Raging Moderates: Trump’s K-Shaped Economy: Why the Economy Feels Broken

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Speaker 8 Welcome, Raging Moderates. I'm Scott Galloway.

Speaker 9 And I'm Jessica Tarlove.

Speaker 8 How are you, Jess?

Speaker 9 Not as good as you are, Mr. Number One on Amazon.

Speaker 8 Oh, Jess, I didn't even know that. I don't believe in these modern-day constructs and measurements.
I'm more about spiritual satisfaction and just feeling content with myself.

Speaker 8 Yes, that's right, bitches. Number

Speaker 8 for the dog. Dancer, finally.
Finally, someone recognizes my genius. And it's the half a percent of America that buys 99% of the books.
That's a true step, by the way. Well,

Speaker 9 we have to move quickly, but that is a good segue into the K-shaped economy. But it's so exciting.

Speaker 9 And I read the book and loved it, especially the end, the note to your boys, be me plus better is the parenting advice or how we all feel about parenting. I just, I don't know.

Speaker 9 If people haven't read it yet, you know, buy it so Scott gets more sales, but

Speaker 8 enjoy it.

Speaker 9 Awesome lessons.

Speaker 8 Do you want to hear about my media tour yesterday?

Speaker 9 Well, I saw you on The View and I watched you on Farid Saqqari. I mean, you're moving and shaking.
Hello.

Speaker 8 How do you say media whore? It's spelled S-C-O-T-T.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I went on. I started the morning on Morning Joe, which I love.
They give me like 20 minutes. I just run.
I just run on that show. I absolutely love it.

Speaker 8 Not only that, I look less ugly on that show for something. There's something about the lighting.

Speaker 9 They have good lighting. You're not an ugly man, but they do have very good lighting.

Speaker 8 And they put the book up, the screen of the book behind you. And they're always, I mean,

Speaker 8 it's really interesting. They really know how to do TV.
They set you up for success. They just like give you these softballs or these fastballs.

Speaker 8 Producers clearly read the book and said, we want to set this person up for success. And then I went to the Today Show with Craig and I don't know his last name and Savannah Guthrie.

Speaker 8 She couldn't be nicer. That's more like, that's more like, we're going to ask a question,

Speaker 8 make a 30-second quick comment, stop talking, and then we're going to sell some pharmaceuticals. That is like quick hit.

Speaker 8 And also, there's like 200 people from Wisconsin outside trying to grab a shot of Drew Barrymore or something. Of course, I walked out.
No one even looked at me.

Speaker 8 A couple of older guys came up and said, can I take a picture? Because I think they felt sorry for me. And then I went to, where did I go? I went to.

Speaker 8 The View. Oh, The View.
That's right. Yeah.
That little show. The View.
Yeah.

Speaker 8 Alyssa Farrell is expecting, by the way.

Speaker 9 I know. We're pals.
Oh, yeah. And she's also publicly expecting.
Yeah.

Speaker 8 Well, no, I don't think I'm breaking news. And that was good, except I became a chocolate mess.

Speaker 8 I hadn't slept very well. I think I was still a little bit hungover from the mushroom chocolates on Friday night.
And they asked me about

Speaker 8 my dad passing away, and I literally started to cry, which is nice.

Speaker 8 You want to talk about a mood change? They're coming back from break and they're like, everybody gets a book. And what a great house, what a great time to be in New York.

Speaker 9 And I was like, yay.

Speaker 8 And then they're like, tell us about your father. And I start crying.

Speaker 8 And like, uh-oh.

Speaker 8 Uh-oh. They're like, okay.

Speaker 9 The magic of a lady show.

Speaker 8 They're literally like, who brought this? Who brought this weepy lady on?

Speaker 8 So that was kind of embarrassing. And then I went on Amanpoor and then I went on Katie Couric's podcast.
And then I went, she's very thoughtful and she asks very pointed questions.

Speaker 8 She got her questions.

Speaker 9 You're the first person to ever say that Katie Couric asked a good question.

Speaker 8 Oh my God.

Speaker 8 She went on Reddit and did her homework. And then I went on my favorite Anderson Cooper last night.
I wasn't as good on AC, unfortunately. But anyways.

Speaker 9 It was a long day. I didn't see that clip, so it's like it didn't happen.
It was a long clip. You're still perfect.

Speaker 8 All right. Enough of Scott talking about Scott.

Speaker 8 Today, we're going to talk about Trump's K-shaped economy one year into his presidency, how more Americans are feeling the fallout from the government shutdown, and the MAGA infighting over Nick Fuente's anti-Semitism.

Speaker 8 I don't love anti-Semitism, but I do love this fight. I do love, I just couldn't think of a better spokesperson for the GOP right now.

Speaker 8 I love watching them all try to be like, well, we want to maintain the racists in the big tent here, but we want to pretend this isn't a component of our party right now.

Speaker 9 When that became a topic, I was like, this is going to be Scott's favorite conversation. He's going to race through the whole pod so that we can talk about Nick Fuentes.

Speaker 8 Oh, I just, I just think it's fucking hilarious. I just,

Speaker 8 I don't know. It just kind of just kind of cracks me up.
Anyways, is that terrible? That's wrong. It's wrong to say it's hilarious.

Speaker 8 I'm going to hear from a lot of my Jewish friends that that is not hilarious, but I'm although you don't mean it like that.

Speaker 9 You just

Speaker 8 pretty hilarious.

Speaker 8 I love the GOP trying to walk it back. I love them trying to walk it back.

Speaker 8 Well, barely. He doesn't represent us.
Come on, Tucker Carlson.

Speaker 9 Okay. Right.
And then I'll defend Tucker Carlson to the death, which is what Kevin Ross is.

Speaker 8 Yeah, because,

Speaker 8 you know,

Speaker 8 we've made comedy illegal and we're in the business of canceling and we don't disrespect people's viewpoints. Anyways, let's get into it.

Speaker 8 It's been a year since Trump got elected and it feels like a good time to check in on the economy. The issue that arguably decided the last election.

Speaker 8 Remember, a lot of voters backed Trump because they felt squeezed under Biden and they wanted quote-unquote cheaper eggs? Now, one year later, we're still in what some call an affordability crisis.

Speaker 8 On paper, things look great. GDP grew 3.8 percent last quarter.
Unemployment's near record lows, and the SP 500 is up 16 percent this year. No recession, markets booming, people working.

Speaker 8 But that's not how many Americans are feeling. Prices remain high.
Home affordability is out of reach for millions, basically out of reach for young people. They've almost given up on it.

Speaker 8 And the wealth gap keeps widening.

Speaker 8 The richest households households are driving nearly half of all consumer spending, power, and growth, while everyone else feels left behind in this K-shaped economy.

Speaker 8 Jess, how are you thinking about this K-shaped economy?

Speaker 9 Well, I'm trying to get out of myself more about it or the people that I run into on a daily basis and look at the coverage of it and the stories that are coming from

Speaker 9 across the country. And it seems incredibly bleak.
Like when I was even reading the intro to the show, it surprised me to see that 3.8% GDP growth. I know it was revised up.

Speaker 9 And I mean, we don't even have people actually formally tracking the numbers anymore because Donald Trump has fired all of them until he can get some numbers that he likes.

Speaker 9 But basically, everything that I've seen for an average working American who isn't earning more than a quarter of a million dollars a year is pretty bleak and heading in the wrong direction.

Speaker 9 And while we're not in a formal recession, Scott Besson even admitted in a CNN interview that there are parts of the American economy that are in recession.

Speaker 9 And this feels like a massive stress test for the Trump administration. I mean, the facade of I'm actually here for the working man or woman is now gone, right? He's given up on that completely.

Speaker 9 And we're going to talk about the shutdown politics as well, where I think that that is the most acute.

Speaker 9 But if you have an economy that's only working for the people who can afford to own stocks like the Magnificent 10 stocks, which I want to hear you talk about, and

Speaker 9 you know that the average working person can't afford their groceries and has exactly the same complaints, and in some cases, even worse than they did under the Biden administration, it feels like they have forgotten the lessons of 2024.

Speaker 9 I mean, I have this conversation all the time with my colleagues when they're out there saying everything's fine, everything's fine.

Speaker 9 And they were on me during the Biden administration saying, How is it possible that you guys are ignoring what's what's in front of your face? People can't go to the grocery store.

Speaker 9 School supplies cost 30, 40 percent more than they did before. I mean, we have people in food pantry lines like we haven't seen before defaulting on credit card payments.

Speaker 9 Like, all of the indications are that the bottom part of the K is bigger than the top part of the K. And I'm curious as to where you think this goes.

Speaker 9 And in particular, the fact that we're starting to see this uptick in white-collar layoffs: Amazon 30,000, UPS 48,000.

Speaker 9 And, you know, I know that the Trump administration talks a big game about bringing back manufacturing to the U.S., which obviously hasn't happened, but they seem to have no plan for the effects of AI on people who have a college degree, like a law associate, right, who now can, chat GPT, can do their job much quicker and much cheaper than ever expected.

Speaker 9 So those are my broad strokes, but it seems bad.

Speaker 8 So I've maintained for a while that two two of the worst metrics in history that should have never been invented are the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S ⁇ P, and actually the NASDAQ, because they create cold comfort.

Speaker 8 They send an absolutely false signal about the state of the economy. And,

Speaker 8 for example,

Speaker 8 we should just have better metrics, like rates of teen self-harm.

Speaker 8 Figure out a way to measure obesity.

Speaker 8 Figure out a way to look at, I don't know, the average use of anti-anxiety medication, just to give people a better sense of how people are doing on the ground.

Speaker 8 Because I think, you know, some people say 10%, I think it's actually the top 1% now own 80% to 90% of the stock.

Speaker 8 So the NASDAQ and the S ⁇ P have largely become a wealth index, or they've become a wellness or financial wellness metric for the top 10%. And spoiler alert, they're doing better and better.

Speaker 8 We have, as a nation, decided, all of us from every income class, to vote in elected officials and laws that essentially say the bottom 90 are going to serve as nutrition for the top 10.

Speaker 8 Even our laws legislatively or in terms of the DOJ and ICE, and that is the top, really the top 10%

Speaker 8 are protected by the law, but not bound by it. And the bottom 90 are no longer protected by the law, but bound by it.
And let's talk a little bit about the economy.

Speaker 8 Better metrics would be things like sales of hamburger helper, which is up dramatically.

Speaker 9 Which is up. They actually, I saw segments about it from people who think that Trump's doing a good job pretending pretending that this is just like a fun retro craze.

Speaker 9 It's like, no, there's a reason people are eating hamburger helper. They can't afford actual steak because we bailed at Argentina and the cattle ranchers are mad.
Anyway, sorry.

Speaker 8 Yeah, it's not harkening back to a kinder, simpler day.

Speaker 8 Easy Pond, which operates 500 pawn shops nationwide, reported stronger sales of back-to-school items such as shoes, boots, electronics, and laptops.

Speaker 8 That is probably a better indicator of how people are doing. When pawn shops boom, that means people are really feeling economically secure.

Speaker 8 And what's happening in the economy and why it's so fragile is that America has essentially become a giant bet on AI. And that is the Magnificent 10

Speaker 8 are responsible for about 80% of the earnings growth in the S ⁇ P 500. In addition,

Speaker 8 without the Magnificent 10, the markets would be flat.

Speaker 8 And what happens is, or my thesis is that the S ⁇ P up 16% provides cloud cover for troops being sent into U.S. cities.

Speaker 8 That if the market was flat or even a little bit down, I don't think that Trump would have the cloud cover because there's this general weird sense that as long as the stock market is up, it must mean that the economy is good, which must mean that the president has made a series of good decisions.

Speaker 8 So we're going to give him the mother of all hall passes on everything. It's like I say to my kids, I say, look, you have one job.
If you get good grades, you can pretty much do anything.

Speaker 8 You can come home with a meth dealer. You can stay up till four in the morning.
If you do your one job, you've got to haul pass across anything.

Speaker 8 And America has essentially said that to the president, to the Oval Office. As long as the stock market is up, you can do anything, even if it's

Speaker 8 deploying a secret police force with mass.

Speaker 8 But what happens if those stocks run out of steam? In addition, the top 10% now account for 50%

Speaker 8 of all consumer spending. And why is that related?

Speaker 8 The top 10%, basically their consumer confidence and willingness to spend money, which accounts for half of the consumer economy right now, is based on how the stock market is doing.

Speaker 8 That's how they feel. That's it.
They think, okay, I'm going to buy a new SUV, even if I don't need it. I'm going to buy a second home, a third home, whatever it might be.

Speaker 8 I'm going to take, I'm going to fly first class instead of business class. I'm going to buy my husband this amazing over-the-top Christmas present.

Speaker 8 They spend a massive amount of disposable income when the stock market is up, A, because they have it, at least on paper, and it creates confidence.

Speaker 8 The scary thing about an economy dependent upon the top 10%, in addition to the moral issues where it's like, okay, should we really be going back to the gilded age, is that when things get rough, they can cut their discretionary spend overnight by 20, 30, 50 percent.

Speaker 8 If you say to a middle-class household, the economy is bad and their consumer confidence goes down, they can reduce their discretionary spend by maybe, well, that would make it not discretionary, they can reduce their total consumer spending by maybe 10 or 20% because they've got to eat.

Speaker 8 They've got to make that mortgage payment. They've got to make that car payment.

Speaker 8 Whereas people in the top 10% can literally turn off a tap and take it down 50, 60, even 70%, which means the economy is really susceptible to these AI stocks not living up to their extraordinary valuations.

Speaker 8 NVIDIA is now worth more than the entire German stock market. You could probably throw in the Spanish stock market just for fun, one company.

Speaker 8 And the expectations built into these stock prices are so enormous that this is how, in my view, the economy begins to kind of, if you will, unwind.

Speaker 8 And that is one of these companies or one of these clients, an SP 500 company that says a big client that spent tens of millions of dollars on site licenses and deploying AI, thinking it's going to revolutionize the way our supply chain is operated, said PepsiCo or Caterpillar.

Speaker 8 And then they come out on an earnings call and say, we are substantially scaling back our investments in AI because, quite frankly, it's not offering the ROI we had anticipated.

Speaker 8 That could start a chain reaction where all of a sudden NVIDIA, Palantir, Broadcom,

Speaker 8 the prospects of a trillion-dollar IPO from Open AI all start winding back.

Speaker 8 Similar to what happened in 99, where Amazon and Cisco lost 90% of their value, despite the fact we were all still very confident the internet was going to be huge and very meaningful to the economy, it began to just kind of unwind.

Speaker 8 If that happens, and there's an unwinding of just these 10 companies based on one technology, and by the way, they could get cut in half and they still wouldn't look cheap, you're going to see the top 10%

Speaker 8 scale back their discretionary spend, which has a disproportionate effect on the economy because they control so much of it. So, what do you have without AI right now?

Speaker 8 You have a stock market that is flat. You probably have a GDP growth that is zero.

Speaker 8 And quite frankly, in a weird way, you probably wouldn't have the same bravado or recklessness where the president feels like he can just start engaging in extrajudicial killings or sending ICE

Speaker 8 to sit outside of a Walmart where they are targeting people based on identity, not on behavior. So, this is, in my view, the economy is really fragile right now.

Speaker 8 Now, I also think I need to put an asterisk on this.

Speaker 8 If you're in the business of being an optimist, you have done better for the last, actually the last 150 years in the stock market. You always have to ask yourself, what could go right?

Speaker 8 Could we start seeing all sorts of different applications of AI? Foreign capital continues to flood in. But this, to me, feels like the thread we could pull on in the whole economy.

Speaker 8 If these 10 companies sneeze, the entire economy is

Speaker 8 going to get a cold. So it feels very fragile right now.
Any thoughts, Jess?

Speaker 9 Yeah, I mean, I like the analogy, I guess, of the thread because we all know what it's like when that button has almost fallen off your favorite coat.

Speaker 9 What's interesting to think about is the difference between what happens if the haves have less and the fact that the have-nots already do have less, because Donald Trump's polling numbers are abysmal on everything from his personal approval rating to how he's handling the economy.

Speaker 9 You know, 32% say the country is doing well, 32%,

Speaker 9 68% say the country is doing very badly. Over 70% think it's either poor or very poor.
61% said that Trump's policies have worsened the economic conditions in the country.

Speaker 9 And it's probably a bit of an occupational hazard that I pay too much attention to the kind of interviews that people are giving.

Speaker 9 But I watch especially the representatives from his economic team do these interviews, and they're totally divorced from reality.

Speaker 9 I mean, you have these moments where a besson, I guess, slips up a bit and said, I admit that parts of the economy are in recession, but generally speaking, they're towing a dear leader line about the realities on the ground.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 I'm not a Trump voter, certainly, but I know that millions of people took a flyer on this guy because they thought that he gave a shit about the price of their eggs. And I don't.

Speaker 9 know if the stock market is what's giving him cloud cover to go into these cities or to do the particularly egregious aspects of his administration or conduct.

Speaker 9 I don't know what is giving him the license to do the things that are particularly egregious.

Speaker 9 I think honestly he's YOLOing it and he knows that they're going to lose in the midterms and he's got to get his licks in while he can.

Speaker 9 And Stephen Miller has too much power, but it makes me sad to listen to all of these interviews. with Trump voters who are saying, I thought that he cared.

Speaker 9 He told me that this was going to be his focus.

Speaker 9 And, you know, we're about to talk about the shutdown where I think that's particularly acute. But

Speaker 9 it's a depressing state of reality.

Speaker 9 And I feel badly as well as a Democrat that there were so many people who felt that way about the Biden administration, too, that people were ignoring the signs that their lives weren't what.

Speaker 9 folks standing up at a podium at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue were saying that it was.

Speaker 9 And as someone, you know, that communicated what I thought were hopeful pieces of data about the trend lines and saying things like, I've had the best recovery in the G7, that doesn't make a difference to the mom that's serving hamburger helper the same way that

Speaker 9 talking about how well the stock market's doing and maybe doing a back channel deal so that NVIDIA can sell their Blackwell chips to China isn't helping that mom this time around.

Speaker 8 Yeah, just some data. Auto delinquencies are up more than 50%.

Speaker 8 Purchases of rice are up 8%. On Yelp, searches for cheap eats are up 21% compared to last year.
I mean, there's just some kind of scary

Speaker 8 indicators. And my

Speaker 8 theory here is a simple, if not a strange one. I think that the likelihood some Venezuelan fishermen who might be drug smugglers are blown out of the water.

Speaker 8 I would not get in a boat off the Venezuelan coast the moment Epstein ever creeps back into the news.

Speaker 8 Because I think the Trump administration says, uh-oh, he's back. Start tearing tearing down,

Speaker 8 you know,

Speaker 8 tear down the Washington Monument so that the media goes crazy and gets distracted. Or start, I mean, it's just so, it's so upsetting.

Speaker 8 It's such performative masculinity and weirdness to be going after the distribution system of the drug supply chain. Let's assume they're actually transporting fentanyl.

Speaker 8 That's going to have no impact. We can't keep drugs out of prisons, but we think that we're bombing some boats is going to keep drugs out of the United States.

Speaker 8 I would even appreciate it more if they were more transparent and said, look,

Speaker 8 we believe that rather than fighting all these wars in the Middle East, which are usually at the end of the day around oil, we're going to go after one of the largest reserves of oil and undo a corrupt government and secure just massive amounts of a new supply of oil.

Speaker 8 Venezuela, unfortunately, is that heavy crude, not that light sweet crude. But I can see economic and geopolitical and rail politic reality in that.

Speaker 8 But bombing fishing boats, I literally think most of this shit is ChatGPT saying this will keep Epstein out of the news for another 24

Speaker 8 or 48 hours at this stage.

Speaker 9 Or makes Pete Hegseth feel like a big boy.

Speaker 8 Yeah, and Trump likes it because it communicates strength. Meanwhile, Russia continues to make small but incremental gains.
And if you look at Ukraine,

Speaker 8 we've now decided to spend a trillion dollars more than the rest of the world combined on the military so we can be strong and thin, I guess. That's our big.

Speaker 8 We're going to start spending, I guess, hundreds of billions of dollars on GLP1 for generals so they don't embarrass Pete, Secretary of War. But if we wanted to make the world a more stable place,

Speaker 8 we would decide the best way to end a war is to win it. Wars end one of two ways.
Either one side just wins, or it's a stalemate. Right now,

Speaker 8 Ukraine is neither. Russia makes small but real gains every day.

Speaker 8 So Putin's under the kind of impression, it doesn't matter matter how many people I sacrifice, as long as I keep making some small gains, at some point I'll win here.

Speaker 8 And we keep sort of reluctantly just giving Ukraine just enough.

Speaker 8 I think if we were serious about the lethality and getting a return on it, I don't think you could spend a trillion dollars on your military and, quite frankly, not get onto your toes geopolitically as it relates to the application of lethal force where it strategically makes a shit ton of sense.

Speaker 8 It makes absolutely no sense to me that we're bombing fishing boats and not sending long-range missiles into Ukraine and giving them an opportunity to start really aggressively taking out the oil infrastructure of Russia, which consists or comprises 50% of their GDP.

Speaker 8 And absolutely, you would bring Putin to the table. And that's how Trump, who seems obsessed more with the prize than the actual peace itself, that's how you make effect real geopolitical change here.

Speaker 8 But this,

Speaker 8 again, it all goes back to, I think

Speaker 8 the person running the country right now is a dead pedophile.

Speaker 8 Should we move on? Should we move on?

Speaker 9 I think so.

Speaker 8 All right, let's take a quick break. Stay with us.

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Speaker 8 Welcome back. This week, the government shutdown officially becomes the longest in U.S.
history.

Speaker 8 And while millions of Americans are stressing about missed paychecks and losing food assistance, President Trump was busy throwing a great Gatsby-themed Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago, tagline and all.

Speaker 8 A little party never killed anybody.

Speaker 8 That was the name of the party.

Speaker 8 After a legal standoff, the administration says it'll release half of November's SNAP benefits, basically a short-term lifeline for the 42 million Americans who rely on food assistance.

Speaker 8 But airports are still short staffed. Families are stretching every dollar, and frustration just keeps building.

Speaker 8 A new CBS poll shows most Americans think no one in Washington, not Trump, not Congress, is handling this well. What are your predictions here? How long do you think this drags on?

Speaker 8 Do you think the Republicans come to the table? Do you think eventually there's some sort of accommodation here? Or do you think we're looking at 60, 70, 90 days of shutdown?

Speaker 9 I don't think that it's going to go that long. There are what seem to be hopeful signs for a short-term spending bill, you know, a decision about whether, like how short-term it will be.

Speaker 9 But Jon Thune, the Senate Majority Leader, has signaled optimism about it. He said, I think we're getting close to an off-ramp.

Speaker 9 And you also heard from Dick Durbin on the Democratic side, Chris Coons, also being positive that would include a vote on the Affordable Care Act tax credits, which is really what the Democrats are making the linchpin of their argument of what they need to see movement on to open the government, not like you get to vote on it after we reopen the government because we've seen that show before, and that's a dirty trick that the Republicans have been playing for months now.

Speaker 9 What I've been seeing, not only rooted in the data, but just listening to people, interviews, focus groups, et cetera, is that this was unequivocally the right fight for the Democrats to pick.

Speaker 9 Not only are Republicans being blamed 10 to 15%

Speaker 9 more for the government being shut down, but that Americans overwhelmingly think that it is important enough to protect their health care and to try to prevent these premiums from spiking on average 114% that the government need to be shut down.

Speaker 9 That does not mean, though, that the pain of this is not acute.

Speaker 9 And especially with SNAP benefits, which have been, as you said in the intro, halfway restored allegedly, that still hasn't hit people's accounts, right?

Speaker 9 That's just kind of a last-minute maneuver that the administration did. You know, you're talking about people, you know.

Speaker 9 not having to shelve a vacation they were thinking about. You're talking about dinner not happening.
And the stories are pouring in from across the country of what this will mean for Americans.

Speaker 9 We have 42 million people on SNAP, one in eight Americans. Is that number too high?

Speaker 9 Yeah, it seems like one in eight Americans in the richest, most powerful country in the world shouldn't have to be on food assistance, but that's where we are now.

Speaker 9 And usually going after the SNAP program is like the third rail and you don't do that.

Speaker 9 In 2018, when the government was shut down for 35 days, which we're surpassing now, Donald Trump made sure that people got their SNAP benefits.

Speaker 9 He knows because he said it back then that this is something that you can't go after.

Speaker 9 And when I listened to Mike Johnson, who was so sanctimonious, saying, you know, we're trying to do something to make sure that we can keep SNAP after Republicans voted to cut $186 billion out of the program in the first place.

Speaker 9 And we know that this is money that has been appropriated. A rest vote doesn't want to, you know, let up the gate and make sure that people can get their mashed potatoes and mac and cheese.

Speaker 9 You just think, like, what repulsive human beings are we dealing with?

Speaker 9 And the optics of two events, one during a shutdown where people are not working, getting furloughed, not getting their paychecks, including our military members for a time.

Speaker 9 And you've seen that military members increasingly are on essentially breadlines or going to food pantries. Like that's where we are.

Speaker 9 Donald Trump's construction crew still getting paid to take out the East Wing to build the ballroom.

Speaker 9 And then this great Gatsby themed party at Mar-a-Lago with girls in martini glasses and, you know, the Marie Antoinette memes cannot even do the depravity of this justice.

Speaker 9 And so I am proud that the Democrats pick this particular fight. And I really hope that it exposes for people how craven Republicans are in this.

Speaker 9 They say nothing of how much they're spending to make sure that people still get their private jet deduction and that it's really a bunch of moochers, moochers, by the way, who live in their states who vote for them, who send them back to office every single time.

Speaker 9 We have this with Medicaid, with SNAP benefits, welfare queens, whatever you want to say.

Speaker 9 I'm so grossed out by the state of affairs.

Speaker 8 Yeah, that was powerful.

Speaker 8 It's shocking how strategic and pointed the Democrats have become lately.

Speaker 8 I've just been so frustrated with Democratic leadership, and I think that they, I don't know if they hired a firm like, engaged someone like you who did polling like what you used to do, who just basically came back and said, this is the one issue.

Speaker 8 Don't muddy it up with a bunch of different shit. This is the issue.
And it's the following. Basically, they figured out a way, according to the polls, to say, all right, we.

Speaker 8 Republicans seem heartless about 14 million children going hungry.

Speaker 8 And in order order to feed those 14 million children, which the Democrats want, the Democrats are demanding that you bring down health care costs for our neediest.

Speaker 8 I mean, it's just a framing that is really hard for the Republicans to push back on. So, and it's very pointed.
It's very kind of relatable and understandable. And at the end of the day,

Speaker 8 as you said, when we have the largest economy in the world and we have incredible prosperity and markets touching new highs, it just feels like you would guess that country can feed its neediest and offer them health insurance.

Speaker 8 And so, my sense is they're feeling more emboldened and more confident, probably, than they've been in a while. This, to me, and again, I don't want to belittle the pain here.
And

Speaker 8 some of the impacts are go beyond. We've been talking a lot about SNAP.

Speaker 8 You know, there are hundreds of thousands of people who get their pharmaceuticals for their blood pressure or their chemotherapy treatments or tamoxifen if they're recovering from metastatic breast cancer.

Speaker 8 They get it via the U.S. Post delivered to them in places that are a long way from a pharmacy or a hospital.

Speaker 8 There are 300,000 people who are not working right now or not getting paid who work for Veterans Affairs, helping veterans

Speaker 8 with physical therapy and giving them literally like life-saving

Speaker 8 treatments and therapy that they, you know, these people are suffering. They're in huge pain.

Speaker 8 are, these are men and women who serve the country valiantly and that are quite, they're not, they can't go into the VA to get their, whatever it might be, their physical therapy or their help or their pain meds, whatever it might be.

Speaker 8 And so

Speaker 8 this has all sorts of ramifications across the ecosystem and really reflects, in a weird way, I do think Americans have finally hit a limit,

Speaker 8 but this is just not a, really not good look. Betters on Calci forecast the shutdown is going to last 49 days.
Roughly three-quarters of a million federal employees are out of work.

Speaker 8 Half of all federal workers make between $50,000 and $110,000 a year. It's just insane that members of Congress still get paid.

Speaker 8 It just seems like an easy bill for someone to propose would be any shutdown, we stop getting paid. We're Federal employees.
We are the first people that should lose our compensation

Speaker 8 if we can't figure out a way to keep the government open.

Speaker 9 Or to even just come to work. I mean, the Republicans have been on vacay,

Speaker 9 for all intents and purposes, for like six weeks at this point. And Mike Johnson,

Speaker 9 he is at Capitol Hill and he's giving these sanctimonious speeches every day where he says, you know, Republicans are here to do our jobs.

Speaker 9 Excuse me? They're at home. I mean, every interview that we even do is people that are at their home or their local constituency office because Washington is not in session.

Speaker 9 The Senate is there trying to figure this out more or less. But I'm concerned that Mike Johnson might not even accept something that comes back from the Senate side.

Speaker 9 And going back several months when we were talking about the big, beautiful bill, you know, a budget is a moral document, right? It expresses your values.

Speaker 9 And the Republicans are telling us loud and clear that their values do not align with the benefit of Americans.

Speaker 9 They align with the benefit of the top earners in this country, the top of the K, right, from the K-shaped economy. And I don't know.
how people could not hear this louder and clearer.

Speaker 9 And it doesn't mean that the Democrats are perfect by any stretch of the imagination.

Speaker 9 I would frankly love to see some sort of Obamacare reform proposal because we're fighting to keep premiums at a level that are frankly too high anyway.

Speaker 9 Of course, we can't withstand it going up to 300%, but Obamacare has a lot of problems, right? Like, let's get that plan.

Speaker 9 I want my, you know, my postcard, right, of your proposal, and I want to see healthcare reform on it.

Speaker 9 So it's not only that there should be a public option that people can get, but that you know how to reform the ACA, which has put 20 plus million people on health insurance that they need.

Speaker 9 They don't get it from their employers, but that there are smart fixes that we can push forward.

Speaker 9 And I feel like that is the secret sauce to doing well in the midterms and to becoming a more serious party to those disenchanted working class voters, for instance, who feel like they're just teetering back and forth between the extremes of the right and then the extremes of the left.

Speaker 9 Like give them something to sink their teeth in. We're trying to save your health care and also we're going to make it better in these ways.

Speaker 8 Yeah, you said something that I parrot and I think is powerful that budgets are moral documents. They reflect the values of a nation.
And the one thing that really stuck out to me is the following.

Speaker 8 So approximately 21%

Speaker 8 of Americans are under the age of 18.

Speaker 8 But 39% of SNAP benefits go to those people under the age of 18.

Speaker 8 So when you've decided, and let's be clear, there's something to America believes in winners and losers. America believes, my father used to say, America is a terrible place to be stupid.

Speaker 8 I think what he meant was America is a terrible place to be unfortunate. But we believe in winners and losers.

Speaker 8 We believe in an incentive system that makes it amazing or the potential fruits of hard work risk-taking are amazing and more upside than anywhere in the world. I think we're still holding to that.

Speaker 8 But we also believe, quite frankly, you can fall further faster here. And

Speaker 8 that is an ugly side of capitalism. It's true.
The question is, where do you want the floor?

Speaker 8 And

Speaker 8 if you are saying people under the age of 18, their success, my kids live a great life. It's not their fault.
It's none of their doing.

Speaker 8 It's because they were lucky enough to be born to parents who were really, really fortunate.

Speaker 8 People under the age of 18 who are on food stamps have done absolutely nothing wrong. None of that is their fault.

Speaker 8 And yet we have decided that the most vulnerable, the ones who have the least connection to the responsibility for their outcomes, that double on a per capita basis, double of their share as represented in the U.S.,

Speaker 8 need government assistance for food. And it reflects a couple things.
It reflects that slowly but surely we have transferred money from young people to old people.

Speaker 8 The DN democracy is working too well in the sense that old people keep voting themselves more money. Corporations and rich people have weaponized government.
And unfortunately, kids don't vote.

Speaker 8 And the people who are their parents,

Speaker 8 the parents of vulnerable kids, have absolutely no political power.

Speaker 8 So, and I looked this up: food payments go to a disproportionately smaller percentage of children as represented by their population in most Western nations. Because those Western nations have said

Speaker 8 to have a greater number of kids

Speaker 8 on these programs than they represent in population means we have failed. It means we really shouldn't be spending money on anything, not on airports, not on the military.

Speaker 8 If kids are disproportionately relative to their population, a disproportionate number of them are going hungry.

Speaker 8 And it just says something very ugly, not only about the shutdown and the GOP, it says something really ugly about the country, everybody.

Speaker 8 That slowly but surely we have let special interest groups and our leadership transfer capital from the young to the old, especially from the most vulnerable and the youngest.

Speaker 8 On that note, let's take another break.

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Speaker 8 Welcome back. Before we go, we're checking in on the latest GOPN fighting, this time over white supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes.

Speaker 8 Ben Shapiro is going after Tucker Carlson, calling him, open quote, the most virulent super spreader of vile ideas in America, close quote. Hmm.

Speaker 8 On a show Monday, Shapiro blasted Carlson for giving Fuentes, a known Holocaust denier, a friendly platform accusing him of normalizing hate and saying conservatives have a duty to draw moral lines, not blur them.

Speaker 8 In the latest flashpoint, in a growing rift on the right, between those trying to keep extremists out of the movement and those defending them under the banner of free speech, let's get a taste of the interview.

Speaker 18 So it was like mid-December, mid-late December. It's actually funny.
It was December 18th. I remember because that's an important date to me.

Speaker 18 And it's Joseph Stalin's birthday. Oh, I'm a fan.
You're a fan of Stalin's? Oh, he's an admirer. but we don't need to go into that.
I guess.

Speaker 17 Okay, let's get back to that. We'll circle back to that.

Speaker 18 It was weird because the reason I mentioned that, it was almost like

Speaker 18 because I woke up that day and I was like, oh, it's December 18th. And I was just like very acutely aware of like, today's like a strange day.
This is the day that the attempt happened.

Speaker 9 There was no circling back also

Speaker 9 on why Stalin's birthday is such an exciting day to Nick Fuentez, though I'm sure we can guess as as to why that's the case.

Speaker 9 But I think, you know, this goes to the larger conversation about the anti-Semitism, the bigots that are a part of the modern day right. And I know that there's been forceful pushback against this.

Speaker 9 I watched the entirety of Ben Shapiro's response episode, you know, over 40 minutes, and

Speaker 9 he

Speaker 9 dismantles all of them, showing tons of clips of Nick Fuentes talking about, you know, how much he hates blacks, hates women, that you should rape them,

Speaker 9 you know, everything was better with Jim Crow, like boohoo, you have to use a different water fountain, how much he hates Jews, talking about, you know, the impact of global Jewry and American Jewry.

Speaker 9 But what stuck out to me, I guess two-parted one, and Tucker does this regularly, or certainly since he's gone out on his own, where

Speaker 9 he lets a lot of insane things percolate and doesn't push back, but then, you know, has fierce fights with people.

Speaker 9 Like, I'm sure you saw the interaction with Ted Cruz, where he was like, Well, what's the population of Iran? And Ted Cruz didn't know it exactly.

Speaker 9 And that was became the flashpoint of that interview, but you just let someone like Nick Fuentes spew this kind of stuff.

Speaker 9 Second piece of it is that for all the people coming out to denounce Fuentes and Tucker Carlson, and even Kevin Roberts, the head of Heritage, who defended Tucker Carlson, nobody is mentioning the permission structure that Donald Trump has granted granted for these kinds of people to live in the modern day GOP and in the MAGA movement.

Speaker 9 And Nick Fuentes is all about America First, which is Donald Trump's insignia, right?

Speaker 9 And that's really frustrating to me because, you know, there have been very real accusations of an anti-Semitism problem on the left.

Speaker 9 I have talked about them myself, but nothing like this is going on at that prominent a level as what is happening with Nick Fuentes and the impact of these groipers.

Speaker 9 You know, you will have plenty to say, obviously, about these young, disaffected white guys that hang out in these chats with him and follow him.

Speaker 9 But that was frustrating to me in the pushback that nobody was connecting the dots to what the MAGA movement has allowed to fester and grow.

Speaker 8 Nick represents not only a dangerous component of the GOP, which has kind of been laid bare here, that they were hoping to just sort of keep on the down low.

Speaker 8 And that is keep voting for us, and we'll ignore some of the crazy shit you say, but just kind of keep it to yourself, wink, wink.

Speaker 8 And it represents something,

Speaker 8 a sickness much deeper in our society, and that is young men, because of the role models that they

Speaker 8 just naturally are going to look up to.

Speaker 8 The two premier role models for young men and around quote-unquote what should be a vision of masculinity are going to be the president who's the most powerful man in the world and the richest richest man in the world.

Speaker 8 We live in a capitalist society. We conflate capital and wealth with honor, dignity, achievement.

Speaker 8 And so what we've done is, is we've said manliness or being a real man or masculinity is conflated with coarseness and cruelty.

Speaker 8 And it's just sort of typical for someone who is trying to grab the mantle and appeal to some of these young men's worst instincts where they become isolated from friends, family, school, church, and start blaming others for their problems.

Speaker 8 And then their role models seem to say strength and leadership is being coarse and cruel.

Speaker 8 And if you look at who Trump admires, she and Putin, you know, a lot of people correctly describe these people as murderous autocrats.

Speaker 8 And then you have Nick Fuentes, who's trying to position himself as a leader of the right amongst young men. And he says that he's a fan of Stalin.

Speaker 8 And I just want to just go over some of Stalin's greatest hits here. Stalin is responsible for the deaths of roughly 10 to 20 million people.

Speaker 8 I mean, you could argue, so World War II, we lost 60 to 70 million people. You could argue that Hitler was responsible for that.

Speaker 8 You know, essentially, what was so strange about World War II as someone who stays up late and is 100 years old and watches, you know, World War II in color all the time.

Speaker 8 What was unusual about World War II is it was the first time that the losers killed more people.

Speaker 8 Japan, of the 60 million people that died, a few unusual things about the war, first time more civilians died than combatants. About 70% of the deaths were civilians.

Speaker 8 But basically, Japan and Germany killed about 40 of the 60 million people.

Speaker 8 And some people would hold Hitler responsible specifically for the 12 million people who died in his effort to eradicate the Jewish people.

Speaker 8 And then rounded up or included in that were political dissidents, gypsies, the gay community.

Speaker 8 But this guy, arguably, Stalin, arguably by many scholar standards, would rank in the top three of murderers in history.

Speaker 8 And the Great Purge, about a million people executed, gulags, which were forced labor camps, about 2 million people died from starvation, exhaustion, or execution.

Speaker 8 The Ukrainian famine, a forced famine, three and a half to five million deaths, deportations, collectivization, other famines. And this is a young man.

Speaker 8 who is getting platformed on podcasts with famous people that is obviously going to create a certain aspirational value value around his success that other young men will model.

Speaker 8 And then the cloud cover is a GOP that

Speaker 8 calls us out, but it doesn't feel like their heart is in it. Like, stop, stop, it kind of hurts so good, or just keep it below the surface.
And it says something really ugly about,

Speaker 8 you know, I've said the most dangerous person in the world is a young man with a lack of economic and romantic opportunities because unfortunately, women will oftentimes re-channel that energy into their friendships and their professional lives.

Speaker 8 And a lot of young men, unfortunately, then get radicalized online and start channeling that energy into conspiracy theory and the demonization of special interest groups.

Speaker 8 And I want to be clear, most men do not go there.

Speaker 8 Most are, and most men aren't going to pick up a gun. But there is definitely a very scary vein in America of young men who I believe have taken the wrong notes.

Speaker 8 from the people they're supposed to look to for guidance and what it means to be a man, and unfortunately have conflated strength and masculinity with a certain level of depravity that is mistaken for leadership and strength.

Speaker 8 And what I find is that the people that Trump respects the most are the ones who, quite frankly, use depravity and murder for control. He conflates that or finds that equivalent to strength.

Speaker 8 And I think it's starting to permeate down to young men.

Speaker 8 And

Speaker 8 I don't know what the answer is here. I got to be honest, I have felt this from the GOP, and I like to see it sort of laid bare.
Like, okay,

Speaker 8 folks, unless you swiftly condemn this

Speaker 8 in the most clear, certain terms, non-negotiable,

Speaker 8 you're sort of

Speaker 8 enabling it. And that's going back to World War II, I think the most shocking thing about World War II

Speaker 8 is how many enablers there were, including Americans who turned away entire cruise ships of Jewish refugees.

Speaker 8 So, but there just seems to be no shortage of enablers or people willing to turn another cheek in the GOP.

Speaker 8 And while the Democrats play too much in identity politics, have a purity test, are more concerned with virtue than the economic or material well-being of Americans, this is just a lot worse.

Speaker 8 This is in a different league.

Speaker 8 Your thoughts, Jess? Yeah.

Speaker 9 Yeah, well, I don't want to say that it's mainstreamed, but it's a hell of a lot closer to the mainstream than what's going on in our party with, you know, the uncommitted movement or people are disrupting town halls in Dearborn, Michigan.

Speaker 9 And I reiterate, there is an anti-Semitism problem on the left.

Speaker 9 But the people who have only been going after folks that vote like us about this have a tremendous amount of Nick Fuentes flavored egg on their face looking at this.

Speaker 9 And they only have to look a few weeks ago to the text messages, the GOP staffer text messages that were filled with similar vitriol to the kind of stuff that Nick Fuentes spews.

Speaker 9 And these are people that work in

Speaker 9 elected officials' offices that even included a state senator from Vermont who admittedly was called on him to step down, and he did. He's left his post.

Speaker 9 But you can see the impact of this kind of ideology on the rank and file, the future generation of the Republican Party. And we have many times asked the question, when is it a bridge too far?

Speaker 9 When do you just say, I'm hanging it up, right?

Speaker 9 Like, it's not worth it to get voted into this office over and over again if I'm not able to put policies into place that are actually going to help my constituents.

Speaker 9 And by extension, you have to ask yourself, are these the kind of votes?

Speaker 9 that I want that I can live with myself forgetting, that I can go to sleep at night and sleep fine, knowing that Nick Fuentes thinks that I'm in the good leadership stratosphere where he also puts Joseph Stalin.

Speaker 9 And that is the meta question in all of this. There's also the practical question of where the Heritage Foundation

Speaker 9 plays a role in the modern GOP going forward. Obviously, they're the birthplace of Project 2025, has had a huge amount of impact.
But the pushback, you know, internally, the Washington Post.

Speaker 9 got access to all of these internal chats, staffers freaking out. People have left the organization.

Speaker 9 You know, Kevin Roberts was clear that he abhors what Nick Fuentes stands for, but we have to let people say their peace.

Speaker 9 You know, there's a First Amendment in this country, and you're someone with an enormous platform, right?

Speaker 9 That people would be dying to get on one of your pods to have these conversations, but you have to have standards.

Speaker 9 And if you're not going to have standards, like I don't want a Holocaust denier on my show, you sure as shit got to have the pushback questions to make that 45 minutes or hour and a half or however long you have them worthwhile to the audience that they can see how depraved and misguided these beliefs are.

Speaker 9 And Tucker Carlson did none of that. And

Speaker 9 it is hugely embarrassing and hugely dangerous. And I went on YouTube to look at, you know, Nick Fuentes' show is on Rumble, but I went on to look at what Nick Fuentes looks like on YouTube, right?

Speaker 9 What the clips are.

Speaker 9 And there are a lot of people floating around on these mainstream platforms that see a lot in him that they think is right, and that applies to their situation and how they're feeling about the world.

Speaker 9 This kind of Christian nationalist, white identitarian vision for what the country would be. You know, people who hate folks of color, who feel displaced.

Speaker 9 And, you know, it was an excellent pitch for your book, what you were saying about what's going on with young men just a few minutes ago.

Speaker 9 But you need only look at YouTube comments on videos with Nick Fuentes in them to see how royally effed we are as a society.

Speaker 8 Yeah, it's the first thing I did when I saw this was I have a friend who's in comms for the Democratic Party. And do you remember those posters? I forget.

Speaker 8 Someone in the Republican Party under the guidance of Donald Trump was putting out this campaign poster and it said Trump, Kanye, Elon. Like these are the three

Speaker 8 legs of the story.

Speaker 9 The House account GOP accounts were tweeting that.

Speaker 8 Yeah, this is who we stand for. These are the men that represent the GOP, Trump, Kanye, and Elon.

Speaker 8 I said, you should do the exact copy of that communication and that graphic or that poster, and it should be Trump

Speaker 8 Fuentes Epstein. Just start putting that out everywhere.

Speaker 8 These are the new legs of the stool of the GOP. I just want to give a little bit of background.
I actually didn't know that much about Nick Fuentes.

Speaker 8 So a little bit of his story involves kind of multiple continually elevating steps towards radicalization. As a 18-year-old at Boston University in 2016,

Speaker 8 by the way, I wonder what that's doing for the applications to Boston University.

Speaker 8 Fuentes held mostly mainstream conservative views and was a Trump voter.

Speaker 8 He then began a show on the Right Side Broadcasting Network, which was abandoned due to his rhetoric, which began exploring ideas including denouncing multiculturalism, criticizing Israel, Christian nationalism, and questioning the Holocaust.

Speaker 8 Fuentes then dropped out of college and began a show in which he broadcasted live from his parents' basement. That seems fitting.

Speaker 8 By 2020, Fuentes' audience had grown, but in the wake of January 6th, which he attended, he was completely deplatformed. He was banned from all major social media accounts.

Speaker 8 His bank account was frozen, and he was placed on the federal no-fly list. After this, Fuentes continued to show by partnering with Alex Jones to create a new streaming website.

Speaker 8 Fuentes began to gain notoriety again, working with Kanye West on a possible presidential run and even attending a dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Trump.

Speaker 8 A man attempted to murder Fuentes at his house in 2024 while he was broadcasting his show. A lot of people would argue he's kind of filling the void that's been created after Charlie Kirk's murder.

Speaker 8 Fuentes was a longtime critic of Turning Point USA and Kirk. Since Kirk's death, Fuentes' following on X has grown by 175,000 followers.

Speaker 8 On Rumble, a live streaming platform, it's grown by 100,000 followers.

Speaker 8 Nick Fuentes and his rhetoric and Tucker Carlson, in my view, are the symptom, again, of a much deeper disease here.

Speaker 8 And that is young people, specifically young men who are more prone to conspiracy theory with a lack of opportunity. And then you can't,

Speaker 8 the wizard behind the curtain or the demon behind the curtain that we continually need to remind people is that this type of content is directly connected to the shareholder value of meta and alphabet.

Speaker 8 And that is the algorithms have figured out that this type of content creates so much rage and so many comments. And keep in mind, every comment is another Nissan ad

Speaker 8 and more advertising revenue and more shareholder value for Meta. So these platforms will elevate this type of incendiary content beyond its organic reach.
And this is a key point because

Speaker 8 I'm not suggesting we censor Nick Fuentes, the dissenter, crazy person's opinion.

Speaker 8 I think a key component of a democracy is that pretty much anyone can say pretty much anything about pretty much anybody.

Speaker 8 That is key.

Speaker 8 And you only test it when it's super fucking offensive, like this stuff. But the question is: should these platforms be unnaturally, inorganically elevating this content such that you see more of it?

Speaker 8 And my fear is that when a young man starts seeing this everywhere and starts getting links to it everywhere, that it becomes normalized and more acceptable, that they see it as part of the modern discourse and it taps into their anger.

Speaker 8 And this guy's telling them, your problems are not your fault. It's the problems.
It's the fault of these special interest groups that are out to diminish you, that are un-American.

Speaker 8 It's really it calls on a lot of things. Social media algorithms that algorithmically elevate content that is especially vile.

Speaker 8 The GOP is kind of hidden, trying to put in the closet and then pull it out around election time. Really vile, dangerous rhetoric.

Speaker 8 And also, and again, I'm a hammer, so everything I see is a nail, how we are producing just too many of the most dangerous, reckless

Speaker 8 individuals in history

Speaker 8 across the globe. And that is young men with a lack of prospects who

Speaker 8 turn their, I don't know, misfortune, if you will.

Speaker 8 It gets converted into rage with algorithms that elevate this content because there's a profit incentive around it.

Speaker 8 Jess, I'll give you the final word here.

Speaker 9 I couldn't have said it better myself. Rage pays very well.

Speaker 9 And if you don't have people in positions of power that are willing to stick their neck out and say, I don't want this guy's vote, I don't want him anywhere near me.

Speaker 9 And he's a poison, a cancer on society, especially I have a young son, you know, Baron Trump. I don't want Baron Trump to end up thinking that Nick Fuentes has a good point about anything.

Speaker 9 You know,

Speaker 9 we need better people in positions of power who are willing to speak up about these things.

Speaker 8 All right. That's all for this episode.
Thank you for listening to Raging Moderates.

Speaker 6 Just have a great rest of the week.

Speaker 9 You should. Well, I'll see you at your Why event because the book tour rolls on.

Speaker 8 That's right. Ben Stiller.
Is this a sell signal when Ben Stiller is introducing me?

Speaker 8 I think that means sell everything.

Speaker 9 No.

Speaker 9 It's just, you're just getting started.

Speaker 8 Yeah, that's right. That's right.
Anyways.

Speaker 9 And happy belated birthday.

Speaker 8 Oh, God, stop it. Have a good rest of the week.

Speaker 9 You too.

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