6/24/24: Trump Flips On Immigration, Trump VP Reveal, GenZ Rages At Boomer Economy, Corporate Greed Screws Americans
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Hey guys, Ready or Not 2024 is here and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that, let's get to the show.

Good morning, everybody. Happy Monday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. Many interesting things happening this morning and this week. So we got to bring you some of this Trump interview with the All In podcast folks completely changing tune on immigration to please his new donors. It is incredible. I love it. Sagar hates it. So a little reversal there. It'll be interesting to get into that one. Meanwhile, he says that he has picked

his vice presidential nominee. And he also says that person will be at the debate. So we've got lots of speculation there. Congressman Ro Khanna is going to be in studio to talk about why he will not be attending Benjamin Netanyahu's speech here to Congress. A lot we want to ask him about with regards to that. We also have some other updates with regard to Israel that mass

We had a massive Lebanon war against Hezbollah looking more and more likely in the US, basically giving a green light for that. We also had an uptick in deadly strikes in the Gaza Strip over the weekend.

Meanwhile, we're taking a look at the economics of various generations. Looks like Gen Z, even though millennials graduated into, you know, horrible economic crisis, it actually looks like Gen Z has it even worse than millennials did when we were young and coming out of college. So we'll take a look at those numbers. Sagar has a great look at science.

Saudi involvement in 9/11, our great friends there. This comes, of course, as we're considering this big defense pact, so important context. And we also have New York Times columnist and author Peter Goodman, who is asking whether global trade was a mistake

in a new book that I took a look at. It's an excellent book. I really recommend it. It's about how the supply chain went completely haywire during COVID, getting down to the granular specifics of, you know, trucking and ports and shipping and all of that. So very excited to talk to him as well. Before we get to any of that, though, Sagar, this week is debate week. That's right. Kind of

crazy. Debate night, the earliest presidential debate in modern American history. We'll have live coverage here at the desk with all of the crew. We're going to have a special section for our premium subscribers. They're going to be able to ask questions during that debate. So go ahead and sign up if you want to get in on that. Breaking points at

We're really excited. We've got all the coverage plans, special graphics, et cetera. So just, yeah, programming update then on Thursday. Thursday morning, we're not going to have our normal show. We will go live. What is it? Around 8 o'clock, something like that. We'll keep everybody updated and we'll go all the way through after the night. We'll bring everybody some analysis and all of that. Staying up late for you guys. Yeah, that's right. It's a major sacrifice. This starts at 9 p.m., which is already an attack on both of our lifestyles. But that's the sacrifice that we do for you.

All right. So let's go ahead with that and get to the show. As Crystal alluded to, Trump sat for the All In podcast, popular technology podcast, for those not familiar, hosted by four venture capitalists. Two of them are donors to him, by the way. That's right. We should note. Two of them. Well, I...

I don't know about, I think Chamath, yeah, you're right. Chamath is a donor. David Sacks, certainly. I've had David here on the program. You can watch that interview if you're interested. All of them are very wealthy, near billionaire status, if not billionaires, literally themselves. Here is a question from Jason Calacanis. Jason is kind of the center left person

host of the All In podcast. And he asked Trump about high-skilled immigration visas being stapled to green cards. This has been a major priority for tech oligarchs for more than a decade now at this point. And just listen to how Trump answered the question. Let's take a listen. We need high-skilled workers in this country. Yes. We need to recruit the best and brightest from the world. Every time we get somebody super intelligent from India or Europe, any country, we need

Three of us are immigrants, sir. Yeah. And three of the four here are immigrants, the ones without the ties. And we can get these great people into our country. And that's a loss for our adversaries and our competitors. And it's a gain for us. But I've never heard you talk about this. Can you please promise us you will give us more ability to import

the best and brightest around the world to America. I do promise, but I happen to agree. That's why I promise. Otherwise, I wouldn't promise. Let me just tell you that it's so sad when we lose people from Harvard, MIT, from the greatest schools and lesser schools that are phenomenal schools also. What I want to do and what I will do is you graduate from a college

I think you should get automatically as part of your diploma a green card to be able to stay in this country. And that includes junior colleges too. Anybody graduates from a college, you go in there for two years or four years, if you graduate or you get a doctorate degree from a college, you should be able to stay in this country. And you know more stories than I do, but I know of stories where people graduated from a top college or from a college and they desperately wanted to stay here. They had a plan for a company, a concept,

And they can't. They go back to India. They go back to China. They do the same basic company in those places. And they become multi-billionaires employing thousands and thousands of people. And it could have been done here. It was such a big deal. Somebody graduates at the top of the class. They can't even make a deal with the company because they don't think they're going to be able to stay in the country. That is going to end on day one. That's going to end on day one. Let's talk about that.

Let's just say this is probably as big of a flip-flop as it gets there from Donald Trump. Look, personally, I think this policy is incredibly idiotic and stupid. Basically, we just continue to turn universities into foreign visa farms. So there's a lot of reasons why we shouldn't go down that hill. That being said, the most important part of this interview is just to show everyone how Trump is very comfortable—I think that's a kind way of saying it—

Flip-flopping on previously held longstanding positions through his administration, through his advisors and others in exchange for basically campaign cash. I mean, as Crystal, you said Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sachs both hosted a Trump fundraiser in Silicon Valley, which raised big bucks, a lot of billionaires, a lot of people who previously had not really entered the fray in politics attended the fundraiser. This is just a pregame

preview again into how Trump is conducting himself in this election. And I want people to understand, whether you think about the policy or not, Trump unambiguously was against his policy back in 2016 and in 2020. The reason he's changing his tune is this is the number

number one priority for tech oligarchs. I have been involved in these circles now for quite some time. There are entire think tanks stood up here in Washington specifically by the technology industry to lobby for more H-1B visas and more of these student visas specifically because these are the people who go to work for them. That's what they want. They want more. And look, let me say also this. It's not that I'm against immigration. This is not fair even for many of these people.

So just to explain, in the H-1B system, for example, they're your sponsor. So like let's say Facebook sponsors you. Well, if you get fired, you lose your visa. So what does that mean? You really don't want to get fired. It also means maybe you're going to take 85% less than an American citizen who can leave if he wants. And everybody wins, right? You get to get paid less. You get a nice visa. You get to stay here in San Mateo and you get to buy a house. It's cool. Same with these universities.

You think that these universities aren't going to just start charging $100,000, $200,000 per year to every rich kid from China and to India because they get automatic green card? What does that mean again? Oh, US citizen, he's a problem. She's a problem. You got to, oh, she can leave if she wants to. Oh, you know, oh, well, what if she decides not to graduate or something like that? They have you by a chain. You're like a slave. That's what a lot of these systems eventually evolve into, not to mention just outright visa fraud. So these are all things that

You could go listen to Stephen Miller say, for example. But now, you know, because these tech people are putting money into his pockets, Trump, just like on several other issues, either that he doesn't care about or previously had flip-flopped on like TikTok, if it's up for sale to the highest bidder. That's why it's ridiculous. I mean, I find it so entertaining because- I mean, is it? No, it's funny. Like, don't get me wrong. It's just so-

It's just such a shameless cash grab. It's incredible. I really recommend you go and listen to the interview we did with Matt Stoller, who was really, he was early to recognizing not just the different policies that Trump has promoted, but his rhetoric is completely different from 2016. I mean, he doesn't

doesn't go after corporations at all. For those of you who were all about the Bud Light boycott or whatever, Trump got out there and was like, stop boycotting Bud Light, guys. Right, because Anheuser gave them money. Yeah, that's right. The Anheuser family literally cut him a check. Even on something that's just like a core hot button culture war issue, he took the side of the corporation. It's incredible.

It's incredible to me. I mean, personally, I support this policy, but you're 100% right, Sagar. I support higher immigration levels. So what will happen here is he goes even further than Hillary Clinton did back in 2016 because her program, I think we have A5. We can put up A5 on the screen. Hers was just with regards to STEM graduates. Trump says, no, no, no. Right.

we want to staple the green card to all, including junior colleges. So yeah, what would happen is, you know, you'd have a lot of junior colleges or diploma mills that set up like this is now your way to get a green card. This is your way into the country. Again, I fully support it because I support higher levels of immigration, but it could not be.

more of a 180 degree flip from where he has been. And especially the reason it's so funny, because he flips on issues all the time. He's like all over the map on critical things like the Ukraine war and our policy vis-a-vis Israel, all kinds of things. He can be all over the place, just depending on what audience he's trying to please at the moment. But the assumption had always been there were maybe a few things that he actually cared about. Immigration was at the top of that list. He had

This man doesn't care about anything. He's decided the number one priority is getting the cash from Wall Street, which he's doing very successfully. We're going to have some of the numbers there. And the big one that doesn't get as much attention is Silicon Valley. And that is reflected certainly with this policy, but also with his flip on, say, crypto, which is another area where he's done a complete 180 in service of getting donors. And this is also, we're going to get to who he's thinking of for VP. This is also why I think there's a chance that Doug Burgum

Former Microsoft executive does end up as Trump's VP because what does he bring with him? He's, you know, no drama. He's sort of, people say he looks like George Washington. My daughter said he gives patriotic eagle. But anyway, I can see Trump liking the look of him. Yes. But,

number one, he brings a lot of money and a lot of Silicon Valley comfort to the table. And clearly that's something that's important to Trump. It's amazing. Yeah. Bergham is himself a near billionaire. Crypto is another good example. By the way, I support crypto. So like, I'm fine with it. But like you just said, it's one of those where it's like, dude, you're obviously doing this for cash because Trump came out and this was famous in the crypto Bitcoin community. He was like, I'm against Bitcoin. This is bad. His administration actively lobbied against Facebook Libra. If anybody wants to know, could go back and

look into that. I mean, he was vocally anti-crypto along with Steve Mnuchin, who worked in the government, much through the chagrin of a lot of people in the Bitcoin world. Then just the other day, the Winklevii, who you may remember from the...

social network movie. They're actually real, by the way. And they became fantastically wealthy themselves because they were very early to Bitcoin. They opened their own exchange called Gemini. Well, both of the Winklevii endorsed Trump just like a couple of days ago openly because they're like, yeah, he supports Bitcoin. I mean, and so it's it's

It's just naked. The TikTok one too, the TikTok flip. TikTok is a great example. I recognize that. So Jeff Yost is an American billionaire. He's worth some $24 billion. I think he's a Mar-a-Lago club member. He wasn't nearly as involved back in 2020. This time around, he makes his inroads to Trump. He's one of the largest single shareholders in ByteDance, which is the Chinese holding company that owns TikTok. A

substantial portion of his own net worth is up in ByteDance. So what does he do? He donates huge amounts to the Trump campaign, ingratiates himself, and now all of a sudden Trump is pro-TikTok. Now, again, each of these policies, you can evaluate them on their face, like crypto, TikTok, immigration, whatever, that's fine. But what are we doing here whenever it's so naked and it's out in the open?

So for all of those, you know, like ultra pro-Trump people, I just think, look, at the very least, you got to make your peace with this and understand that whoever's got the cash is actually who's going to win. Not all that different last time around, but at least there was some rhetoric. And this is the thing, too. He's dropped even the rhetorical allusions to any sort of a different like populist rhetoric.

Republican Party. He tried to pull himself out more recently at a Faith and Fam, it was like Freedom Coalition or whatever event, talking about, he's like, we need some migrant UFC events. Let's take a listen. Dana White. Did anyone ever hear of Dana White? He's a legend, right? UFC, ultimate fighter, ultimate fighting. And he's a fantastic man. I said, Dana, I have an idea. Why don't you set up a migrant league of fighters?

And have your regular league of fighters. And then you have the champion of your league. These are the greatest fighters in the world. Fight the champion of the migrants. I think the migrant guy might win. That's how tough they are. He didn't like that idea too much, but actually...

Not the worst idea I've ever had. So it's like, he's trying to pull himself out. He's trying to get credentials back with the immigration hawks. And that's another one where I have no respect for people whose like major issue is like immigration, for example. And then when Trump, who is like their God King,

betrays them, they don't say anything. So shout out to, there's a lot of real ones out there. People like Ryan Gerduski and others, they really care about the issues. They're actually consistent. They'll criticize people whenever they actually go against the grain. But here you have Steve Bannon, who is, again, he's like the so-called ideological godfather of MAGA, of Jacksonianism. He's like the major defender of the policy. Just listen to the most milquetoast criticism here.

of Trump whenever he outright flip-flops on this. Let's take a listen. The exit visa should be clipped to the diploma, the exit visa. We can't make the world, okay, we can't keep the world on our shoulders and keep spending money on all these forever wars and this international apparatus in this empire. We want the nations of the earth to also make themselves great again.

People by and large want to live back where they come from and where their folks are and what their culture and society is. Yes, let's take them in on a selective basis, train them up, let them root for college football and get all that. You know, you look at the college football stands, the diversity, it's fabulous. But then it's time to go back home and make your country great again. Work for your country and make it great again.

That is the way we go as nations of the earth, as nations of the earth, and we move together. We can't suck it all in like Britain did. You can't do that. Then it's going to be, these are going to be shells of each other.

What? You know what word I didn't hear? You know what word I didn't hear that entire time? Trump, the guy who said the policy. This is what I'm talking about. It's like if you this is if a Democrat said this, if Mitt Romney said this, if Mike Pence said this, it would be slaughter out in the open. He wants to replace us. He wants to just imagine if Nikki Haley said this on a debate stage during the Republican primary. The only difference is I would be like, yeah, that's stupid either way. But these people, they have no integrity.

Like, you know, in general, they are just willing to go along because they know if the clip goes viral, then Trump will find out and they're going to be out of his good graces and they'll stop being MAGA warriors. So there are very few out there who are being genuine, you know, in their criticism here, but the nakedness of it, it's just too much. It's too much. And you, you know, we have this political story, which just details, you know, so many key instances like this, where Trump keeps flip-flopping his policy positions against

after meeting with rich people. For example, the All In podcast is what they start with. They point to the TikTok ban. They point to the cryptocurrency. But there have been other just cartoonish elements here with Trump. For example, he recently had a fundraiser where he's like, anybody who donates a million dollars can come and take this microphone right now and speak at my event. And he had like three people do it. Yeah. Three people just walked up and were like, yeah, and then ranted about whatever, you know, Israel, you know, anything he wants. Miriam Adelson-

cuts him a hundred million dollar check. It's flying around Nikki Haley in her Gulf Sands jet. And what does Trump say on the policy? He's like becoming even more pro-Israel and basically tacitly agreed that he will allow Israeli total control of the West Bank. He won't even rhetorically push against it. Yeah. So how is that not foreign interference in our elections? That's right. All of these cases. Is this buy in our form?

policy. It's basically for sale to the highest bidder of whatever they want. And again, you can have policy which you agree with, disagree with, but that's not how, at least allegedly, this entire drain the swamp rhetoric from 2016, what happened, man? It's gone. It's just totally gone. Absolutely gone. But you can't say it's not paying off. Of course it's paying off. Put A6 up on the screen. Biden had a big cash advantage

and has been able to run a bunch of ads and sort of get started early. Apparently, they used to have a $100 million cash advantage, but Trump has out raised Biden by $81 million in the last two months.

And now the gap between the two of them, when you look altogether at both the direct campaign contributions and the outside groups, which are just important in terms of fundraising, Trump has effectively closed the gap. So his shameless Wall Street and Silicon Valley and Miriam Adelson cash grab, definitely paying off.

also want to say there was also a huge fundraising surge in smaller dollar contributions to Trump after he was found guilty. So it's not all just because of the shameless cash grab. It's also partly because of the cult of personality. But there you go. So it's working for him in terms of those goals. And I think he rightly, he sees

this landscape. He famously said, I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue. It's the case. He could shoot his own original policy in the head on Fifth Avenue and people would still, oh, well, if Trump said it, it must be fine. It must be good. Here's the question. How many of these boomers who are going to listen to the Steve Bannon podcast, whatever, it's War Room, right? How are they even going to know that Trump flip-flopped?

if that's the way that you milquetoast criticize, they're not going to know. Same on Fox News. It's like, are they really going to cover this over on Fox for real? Is this going to be part of the Jesse Waters monologue? Like, not a chance. I'm waiting and I'm hoping that somebody will actually have some integrity on this issue. But, you know, I'm not delusional. And the more that we look

at all of the, you know, from the campaign so far is this really is a road to hell because it's not just Trump, you know, who's holding big dollar fundraisers. Biden is doing it as well. Biden on these glitzy stages, he just had George Clooney and Julia Roberts. The art of the mega campaign fundraise seems to be more overt today than ever before. Yeah, that's true. Right? There's not even a pretense around it. I mean, the Democrats don't even pretend like they're going to do campaign finance reform.

They just rent out, what is it? They have that New York City place and they have three presidents up there and you get to pay $1,500 or whatever a tick. And they raise $25 million in a single night. Why should they even tweet or hit your campaign inbox? Sure, they're going to make some money. But the vast majority of the dollars have been coming in for the Biden people. For him, he doesn't want to go out there and

campaign. He just wants to go hit a room full of rich folks. Reid Hoffman, for example, another Silicon Valley billionaire, he's fundraising huge fundraisers for the Biden campaign. And I mean, don't get me wrong, by the way, 85% or whatever of venture capitalists are still donating Democrat. It's just that there's also super ultra wealthy ones on the right now as well. So in both cases, everybody is just getting in on the game. And it's more of a club of elites at the top than ever before.

really. So I'm not even sure that's true with the regard to the venture capitalists anymore. If you look at wall street overall, so Obama was the first Democrat that like won the wall street donation bid war, right? Um, he was able to out fund him. This was touted as like a positive thing at the time, by the way. Anyway, since Obama, obviously with Hillary, then Biden last time around, um,

Democrats have been sucking up more Wall Street cash than Republicans. Yes. Right now, Trump is ahead of Biden. And it's the first time again since back during George W. Bush.

So he has flipped that dynamic very successfully. And it's not only through these things. And we also covered how, you know, he's just very naked. He'll go into a room full of billionaires or, you know, very high net worth individuals and tell them, listen, you got to give to me because I'm going to give you your tax cut. Like, I'm going to make sure that there's a return on investment in that cash. He went to oil executives and

and told them, hey, you need to raise a billion dollars for me because I'm going to make you lots of money. And I'm going to roll back any sort of regulation. I'm going to take, I'm going to completely unleash it. Like you do whatever you want. You're going to make a ton of money. It's going to be worth it for you. So there's a culture of just brazenness

That I think has really developed. I mean, Trump always takes things to the next level. But the Supreme Court has basically said that unless you're literally like Bob Menendez taking gold bars in exchange for explicit business promises, then it's all fine and good. So this is the hell.

that they have unleashed where foreign policy is up for sale to the highest bidder, tax policy up for sale to the highest bidder, immigration policy up for sale to the highest bidder. The funny thing too about the immigration policy, which again, I support because I support higher immigration levels. And I do think that what Trump is talking about here would open a massive pathway to a lot more immigrants. And I do also think he makes a good point

about, oh, part of the reason that this country has been as strong and successful as it is is because we have been a magnet for the brightest minds around the world through our university and education system. And to then say, okay, well, now that we've trained you up, you have to leave, I think is counterproductive in the terms of the national interest. But, you know, the funny thing about it is, to your point, Sagar, if Biden proposed this,

Not a fucking chance. Not a chance. Not a chance would this be allowed through. Trump could actually get it done, though, because you see the slavishness of the level of devotion to him, the cult-like approach to anything that he utters.

So if he actually, I don't know if he will, I don't believe a word this man says, who knows what he actually would do in office. But if he actually decided he wanted to deliver for David Sachs and Chabot Palihapitiya and his other Silicon Valley buddies, and he's got Doug Burgum on the ticket, then I think they're

is a good chance that he does it and he could actually do it where Biden and the Democrats couldn't. It's like the Nixon goes to China thing. It's like, you know, Clinton being the one who could actually end welfare. When you go against the grain of what your party typically stands for, you sort of force your own partisans into line. The other party may already agree with you. And then there you go. So, um,

The irony here is that if anyone was going to get this done, it would be Donald Trump. Yeah, yeah, you're probably right. Maybe you will do it. I will just say, look, we already have an O-1 visa. It's called a talent visa. And if you're allegedly so great, you can apply for it. Currently has a 97% acceptance rate. Just so people know, it's not like people are hard up right now for talent visas to the country.

Hi, I'm Katie Lowes. And I'm Guillermo Diaz. And now we're back with another season of our podcast, Unpacking the Toolbox, where Guillermo and I will be rewatching the show. To officially unpack season three of Scandal. Unpredictable. You don't see it coming. It's a wild, wild ride. The twists and turns in season three. Mesmerizing. But also,

Also, we get to hang out with all of our old Scandal friends like Bellamy Young, Scott Foley, Tony Goldwyn, Debbie Allen, Kerry Washington. So many people. Even more shocking assassinations from Papa and Mama Pope. And yes, Katie and I's famous teeth pulling scene that kicks off a romance. And it was peak TV. This is new Scandal KC.

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Meet the real woman behind the tabloid headlines in a personal podcast that delves into the life of the notorious Tori Spelling as she takes us through the ups and downs of her sometimes glamorous, sometimes chaotic life and marriage. I don't think he knew how big it would be, how big the life I was given and live is.

I think he was like, oh, yeah, things come and go. But with me, it never came and went. Is she Donna Martin or a down-and-out divorcee? Is she living in Beverly Hills or a trailer park? In a town where the lines are blurred, Tori is finally going to clear the air in the podcast Misspelling. When a woman has nothing to lose, she has everything to gain. I just filed for divorce. Whoa, I said the words.

That I've said like in my head for like 16 years. Wild. Listen to Miss Spelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Let's go to the next part. You alluded to the vice president. Trump says he has picked his vice president. Let's go and put that up there on the screen. Donald Trump told NBC News, quote, in my mind, yes, I have picked the person that will, quote, most likely then be at the Thursday debate against Joe Biden. He says they will be there. I think we have a lot of

people coming. So Trump said nobody knows his choice yet. Currently, there are multiple people who are in contention. NBC claims Doug Burgum, J.D. Vance, and Marco Rubio are, quote, the possible top contenders. I don't know how much I would take that list necessarily to the bank. But Doug Burgum, I don't think there's any chance, is not near the top of the list. He is blank slate. People can go watch our interview with him, you know, if you're interested. It doesn't—

Look, in terms of his political experience and all that, let's just be kind and say it's not near the big leagues. But he has been making the rounds on television and kind of slavishly selling himself as a Trump defender. Here, for example, is a recent interview he just gave yesterday talking about the veepstakes,

Let's take a listen. But the real thing, which we ought to be talking about, is Joe Biden's choice for VP, because as you showed earlier in the show with with Joe, with him obviously failing right now in front of the world stage and the national stage. And then he picked four years ago someone who's got no business experience, no operating experience between Biden and Harris. They've never created a private sector job in their life. And then here we are facing a set of issues that a businessman like Trump

can really take care of, which is our economy. Trump's proven that he can take care of the border. And Trump's energy policy is gonna change the whole national security scene. So I think that the focus ought to be on Biden's choice and who knows if Biden's even gonna make it to the starting line. - So who knows if Biden's even gonna, it's like, dude,

answer the question. It's like, are you actually in the running for VP or not? He also went on CNN. He said Trump was a dictator, or sorry, Biden was a dictator, actually, when asked a question about Trump. Let's flip this also, and let's go to the next part, just to show you. There's like multiple competing factions, as I understand it.

Apparently, Rupert Murdoch has been pushing Doug Burgum, and he really doesn't like J.D. Vance. Donald Trump Jr., though, has kind of his own coterie of people. Him and J.D. Vance have become relatively close. J.D., for example, appeared on Trump Jr.'s podcast on Rumble. Trump Jr. has been tweeting about J.D. Vance. You want somebody who's more ideologically aligned with the quote-unquote America First agenda. This is one of those where I just don't know who is going to win out. All—all—it's—look, it's—

Look, it's certainly possible Trump picks somebody who ideologically could be his enforcer, somebody like J.D. It is also equally possible that he picks somebody like Marco Rubio. Now, one of the reasons that I've heard about Rubio, Crystal, is that they are very excited about the burgeoning Hispanic vote and they want somebody who can genuinely speak Spanish, who can cut ads for them.

that they could play all across South Texas, Florida, et cetera. The other one is that Trump himself right now is so beholden and so excited by cash and by billionaires that Doug Burgum both has traditional Reaganite

policy. Obviously, he'll just say whatever he needs to say, you know, to take the job. He himself has got a lot of money, so he could both write checks and he can get a lot of rich friends to donate. And he's not offensive in any way. Like, he makes the billionaires very, very happy. And right now, obviously, they're in his ear. And Trump has been taking a lot of advice from them. Everything I've read currently is that the, like, old guard GOP has been donating a lot of money to Trump this time around. They're pushing Trump, somebody like Burgum and Tim Scott,

very heavily. So we will find out. I doubt we'll actually, I'm actually, I'm curious. What do you think? Do you actually think he's going to tell us on debate day? No. Yeah. I don't think so either. Cause you wouldn't want that to upstage whatever he's about to do. Maybe it'll be the day after. I'm not sure, but.

- I think he's gonna wait till the RNC to announce. I mean, I just think he'll want the build up. - He likes the show. - Exactly, he wants the show. I mean, to announce it at the debate or after the, it just kind of lacks the pop that he would want. I don't know, I'm feeling the Bergamentum. Who knows? - I think you're right. - I mean, Tim Scott is another one where the donor class really loves him. - They love him, love him. - So I could see the logic there.

Listen, Trump last time made a very strategic choice. He needed to, back in 2016, he needed to solidify his standing with evangelicals who were a little shaky with him. Mike Pence was the perfect pick and I think was really responsible for helping to get him over the top at then, especially after Access Hollywood. It was a very clever choice.

And Pence was incredibly loyal to him all the way up until basically January 6th. So, you know, on every level, it was a tactically wise choice for Trump. I think he will make another choice that he feels to be in his tactical interest. Because remember, this man is not just fighting to get back in the White House. He really is also fighting for his, like, freedom because he's

There is a good chance that even though these various case, the documents case, for example, even though they've been slow rolled and are not going to come to some sort of conclusion before the election, if he doesn't win, he's facing tremendous legal jeopardy. And so I think that's something not to lose sight of, which is why, I mean, listen, who knows?

I don't have any special insight into the mind of Donald Trump, nor do I want to. But I just find it hard to believe he's going to pick someone like J.D. Vance. Because what does he bring? What does he bring coalitionally? You know, he doesn't bring, there's not a demographic group that Trump's going to imagine he brings to the table. There's not a group of donors, like the donors, if anything, they don't really like J.D. Vance, like the Rupert Murdochs of the world. He's friends with Silicon Valley. Are uncomfortable with him. That's true. He is friends with Silicon Valley. He helped make the all-in thing happen, right? But the other thing is that like,

J.D. Vance is trying to channel what Trump said in 2016, and it's no longer actually an ideological match even. So I don't know. We'll see what direction he goes in. But given the ideological direction he's moved in, given what he's prioritized in terms of this campaign, I don't know. There's a lot there in terms of like a Tim Scott or a Doug Burgum, someone who really is a sop to the donor class. And we

And we should also say, too, and give Biden his credit, it's not just that they've grown more comfortable with Trump and he's given the, hey, I'll give you your tax cuts. I'll give you your deregulation. I'll flip-flop on TikTok. I'll flip-flop on crypto. I'll flip-flop on carried interest. Whatever you want, I'll do it for immigration. It's also that Wall Street really hates Biden's antitrust division in particular. They hate it because so many Wall Street—

like rank and file workers, they get their bonuses based on mergers and acquisitions. And Biden's antitrust division has really put a lid on all new mergers and acquisitions. So that is a big part of why Wall Street really dislikes Joe Biden, in particular, really dislikes Lena Kahn, who he has sort of turned the policy over towards.

and has really charted a much better course in terms of antitrust enforcement. And they absolutely hate that. I'm sure they're not in love also with the new labor organizing and the way Joe Biden's NLRB is positioned. But I do think antitrust is sort of like the key rub for them. So it's not just that they're more comfy with Trump. It's also that they're unhappy with some of the Biden economic policies and the way it's hurt their bottom line. Yeah, certainly. Look,

Don't get me wrong, they don't like him. Trump also, it helps if Trump is like, yeah, sure, whatever you want in terms of the policy. Last time around, it was a little bit different. We will see, certainly. I think J.D. still got a decent shot just because Trump Jr. really likes him. Do you think

- I don't think the dad cares what Trump Jr. thinks. I just really kind of doubt that. - What I think is that FaceTime at Mar-a-Lago matters with a man who's constantly polling people around him. And I know JD's basically been a second. - I get a vibe of a lot of disrespect towards Don Jr. from dad. - I'm more saying that's how he's been able to get in.

He likes people who go on TV. J.D. goes on TV and defends him. So does Doug Burgum. So does Tim Scott. J.D. actually is articulate versus some of the other candidates there who are in the race. Coalitionally, it's true. I mean, Ohio, you're going to win Ohio no matter what.

Again, it really feels about how comfortable he is in a victory and what it's going to look like. And also the optics that he wants on television, because Trump himself doesn't like to go in and do all he likes to spar, but he doesn't want to do the daily hits. Whereas I think the VP candidate, just like all of these people have been all over television. He wants them on TV constantly defending him like a surrogate. So who he thinks will representatively do a really good job against Kamala Harris and

also just on television constantly defending him, that is what's going to come into play because he's always about the optics and about how it's going to look going into the race. So I'm curious, too, to see what he does. I would give all of them a relatively equal shot. I do think Burgum...

I don't know. I'm just feeling Doug Burgum right now. Yeah. Yeah, as well. It would be so funny because you guys got to go back and watch the interview. I never in a million years would have thought he had a shot at anything. Just go watch it. Just go watch it. That's all I have to say.

Hi, I'm Katie Lowes. And I'm Guillermo Diaz. And now we're back with another season of our podcast, Unpacking the Toolbox, where Guillermo and I will be rewatching the show. To officially unpack season three of Scandal. Unpredictable. You don't see it coming. It's a wild, wild ride. The twists and turns in season three. Mesmerizing. But also,

Also, we get to hang out with all of our old scandal friends like Bellamy Young, Scott Foley, Tony Goldwyn, Debbie Allen, Kerry Washington. So many people. Even more shocking assassinations from Papa and Mama Pope. And yes, Katie and I's famous teeth pulling scene that kicks off a romance.

And it was Peak TV. This is new scandal content for your eyes, for your ears, for your hearts, for your minds. Well, suit up, gladiators. Grab your big old glass of wine and prepare yourselves for even more behind the scenes. Listen to Unpacking the Toolbox on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Meet the real woman behind the tabloid headlines in a personal podcast that delves into the life of the notorious Tori Spelling as she takes us through the ups and downs of her sometimes glamorous, sometimes chaotic life and marriage. I don't think he knew how big it would be, how big the life I was given and live is.

I think he was like, oh, yeah, things come and go. But with me, it never came and went. Is she Donna Martin or a down-and-out divorcee? Is she living in Beverly Hills or a trailer park? In a town where the lines are blurred, Tori is finally going to clear the air in the podcast Misspelling. When a woman has nothing to lose, she has everything to gain. I just filed for divorce. Whoa, I said the words.

that I've said like in my head for like 16 years. Wild. Listen to Misspelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Angie Martinez. Check out my podcast where I talk to some of the biggest athletes, musicians, actors in the world. We go beyond the headlines and the soundbites to have real conversations about real life, death, love, and everything in between. This life right here, just finding myself, just relaxation, just not feeling stressed, just not feeling pressed. This is what I'm most proud of. I'm proud of Mary because I've been through hell and some horrible things.

That feeling that I had of inadequacy is gone. You're going to die being you. So you got to constantly work on who you are to make sure that the stars align correctly.

Life ain't easy and it's getting harder and harder. So if you have a story to tell, if you've come through some trials, you need to share it because you're going to inspire someone. You're going to give somebody the motivation to not give up, to not quit. Listen to Angie Martinez IRL on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Cheaters and Backstabbers. I'm Shadi Diaz. And I'm Kate Robards. And we are New York City stand-up comedians and best friends. And we love a good cheating and backstabbing story. So this is a series where our guests reveal their most shocking cheating stories. Join us as we learn how to avoid getting our hearts broken or our backs slashed. Listen to Cheaters and Backstabbers on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Welcome to the CINO Show. I'm your host, CINO McFarlane. I'm an addiction specialist. I'm a coach. I'm a translator. And I'm God's middleman. My job is to crack hearts and let the light in and help everyone shift the narrative. Whether your get down is sex, drugs, alcohol, love addiction, self-hate, codependency, or anything else for that matter.

I want to help you wake up and I want to help you get free. I want to help you unleash your potential, overcome obstacles, and achieve your goals. Most importantly, I don't want you to feel alone. So join me on The Cino Show, where each week we'll feature a compelling individual with an even more noteworthy story that will be sure to inspire and educate. Listen to The Cino Show every Wednesday on iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, let's move to the next part, and this is very relevant to many of the things that we talk about here on the show, just about how Gen Z may actually have it worse off financially than millennials, millennials who graduated into a terrible economy with sluggish employment, with

Well, it turns out inflation plus sluggish employment may be the worst of all worlds. So let's put this up there on the screen. We have here the article, but let's actually go to the next part with the charts because this really demonstrates to everybody. So here we have Gen Z inflation-adjusted change for 16 to 24-year-olds who are spending 140% more on vehicle insurance, 110% more on housing, with a real wage increase of just...

25 to 30%. So barely keeping up with the level of food inflation with housing and with car insurance dramatically outpacing it by almost fivefold. If you go to the next part, you can actually see this as well.

The average credit card balance has increased the most for people who are Gen Z, 42.9%, right up there with our fellow millennials at 42.5%. 29% for Gen X, just 14% for boomers, and 7% for the silent generation. Next part, please, as well, you can see here being hit hard the worst by inflation.

inflation. The way that they calculate that is just about the level of price increase over the course of your working life. So obviously you can see there for millennials and for Gen Z, but there's also a lot of goods and services that people need to spend on necessities whenever they're younger. That's going to take up a huge more, a bigger portion of their income. And that gets us to the last chart. If we can put that, please, the outside share on necessities, where you can see that a

Compared to all ages, rent is 20% of a Gen Z overall spending, just 6%, 8% for all ages. So almost three times more there for rent. Dining out is roughly similar. Car insurance, roughly similar. But gas is higher. The rent equation and housing just shows us again how much worse it is for the younger that you are. You're not in a house, which means you are subject to the worst single part of inflation with housing prices.

with rent and your inability also to save to buy that house. So it all comes back to housing, as they say, and as we continue to say here on the show. It really is astonishing when you think about it. When you think about, you know, millennials were basically like in college or graduating into this massive economic crisis where the bottom just completely fell out. And that impacted millennials' employment. It impacted their earning prospects. Really, that lingers actually throughout an entire career. Oh, for sure. And so even though

you had this massive economic crash, just the fact of how much housing, food, car insurance, health insurance, how much those costs have gone up has actually made it so that even without this singular financial crash-type event,

Gen Z is doing worse than millennials at the same point in their lives. It really is quite eye-opening. It truly is. And just to go over a couple of the numbers again, Gen Z workers, they're more likely to go to college.

They're more likely to have jobs and they make more money, right, in nominal terms, not of inflation ingested, in nominal terms than millennials did. So you'd look at that and say, okay, well, they should be doing pretty good, right? Wrong. Because they're paying 31% more for housing than millennials did when they graduated college after ingesting for inflation. Car insurance by people 16 to 24 more than doubled over that time period. Health insurance spending doubled.

46% increase from when millennials were coming out of college and having to figure out health insurance. So when you add all of those things up and then you look at tepid wage growth that does not even come close to

to comparing, it is quite astonishing. And it also obviously dovetails with our politics. You know, all these people, oh, the economy's great and unemployment's low and the stock market is so high. You think these people have investments in the stock market? They're just trying to be able to afford a grocery bill. They're just trying to be able to make it in terms of rent. I mean, that's really the one that's such an incredible burden. And so, of course, they don't feel like the economy is good. Of course, they don't feel like this economy was designed to work for them because it's not.

And it also really explains why you've seen such an age divergence in terms of perceptions and reality of the economy. And then that's trickling down into political choices, obviously. But it's quite something to see it laid out like this. Yeah, well, we have some of that, actually. CBS News just put out a new poll about young people. Now, whether we agree with the actual numbers on Biden or Trump or not, they had good insight into what the outlook of this generation is.

Let's take a listen. We're gonna look at all the key groups in this election, but I wanted to start with this one. What's interesting about them is they feel like they've already been tested in their lives. This is a generation, the younger part of them who were in high school or college during COVID in the lockdowns. And most of them tell us that interrupted their education. They also look back, say they were more concerned about gun violence during those years than older generations. But what's really interesting here is,

They are also feeling like the older generation has handed them, has left them a world that's more dangerous and a climate that's worse. And that motivates a lot of the issues that they care about. Having said that, Margaret, you can look at polling from the 60s when the baby boomers were the young generation then, from the 90s when it was Gen X. There have always been generation gaps in America.

But for this generation today, they're the most racially diverse generation that the country has ever seen. And that comes out in their politics too. They tell us they feel that politics would be better, not just with more young people in it, but also with more minority voices in politics, with more women in elected office. And they feel that way much more so than the oldest generation does.

So there you go. Also, the funny thing is, as usual, media, they're like, oh, race and all that. I'm like, yeah, what about some diverse opinion? That's really what I think a lot of people are thinking as well. So as usual, people, they can see it on the surface, but then they never estimate their own culpability. But we can't put our own people off the hook. We don't vote even close to the same numbers. Not enthused, not excited, not engaged in the political process, lack a lot of

more community roots. There's a lot of reasons for that, but structurally, it just means you're not going to have as much of a voice, you know, in the system. And thus the system chugs along for the old, for the boomers and for the silent generation. Yeah. I mean, they're certainly not wrong that the way the economy has been set up

And the ideological project, you know, predominantly of the boomers has it's massively inflated asset prices. So what does that mean? That means that they're like, OK, my parents were able to get a home. Remember the concept of a starter home? You know, the idea that you could like get a job and then you can buy it. That's dead. That doesn't exist.

I don't know if I'll ever be able to buy a home is what they're thinking. They're looking at the cost continuing to go up and up and up. Mortgage rates obviously have made it so much more expensive. You're competing now against Wall Street buyers who are coming in or people who are already wealthy and older who can plunk down all cash offers. You just feel like you don't stand a chance. You feel like your parents' generation had a lot more opportunities open to them than you do.

you know, that's really antithetical to our self-conception as a country. Like the idea of the country, the sort of like, you know, the core American dream ideas, things just keep getting better. And, you know, as parents too, like it'll even, I'll be able to pass forward something to my kids that will be even better and they'll have more opportunities than I did. Young people don't feel it that way and they haven't felt that way for decades.

quite a while, really since the financial crash, I think, and everybody who has come after. And inflation has been such an incredible burden for this generation to be able to cope with. The wages have ticked up some, but it's not nearly enough to deal with when you look at things like health insurance.

Right. Well, you referenced starter homes. I was telling you I read that book about grand expectations about America. It was really inspirational, honestly. It was a cool country. We used to build a lot of stuff. We had these things called Levittowns. They're very famous with starter homes. So I'm looking in Levittown, New York, in the neighborhood that was supposed to be starter homes, which were very available.

to the average middle class. The cheapest house that I can find in Levittown is $415,000. That is a complete starter up and it's a condo. It's a one bed, one bath. If you want a 1,400 square foot house, which is like kind of redone, but still done in the 1950s whenever it was born, $650,000.

Good luck, good luck paying $655,000 for a house that was built, what, in the 1950s, starter home, 1,400 square feet, which was considered a starter home at that time, and no garage parking.

That's the country that we live in right now. Yeah. And that's like, I mean, we're not talking about Manhattan. We're talking about Levittown, which is far away. It's probably still, what, an hour drive or something like that. And there's a couple of other Levittowns across America, I think one in PA as well, similar in terms of their prices. There's a good write-up there about how all the old starter homes from the 1950s to the 1970s now are selling for like –

orders of magnitude more in terms of percentage of income than they did at the time. So we have a crisis and nobody just seems to care about it. And that's why, you know, the rent piece of this for the younger generation, I think, you know, they're going to be the most like pro-housing generation ever just because they got more screwed than anybody else. It's going to take a long time before a lot of the boomer political power fades away. Yeah, no, that's right.

Very excited to be joined today by Peter Goodman. He is the global economics correspondent for The New York Times. And more importantly, for our purposes, let's put this up on the screen. He's the author of a terrific new book, How the World Ran Out of Everything, that takes a look at the

catastrophe of the supply chain on every level during COVID and also takes it back to the origins of what created so much fragility and some lessons learned for moving forward. Great to see you, Peter. Congratulations on the book. Good to see you. Great to see you guys. Thanks so much. So I just gave my little synopsis, but why don't you talk about why you wanted to write this book? Because you were covering all of these major backups, snafus, shortages, et cetera, as they were unfolding.

Right. I mean, I never expected to write about such a wonky subject as the global supply chain. I mean, it's kind of in everything that I've written about for the last three decades. But to go hard at it, I mean, it happened really because we all discovered that this system, that we don't think about it. I mean, it's a series of overlapping systems, a whole army of people who make our products and get them to our door.

it just kind of buckled and collapsed right when we needed it most. I mean, I was living in London in lockdown, had a baby born in the first wave of the pandemic. Our son was born on April 8th, 2020. And my wife was pretty stoic about the fact that, you know, I couldn't be in the hospital.

an hour after he was born. We couldn't get the usual National Health Service checkups, and her parents couldn't fly in from New York to help with the baby. But where we all just kind of lost it was then we get home and we discover that we can't find hand sanitizer anywhere, and we can't even find the ingredients to make hand sanitizer. And

This was just sort of cosmically bewildering, and I think most people can relate to that. So as I found myself writing about all of the constituent components of this collapse, the container shipping crisis, the supposed shortage of truck drivers and warehouse workers, which was really just the result of downgrading people's jobs to the point where we ran out of people willing to do them in the middle of a pandemic, I realized that this was indeed a book.

Right. I mean, no, you did a fantastic job here. And we have this book review, which I think is really hits at the crux of what we're talking about. We can put it up there on the screen. Was global trade a mistake? You can tell us whether you agree with that question or not.

But most importantly, you focus in on just-in-time manufacturing and how the entire modern consumer economy was constructed around this global exchange of goods. And that with a supply shock like the pandemic, it threw things for a loop that had devastating consequences for a lot of American consumers. So where do you fall on the question and specifically here with just-in-time manufacturing?

Well, I don't think global trade or just-in-time manufacturing are mistakes. I think the mistake was allowing a system to be constructed by publicly traded, profit-maximizing corporations that were largely deregulated. You know, to do these things while we're in the thrall of this kind of ruthless form of efficiency that, as I demonstrate in the book, isn't actually that efficient.

We can get into this in detail, but one of the most incredible things I discovered in the book was in the middle of pandemic, rail companies were actually sending cargo to the wrong destinations intentionally, resulting in delays and product shortages because they were so obsessed with proving to Wall Street that they were lowering their dwell times.

You know, this metric that had currency on Wall Street. That's how long cargo sits in any particular place. So I found this engineer in Idaho who was just appalled to discover that he's hauling things to the wrong destinations because some guy running a rail yard in Nebraska is just attaching cargo to whatever the next train is that's moving out of there, never mind who happens to be waiting for that cargo. So the mistake was allowing monopoly control

you know, to develop. I mean, a lot of the industries that I'm writing about, transportation, meatpacking, have, you know, leaders who have market share that would make the robber barons blush. And just in time was this idea, you know, pioneered by Toyota at the end of the Second World War, that instead of just making as much stuff as we possibly could, a la Henry Ford, uh,

Just make what you need to replenish the cars that you've already sold, get your suppliers to bring parts and raw materials to the assembly line just as you need them. That worked out very well for Toyota. It dropped consumer prices very low. It did reduce a lot of waste, but along comes, again, the paramountcy of shareholder interest,

I spent a lot of time looking at the role of McKinsey and other consultants in turning just-in-time into this crude imperative for companies to just slash inventory to the bone, take the money that they used to waste as they see it, stick in parts in warehouses as a hedge against trouble like the pandemic, and then just give the money to themselves through executive compensation, through bonuses, through dividends and share buybacks that make the investor class unhappy.

leave the rest of us running out of all sorts of vital things, you know, basic chemicals to make medicines, protective gear in the middle of the pandemic, computer chips, which means we can't make medical devices. I mean, we are still right now paying the costs of this excessive embrace of just-in-time. Wow.

I think one of the most important reasons to read your book also is to really wrap your head around some of the ways that we were really lied to during this period of time. For example, a sort of micro example, you know, we were told, oh, there's this shortage of truckers. Like people just they don't want to work. They just don't want to work hard. So there's not enough truckers.

So, you know, what we need to do is actually get Congress to fund these education programs that, by the way, we, the trucking companies, are going to nobly run. And I'm sure that's not, you know, that's not a kickback whatsoever. Instead of actually looking at the fact

You've made it so people cannot live on these jobs. You're putting them in massive debt. Of course you have a shortage of truckers because you've made the job so incredibly miserable. And then at the macro level, so that's a sort of micro example that I'd love you to talk more about.

because I think it's a really, really important one. But also at the macro level, you know, the big story about inflation wasn't, they'd say something about the supply chain, but the real problem was that people got money during the pandemic. Oh, they got the child tax credit. They got those direct checks and people went out there and they were spending money like crazy. And that was the one and only cause of inflation was this spending that benefited average people.

people. Your book really takes a look at the way that that, at its core, was also an incredible lie in service of people's ideological project, in service of hiding these corporate shenanigans also, and just a sort of greedy profit maximization that you expose as well. Yeah, I really appreciate that careful read. It's true that

But time and again, I mean, this to me is sort of reminiscent of how the subprime mortgage crisis gets blamed or really the derivatives crisis that then trashes the financial system, that trashes the regular economy that all of us depend on. That gets blamed on poor people who were greedy about buying houses instead of the Wall Street players.

who gorged on synthetic derivatives. And, you know, again, we're told to your point, Crystal, that yeah, inflation is, you know, the cause of, is the result of having, you know, helped people who were thrown out of work or who couldn't pay their bills. And, you know, they went out and just extravagantly blew it all on Pelotons and the supply chain couldn't handle it. Now, now we're dealing with inflation. Uh,

I mean, the reality is that engineered scarcity is part of our global economy. Uh, and monopoly power is not some sort of accident. It's the result of corporate strategies. And, you know, in, in fact, uh, you know, I tell the story of how, uh,

The Trump administration used an executive order to keep workers laboring in slaughterhouses, even when it was very clear that they were super spreaders, when local public health authorities across the country said, we've got to shut these plants down. People are getting sick. And the Trump administration dropped this executive order that forced...

Among others, a woman whose story I tell in the book, a refugee from Myanmar named Tin Ai, who kept going to work, was one of five people who died at the Greeley, Colorado plant owned by JBS Foods. This is the world's largest meatpacker. It's run by two convicted felons from Brazil who fraudulently amassed money

tens of billions of dollars to buy up slaughterhouses. Four companies control 85% of the meatpacking capacity in the United States. And the cynicism of this executive order was premised on the idea that if we don't keep people laboring in slaughterhouses, Americans are going to go hungry. And in fact, as I reveal in the book, at the time when this order drops, the meatpackers, including JBS, are sitting on record volumes of frozen product. They're exporting product

to China, among other places. So we asked Tin Eye and other slaughterhouse workers to sacrifice their lives in the name of feeding everyone where really we were just funneling fatter profits to monopoly companies. And that is the reveal of this book again and again, that we blame...

To your point, truck drivers for somehow losing their appetite for driving trucks. We've got 10 times, I'm sorry, we've got three times as many people as we need with commercial driver's licenses in the United States. Why is it that so many people walk away from truck driving? Well, I spent three days riding along with a truck driver

from Kansas City down to Dallas and back in the middle of winter. And boy, I can tell you from having slept in the bunk for a couple of nights, from being there as this driver is worrying about where I'm going to, where's he going to park? He's got to caffeinate enough to not fall asleep at the wheel, but not so much that he has to stop and use the restroom. I mean, these are the sorts of thoughts that fill the heads of people we're entrusting to deliver stuff while we're asking them to be away from their families, to have

less and less control over their schedules, to be at the mercy of this just-in-time system where we basically treat them like their own time and their family time is limitless and valueless. Yeah. I mean, Peter, one of the things that you write about is that, and also that they mentioned in their review, you're not naive enough to think that this is just going to go away, but we are going to have to reach some equilibrium. What does the future look like?

I mean, we have to welcome this labor mobilization because Henry Ford, who's a very problematic character, who I use quite a bit in the book, he did know a thing or two about supply chains and mass assembly.

He said directly, as he doubled wages for workers in 1914 and was called a communist by parts of the business world, he said, look, I'm a capitalist. I'm trying to make my products, trying to drop the price really low so they can have mass appeal. And I need people showing up for work who aren't worried about paying their own bills and who are happy to be there and feel part of it. And he specifically said any business that's

premised on low wage labor is inherently unreliable. So we should embrace the fact that, you know, rail workers, I traveled with traveling maintenance crews, that they've managed to extract some paid sick leave, not enough, but some through Biden's bully pulpit, resolving their threat of a strike. We should embrace

we should be happy that dock workers were often treated as sort of aristocrats of the supply chain. Their only move is to threaten to monkey wrench the supply chain to get more job security in the face of automation. We should be glad that they're well-paid. I mean, those are tough jobs. Truck driving has always been a difficult job, but back when the Teamsters were in charge, another problematic institution, but nonetheless an illustration of what happens to wages and working conditions when there's strong labor power

We didn't have a shortage of truck drivers back when the Teamsters were in charge. So we don't want to go back to the 70s. We don't want the government setting the prices of everything, but we need more transparency in the market. We need the international shipping cartel, something we haven't talked about. There's basically three alliances, like air alliances, that dominate the most lucrative routes across the Pacific and from Asia to Europe. We need regulations so that

These entities are treated more like utilities. I mean, utilities make money. They're profit-making entities. But we understand that electricity is really vital. We don't think about it much. But when it fails, we sure do. And we need to take the same approach to these crucial components of the supply chain. Mm-hmm.

I have a media question for you, which is, yeah, I'm thinking specifically about the meat shortage thing, which I saw covered, you know, credulously across a lot of media outlets of, oh, my God, there's going to be a meat shortage. And I guess we just have to keep these slaughterhouses going. What are you going to do?

You may have written about it and I missed it, but I didn't see reported anywhere what you just said about how actually they were sitting on this tremendous surplus. They were selling to China and had frozen and freezers and whatever. This was never actually gonna be an issue. So why is that? Why was the, we're gonna run out of bacon and we're gonna run out of pork story? Why did so much of the media run with that and not actually even do just the basics of checking? Is this even actually true?

Well, I think it would have been hard to check the part about the surplus in real time because it took Congress actually using its power to demand documents to produce some emails that brought that home. But I will say this, you know, I mean, it's not just my colleagues in the media. It's also, you know, mainstream economists. I mean,

We like to think about supply and demand because we learned about it in textbooks in college and grad school. And let's face it, supply and demand is a really beautiful model that does explain certainly part of the supply chain shocks.

I think that market concentration and monopoly power, you know, these are things that we're kind of trained not to think about. And the economists who are easiest for beat reporters to get hold of generally work for companies that are interested in making equities go up. I mean, that's just the reality. That's not some sort of conspiracy. That's just the reality that a reporter who's on deadline, who needs an economist to make sense of some

arcane subject that they don't really know about, they need to get expert enough to write about in the next 15 minutes, can easily get hold of somebody at a bank that's invested in making equities go up to go find somebody who really understands monopoly power. There's a good chance that person is at some nonprofit and they're busy dealing with some sick kid who's home from school or they can't afford childcare. I mean, there's just friction in the system there.

And so it's not something that we're trained to think about much. Once you start to see monopoly power in the economy, you can't unsee it. Once you're there, you're there. And I do hope that my book will be part of, I think, a movement amongst those of us thinking about it to bring that home for people. And I hope no one will ever see a package that lands at their door, you know, the same ever again. Hopefully.

My last question, Peter, is, obviously, you learned a lot. Your book is helping us learn a lot about what actually went wrong during the pandemic, about how this almost like religious devotion to cutting inventory created all this fragility that wasn't in the interest of anyone, wasn't even in the interest, medium to long-term interest of these companies that were so devoted to that direction.

Do you think that on a deeper sense, like the country, those companies, policymakers actually learned anything from what should have been an incredibly searing experience? I think policymakers have learned something. I mean, I think it's not an accident that the Biden administration is now engaging in industrial policy, whatever you think about that. And we're spending tens of billions of dollars in subsidies to make sure that computer chips are made in the United States. There's

There's a concerted effort to make sure that the electric vehicle industry has time to develop in the U.S., which is why there are trade protections against Chinese imports. Again, reasonable people can disagree about the permutations of this. I mean, I talk to people all the time who say climate change is not going to wait for us to sort out the trading rules. You know, we need to buy what's needed right now to deal with that crisis. But clearly there's been a policy shift in the United States in terms of

the people who run publicly traded corporations, yes, there's a push to diversify away from heavy reliance on China. I mean, I just came back from a couple of weeks in India where Walmart is shifting production that used to be in China. It's not an abandonment of China. China is going to continue to be, you know, right at the center of global manufacturing, but it's sort of

Marginal shift. I mean, 15 years ago, if you flew down to Bentonville, Arkansas, and you were trying to get your product on the shelf of a superstore, the Walmart buyer would ask you, well, where's this product made? And if the answer was something other than China, you had a problem because that indicated that you weren't making it at the cheapest possible price or at the most efficient scale. And now if the answer is only China, you have a problem.

That's viewed as you're putting us at risk of these geopolitical shifts. I mean, you got the Trump tariffs on imports from China. Now the Biden tariffs continued. Whoever wins the presidential election in November, you can pretty much count on trade animosity between the US and China continuing. You got the shipping crisis. So these things are changing, but as I say in the book,

I am dubious that the further away we get from the pandemic, this will stick because the simple fact is that if you are running a company that's publicly traded and you're suggesting that we move production away from the lowest cost provider or we think about more redundancy or let's put more parts in a warehouse, you're essentially arguing let's dilute the next quarter's earnings and Wall Street might punish you for that. And by the time some crisis happens,

that will reveal that we should all be grateful that you took these steps. There's a good chance you're out of a job. Whereas if you're still saying, let's carry on with the same sort of globalization that we've all lived through for the last three decades, there will be a shock. I mean, there will be another pandemic, a typhoon, you know, who knows? Something we're not thinking about that will reveal that

as folly. But with any luck, by then, you know, you'll be on some beach, you know, in a hammock, hoisting a cocktail, it'll happen on somebody else's watch. And that short termism that has driven our particular kind of capitalism and globalization is still with us. Yeah, I mean, basically, if you're arguing for those sorts of redundancies, because so much of executive compensation is tied to the stock price, you're basically arguing for cutting your own pay, which they are

probably pretty unlikely to go in that direction. I just wanna say to people, it is a wonky subject. It's a very readable book. You take us through a small businessman in what was it, Mississippi? - Mississippi, yeah. - He's trying to get his product manufactured in time for Christmas. And you use that as a story to go through each of these pieces of the supply chain, which completely collapsed.

during COVID and help us make sense retrospectively of some of the things we were experiencing in our own lives and draw some lessons from the future, I really highly recommend it. And I really appreciate you, Peter, taking some time with us this morning. Oh, I really appreciate you guys. Thank you so much for your excellent questions. Yeah, it's our pleasure. All right. Thank you guys so much for watching. We have a great show for everyone tomorrow, and we'll see you all later.