker 5 And I think there's some truth to that. I've always been very focused on economic security and on men being providers in a capitalist society.

Speaker 5 But this woman who's a psychiatrist is saying a lot of these men, if they achieve economic security, if they don't find other means of purpose and self-satisfaction, they end up on my couch.

Speaker 5 And that also I recommend finding a girlfriend and that if they don't understand themselves and love themselves first, that they still end up, they end up in bad relationships.

Speaker 5 And I, quite frankly, I still think bad relationships are better than no relationship because you learn from them. And I mean, of course, not an abusive relationship, but

Speaker 6 just a normal, like, well, we spent a year together and it didn't work out. Yeah.

Speaker 5 I think that helps you figure out how to behave better or how to be more patient or what you're looking for, what you're not looking for.

Speaker 5 You know, I think that stuff, I think you got to try on some stuff before you find something that fits and vice versa. I think it's also good to get your heart broken and occasionally break a heart.

Speaker 5 I was mostly in the former camp, but I'm getting a lot of

Speaker 5 feedback. And some of it is very thoughtful.
And some of it makes me

Speaker 5 pause and think about, all right, how do we ensure,

Speaker 5 I don't know, it's like Dr. King said, you need to bring along the white poor in this moment.
And I'm very focused on how,

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 so far we've mostly achieved this, but how does the message resonate enough to bring along feminists? Because what I think we mistake sometimes is the center of conflict.

Speaker 5 And we like to think the center of conflict because it's easier is between people of different identities.

Speaker 5 That this is a fight between the genders do a great job of convincing themselves it's the other gender's fault. And we oftentimes couch men versus women, men's problems versus women's problems.

Speaker 5 And I think if you actually look at what's going on, it's sort of liberal versus illiberal thoughts.

Speaker 5 So Title IX, which lifted women up and said we can't, anti-discrimination laws meant to promote women's entrance or admissions into college when it was 40-60, female to male.

Speaker 5 Now it's 60-40, there's no talk of affirmative action for men, and I don't think there should be.

Speaker 5 But I think it's important to acknowledge that 50 years ago, when that law was passed, it was passed by electoral bodies that were 97% male.

Speaker 5 There's been a lot of men on women's side for a long time, and there's been a lot of women, quite frankly, who are part of the patriarchy.

Speaker 5 I think Donald Trump kind of represents or is a decent evangelist for the patriarchy, and 54% of white women went for Trump.

Speaker 6 elevated women to enormously powerful positions of power. But that's always the contrast within him that people who like him will point out to me.

Speaker 6 And I'm like, yeah, both of these things can be true, that he can be a misogynist and Susie Wiles is the first female chief of staff. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah, but what I would argue is it's not about whether you have women or non-whites in your cabinet. It's about whether you have people who are qualified and, quite frankly, aren't corrupt.

Speaker 5 It's great to have a female attorney general, but if she's corrupt and is basically acting as personal attorney, so

Speaker 5 I just, I find that on these issues,

Speaker 5 it's essentially the division here is between liberal and illiberal. It's between people who want to go back to the 50s and people who think

Speaker 5 we need to advance the rights or be empathetic, whatever the term is. But I think it's really unproductive to continually couch everything.

Speaker 5 So for example, I've been thinking a lot about this, that the best thing we could do for young men is just to put more money in the pockets of young people.

Speaker 5 And the easiest way to create, put money in the pockets of young people is not only increasing minimum wage but universal child care which most people associate with a program that is somewhat would benefit women more than men i don't think that's true i think it would benefit young families and actually reduce the economic strain and reduce divorce levels and reduce the levels of self-harm among men who seem to be much more prone to self-harm after divorce than women 70 percent of divorce filings are from women basically men have not kept pace with women in terms of their scent and a lot of women wake up and do the math math and say, I'm out.

Speaker 5 You're neither a provider or doing your job as a procreator. And I mean, helping to take care of the kids at home and support me who, and I'm better at this money thing.

Speaker 5 They just do the math and they're out. So I think universal child care that makes it easier for dual-income homes and takes financial stress off of young families in some ways would actually be

Speaker 5 as beneficial, maybe more beneficial. to young men who benefit more from relationships.
Anyways, I'm getting a lot of really good feedback. Some of it hurts.

Speaker 5 And what I found, and I'll end here, the lesson around feedback, is that if it hits you hard and you get defensive, that probably means there's some truth to it.

Speaker 5 Because it's the criticism that's accurate. I have found, I go through this every semester at school, the students give you very detailed feedback.

Speaker 5 And when they're paying $7,000 to sit in a chair amongst 160 kids and listen to you talk about a strategy or a brand, they will give you very robust feedback on whether they feel they got their $7,000 worth.

Speaker 5 And the feedback that really hurts is the feedback that is accurate, that is, that, you know, it kind of cuts to your soul.

Speaker 5 And so what I've, anyways, my lesson to young people is that if someone's mean or stupid or says something, fine. That should just roll right off you.
This person is angry or trying to lash out.

Speaker 5 But if feedback immediately you check back and you get defensive, it's probably because there's some truth there and you just need to take a beat and absorb it.

Speaker 5 Anyways, here you are with a stare Perel. You didn't know.
You didn't know.

Speaker 6 I didn't know. That's what I was going to get this morning.
But I'm thrilled to see you, lady. I love you.

Speaker 6 I'm glad to hear you kind of, you know, talk about the swirl around the book because obviously, you know, there have been some fancy ink spilled about it, like in the New Yorker.

Speaker 6 And how I see it as someone who identifies as a feminist is

Speaker 6 that there's this clash going on on between traditional feminism and more modern-day feminism, which sometimes is called intersectional feminism, where,

Speaker 6 you know, economic opportunity is the silver bullet that kind of

Speaker 6 rises all tides, right? Or that all the tides rise all boats.

Speaker 6 And this is what Bernie Sanders was arguing against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, which is when I became, you know, first aware of this shift going from Gloria Steinem to, you know, what modern day feminism looks like more and, you know, the elements of allyship in it.

Speaker 6 And I, at least from the New Yorker piece, felt like, I don't know how you took it, but I saw it more as contextualizing you and Richard Reeves in the broader conversation rather than attacking you.

Speaker 6 I certainly have seen people that have attacked you.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I thought it was quite thoughtful

Speaker 6 and kind of going through the history of this and where the conversation is.

Speaker 6 So I thought that that was, you know, a bit of a feather in your cap. And it's obviously a big deal when the New Yorker wants to write about your book.
But,

Speaker 6 you know,

Speaker 6 what you said about universal child care really resonates to me, not only as a New Yorker, who's hopefully going to get that, because it's one of Mondani's main promises, and universal pre-K was such a boon for our community.

Speaker 6 And now that plan has been outsourced all over the country.

Speaker 6 But I feel like when a lot of these, I don't want to just just say more traditional feminists, but even when our high-end culture is discussing what goes on at home these days, like in the pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times, that they have a very outdated vision of what rearing a family looks like today, that millennial dads do three times the level of child care work than their boomer fathers did, which is a massive amount.

Speaker 6 And I am not here to say that it is even Stevens at all, but I mean, you know what 40-year-old 40-year-old dads are like now. And they are as likely,

Speaker 6 at least the ones that I know and certainly the one I'm married to, that if they hear a cry, that they're getting up as if their wife or partner is getting up.

Speaker 6 And I think that that has been lost in the conversation, much to the detriment of all of us, frankly, that are trying to forge a better path where we can have dual income households and earn as much as possible and also enjoy having these families as much as possible.

Speaker 6 Because, you know, the moments where I'm alone with my girls, you know, we have a great time and we do girls weekend and it's cute and we have a little dance.

Speaker 6 But when you're actually with your full unit and everybody is as enmeshed in it or dedicated to it as possible, it hits differently.

Speaker 6 You know, those moments and you've described it as when the four of you are sitting on the couch watching something together and your legs are all intertwined and it feels like you're really connected to one another, that those are when you're most at peace.

Speaker 6 That's what you said in your 92nd Street Y talk last week with Ben Stiller. And it really stuck with me.

Speaker 6 And I feel like that element of it is kind of missing from some of the discussion around the masculinity crisis or where we are. I mean, your

Speaker 6 provider, protector, procreator, model, you said these are qualities that can be applied to women as well. It really wasn't about, you know, like pushing women down so that men can get up.

Speaker 6 It was like, how can we all rise together? Or at least that's how I read it.

Speaker 5 I did an hour-long interview with Nicole Wallace, who I adore,

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 she asked me for some examples of masculinity or role models. And one of the role models I gave was Secretary Clinton.

Speaker 5 She just has this very strong code, has always been about protecting people domestically and internationally, specifically children.

Speaker 5 And that's the clip they played at the top. And you cannot, that's where the comments got really ugly.
Oh, really? She really inspires a lot of, I just have never understood.

Speaker 5 Anyways,

Speaker 5 yeah, it's a look.

Speaker 5 I should bring us back. Do you think that this is a good idea for Newsom, for Governor Newsom?

Speaker 5 And by the way, he's gone from on Calchie, Newsom's chances of winning the next election are at 21%, and that's up from just 10% in June. I think he's the leading candidate right now.

Speaker 5 Now, granted, you don't want to be the leading candidate. Very rarely has a candidate who's at the top of the polls this early

Speaker 5 go on to win. Some of the people that were leading, my favorite is some of the people who were leading in the polls in the Republican race.
Herman Kane, remember him? I do.

Speaker 5 Fred Thompson from Law and Order fame. Rudy Giuliani was the leader early on.

Speaker 5 So you just, it's almost, it's almost, it's not a curse, but you want to be, you don't want to peak this early, and I don't think he's doing that.

Speaker 6 What he's doing is so necessary that, I mean, the party needed someone to kind of

Speaker 6 coalesce around. And he's showing the way on how you can fight back and fight back effectively.
I mean, we just got a big win in Utah on the redistricting front.

Speaker 6 It looks like now it's basically going to be a wash, whatever, even if the Republicans get their best map. And Newsom was the first person to stand up and just say, like, not on my watch.

Speaker 6 And Prop 50, the margins are crazy. I think it's going to be, it's at like 28 or something right now.

Speaker 6 So yeah, I think it's the right thing. I think you can always gauge with by how well you're doing with how much the right is attacking you.

Speaker 6 And I have to talk about that, about Newsom every single day, which means you are doing a good job. So

Speaker 6 I think, you know, he's identifying core issues that bedeviled us in the 2024 election. And, you know, we'll see.
The primary is going to be huge.

Speaker 6 There are going to be a lot of people up on that stage with very compelling cases to make.

Speaker 6 But I think that Newsom being able to say, I've been in this fight since Donald Trump got reelected, and these are the wins that I can show you up on the board will make him a compelling candidate for a lot of people.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 they respect how hard he's going. We have to talk about James Tallarico being a little horny.

Speaker 5 All right, but first, let's take a quick break. Stay with us.

Speaker 8 Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start? Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to.

Speaker 8 Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin, or what that clunking sound from your dryer is? With thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro.

Speaker 2 You just have to hire one.

Speaker 8 You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today.

Speaker 3 Millions of players.

Speaker 4 One world.

Speaker 4 No lag.

Speaker 1 How's it done?

Speaker 3 AWS is how.

Speaker 3 Epic Games turned to AWS to scale to more than 100 million Fortnite players worldwide so they can stay locked in with battle-tested reliability.

Speaker 3 AWS is how leading businesses power next-level innovation.

Speaker 16 As a founder, you're moving fast towards product market fit, your next round, or your first big enterprise deal.

Speaker 16 But with AI accelerating how quickly startups build and ship, security expectations are also coming in faster, and those expectations are higher than ever.

Speaker 16 Getting security and compliance right can unlock growth or stall it if you wait too long.

Speaker 16 Advanta is a trust management platform that helps businesses automate security and compliance across more than 35 frameworks like SOC2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more.

Speaker 16 With deep integrations and automated workflows built for fast-moving teams, Vanta gets you audit ready fast and keeps you secure with continuous monitoring as your models, infrastructure, and customers evolve.

Speaker 16 That's why fast-growing startups like Langchain, Ryder, and Cursor have all trusted Vanta to build a scalable compliance foundation from the start.

Speaker 16 Go to Vanta.com slash Fox to save $1,000 today through the Vanta for Startups program and join over 10,000 ambitious companies already scaling with Vanta.

Speaker 16 That's vanta.com slash box to save $1,000 for a limited time.

Speaker 5 Welcome back before we go is Jeff's reference two stories we couldn't resist talking about.

Speaker 5 First in Texas, Democratic Senate candidate James Tallarico, who's built his campaign around faith and moral values, is under fire for following several adult film stars and OnlyFans models on Instagram.

Speaker 5 His team says it's just part of engaging with high follower supporters. Ah, come on, brother.
Come on. We feel you.
We feel you.

Speaker 5 Nobody minds a little horny Christian man, but it's not exactly the kind of Christian values headline he was hoping for.

Speaker 5 I got to be honest, I love the story. I love him.

Speaker 5 And in Washington. Right.

Speaker 6 He was fabulous when he came on. He's so great.

Speaker 5 He's great. And in Washington, plastic surgeons say Trump world is literally reshaping itself with a surge of requests for what they're calling the Mar-a-Lago face.

Speaker 5 I think gold-leafed energy means Botox maximalism. Surgeons say the look is all about being over the top, a kind of physical reflection of Trump's aesthetic.

Speaker 5 Jess, let's start with Tallarico following.

Speaker 5 Why does this make me happy, Jess?

Speaker 6 Because he's like a normal dude and we've been craving normal dudes.

Speaker 5 Okay, first off,

Speaker 5 any guy who spent a lot of time in a a church and isn't horny for women,

Speaker 5 okay, I should probably keep away from this one. This is a good sign.
This is healthy. Anyway, I promised myself I wasn't going to say anything here.

Speaker 5 What do you think here, Jess?

Speaker 6 This is the maraschino cherry of the episode. You weren't going to say anything.
Like, this is

Speaker 6 the fact that

Speaker 6 this was a scoop. kills me.
Like, obviously, in the commercialization of news, we have gone too far and everything is breaking news, major update. And then it's like somebody went to the bathroom.

Speaker 6 But like this of all things to be something that

Speaker 6 all over social media is so ludicrous.

Speaker 6 And I mean, the things that we've seen on the other side that people have, you know, just accepted, I'm not even talking about like, I follow some hot girls online, but like I literally, you know, cheat on every wife that I've had.

Speaker 6 It doesn't even matter if they're pregnant at the time. And

Speaker 6 there,

Speaker 6 the thought was that we were going to get upset about this. I've literally seen not a single negative comment.

Speaker 6 Adam Mockler, the YouTuber who we both really like posted breaking, James Tallarico revealed to be a chill ass dude.

Speaker 6 Like he also follows, I think, like 3,500 people. It wasn't like he has an account that only follows naked women.

Speaker 6 I would probably think that was a little bit weird, or he should have not had that attached to his actual name. But like, I don't, I don't want to be like, boys will be boys.

Speaker 6 Maybe that's a toxic thing to say, but who cares? He's like a 36-year-old guy likes to look at pretty girls. I'm all for it.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I don't. I think this actually, this actually helps him.
Helps him.

Speaker 6 And I'm call it all red. Start following all the naked ladies.

Speaker 5 I'm convinced that essentially Instagram is either wealth porn or just porn. And I'm kind of actual porn.
I'm convinced their greatest signups are when U porn crashes.

Speaker 5 It's like, well, I don't got U porn, but I got instagram and uh so i don't i i i i think this helps him i think this puts him in the news i think he comes across as a red-blooded male i think he's doing exactly what he should be doing i don't you know i don't i don't think there's anything i don't think anyway i think this helps him james we support you come back on and show us your friends dude i'm i'm just so dying to roll with this guy so The Mar-a-Lago face, what do you think?

Speaker 6 So this has been going on for a while. And I think it was New York Mag after Trump got elected that did a whole thing on

Speaker 6 like Republican face. I don't know if they had an actual name for it, but like the Caroline Levitt.
And this was how it applied to younger women.

Speaker 6 But whenever you see those pictures from like a great Gatsby party at Mar-a-Lago while the government is shut down and people are starving, you notice that they all look the same and not in the good way.

Speaker 6 So it doesn't surprise me. It's like they're a a kardashian is donald trump yeah i don't know i mean

Speaker 5 my plastic surgeon suggested a scrotum lift he said it was low-hanging fruit i couldn't resist

Speaker 6 you knew it was coming you knew no actually i didn't think that we were going to talk about your scrotum so my mistake

Speaker 5 let's talk about plastic surgery or cosmetic treatments i'll go first i get uh botox i'm actually crying right now you just can't tell uh do you get botox you're on tv

Speaker 6 Yeah, I do.

Speaker 6 Actually,

Speaker 6 the nurse who was working in the office where I get Botox is a fan of the pod. I found out.

Speaker 6 Yes. Do you get numbing cream or no numbing cream?

Speaker 5 Oh, are you kidding? I'm a dude. I'm the biggest wimp in the world.

Speaker 6 Okay, I thought you were going to say you don't because you're a dude. I'm like, we're talking about you getting Botox.

Speaker 5 Women have a much higher tolerance for pain because they have to endure childbirth.

Speaker 5 Guys, and anyone in a plastic surgeon's office or a cosmetic or anyone will say, oh, yeah, the dudes don't do well with pain. I go in and I get fully numbed up and then my doctor comes in, Dr.

Speaker 5 Analik, who makes a few jokes and then throws some needles in my face and charges me $6,000. I also get the Pico laser, which I think makes me look 59 again.
And I love him because he's super quick.

Speaker 5 He's kind of the, I don't know, the cosmetic, whatever, cosmetic dermatologist to the stars.

Speaker 6 He's here.

Speaker 5 Oh, no, he's here.

Speaker 6 Oh, should I be going there? I do like my face, though.

Speaker 5 The thing I love about him is he just kind of comes in. He doesn't even tell you what he's going to do.
He's just like, boom, boom, boom, boom. All right.

Speaker 5 See you next, you know, see you next fall or whatever.

Speaker 5 But it's, it's, yeah, I never thought I would do shit like that. Now I don't.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 6 Well, you start out, you're like, I'm going to be an academic. I'll wear, you know, blazers with elbow patches.

Speaker 6 And now you're like, inject me anywhere that you possibly can to make sure that I look 100%.

Speaker 5 I was with my partner and she was putting on makeup and I said

Speaker 5 I said, sweetheart, you don't need makeup. And she's like, oh, thanks.
I'm like, you need plastic surgery.

Speaker 5 Is that wrong?

Speaker 6 Yeah. Is that wrong?

Speaker 5 It's really wrong.

Speaker 6 And she legitimately doesn't need plastic surgery. She's beautiful skin.

Speaker 5 Yeah. I hope she's listening to that.

Speaker 6 All right. Anyway.
I'll try and fix it then if she is listening.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 5 Well, yeah. No, I said, my family has absolutely no interest in what I do professionally, which is probably healthy for all of us.
Anyways,

Speaker 5 that's all for this episode, folks.

Speaker 5 Thank you for listening to Raging Moderates. And Jess, have a great rest of the week.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 Have a great rest of your tour. And then take a nap.

Speaker 1 Support for the show comes from Saks Fifth Avenue. Saks Fifth Avenue makes it easy to holiday your way.

Speaker 1 Whether it's finding the right gift or the right outfit, Saks is where you can find everything from a stunning David Yerman bracelet for her or a sleek pair of ferragama loafers to wear to a fancy holiday dinner.

Speaker 1 And if you don't know where to start, Saks.com is customized to your personal style so you can save time shopping and spend more time just enjoying the holidays.

Speaker 1 Make shopping fun and easy this season and find gifts and inspiration to suit your holiday style at Saks Fifth Avenue.

Speaker 10 Adobe Acrobat Studio, so brand new. Show me all the things PDFs can do.
Do your work with ease and speed. PDF spaces is all you need.
Do hours of research in an instant.

Speaker 10 With key insights from an AI assistant. Pick a template with a click.
Now your Prezo looks super slick. Close that deal, yeah, you won.
Do that, doing that, did that, done.

Speaker 11 Now you can do that, do that, with Acrobat.

Speaker 10 Now you can do that, do that with the all-new Acrobat. It's time to do your best work with the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio.

Speaker 17 Support for this show comes from Odo.

Speaker 14 Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other?

Speaker 17 Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need.
It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more.

Speaker 17 And the best part? Odo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch.

Speaker 14 So why not you?

Speaker 2 Try Odoo for free at odu.com. That's odoo.com.