Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
Speaker 1: where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
Speaker 1: today's best minds, and GOP Congressman Don Bacon confirms the
Speaker 1: DoD Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered pause and cyber operations against Russia.
Speaker 1: I wonder why we.
Speaker 2: Have such a great show for you today.
Speaker 1: The Lincoln Projects owned Ritt Wilson joins us to discuss
Speaker 1: life in the newly minted United.
Speaker 2: States of Arabia.
Speaker 1: Then we'll talk to the Economist's own Callum Williams about
Speaker 1: how Gen X maybe the saddest generation America has ever seen.
Speaker 2: But first the news, Samali.
Speaker 3: Right as we were recording this afternoon with Rick Wilson,
Speaker 3: we got horrible, horrible news that former President Biden has
Speaker 3: been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which, for those who don't know,
Speaker 3: is for someone his age a very bleak outlook much
Speaker 3: of the time.
Speaker 2: Well so a lot of time.
Speaker 1: Prostate cancer is very treatable, but this cancer has, according
Speaker 1: to The New York Times, has metastasized the bone. According
Speaker 1: to his statement from mister Biden's personal office, aggressive form
Speaker 1: of prostate cancer spread to his bones. That is not good.
Speaker 1: It's a you know, metastasis as I just went through.
Speaker 1: And you can read about of my book How to
Speaker 1: Liz your Mother.
Speaker 3: Yes, I was going to say, your book details this
Speaker 3: very thoroughly and it comes out very soon. I'll give
Speaker 3: you the plug to say June third.
Speaker 1: It's a book about what happens when everything goes wrong.
Speaker 1: My cancer patient is totally fine, but a lot of
Speaker 1: cancer pigeons are not, and a lot of us are
Speaker 1: going through this experience of having a loved one with cancer.
Speaker 2: So I have had a lot of experience dealing with this.
Speaker 1: It's really when it spreads the bone that is not good.
Speaker 2: Again.
Speaker 1: Cancer is a major problem in America, and you know
Speaker 1: who just cut funding for cancer research, Donald Trump and
Speaker 1: his doughe initiative. And you know who funded a lot
Speaker 1: of cancer research was Joe Biden and his cancer moonshot.
Speaker 1: So I do think it's really important that we see that.
Speaker 1: As much as this is fucking heartbreak, it's also a
Speaker 1: real case of where our vote actually means a lot,
Speaker 1: because there are a lot of people in this country
Speaker 1: are going to get cancer, and the treatments we have
Speaker 1: will be discovered now for later, and so it's really heartbreaking,
Speaker 1: and I think all of us send lots of lots
Speaker 1: of hope and prayers to the Biden family, Joe, Jill, Hunter, Ashley.
Speaker 1: They're a big family, very boisterous, a lot of people
Speaker 1: in that family, but a lot of hardship.
Speaker 2: So let us all hope that.
Speaker 1: Joe Biden makes it through this, and more importantly, that
Speaker 1: we can stop le get relitigating the fucking twenty twenty
Speaker 1: four election cycle.
Speaker 3: Now, yeah, Somali scottisent. He went on with Kristen Welker
Speaker 3: this morning and it was pretty hilarious. I thought, personally,
Speaker 3: hot take. I love that guy on television. He is
Speaker 3: so wooden and so uncomfortable. You know, like, here's a man,
Speaker 3: Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: Who has pretty much cast his entire administration from Fox
Speaker 1: News hosts because they look good on television, and then
Speaker 1: he gets this guy who is clearly the most uncomfortable
Speaker 1: person on television you have ever seen. And he is
Speaker 1: just himming and hawing about these tariffs. And by the way,
Speaker 1: every time he goes on television, you know, a less
Speaker 1: so today. And and let me just add, but sent
Speaker 1: is actually relatively smart. I mean, he's like one of
Speaker 1: the very few people in this administration, who's not a
Speaker 1: complete like sycophant with no qualifications. Right, the guy has
Speaker 1: at least some experience working in what he's doing, which
Speaker 1: is a dark contrast to people like Linda McMahon, who
Speaker 1: is the head of the Department of Education. You know,
Speaker 1: he said a lot of confusing things on there. And
Speaker 1: he said the thing which Donald Trump has been again
Speaker 1: and again lying about, right, which is he said Walmart
Speaker 1: will be absorbing some of the tariffs. Again, if they
Speaker 1: do that, they hurt small businesses. And also they said
Speaker 1: they wouldn't do that, so maybe they've decided they will
Speaker 1: some that get passed onto the consumer. Donald Trump said
Speaker 1: tariffs will not raise prices. Here is Scott per Cent
Speaker 1: saying some of it may get passed onto the consumer.
Speaker 3: Well, I can tell you this hoping you post that
Speaker 3: a great article today where they've started to assemble all
Speaker 3: the different companies showing what the tariffs are doing to them,
Speaker 3: including security cameras, people placing orders and getting shipping fees
Speaker 3: that are three hundred dollars, six hundred dollars. It's not
Speaker 3: looking good for what they did. And Scott per Cent's
Speaker 3: whole deer in the headlights thing where he's just not
Speaker 3: as cute as a deer. It's not feeling very comforting
Speaker 3: to the consumer.
Speaker 1: I mean, I find him to be hilarious, but I
Speaker 1: do worry it's going to kill our economy.
Speaker 3: The laughing so we don't cry type of energy that
Speaker 3: we bring to this podcast.
Speaker 1: There's more laughing than we're if you think we're laughing
Speaker 1: to keep from crying. On this topic, let's move on
Speaker 1: to everyone's least favorite group.
Speaker 2: Of nine people who dress weird judges.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, look, three of them are good, six
Speaker 1: of them are not.
Speaker 2: Are you talking about the Supreme Court?
Speaker 1: I am, in fact talking about the Supreme Court. So
Speaker 1: I want to point out, so this is the Supreme
Speaker 1: Court ruling. It goes seven to two. I bet you
Speaker 1: can't guess the two two judges who are like Trump
Speaker 1: should be able to do anything they want because he's
Speaker 1: our mango god king. Those are Alito and Thomas, who
Speaker 1: practically work for Rupert Murdic at this point, but I
Speaker 1: just want to talk about this Alien Enemies Act, which we,
Speaker 1: by the way, on this podcast, I've been talking about
Speaker 1: since we read Project twenty twenty five, where we saw
Speaker 1: that the Trump administration at every point. This at stration
Speaker 1: months before has told us what they're going to do.
Speaker 1: And this is a great example. Alien Enemies Act. They
Speaker 1: said they were going to use it. They only has
Speaker 1: ever been used World War one, World War two, War
Speaker 1: of eighteen twelve, so it has only ever been used
Speaker 1: during wars, right wars, not during made up things that
Speaker 1: don't exist. Okay, so Trump administration wants to use it
Speaker 1: to deport Venezuelans because of this gang that no one
Speaker 1: has ever heard of, right trende Iragua.
Speaker 3: It sounds like a really great restaurant that I could
Speaker 3: go to somewhere to hit part of town.
Speaker 1: Yes, correct, But more importantly, there just is no There
Speaker 1: is no there there. So this is already a wildly
Speaker 1: insane case. And still and still two of Trump's justices
Speaker 1: are like, you can do it. I want to add that.
Speaker 1: As soon as this happened, Donald Trump retweeted a guy
Speaker 1: called Mike Davis, who is a close Trump aallet and
Speaker 1: founder of the Article three project. So he is in
Speaker 1: this conservative legal space, but really even more to the
Speaker 1: right than the Supreme Court, and he called the decision illegal,
Speaker 1: claiming it was heading down a peril's path. The perilous
Speaker 1: path being keeping the Constitution going. And then he said,
Speaker 1: and I think this is worth seeing. The Supreme Court
Speaker 1: still has an illegal injunction on President of the United States
Speaker 1: preventing him from commanding military operations to expel these foreign terrorists.
Speaker 1: There's no evidence in these people are terrorists. There's no
Speaker 1: evidence in any of this makes any sense. And he
Speaker 1: says the president should house terrorists near the Chevy Chase
Speaker 1: country club with daytime release. Chevy Chases located in Maryland,
Speaker 1: near the homes of Chief Justice John Robbers and Justice
Speaker 1: Berg Kavanaugh. If you don't see what the alt right
Speaker 1: is doing here, I don't know what to tell you,
Speaker 1: because what they're doing is trying to intimidate these in
Speaker 1: order to get them to rubberstamp stuff Trump wants to do.
Speaker 3: Speaking of fuckery around this issue, one of the new
Speaker 3: tactics Ices adopting is to deport before court. Which it's
Speaker 3: just so bleak that these people cover themselves in the
Speaker 3: Constitution and the rule of law while they do things
Speaker 3: like this.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Again, these are the plain clothes guys that are rolling
Speaker 1: up grad students, right. They're doing things like leaving children.
Speaker 1: You saw that where they left a kid on a
Speaker 1: platform by himself and arrest of the parents. This is
Speaker 1: a sort of despicable militious. Some members of this group
Speaker 1: are from actual militias. They're just doing anything they can
Speaker 1: to deport without offering due process, and now they're going
Speaker 1: to deport them before they go to court. I just
Speaker 1: want to point out that again, we need people to
Speaker 1: work these jobs like this is not We're not to
Speaker 1: pouring people because we don't have enough work for them.
Speaker 1: If anything, we have too much work for them. We
Speaker 1: are deporting people because Donald Trump has made this a
Speaker 1: central campaign issue, just like we are not cutting the
Speaker 1: federal government. I mean, we do have a deficit, but
Speaker 1: we could raise taxes, we could let the tax cut expire.
Speaker 1: All of this is because Donald Trump has a few
Speaker 1: ideas that he wants tariffs, tax cuts, deportations. None of
Speaker 1: these things need to happen. They are just all Donald
Speaker 1: Trump's brainchild. And even though Trump says that all his
Speaker 1: people want this, in fact they want it with caveats, right.
Speaker 1: They believe in some deportation, but they don't like a
Speaker 1: lot of the stuff that this administration is doing. And
Speaker 1: we're already seeing in the polling Trump is losing you know,
Speaker 1: those working class voters that went to him, He is
Speaker 1: losing them at a rapid clip. And I think that
Speaker 1: is probably the one bit of good news.
Speaker 4: Hell yeah.
Speaker 1: Rick Wilson is the founder of the Lincoln Project and
Speaker 1: the host of the Enemy's List.
Speaker 2: Rick Wilson, Lolly John Fast.
Speaker 1: Here we are another week in Trump's America or is
Speaker 1: it Trump's Arabia? So I feel like, you know, what
Speaker 1: a lot this trip, this Trump Middle East? I want
Speaker 1: to say jaunt. Can we say it's a jaunt?
Speaker 5: We could say it's a johnt sure?
Speaker 1: This Trump?
Speaker 5: You could just say it's a hajj.
Speaker 1: It's a hajjh. It's a hash beaj uh. This trip
Speaker 1: reminded me that everything in Trump world is just a
Speaker 1: rehash of something else that happened in the first administration,
Speaker 1: that happened on reality television, that happened to him in
Speaker 1: the eighties in New York. Like, we're just in a
Speaker 1: kind of cyclical Fuckeray.
Speaker 5: It's a cyclic fucker is a great way. It's a
Speaker 5: time loop. Yes, I mean we're just stuck in the
Speaker 5: same bullshit with him over and over and over and
Speaker 5: and it is why I think Americans have such a
Speaker 5: hard time dealing with it because even people who like
Speaker 5: Trump or support Trump, this week were like, uh, boss, boss,
Speaker 5: no man, come on, this ain't it chief?
Speaker 1: This ain't it?
Speaker 2: Chief?
Speaker 1: Was that the plane was that that was a lot of.
Speaker 5: It was about the plane that could The guitaris have
Speaker 5: been trying to sell since twenty twenty and decision had
Speaker 5: forest one is actually not the bargain Trump can see to.
Speaker 1: Be, but even has one, so like, I mean, God,
Speaker 1: I mean and look.
Speaker 5: That's a that's a sea tier, a seat tier dictatorship. Honestly, Look,
Speaker 5: I think what we what we saw this week was
Speaker 5: two things. One that is Trump centric and one that
Speaker 5: is about America. All these people in corporate America who
Speaker 5: got on the plane and went over there with Trump,
Speaker 5: they now, in his mind, owe him anybody who made
Speaker 5: a deal over there, or who who it could even
Speaker 5: tangentially be seen to benefit from being over there. Trump
Speaker 5: will now think Boeing must do whatever I want forever
Speaker 5: and ever. They must give me whatever I want forever
Speaker 5: and ever. You know, Sam Altman is over there, and
Speaker 5: Ray Diallo's over there, and Blackstone and black Rocks leadership
Speaker 5: are over there. And all these folks that are sort
Speaker 5: of dragging along behind Trump, he will make them pay
Speaker 5: for this trip, literally or metaphorically.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, as for Trump and the and the Trump and
Speaker 5: the Trump clan, this was pure you know, gimme, gimme, gimme.
Speaker 5: This was hand out. Whatever you can fork into the bag,
Speaker 5: I'll take it first.
Speaker 1: You know. Amazon said we're gonna show how much the
Speaker 1: tariffs raised prices. Trump was like, no, you're not. Walmart said,
Speaker 1: we're gonna have to raise price is because of the tariffs.
Speaker 1: Trump said, no, you're not. You have to eat the tariffs.
Speaker 4: Again.
Speaker 5: I was told, by the way, I was told that
Speaker 5: foreign countries paid those tariffs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 5: I was assured that was how it were.
Speaker 1: But it turns out that what he meant by foreign
Speaker 1: countries was American consumers. But so here's a question. Though
Speaker 1: these are a companyes Walmart is a huge country, country
Speaker 1: and also company, how do you square this? So you're
Speaker 1: gonna they're just gonna.
Speaker 5: The scale of Walmart is such that.
Speaker 1: By the Americans shop at Walmart some absurd number.
Speaker 5: But by the time they reached the point where they
Speaker 5: had to say, hey, we're gonna have to raise prices.
Speaker 5: You have to understand that they've already done everything they
Speaker 5: can to keep their suppliers in line, keep prices down,
Speaker 5: negotiate further down on They're already inexpensive supply chain deals
Speaker 5: to make up for the tears. All of this is
Speaker 5: super terrifying for Walmart because they've already done what they can.
Speaker 5: They've already pushed the levers down as far as they can.
Speaker 5: So at this point, Walmart is kind of like China.
Speaker 5: They're an organization that plans on a fifty year scale.
Speaker 5: Now they're not just quarter to quarter to quarter. They
Speaker 5: are looking out into the future. And their deal is,
Speaker 5: we're not going to blow ourselves up financially. We'll take
Speaker 5: a little bit of a hit from Trump and his people,
Speaker 5: but where else the fuck you gonna go?
Speaker 1: Chief? If Walmart raises prices, that is actually better than
Speaker 1: if Walmart eats the tariffs, because if Walmart is able
Speaker 1: to somehow keep prices lower, will they will put out
Speaker 1: all of the other businesses that exist out of business. Right,
Speaker 1: So it's.
Speaker 5: Correct, Yeah, so you have you have the exact you
Speaker 5: have the exact key to this thing.
Speaker 1: So if you go to the drug store next door
Speaker 1: and the whatever the hammer is twenty one dollars and
Speaker 1: you go to Walmart and it's fourteen. Then eventually those
Speaker 1: mom and pop shops are going to go out of
Speaker 1: business sooner.
Speaker 5: Round they're vastly more price sensitive than Walmart or Target
Speaker 5: or or you know, Amazon to some degree, but other retailers.
Speaker 5: But once you get below that tier, I mean, these
Speaker 5: days in America, unfortunately, retail is the pyramid is weirdly inverted.
Speaker 5: It used to be a lot of small businesses and
Speaker 5: a few big ones. Now it's a couple of big
Speaker 5: businesses who take eighty percent probably of the national revenue
Speaker 5: that's coming into to that kind of sector, and small
Speaker 5: business is taking twenty percent, but they're going to take
Speaker 5: a much wilder degree of pain.
Speaker 1: Yes, and I wonder, I wonder what the sort of
Speaker 1: larger how you can spin that to be good for anything,
Speaker 1: including capitalism. But I think.
Speaker 5: Besides, I mean, but we got to realize this is
Speaker 5: not capitalism now right, This is crony, this is maoism.
Speaker 5: We keep talking about it, but this is not capitalism.
Speaker 5: You know, all those all those fuckers last year who
Speaker 5: were screaming like, oh, I'm a free market, free market Republican.
Speaker 5: I'm a big I believe in markets and free enterprise,
Speaker 5: and Harris will lead to full communism. They don't mind
Speaker 5: when Donald Trump sets wages and prices. They don't mind
Speaker 5: when Donald Trump controls the means of production. It's kind
Speaker 5: of odd.
Speaker 1: Yes, it's almost as if they're all hypocrites. Almost almost
Speaker 1: that you will be listening to this podcast on Monday.
Speaker 1: If all goes well. Tonight Sunday nights ten o'clock, we
Speaker 1: have another meeting of Mike Johnson and the big beautiful Bill,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 5: At ten o'clock on Sunday night. Meeting screams out to me, everything's.
Speaker 2: Fine, everything is going what could possibly go wrong? Going great?
Speaker 5: Are going great?
Speaker 1: When you're a member of Congress and you have a
Speaker 1: meeting at ten o'clock at night on a Sunday. Mike
Speaker 1: Johnson has done a number of really amateurish things. Set
Speaker 1: deadlines he couldn't make right. Is supposed to be done
Speaker 1: by next weekend. Could have put two bills together instead
Speaker 1: decided to do one. I think the thinking here is
Speaker 1: that they're only going to be able to get one
Speaker 1: piece of legislation passed, which I think is probably very likely.
Speaker 2: True.
Speaker 1: But the top line in this House bill that I
Speaker 1: want you to talk about, Rick Wilson, is something that
Speaker 1: I feel like we have not been talking about in
Speaker 1: the pundent industrial complex, and that is eight hundred and
Speaker 1: eighty billion dollars cut from Medicaid.
Speaker 5: So it's now about ten days ago. I was told
Speaker 5: by a reliable person I've known for a long time
Speaker 5: who said there had been polling done for the Republican
Speaker 5: Caucus and it was so bad that Mike Johnson refused
Speaker 5: to let the polling company brief the members. And the
Speaker 5: worst part of it was that eighty three percent of
Speaker 5: American voters said that they would be more likely to
Speaker 5: vote against a candidate who cut Medicare or Medicaid. Yeah,
Speaker 5: good luck, Chief, because at that point, at that point, you.
Speaker 1: Tell all Republicans if you have hit.
Speaker 5: A level where Republicans, no matter how loyal they are
Speaker 5: to Trump, and no matter how much they want this
Speaker 5: tax cut, and no matter how scared they are of
Speaker 5: Elon and all this of their garbage.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I don't think they're so scared of the
Speaker 1: al anymore. So let's talk about that next.
Speaker 5: But they're going to cut eight hundred billion dollars out
Speaker 5: of Medicare and Medicaid over a five year window. Which,
Speaker 5: first off, one thing that people have not figured out
Speaker 5: yet about this is the minute you do that many many, many, many,
Speaker 5: many American families who have a father or a mother,
Speaker 5: a parent or grandparent in a nursing home right now
Speaker 5: that is partly paid for by Medicaid. They're moving home, chief,
Speaker 5: they're coming back. You enjoy that, You'll have fun, you'll
Speaker 5: have phone. That happens.
Speaker 1: That's the nay mercenario for everyone. That and then also
Speaker 1: your rural hospital is going to close. But I want
Speaker 1: let's talk about Elon's more diminished role in the death
Speaker 1: of democracy. So my man has gotten in there and
Speaker 1: he's gotten in all the computers, he's fired a ton
Speaker 1: of people. He's had to rehire some. Right, we have
Speaker 1: some The FAA seems like it is having some issues,
Speaker 1: Rick Wilson a little bit.
Speaker 5: Yeah. You know, Look, they did in fact want to fire,
Speaker 5: and they did offer early retirement to many of these
Speaker 5: FAA controllers and many took it. We have about thirteen
Speaker 5: thousand controllers we were due to hire under the Infrastructure
Speaker 5: Bill about twenty five hundred more, which we needed that's
Speaker 5: on hold. They're blaming Pete Butta Judge and Joe Biden
Speaker 5: for doge cuts which disrupted the FAA. I've talked to
Speaker 5: people in the FAA who I have been told are mortified.
Speaker 5: They're working the extra hours, they're covering the extra bases.
Speaker 5: But this thing has been so screwed up from DC
Speaker 5: that the head of air Traffic Control took the retirement bonus, yeah,
Speaker 5: and got out. This is a dangerous situation. Look, and
Speaker 5: I'm going to do the as a pilot. But as
Speaker 5: a pilot, I'm not a I don't fly a commercial jet,
Speaker 5: but I fly in the instrument system all the time.
Speaker 5: And you rely on these underpaid, overworked, overhassle people to
Speaker 5: keep four hundred mile an hour, four hundred passenger steel
Speaker 5: and aluminum tubes from crashing into each other. And it's
Speaker 5: a pretty good use of my government, of my taxpayer money.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I would think so too. I would like my
Speaker 1: taxpayer dollars to.
Speaker 5: Go to good to not having me killed in a
Speaker 5: fiery crash.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's my I'm.
Speaker 5: Against the fiery crash thing.
Speaker 1: That's my hottest take. But I want to talk about
Speaker 1: Elon for a minute. She's definitely. Let we don't know again,
Speaker 1: because we have so little transparency into what the fuck
Speaker 1: Doge did in our federal government, and years from now
Speaker 1: we'll probably find out nothing good. Big Balls and his
Speaker 1: group are still in the government. Computers are federal agencies.
Speaker 1: But whether or not this is true, there is less
Speaker 1: Elon in our.
Speaker 5: Me there's less Elon in the press. And I I
Speaker 5: have Atrairian take on this, and a lot of people are, oh,
Speaker 5: he's thrown out, it's over. I have a contrarian take
Speaker 5: on this. I think that Elon had this is a
Speaker 5: very deliberate pr strategy to pull him out of the limelight.
Speaker 5: I do think he had a little bit of fence
Speaker 5: mending and fixing to do it Tesla and SpaceX, but
Speaker 5: I think this is a very deliberate let's let's take
Speaker 5: the heat off Elon by by by you know, making
Speaker 5: him wear the ballgag for a few weeks. But I
Speaker 5: still think the fuckery that's going on here that Elon
Speaker 5: has a direct hand in, like the South Africans coming
Speaker 5: here right right, which, by the way, the the the
Speaker 5: oppression of those poor South Africans. You can see that
Speaker 5: many of them had lost the Battle of Buffet Ridge
Speaker 5: as they were coming off the plane. These were not
Speaker 5: people that looked to me like they were that they
Speaker 5: were draggled war refugees, But in fact they looked like
Speaker 5: a bunch of fucking middle class people who watch too
Speaker 5: much television, need too many carbs. Right.
Speaker 1: But the point, the point of the story is that
Speaker 1: it's not clear. I think what we both are. We
Speaker 1: know that Elon pulls slightly below the Saponic plague. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so we know that Republicans have a real incentive
Speaker 1: to make him disappear, especially if you look at what
Speaker 1: happened in that judicial election in Wisconsin. Ye, the polling
Speaker 1: was that Elon did not help.
Speaker 5: Yeah. We tested ads that had the same message and
Speaker 5: once said Brad Shimmel supports Trump, and it worked. It
Speaker 5: wasn't it wasn't like a home run. It was like
Speaker 5: a good, solid double. And then we said took the
Speaker 5: same message, he supports Trump doing this, this and this.
Speaker 5: Then we swapped it out and said Brad Shimmell supports
Speaker 5: Elon and the DOJH agenda to cut medicare, to do this,
Speaker 5: and it was one hundred and forty five percent more effective.
Speaker 4: Yeah, insane it was.
Speaker 5: It was like, fuck, Elon, Yeah, Elon, doesn't that immune response?
Speaker 5: You know?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Elon is polling poison. So the question is is
Speaker 1: he really gone or is he pretend gone.
Speaker 5: My theory of the case is he has pretended on.
Speaker 5: I am gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna die on this
Speaker 5: hill that I think he I think he needed a
Speaker 5: week or two to reset because SpaceX.
Speaker 1: Has been having a lot of problems and seventy what
Speaker 1: they had they had an earnings call where they announced
Speaker 1: that they were down seventy one percent their earnings were down.
Speaker 1: Imagine like what you have to do for your earnings
Speaker 1: to be down seventy one percentage And.
Speaker 5: And think about this in context too. Molly the year
Speaker 5: before SpaceX is board and it's and and I can't
Speaker 5: remember her name right now. The chairman of the board
Speaker 5: was arguing to both the board and to the Delaware
Speaker 5: Chancery Court that Elon Musk last year deserved a fifty
Speaker 5: four billion dollar annual salary.
Speaker 2: No, it can't be a billion billion.
Speaker 5: Oh no, billion with a book nollions.
Speaker 1: We're going to need a We're going to need a
Speaker 1: fact check from Jesse Cannon.
Speaker 5: Here you can check it out.
Speaker 1: But the point is, uh yeah, so we don't know
Speaker 1: is Elon gone or is Elon pretend to be gone.
Speaker 1: We have no idea. And again I want I want
Speaker 1: to go back to another thing we were talking about before,
Speaker 1: this idea that Trump all these people made these deals, right,
Speaker 1: and they were announcing these deals that were faky numbers.
Speaker 2: Right right, trillion dollars.
Speaker 1: Tell us about some of these Middle Eastern deals that
Speaker 1: they were announcing, you.
Speaker 5: Know, as I was on with Ali Velshi this morning,
Speaker 5: and I refer to them as concepts of a deal. Right,
Speaker 5: This is a this is these are press release promises.
Speaker 5: These are not These are not actual hard number, you know,
Speaker 5: commitments like the I'll give you an example, the the
Speaker 5: supposed deal with with uh uh Tar to buy two
Speaker 5: hundred and fifty billion dollars worth of jets. Well, it's
Speaker 5: really to buy fifty jets with an option to buy
Speaker 5: a hundred more. Okay, none of these things are and
Speaker 5: again this is all such press release hurry up bullshit.
Speaker 5: And some of these deals, by the way, had been
Speaker 5: percolating that the arms deals in particular had been and
Speaker 5: the Boeing deal had been percolating in the background. Since
Speaker 5: well before Trump took office. Some of them were negotiated
Speaker 5: by the Biden administration. They're just taking credit for them.
Speaker 5: But a lot of them are just vaporware, right.
Speaker 1: But I also I love that they were so because
Speaker 1: of everything is fake. They were just getting bigger and
Speaker 1: bigger numbers. You know, I think, oh, Fatari's had a trillion.
Speaker 1: You know, someone's an eight you know, billions, No trillion, billions,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, none of that to my mind, None of that,
Speaker 5: to my mind, is what we call real. Nobody. Nobody
Speaker 5: in this world who deals with the Middle East, ever,
Speaker 5: who's ever dealt with any business, organization, government, or person
Speaker 5: in that ultra high wealth petro dollar universe, walks away
Speaker 5: believing anything as racist as it was. Even Senator John
Speaker 5: Kennedy said, you know, you can't trust any of these people.
Speaker 5: Lock up your camel. Which look, if I had Campbell's
Speaker 5: I'd be afraid that John Kennedy would come and, you know,
Speaker 5: do unspeakable things to them.
Speaker 1: But well, I also think, like you know, this is
Speaker 1: a little like anti Muslim.
Speaker 5: No, no, it's not. Actually, it's actual real talk. The
Speaker 5: idea though, that Trump right goes and looks at the
Speaker 5: Middle East. Now, I have to say, I think a
Speaker 5: lot of American Jews had to be a little surprised.
Speaker 5: And Israel has been totally cut out of all these discussions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm not surprised. Here's an American Jew who's not.
Speaker 5: Yes, I think I have a little bit sophistication about this.
Speaker 5: But Harris will abandon Israel.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: By the way, I was wrong about the fifty four
Speaker 5: billion dollar pay day. It was a fifty six billion
Speaker 5: dollar pay day.
Speaker 1: How is that possible?
Speaker 5: It was a I'm looking at Reuter's judge voids Elon's
Speaker 5: unfafthable fifty six billion Tesla pay package. Right, just put
Speaker 5: a link in the chat.
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, I'm Ridy Wilson again.
Speaker 2: Correct.
Speaker 1: Callum Williams is a senior economics writer for The Economist.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Fast Politics.
Speaker 4: Callum, thank you very much for having me. It's nice
Speaker 4: to be here.
Speaker 2: So let us talk about Generation X.
Speaker 1: Are you generation X?
Speaker 4: First of all, No, I'm certainly not. I'm right in
Speaker 4: the middle of the millennials.
Speaker 2: Oh that's so annoying.
Speaker 1: This was a really interesting article that I read the
Speaker 1: Economist that got me really As Jesse and I are
Speaker 1: both Generation X.
Speaker 2: First, define what generation ACTS is. How old is Generation X?
Speaker 6: Typically these are people who were born between nineteen sixty
Speaker 6: five and nineteen eighty. I mean, there's a bit of,
Speaker 6: you know, poinless debate about really where the boundary is,
Speaker 6: but it's roughly between those years.
Speaker 1: So let's talk for a minute about what it looks
Speaker 1: like for these people sort of where they are in
Speaker 1: their lives.
Speaker 6: Okay, well, I suppose you would say that they are
Speaker 6: in early middle age on average. You know, they've they've
Speaker 6: they've obviously left college a long time ago. If they're
Speaker 6: going to have kids, that they're likely to have happened
Speaker 6: by now.
Speaker 4: Not certain, but but likely.
Speaker 6: They're at a point in their careers where, you know,
Speaker 6: it's kind of they've probably reached the peak of where
Speaker 6: they'll be in their in their career. They're not yet
Speaker 6: retiring unless they've been enormously successful and sold the company
Speaker 6: or anything. So you know, in that kind of period
Speaker 6: of life, I would say, you know that the parents
Speaker 6: are possibly still alive, possibly pretty old now, and their
Speaker 6: kids are kind of not probably super young, but kind
Speaker 6: of their kids are starting to move out of the house,
Speaker 6: so they're in that kind of that kind of age.
Speaker 1: I think it's fair to say that this, or at
Speaker 1: least the sort of the thought of this piece was
Speaker 1: that we in generation acts are the least written about
Speaker 1: and thought about generation in some time.
Speaker 6: Right explained to us that that's exactly right. So, you know,
Speaker 6: the Baby Boomers get a lot of hate, I would say,
Speaker 6: because they've done.
Speaker 2: So well, yes, and maybe that's not the only reason,
Speaker 2: I continue, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5: Maybe not.
Speaker 6: So they get a lot of press, as it were,
Speaker 6: had a lot of interest. And then the Millennials, maybe
Speaker 6: less than before, but certainly in the twenty tens, like
Speaker 6: people often talks about it, you know, how much millennials
Speaker 6: were struggling to buy a house and how they've been
Speaker 6: screwed over by their financial crisis and a lot of stuff.
Speaker 6: So they've got a lot of press.
Speaker 4: And then gen Z. Of course everyone's talking about gen Z.
Speaker 6: You know, people worry about the effect that social media
Speaker 6: is having on gen Z and whether gen Z are
Speaker 6: entitled and all this kind of stuff. But the weird
Speaker 6: thing was that actually people don't really talk about gen
Speaker 6: X all that much, Like there aren't really many books
Speaker 6: about gen X, there's not many many memes about gen X,
Speaker 6: so it just seemed like a big gap in the literature,
Speaker 6: and so I was looking at what's going on with
Speaker 6: this with this generation?
Speaker 2: So why is that?
Speaker 4: Well, I think there's a few things going on.
Speaker 6: One is that they are a relatively small generation in
Speaker 6: comparison with the Baby Boomers. So there was you know,
Speaker 6: in the US, there was this enormous surgeon in births
Speaker 6: after World War Two, and that created this big kind
Speaker 6: of co orp which you just don't really have with
Speaker 6: with with Gen X.
Speaker 4: But I guess also, like you know.
Speaker 6: I guess it's probably to do with the fact that
Speaker 6: the Millennials and Gen Z have just been growing up
Speaker 6: at recently, right, you know, people are more interested in
Speaker 6: like young people than they are in middle aged people.
Speaker 6: So it's partly to do with kind of where we
Speaker 6: are in the long term use cycle. It's you know,
Speaker 6: it's nothing that Generics has done wrong, it's just that
Speaker 6: they've they're just that the sort of boring age I suppose, I.
Speaker 1: Mean, yes and no, though, right, it strikes me that
Speaker 1: there was more written about other generations too, right as.
Speaker 6: You were saying, you're saying, so twenty years ago, that
Speaker 6: was probably more written about baby rivers.
Speaker 4: Yeah, when they were in middle age. That's that's right.
Speaker 6: I mean, I don't know about that because my sense
Speaker 6: is that interest in the generations has really taken off
Speaker 6: in the past, like I would say, fifteen years. So
Speaker 6: you know, the idea that people belong to a specific
Speaker 6: generation is not something that's been around for a very
Speaker 6: long time. But if you went back fifty years, no
Speaker 6: one was really talking about like the baby Boomers or
Speaker 6: you know, and if you ask someone like, what's the
Speaker 6: generation before baby Boomers?
Speaker 2: The greatest generation?
Speaker 5: All right?
Speaker 6: So okay, well I can push that question again that
Speaker 6: what's before that? And what's before that? Then you know,
Speaker 6: you ask someone like, what's something fairly modern. Yeah, it's
Speaker 6: not just a modern thing. I'd say it's like a
Speaker 6: twentieth maybe even twenty first century thing. So yeah, But
Speaker 6: I think also the other thing to spare in mind
Speaker 6: is that, like the ability for us to analyze generations
Speaker 6: in a rigorous data driven way, that it's definitely very
Speaker 6: new because what you need to be able to do,
Speaker 6: right is you need to be able to look at
Speaker 6: at a given person of given age over time. It's
Speaker 6: a bit sort of like follow that person from when
Speaker 6: they're in their twenties to win their threads in their forties. Now,
Speaker 6: that requires very detailed, in very high quality data, and
Speaker 6: that really hasn't been amount for very long.
Speaker 1: That's certainly true. Why is generation acts the most sort
Speaker 1: of fun generation?
Speaker 6: Well, the argument is that in two ways. So one
Speaker 6: way is to do with the age that they're at
Speaker 6: right now, right, and then the other way is to
Speaker 6: do with the actual cohort of people, the actual specific
Speaker 6: people who are you know, maybe in their forties now,
Speaker 6: but will be in their fifties and ten years time.
Speaker 6: So in terms of where they are right now, they
Speaker 6: are at the bottom of what people call the U
Speaker 6: bend of life right, which is essentially the idea that
Speaker 6: you're you're happy when you're young, and you're happy when
Speaker 6: you're old, but you're miserable in middle age. And that
Speaker 6: is for all kinds of reasons including yeah.
Speaker 2: Why why are we miserable? Jesse and I want to now,
Speaker 2: So what I.
Speaker 6: Would say for us is that this I think that
Speaker 6: the evidence for this ubrend is is not bad. Actually,
Speaker 6: I mean, it's hard to measure, but it seems pretty clear.
Speaker 6: One factor is this this idea that you're responsible both
Speaker 6: for young slash youngish children and responsible for old oldish parents,
Speaker 6: So you're kind.
Speaker 4: Of being pulled in both directions, right.
Speaker 6: So that's a lot of work, and we did some
Speaker 6: work to show that both in terms of the time
Speaker 6: spent on caring for others and the money spent on
Speaker 6: caring for others, gen X does a lot more about
Speaker 6: in all generations right now.
Speaker 4: So that's one thing.
Speaker 6: When people get chronic health problems, they tend to emerge
Speaker 6: around this time. People also kind of come to realize
Speaker 6: that their career has really topped out, and so you know,
Speaker 6: they might have aspired to be the CEO, but they
Speaker 6: kind of realized by their fifties it's not going to happen.
Speaker 6: So that's kind of depressing. Yeah, I guess those are
Speaker 6: the main reasons. And you can see that in the
Speaker 6: survey data that you ask people in loads of different
Speaker 6: countries like how happy are you, and people who are
Speaker 6: in Generation X are less likely to say they're happy
Speaker 6: than people in other generations.
Speaker 2: M That is interesting.
Speaker 1: So you think that they are less happy because of
Speaker 1: their age and not because they have had less positive
Speaker 1: struggle like boomers made a ton of money.
Speaker 2: You don't think it's that's the reason.
Speaker 6: Right, I see what you're saying. Yeah, it's a good question.
Speaker 6: I mean, to be perfectly honest, it's hard to know
Speaker 6: for sure. All I would say is that the U
Speaker 6: bend idea has been around for quite a long time,
Speaker 6: and so you typically do see that. For example, the
Speaker 6: baby rooms appear to go through the same thing where
Speaker 6: they were relatively unhappy when they were in their late
Speaker 6: forties and fifties, and then they kind of saved it
Speaker 6: when they moved into into their sixties and they've got
Speaker 6: happier again. So I but I agree with you could
Speaker 6: be right that this could also be a cohort problem
Speaker 6: rather than just the kind of life stage of life problem.
Speaker 4: But it's hard to be sure.
Speaker 2: Are boomers happier now?
Speaker 5: Yes?
Speaker 1: Why?
Speaker 6: Well, I think your view of life goes through some
Speaker 6: kind of evolution. Right, you leave your job and maybe retire.
Speaker 6: You go and spend all their golfing or going on cruises.
Speaker 6: You've got more time on your hands. Your kids are
Speaker 6: probably grown up, so they are looking after you rather
Speaker 6: than you looking after them. Your parents have died, so
Speaker 6: you don't have them to take care of. You know,
Speaker 6: I think there's lots of reasons to expect people to
Speaker 6: get happier if they properly age.
Speaker 1: Do you think that the sort of higher rate of
Speaker 1: illness caused by whatever have affected my generation, our Generation Generation.
Speaker 6: X, Well, they are, but I mean if you look, certainly,
Speaker 6: if you look at the on mental health stuff, so
Speaker 6: you look at questions of anxiety and despair and nut
Speaker 6: kind of thing. You know, there's the U shape is
Speaker 6: pretty it's pretty stark. Actually, like when you're in your
Speaker 6: particularly we're kind of around age fifty, if you are
Speaker 6: going to be anxious, it will be then basically. And yeah,
Speaker 6: so on the kind of physical health problems like mobility
Speaker 6: and you know, being diagnosed with some bad disease or
Speaker 6: something like. I mean that's more anecdotal, I think, at
Speaker 6: least in terms of such idea, but it you know,
Speaker 6: it seems obviously correct that the older you get, the
Speaker 6: more at risk you are of developing these problems.
Speaker 4: So yeah, I think I think that's right.
Speaker 6: But as I say, I don't think this is something
Speaker 6: that affects necessarily affects Generation X more than other generations.
Speaker 6: I'm sure that when I'm in my fifties, I will
Speaker 6: also reach a peak of anxiety, and you know, I
Speaker 6: will become more likely to realize I can't run like
Speaker 6: I used to and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 4: So I'm going to go through it like everyone else.
Speaker 6: Oh so you think this is like midlife crisis. Yeah,
Speaker 6: I mean you could call it a mid life crisis.
Speaker 6: I guess it's a reflection that you of your that
Speaker 6: your body is not what it used to be. Right,
Speaker 6: you can't do all the things you used to be
Speaker 6: able to do, Like you know, when you're in your
Speaker 6: Maybe when you're in your thirties you can still go
Speaker 6: out and drink a lot and be fine the next day.
Speaker 6: Maybe that's less true in your forties and fifties, all
Speaker 6: those kind of things like going out and paying soccer
Speaker 6: with your kids. You like, you realize that you can't
Speaker 6: turn as quickly as you used to, or you're more
Speaker 6: likely to get injured and all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 4: Like it's as you know, that's a depressing realization for anyone.
Speaker 1: I think, do Americans seem less happy overall than other countries?
Speaker 2: How does this break down.
Speaker 4: America is about?
Speaker 6: In the middle, I would say of the happiness people
Speaker 6: love to do cross country comparisons of happiness. But you know,
Speaker 6: happiness the word happiness or whatever the word is in
Speaker 6: different languages that you know, that means different things in
Speaker 6: different countries. You know, happiness, I think for us in
Speaker 6: the kind of English speaking West can often mean like
Speaker 6: a great sense of fulfillment or like joy, whereas I
Speaker 6: think can maybe scan Scandinavia it means more like contentment.
Speaker 6: You know, those those do being different things. So I
Speaker 6: think it's hard to say that country X is clearly
Speaker 6: happy in the country why, you know, Like Japan, for example,
Speaker 6: always comes out very badly on these on these topics
Speaker 6: of on these questions of happiness, Japan seeds incredibly unhappy.
Speaker 1: Now I.
Speaker 6: Don't know if you can really be sure that it
Speaker 6: actually is like full of really unhappy people, just because
Speaker 6: again the term happiness will mean something different in Japan
Speaker 6: than it does in the US. But so what I
Speaker 6: would tend to do is look at, you know, how
Speaker 6: it's happiness changing over time within a country. Now, what
Speaker 6: is very clear is that the US has it does
Speaker 6: seem to have become less happy over the past stay decade,
Speaker 6: fifteen years, not not massively so, and other countries have
Speaker 6: got worse, but yeah, it has become less happy.
Speaker 1: Do you be said about how the other countries feel
Speaker 1: about America right now.
Speaker 6: Well, so I'm based in the US, but obviously I'm British,
Speaker 6: so I can tell you that there is a bit better.
Speaker 1: And you guys have done a lot of work on
Speaker 1: this at the Economist, which is why I'm asking.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you know, so they do these polls about who
Speaker 6: would you vote for in the election? They did they
Speaker 6: did a global poll just before the twenty twenty four election,
Speaker 6: and obviously, you know, the Democrats win in a complete landslide.
Speaker 6: I think people are quite shocked by the stuff about
Speaker 6: defense and about the tariffs, so I would say, but
Speaker 6: you know, I think, you know, people are smart. They
Speaker 6: are able to distinguish between the actions of an administration
Speaker 6: and what they encounter when they either come to America
Speaker 6: or meet Americans. There was a lot of concern actually
Speaker 6: the other day about this idea that travel from Europe
Speaker 6: to the US has fallen off cliff and this idea
Speaker 6: going around, particularly in the Financial Times, that Europeans were
Speaker 6: canceling travel to the US because they hated Trump so much.
Speaker 6: And actually that's turned out it could be completely wrong,
Speaker 6: but it's just a kind of very basic stake that
Speaker 6: they made in doing this stuff, and people still.
Speaker 4: Come come to US a lot.
Speaker 6: I mean, I'm in San Francisco, San Francisco, so there's
Speaker 6: loads of tourists from Germany, and it's.
Speaker 2: What's the mistake.
Speaker 6: Well, basically what they did was they looked at the
Speaker 6: year on year page change in people from Europe coming
Speaker 6: to the US. And what you can see is that
Speaker 6: I think it was in March of twenty twenty five,
Speaker 6: the year on year change from Europe was like it
Speaker 6: was like down like twenty percent or something. So could
Speaker 6: say there is everyone freakdowns, like Europeans are canceling their
Speaker 6: holidays to the US and it's because they hate Trump.
Speaker 6: And actually what had happened was that in March of
Speaker 6: twenty twenty four, so the year before, there was this
Speaker 6: really weird spike surge in tourists and people visitors coming
Speaker 6: from Europe to the US. I think it was to
Speaker 6: do the Time of the East or something, And so
Speaker 6: the comparison with twenty twenty five is really unfavorable. And
Speaker 6: in fact, if you just looked at the level of
Speaker 6: people coming to the US, it was fine, there was
Speaker 6: no change. It was just because you were comparing it
Speaker 6: with a really unusually strong month in the previous year,
Speaker 6: and it looked really bad. But then if you look
Speaker 6: at what's happened in April the year on your comparison
Speaker 6: is much more kind of fair, honest, then in fact
Speaker 6: there's no change at all. But I suspect that many
Speaker 6: of the people that wrote that European tours into the
Speaker 6: US is collapsed. I'm not going to be pieces of saying, oh, no,
Speaker 6: it hasn't actually collapsed, because that's the nature of the
Speaker 6: media these days.
Speaker 1: But there you go, Yeah, is that media or is
Speaker 1: that hyperpartisanship? What is that?
Speaker 5: Well?
Speaker 4: I think it's probably a bit of both.
Speaker 6: It's you know, you see in academia too, where people
Speaker 6: will publish results if they're exciting, but then they won't
Speaker 6: report on results when they're not exciting, if you know.
Speaker 5: What I mean.
Speaker 1: Is this a collapse of the sort of attention economy?
Speaker 1: Is Is it just so hungry for attention that it
Speaker 1: has a sort of attention to itself into no longer
Speaker 1: being true? I think it's definitely. I think it's definitely that.
Speaker 1: And I think getting clicks on Twitter is obviously massages
Speaker 1: people's egos to a great degree. So I think it's
Speaker 1: very nice to get clicks on Twitter, so I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a bigger sense to do that. I think the
Speaker 1: spectru of Trump is something the journalists I think have
Speaker 1: to be much more careful about than they are. I
Speaker 1: think what basically what's happened is people most journalists, I
Speaker 1: would say, wouldn't have voted for Trump. I think that's
Speaker 1: probably fair, and I can go so far. I said
Speaker 1: that most journalists really don't like Trump, and so I
Speaker 1: think what they there's this behave you all bias? I
Speaker 1: think as a result to finding stories that confirm what
Speaker 1: they would like to believe, which is that Trump's awful,
Speaker 1: and so people will do things and say things and
Speaker 1: respond in a way that accords with the notion that
Speaker 1: Trump is awful. So I think probably when people see.
Speaker 2: This right story like this, it makes sense because they
Speaker 2: believe it.
Speaker 6: It's too good, And I think that blunts your critical faculties.
Speaker 6: And I think, you know, had it been that's safe,
Speaker 6: for example, that Kamala had won, and in fact, it
Speaker 6: probably would have been exactly the same, tourism in March
Speaker 6: twenty twenty five to the US probably would have been
Speaker 6: twenty five twenty percent down as well. I strongly suspect
Speaker 6: that no one would have written the piece saying everyone
Speaker 6: hates Kamala, they're a band in it. It just wouldn't
Speaker 6: have happened, right, So I think we have to be
Speaker 6: very and I'm sure, I'm sure you think about this
Speaker 6: aholl time, but I think you have to be so
Speaker 6: careful about like, you know, would I have written this
Speaker 6: piece if there was a politician in charge that I like?
Speaker 6: Is always that question you got to ask yourself, And
Speaker 6: I think people tend not to ask that question of themselves.
Speaker 1: I have seen pieces of that be true, but I've
Speaker 1: also seen other things. But the thing I want to
Speaker 1: ask you about now is this idea that if you
Speaker 1: read the newspaper it was like very unlikely that you
Speaker 1: would vote for Trump.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Go, well, there's obviously there's obviously a causality question there is,
Speaker 6: you know, does does reading the newspaper make you less
Speaker 6: likely to about for Trump? Or do people who would
Speaker 6: never have voted for Trump anyway are they more likely
Speaker 6: to read the newspaper. I don't know the study referring
Speaker 6: to it. I can't ask that question. I suspect it's
Speaker 6: probably that part mostly the latter. I don't think people
Speaker 6: really are persuaded by what they need in the newspaper
Speaker 6: one way or the other.
Speaker 4: It's quite rare. It's basically quite work to.
Speaker 6: Change their minds about anything, right and mostly when say,
Speaker 6: for example, with this piece that we're discussing now, the
Speaker 6: gen X piece, right, generally, the letters I got about
Speaker 6: this piece were either that was great, I completely agree
Speaker 6: with everything you said, or it was You're an idiot,
Speaker 6: You've got everything wrong.
Speaker 4: No one emailed to say or let what a letter
Speaker 4: to say?
Speaker 6: Thanks for changing my mind on this particular point, because
Speaker 6: I you know, people just don't do that basically unfortunately.
Speaker 4: But that's not a new thing.
Speaker 2: I don't think so interesting. Thank you for joining us column.
Speaker 2: Of course, no moment, Rick Wilson.
Speaker 5: Yes, Molly John Fast are we ready for the moment?
Speaker 1: Yeah? What is it?
Speaker 5: The moment America loves? I would say that this week's
Speaker 5: moment is is a is an all time champion example
Speaker 5: of everything Trump to just dies. The moment of fuckery
Speaker 5: is our international credit rating? Tell me it's now been
Speaker 5: reduced by a notch. It's been cut And Moody's was
Speaker 5: very direct about what it was. I'm surprised Trump hasn't
Speaker 5: attacked them yet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well Moody's, Moody's, you're going to the Hague, going
Speaker 1: to the hag, But they are.
Speaker 5: Credit rating has been downgraded for the first time in
Speaker 5: a long.
Speaker 1: Time since Obama, not because of since the twenty.
Speaker 5: Meta economic crisis, right right, Yeah, that was a crisis
Speaker 5: where there was a downgrade and by the way, people
Speaker 5: on the right at the time were screaming bloody fucking murder.
Speaker 1: Including Trump clearly, who's always lead because.
Speaker 5: It's always Yeah, But the fact that our credit rating
Speaker 5: has been downgraded, which is going to mean higher costs
Speaker 5: for every American, higher interest rates, higher lending rates, uh,
Speaker 5: more scarcity in the financial markets for people looking to
Speaker 5: expand a business. All of this comes down to one guy,
Speaker 5: and it's Donald Trump. Well, it's easy to make him
Speaker 5: the moment of fucker every week. He really deserves it
Speaker 5: this week.
Speaker 1: And I would add that, like, there's this scenario that
Speaker 1: we are all really anxious about, which is why Trump
Speaker 1: backed off the tariffs in the first place, which is
Speaker 1: dollar flight to this idea that maybe the dollar stops
Speaker 1: being the world's currency finally, and the your you know,
Speaker 1: euro bonds or they go somewhere else. And by the way,
Speaker 1: if they do that, right, because we have a president
Speaker 1: who acts like a leader in an emerging country, and
Speaker 1: our markets behave like emerging markets, and then we have
Speaker 1: we find ourselves in a scenario where everything is more expensive.
Speaker 1: The you know, debt is more expensive to service. We
Speaker 1: are down a rabbit hole.
Speaker 4: That is pretty yeah, it is.
Speaker 5: It is a ship and all this is because of
Speaker 5: his wrong ideas and his big ego.
Speaker 1: Right well, and also because he wanted to onshore manufacturing
Speaker 1: without doing the work of entering manufacturing.
Speaker 5: Unlike that chips and science sector which we had to
Speaker 5: get rid.
Speaker 1: Of, right because it was short manufacturing.
Speaker 5: Who knew?
Speaker 1: Everything is so stupid? Till next Monday, Rick Wilson.
Speaker 5: Thank you, Molly. I'll talk to you later.
Speaker 1: That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
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Speaker 2: Thanks for listening.