Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 8/27/24: Trump Kamala Fight Over Debate Rules, Trump Abortion Flip Flop, Tarantino Demands No Kamala Interviews, Feds Prosecute Corporate Landlords, Cuomo Calls Out DNC Corruption

Episode Date: August 27, 2024

Krystal and Saagar discuss Trump Kamala fight over debate rules, Tarantino demands Kamala no interview, Trump abortion flip flop, feds prosecute corporate landlords, shock poll on Kamala price controls, Chris Cuomo calls out DNC corruption live.    To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.com/   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it.

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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 Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do.

Some interesting topics to tackle this morning. We've got a little debate over debates between Kamala and Trump revolving around whether the mic should be on or off. It's kind of interesting. It is interesting. It's kind of interesting. We'll get into that. Also, continued pressure on Kamala Harris to give an interview. Seems like a good idea to me.

Quentin Tarantino, though, weighing in on that in an interesting way. So I'll play those comments for you. Also, be excited to be joined this morning by a Gen Z panel. We took note of a new poll from New York Times-Siena. They did some reporting on the massive gender gap in particular among young voters, which there's a gender gap among all age groups. But with Gen Z, it is particularly stark. So interesting demographic things going on there to dive into with the panel. Trump, meanwhile, desperately trying to moderate on abortion and making some within the pro-life community very, very unhappy. Will that matter come election time?

We'll talk about that. We also have some actually good news. Justice Department going after that rent collusion scheme that we've reported on a few times here involving RealPage. We'll break that down for you. We also got new polling on Kamala's economic plan, including her plan for quote unquote price controls, which isn't even really what she's doing, but that's the way it was framed. Anyway, it's really popular. Might not be popular with economists, but very popular with the American people. We're also bringing on David Sirota, who has a fantastic new podcast

called Master Plan. They spent two years reporting this out about the plot to basically legalize and normalize corruption in America. What could be a more important topic? He does a fantastic job breaking all of that down. So excited to talk to him about that as well. Yeah, it's going to be a fun show. We always like to get debates and things here on the panel and actually with some Gen Z folks. I know people enjoyed our Gen Z one previously. Thank you to all of our premium subscribers All the people took advantage of the free month trial whenever we were in Chicago if you missed out on that Don't worry. You can still just become a premium member today breakingpoints.com We've got a lot of fun coverage plan including with the debate if such a debate

Materializes so there was a lot of consternation yesterday, debates around the debate. And actually, they reveal some interesting things about the Trump campaign, about the Harris campaign, and about the major differences between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. So let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. Everything broke out into the open and, of course, Politico playbook where they talk here about, quote, Harris and Trump battle over hot mics at the debate. So all of this comes down to the rules of the debate, which were pre-negotiated by the Biden and the Trump campaigns. The Biden campaign famously insisted on a couple of things. Number one, microphones will be muted throughout the debate, except for when the candidate whose turn it is to speak. They insisted on no studio

audience. And of course, they insisted on moderators at CNN. And then they eventually also agreed to this ABC News debate. Now, since Biden dropped out of the race, there apparently has been a major fight between the Harris campaign and the Trump campaign, because the Harris campaign is like, no, we're not the Biden campaign. We're a different one. They want the mics unmuted. Now, what's fascinating about that is that the Harris campaign is making a very different play here where they believe that Trump, and actually, if people go roll the tape before that debate, I was like, I think it might be a mistake for Trump to have muted mics or largely because I think he's better off the cuff. But what the Harris people are bargaining on is that Trump will not be able to restrain himself and that he will appear chaotic, that he'll interrupt her.

There are allegedly a few moments where Trump did try in that CNN debate,, where clearly I think Biden's campaign wanted it to be very controlled, very like staid debate, where you're trying to basically protect an old man who eventually does sink himself in that first one. He sure did. Yeah, I mean, no matter what they did, you know, when you open your mouth and you're that far gone, it almost doesn't really matter. There was no debate rule that was going to rescue him last time around. I mean, I always thought that that was foolish even for Biden to want this rule in place again. It did not end up being that significant or that determinative. But you'll recall in the first debate back in 2020 between Trump and Biden, Trump basically undercut himself. Biden didn't do anything special. It's

just Trump was so out of control and just would not let him finish a sentence that almost across the board, people said this was a disaster for him. And so personally, I think Kamala Harris's team wanting the rule to be that the mics stay on. Number one, I think it's better in the interest of transparency. We talked some about this before. Like if there's something said by Trump who and there's only the you know, this one network in the room, they get to determine whether it's in the official transcript or not. You don't really get to hear it. So I just think it's better in general. But also, I think it's emblematic of the fact that the Kamala Harris people are running a smarter campaign with Kamala than they were with Biden, which is funny because it's a lot of the same campaign team. They do have some new figures

that are influential at the top. But to me, it's a much smarter play to let Trump hang himself with being over the top, being too abrasive, being too aggressive. Their bet is that he won't be able to control himself. And I think that's a pretty fair bet. Now, there's a lot of back and forth. One of the things that's kind of interesting is it's more Trump's campaign team that wants to keep the mics muted than it is Trump himself. He came out and was like, yeah, I kind of prefer to have him on, but this is what we agreed to. So we should just stand by that. There's a lot of posturing going on here too. It is true that these particular debates are what the Biden team agreed to. And then when Kamala steps into the role, she basically she's trying to take the pieces she likes and leave the pieces that she doesn't like. So she likes the schedule of just having this one

debate in September. She likes the that it's ABC. You know, she's comfortable with all of that, but she wants to tweak the rules around the edges. So in any case, overall, I think it's ABC. She's comfortable with all of that, but she wants to tweak the rules around the edges. So in any case, overall, I think it's better for the mics to be on. But I understand why Trump's campaign is like, yeah, we kind of like things the way they are. Yeah, it is actually kind of interesting. Trump himself, by the way, this was all playing out. You had Trump advisors be like, no, the mics need to be turned on and all of that. But then he was asked at a campaign stop actually here in Northern Virginia, what he thought about the rules. Let's take a listen. Would you want the microphones muted in the debate whenever you're not speaking? We agreed to the same rules. I don't know, it doesn't matter to me. I'd rather have it

probably on. But the agreement was that it would be the same as it was last time. In that case, it was muted. I didn't like it the last time, but it worked out fine. I mean, ask Biden how it worked out. It was fine. And I think it should be the same. We agreed to the same rules, same rules and same specifications. And I think that's probably what it should be. But they're trying to change it. The truth is they're trying to get out of it because she doesn't want to debate. She's not a good debater. She's not a smart person. She doesn't want to debate.

So there you go. He's like, well, it doesn't really matter to me. He's one of those. Previously, one of the things that he actually has now said was a bad decision. And I'm wondering if this informs his analysis. He believes solidly, correctly, that it was a mistake to agree to debate Biden so early because he would have stayed in the race. And he's like, well, he did so badly, he dropped out. He's now, he's been kind of striking a jihad against ABC News. George, I think Slopadopoulos is the name. You know, it's not bad. That's a good one. That's a good one. I like it. It's a lot better than

Kamabla. Yeah, Kamabla. Yeah, which I don't even understand. Kamabla, that was their- That was a fail, anyway. Slopidopoulos is good. So he's very mad at ABC News. I'm not exactly sure why, but he keeps threatening to pull out of the debate. And I think he's more trying to keep them on their toes because in his head, he believes that it was such a big mistake eventually to agree to that. So in general, now you've got more posturing here. We've got the Kamala Harris campaign that is now posting a video about Trump and the debates, adding chicken sounds to the clip. Let's take a listen. They already know everything. Trump's not doing the debate. That's the same thing they say now. I mean, right now I say,

why should I do a debate? I'm leading in the polls. And everybody knows her. Everybody knows me. All right. So there you go. She's accusing him of being chicken. I mean, they're both like this lady literally won't even do an interview. So, OK, they're both trying to posture like this. He doesn't want to. He's afraid he doesn't want to debate.

You know, she's afraid she doesn't want to debate. You know, I think there's sort of some some betting going on whether or not this debate is actually going to happen in 15 days. I suspect it will, because neither one of them. There's sort of some betting going on whether or not this debate is actually going to happen in 15 days. I suspect it will because neither one of them— It would be insane not to. I think the Trump people feel like, you know, just based on their decision, I think they feel like they're a little bit behind. And so, you know, they need to make up a little ground. They need to change the framing around the campaign and the conversation around the campaign. Of course, a debate is a fantastic opportunity to do that. But the Kamala Harris people don't feel like

there's so much ahead that they can afford to just, you know, back out of a debate. And the optics of that are a problem, et cetera, et cetera. So, I mean, I think it's likely to happen. I don't know if the mics will be on or off or that it matters all that much, but a lot of pre-debate posturing. And Trump over the weekend, he also, you know, he put out a true social that seemed to call into question, like make it seem like he was trying to back out of the debate a little bit. But again, I think the dynamics of the race are close enough that both of these candidates really have an incentive to go forward with this pre-agreed debate. Which is good because the country needs actually to see it. Yeah, I mean,

at least one. Jesus, like we should get a lot more than that, honestly. You know, not to step too much on our next segment about interviews, but I was reading this morning about who Kamala thinks they were going to do an interview. Their first choice was David Muir of ABC News, but because he's the moderator of the debate, that means that they are likely ruling him out. But so by reading that, though, I was like, OK, well, that's a good sign that she's probably going to do the debate, because at the very least, then when they're thinking of that, then they're like, well, then they probably are going to participate. Trump obviously is the wild card at a certain point, too.

He's also trying to make sure that there's interest and hype around the debate. But you're right. I mean, both of these candidates need this. We are in a complete toss up election now with Kamala Harris, one of the interesting things, I was reading some polling this morning, they were finding it was like Kamala looks like a, quote, strong leader. And that's actually one of the biggest changes that you see in the polling between Joe Biden and her. It makes sense because you have like a corpse versus a functioning human being. But it's a major incentive for the American people

because they need to imagine her in the job. And part of imagining somebody in the job is doing a presidential debate. That's what all Americans have seen. So in general, my refrain is like debates don't matter. But because this is such an unknown candidate relative to like the general election field in that way, I think it's probably higher stakes for her more so than for him. The other thing where the stakes think that's probably true. The stakes true for Trump are that, you know, with the Biden debate, he wasn't the story. And in a way, like he's got to hope and pray for one of those Kamala twisted moments. And I actually think there's quite a bit of risk to, for Kamala because, I mean,

she's changed her position on everything she's ever stood. You know, Crystal, I'm reading this morning in Axios, she supports building a border wall. I'm like, do you believe anything, lady? What do you believe? She believes she should be president, that's what she believes. She's Selina Meyer, like almost literally out of the HBO show, Veep. But Trump is a difficult person to prosecute that case because he also has been all over the map. Yes, definitely to the same extent.

Just so we're going to talk about abortion. Like how many different positions has he taken on abortion throughout his career? At one time he said that women who get abortion should be punished. That's true. Yeah, he is also the king of saying whatever he wants, even within like the same interview, he'll change his position. However, point stands about Kamala, also true about her. But, you know But the position that

debates don't matter has taken a pretty hard beating this year, soccer. Hey, listen, we're looking on a large, it's about data sets. Few things more consequential, like single events more consequential in modern politics than Biden deciding to do that debate and Trump accepting. I'm sure he does, even as he said in that clip, oh, it worked out pretty well for me. He does not think that. He thinks that was a catastrophic decision. He is still ruining the day that he took the bait of that debate challenge. And there were people on the Democratic side like Chuck Schumer who wanted the debate to be early just so they would have this potential opportunity if it went really badly for Biden

to, you know, pull the plug on him, force him out and have a better, you know, more winning hand possibility of winning hand going into November. So, yeah, that was one of the most consequential political decisions you can possibly imagine. So are the stakes as high for this debate? I wouldn't say so because Kamala is likely we're likely to have some, you know, typical word salad-y type answers from Kamala, but nothing like what Biden did. I mean, there's, I think it would be, I cannot conceive of anyone having as catastrophic a performance as Joe Biden did. Remember all those, we kept the camera on while we were watching the debate,

and there were all those images, and I was like, oh my God, this is insane. I can't imagine that happening. But because she's new, because she's untested, because there's a lot of half-formed opinions about her, it is obviously consequential. And in any case, it matters for our democracy for people to get to see both of these individuals under pressure. And to your point about the stakes being higher for her than for him, I think that's right. Because by and large, people know how they feel about Donald Trump. They do. There's nothing that he could do, say, whatever, that's really going to change a lot of minds about Donald Trump at this point in time in American life. With Kamala, part of why she's risen so quickly is because views of her, the negative views of her, turn out to be quite soft.

Well, the positive views of her are also probably quite soft at this point because we're talking about basically a month of real, you know, focus on her on, you know, the biggest stage in the entire world. So I think that the view of her is quite malleable and could change very quickly. That's a hopeful thing for the Trump campaign because her approval rating is pretty decent at this point, you know, higher than his and sometimes net positive, which again for a modern politician is actually quite a feat. So they have an opportunity here to ding her up a bit. And so that's that's why I think the debate will go forward, because ultimately I think they're going to want to take that opportunity. Trump is going to want to take that opportunity. Trump is going to want to take that opportunity. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy,

transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and re-examining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover?

I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family.

I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways. Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding, but the price has gone up. So now I only buy one. The demand curve in action. And that's just one of the things we'll be covering on Everybody's Business from Bloomberg Businessweek. I'm Max Chavkin. And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. Every Friday, we will be diving into the biggest stories in business, taking a look at what's going on, why it matters, and how it shows up in our everyday lives. But guests like Businessweek editor Brad Stone, sports reporter Randall Williams, and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull will take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick. Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing.

So listen to Everybody's Business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. At the same time, there's an elite debate about the debate and about interviews, about whether Kamala should do interviews. Quentin Tarantino, I mentioned this yesterday, we thought we would talk about it because it probably is a very common elite liberal mindset. Basically, it was like, no, she shouldn't do an interview at all. Sometimes it's just about winning. Let's take a listen. This is about fucking winning. What most people don't give the Democrats enough credit for, all right, but we give the Republicans credit for, it's like, no, sometimes it's just about fucking winning. And it doesn't matter how we look at this moment.

It's about fucking winning. This is about fucking winning. Yep. No, it is. It's a mad fucking dash, and she is running, and she's not stopping to stumble. And you know what? And there's nothing wrong with stopping this. I'm going to vote for her fucking anyway, no matter what she says in a stupid fucking interview. Exactly.

So don't fuck shit up. Quintin in his most Quintin way. By the way, I highly recommend that interview. It might actually be one of the worst interviews I've ever listened to because of Bill Maher. Because I listen to every interview Quentin Tarantino gives. I love his thoughts on film. I could listen to that man literally for hours. And Bill, at various points, interrupts Quentin when he's making good points about film.

And then at one point insinuates that Quentin doesn't know as much about 2001, A Space Odyssey, as he does, which is one of the most insane interview moments I've ever listened to. But there were confidence on that man, the ego. To interrupt Quentin Tarantino with maybe you don't remember about Stanley Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey. He's like, yeah, Quentin doesn't remember the guy who has an encyclopedopedic knowledge of every film ever made in US history. So Tarantino's staying here for film reasons. But Tarantino sums up a very common sentiment amongst, I think, a lot of elite liberals. We did see a poll this morning. I mean, I don't know how to take it seriously. POC News saying 89% of Americans say they want to see America do press. But it's like, do they really?

I mean, our favorability is going up. I think people do want to see it, people like us and others. But part of the problem is that a lot of the expectations of our major candidates have really fallen off a cliff recently. And we don't demand any of the things that we used to. A lot of the norms have been destroyed by Trump. I think some of that is a good thing. But part of the problem is that along the wayside is that you sit for friendly interviews for others. I mean, Kamala has now been, so it's August 27th, Joe Biden dropped out of the race, what, on July 21st. So over a month now, she's been a candidate. She promised to have a quote, major interview scheduled

until by Labor Day. That schedule has still not yet happened, right? So like not even the interview itself has happened. And, you know, we've only got 70 days officially today until the election. So it's not, you know, almost two months and some change. And, you know, the first time we hear from her on the debate stage, I think that's a problem. I really do. For democracy. Yeah, absolutely. It is. I mean, to your point about like the norms, you know, which sometimes we we mock and derive the obsession with the norms. But when you have norms break down, what that means is that anything that you want to actually have has to be codified. They have to be forced to do it because I guarantee you her campaign is making exactly

the same calculus that Quentin Tarantino is elucidating. They're basically like, no, no one is going to switch their vote based on this process question about Kamala Harris not doing an interview. That's their bet. And I think they're probably correct that even though, yes, you'll get 90% of Americans or whatever who say, yes, of course we'd like her to do an interview. Is that going to affect their vote? No. For almost no one, is it actually going to change whether or not they vote for her? Probably not. So it's not that they're lying. It's just that it's not these. They see it as a side issue, not determinative, et cetera. And that's what the Harris people are banking on.

You know, they she has always been a cautious politician. Some of her worst moments have come in interviews with mainstream figures. So it's not like she can feel confident if she sits down with some, you know, relatively friendly mainstream interviewer that that's going to be any sort of a safety blanket for her. She still has to be able off the cuff to respond to her changes in position or the border policy or whatever it is.

And she'd really rather not do that. And because all of the, you know, expectations and niceties of politics have been thrown out the window, they feel probably correctly that she can get away with that, at least for some extended period of time. Let me read here. This just came out this morning. I was telling you about this Politico playbook insight into Kamala's thinking around interviews. I talked about how there's a debate within the campaign about who to do it. Right now, Gayle King is the prevailing person who's going to interview her. Okay. The lady who goes on vacations with Obama, but I guess it's

better than nothing. What they currently say about interviews and others though is, quote, Harris herself has expressed disagreement with the view that she needs to do an interview because, quote, she says, I don't need to do some big showy interview. She's right. She talks about how she did a previous sit down on 60 Minutes with foreign policy and how some of the exchanges were, quote, testy and they came away unhappy with the experience. The other question, too, is whether they want to go back to Lester Holt. Some are like, well, it would be a sign of strength. The others are saying, well, especially Harris, she seems to be actually quite insecure whenever it comes to interviews, I think with good reason.

Absolutely. Lester Holt made her look like an idiot. That was the famous, I've been to the border. And he's like, no, you haven't. And she's like, well, we've been to the border. I mean, that probably is one of her single worst interviews she's ever given. I believe that was the same weird abortion answer that she gave as well. So some are like, well, you need to go back to prove herself. And she's like, no, I'm riding high right now. I don't think there's any reason that I should. So anyway, reading this gave some insight into they are not feeling the pressure in any way that let's say it's even become a media conversation.

I think a lot of media, unfortunately, seems to be generally okay with it. Anything before we get to, we did find, by the way, she has done one interview with a TikTok girl. So we did find that, which I missed apparently, but just to show you how little news we got out. I mean, just, I would say their assessment is she's a little bit up. They like the press conversation that's going on. They like, you know, the honeymoon and the bump coming out of the DNC and all of those sorts of things. And if you sit for an interview, you risk changing that. So, you know, party of democracy, not really living up to their word here in terms of the democratic process. Right. So let's listen to that interview she gave with a TikToker at the DNC. To date, the only interview she has actually given. Hi, it's good to see you. So good to see you.

Hi, guys. I am here with Vice President Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Convention. I am so honored to be here. Thank you. I'm glad to be with you. Thank you so much for speaking with me. Of course. And a little fun fact.

My last name is Gopalan. I know. I know. Which is your mom's last name. Yes, it is. And, you know, I grew up going to India in the summers, and I know you did that as well when you were young. We used to go in the fall, though. In the fall, yeah, when it's not so hot.

And I wanted to kind of hear from you what your fondest, like, memories were from then. Well, some of my fondest memories are with my grandfather. You know, it's funny because Kamala in Indian is lotus. Yes, that sounds great. And Kamala in America is potus. So lotus for potus. So I didn't know I'd ever have to educate a fellow Indian American.

There is no language called Indian. Despite the many hillbillies over the years who have asked me, do you speak Indian? And I had to inform them that actually there's no such language as Indian, but okay. Hard-hitting stuff there though.

Yeah, very hard-hitting stuff. They really put a lot of pressure upon it. You know, Kamala and I have a lot in common. I also used to. I did not go in the fall. I actually had to go to school. So I don't know how exactly her schedule worked out. But as most Indian kids can attest to, they did go to India over the summer.

But it's like, come on, what are we doing here? That's the only interview this lady's given. And we didn't even know about it. Somebody flagged it to me. They're like, no, no, no, she has done an interview, and it's here. It's worse than you think. And seeing it, I was like, I mean, it's ridiculous. It's the equivalent of, you know, Trump doing the Aiden Ross podcast or, you know.

He's not only doing that, right? I mean, he's also done multiple press conferences. He just did this press availability. That is definitely true. He has allowed more press questions. But it's not like he subjected himself to a lot of difficult interviews either. I just think I think that this is one of the areas where losing the norms does suck. And, you know, I'm a big fan of what Irami always talks about, like some of these processes,

like the requirement to debate, they have to be codified because increasingly these candidates, the downside of having so many different media platforms in a way is that they can just pick and choose. Like, I know this person is going to be super friendly to me and I can go out there and get my face in the public. And I don't really feel like I have to sit down for an interview that could go poorly for me or be difficult for me or whatever. So you see this, you know, not just at the presidential level. You see this at all levels of politics. And it truly is a loss. It truly is a loss for democracy at a time when, you know, there's a lot of discussion around such things.

Yeah, I think they both should do it. I would be happier, you know, at the very least, please, please sit for an interview. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye.

Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today.

Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other.

It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news

show up in our lives in small ways. Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding, but the price has gone up. So now I only buy one. The demand curve in action. And that's just one of the things we'll be covering on Everybody's Business from Bloomberg Businessweek. I'm Max Chavkin. And I'm Stacey Banik-Smith. Every Friday, we will be diving into the biggest stories in business, taking a look at what's going on, why it matters, and how it shows up in our everyday lives. But guests like Businessweek editor Brad Stone, sports reporter Randall Williams, and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull will take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms,

even the signal chats that make our economy tick. Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing. So listen to Everybody's Business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, guys, unfortunately had some significant tech issues this morning, so we are going to have to reschedule that debate on the gender gap with Gen Z. But really looking forward to that one in the future. In the meantime, let's get to Trump's

latest comments on abortion. That's right, abortion. There has been just some absolutely bonkers movement by the Trump campaign now so far. First started with the interview that vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance gave to NBC News' Meet the Press, asked about a national abortion ban. Now, as Kristen Welker points out, Democrats multiple times said that Trump would pass a national abortion ban. J.D. Vance says not only would Trump not sign it, he would actually veto it. Let's take a listen. Democrats made the case this week and beyond this week that Donald Trump, if elected, will impose a federal ban on abortion if he wins. Now, Donald Trump says he won't. But can you commit, Senator, sitting right here with me today,

that if you and Donald Trump are elected, that you will not impose a federal ban on abortion? I can absolutely commit that, Kristen. Donald Trump has been as clear about that as possible. I think it's important to step back and say, what has Donald Trump actually said on the abortion question? And how is it different from what Kamala Harris and the Democrats have said? Donald Trump wants to end this culture war over this particular topic. If California wants to have a different abortion policy from Ohio, then Ohio has to respect California and California has to respect Ohio. Donald Trump's view is that we want the individual states and their individual cultures and their unique political sensibilities to make these decisions because we don't want to

have a nonstop federal conflict over this issue. The federal government ought to be focused on getting food prices down, getting housing prices down, issues, of course, where Kamala Harris has been a total disaster. So I think Donald Trump is right. We want the federal government to focus on these big economic and immigration questions. Let the states figure out their own abortion policy. Let me just follow up with you a little bit on that point because I've been talking to Republicans, including Senator Lindsey Graham just last week,

who've made it very clear that if Donald Trump is elected, if you are elected, they will continue to press this point. Senator Graham said to me, I'm going to keep saying that there should be a federal ban. If such a piece of legislation landed on Donald Trump's desk, would he veto it? I think it'd be very clear he would not support it. I mean, he said that

explicitly. Yeah, I mean, if you're not supporting it as the president of the United States, you fundamentally have to veto it. So he would veto a federal abortion ban? I think he would. He said that explicitly that he would. Actually, he had not said that previously. It's the first time I've heard that, that he would veto it. But that little exchange there, Crystal, is a real preview of how they are on their back foot right now on the issue of abortion. Let's put this one up on the screen as well. Donald Trump himself from Truth Social, quote, My administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.

Reproductive rights, of course, not a phrase you're usually used to hearing from a Republican presidential candidate. So we now have the vice presidential GOP nominee who says that they will veto a federal abortion ban, even though he previously has expressed at least some support for that type of policy in the past. And then Trump saying my administration will be great for, quote, reproductive rights. This demonstrates just how much the issue is going against them at the campaign level. And I still, to this day, think it is the single biggest existential threat to their entire case for victory. Yeah. And obviously, J.D. Vance is a

very difficult messenger on this, given what he said in his own personal faith and, you know, all of that. And the big problem for Trump is, look, end of the day, you're the guy who put the people on the court that overturned Roe versus Wade. So it's not really a messaging bind that they can get themselves out of. I think this is probably the best that they can do is basically to say, we promise, we promise. If you're in California, we're not going to touch your rights. Mississippi women, like, good luck. It is what it is within your state. It's probably the best they can do. But I don't think there's any ameliorating what a damaging issue this is for them, and even more so with Kamala Harris now as the Democratic nominee. I will say others have pointed this out that I know there's been some

freak out, certainly among pro-life groups. Oh, yeah. have pointed this out that I know there's been some freak out, certainly among pro-life groups. Oh, yeah. About that. We have some examples of that, etc. But I do think that if it was any other Republican other than Donald Trump, who has this incredibly like force of personality within the Republican Party, the freak out would have been like a hundred times greater. A hundred thousand times. Yeah, right. Because it's not only, him saying reproductive rights is so hilarious. I mean, that is pro-choice language, period,

end of story. And the Republican Party is obviously always very careful and strategic about the particular word choice and languages that they use. So for him to say reproductive rights is pretty astonishing. But yeah, I mean, he's able to get away not only with things like that somewhat, but also with the RNC platform. And he stripped a bunch of the pro-life language and also the anti-LGBT language from the Republican Party platform because he realizes both of these positions are difficult. And he himself, you know, he was a New York liberal on social issues previously prior to wanting to be the Republican Party nominee, so probably still has some sympathy for those cultural positions, even if he is the person who has most aggressively pushed forward the, you know, the end of Roe versus Wade. Look, Trump made a deal with the devil. Trump, everybody, look, I'm not

going to question anybody's personal faith. As you said, he previously was pro-choice. Okay, became a Republican. Gave money to Planned Parenthood. So fine. I'll accept that on its merits. The thing is, though, is that he made a deal with the evangelicals to win the 2016 nomination and the election by choosing Vice President Pence. That was a smart electoral play. They did not in a million years dream that they would appoint three Supreme Court justices who would then overturn Roe versus Wade in such a quick turnaround.

And then I have noted this from day one, from the day that Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign. I believe we did a live stream here on the show. And I remember the first thing I said, I go, I might be wrong, but I don't think he said the word abortion once. I don't think he even bragged about Roe versus Wade. Why? Because Trump is actually a good politician. And he understands that this is a complete loser for Republicans. And in fact, I would say this is evidence of how he can be a moderating force when he wants to be, in terms of his rhetoric. He uses the cult of personality to force all these Republicans who for years have been calling Democrats like genocidal baby terrorists or whatever. And he's like, no, actually, we're reproductive rights now. And everyone's like, oh, I mean, Mike Lee and

others who are like, oh, okay, got it. But this, though, is the power, the political power of Trump. You also see a huge freakout amongst a lot of pro-life activists and others. Let's put this up there on the screen just as an example. Seth Dillon, Babylon Bee, says, my administration will be indistinguishable from a Democrat's. You know, this is particularly laughable to me, Crystal, because really? It's like, my administration will be indistinguished from Democrats? It's like, guys, not only is he the person who appointed the justices that overturned Roe versus Wade, there is all kinds of federal power, as the Democrats often talk about, through the help of the Human Services, FDA, through what? I forget, the Hyde Amendment. There's a million different ways that you're substantively

different. But I mean, pro-life activists are so used to getting catered and pampered by the entire Republican Party, they don't know what it's like to just be another coalitional group. And in fact, this time around, you're the least popular coalitional group in the entire Republican Party. So again, as pro-choice person, I'm actually quite happy about this because, I mean, frankly, these people are like defund the police activists, except what, 50,000 times more powerful in terms of their hold on the Republican Party? I mean, I see folks out there defending this IVF legislation out of Alabama. They're out there like talking about how Trump and the FDA should prosecute people for abortion pill through the mail. I'm like, are you out of your goddamn minds?

Just say politically, right? There's a lot of unpopular political positions. I hate weed. Do you think I'm going to be like, my candidate needs to endorse, you know, being against marijuana? No, I'm not an idiot, okay? I don't know why is it that compromise is so difficult for a lot of these folks. But I think it's largely that 45 years of political coalition-wise, they have been catered to. And for the first time in their lives, they're like, oh, wait, we're actually deeply unpopular. You know, I actually have a lot of sympathy for them, even though obviously I don't share the position. I'm much more sympathetic to where they're coming from than you are because they're looking at this and like, yeah, for 40 years, these politicians have been telling us they agree with us that abortion is murder and that this is like a holocaust of babies and that this is a genocide of babies.

They claim they agreed with us. And now you're like, yeah, but it's fine to murder babies in California. No biggie. You know, if Californians want to murder babies, okay. So if you view this as like a truly moral core issue, let's actually put the next Seth Dillon tweet up on the screen because he elaborated his view here in a way that, again, I don't agree with, but it is sort of cowardly to be like, you know, on an issue that has such moral weight to say that it's okay in one place and not in the other. Like, for example, as a pro-choice person,

I don't find it acceptable that women in Mississippi or Alabama or another red state don't have the same rights as a woman in California. And so, you know, from Seth Dillon, this is a much more consistent philosophical position that he's elucidating here. He says, when considering whether an issue should be decided by individual states

or whether it should be universally prohibited, the key question is whether the issue involves fundamental human rights. At one point, slavery was left to the states. Some states permitted it while others did not. The outcome was not peace and harmony but civil war. Eventually, slavery was recognized as a violation of human rights. He goes on to say abortion, like slavery, is a crime against humanity. It devalues and dehumanizes. It treats a certain subset of human individuals as less than to justify stripping away the rights and dignity for the benefit of another. Just as the moral atrocity of slavery could not be left to the

discretion of individual states, neither should abortion. It doesn't matter how popular it is with suburban women. Obviously, I have the polar opposite view of this, right? I think, you know, women being able to have their own choices and what we've seen in the horrors of the post-war landscape, like I don't think that women in Mississippi should be allowed to bleed out in a parking lot waiting for their life to actually be technically deemed by a doctor who's afraid of being prosecuted at risk. I don't think women should be surveilled, you know, if they use a menstrual tracking app. I don't think they should be surveilled and have that data given to police to track whether they cross straight state lines to get an abortion. I think that should be

nationwide. His position here is ideologically much more morally consistent than the yes, we think it's fine to murder babies in California, but not in Mississippi line. But the problem is, and again, as a leftist, I very much sympathize with the position that they're in. Where else are you going to go? Yeah. Where else are you going to go? Yeah. Where else are you going to go? And so that's why Trump feels perfectly at ease throwing them completely under the bus, which he has done absolutely at this point. Because he knows at the end of the day, they're not going to vote for Democrats.

They're going to vote for him. And if he gets more Supreme Court choice picks, he's probably going to put more people on the bench who back up Amy Coney Barrett at all. But then that's why the slavery example is. It's like, OK, dude, if you believe that, then you are actually saying you should fight a civil war. So where are you? Where's your arms? Like, if you believe that, if you believe that, then you would support, which they always say they don't support violence and all this other stuff. No, I mean, the logical history and reading of all that, John Brown and Harper's Ferry raid, etc., then act like it, but they don't, okay? And that's what I'm talking about, is that they morally

are always grandstanding, but then politically have been willing to play ball in the past. Like, for example, going with somebody like Donald Trump, a literal New York liberal, to work within the political process to achieve their aims. So when they want to achieve something which is in their aims, and they're very willing to do compromise, but whenever somebody goes against it, then they're not willing to do compromise. And that is why it annoys the crap out of me, is because they acted like a normal political movement for 40-something years to exert political power, compromising with various different candidates, et cetera, and working within the system. And then when it goes

against them on popular opinion, now all of a sudden it's the moral genocide, et cetera. It's like, well, you got to pick one, okay? And that's why I don't have a lot of sympathy because whenever you are, again, if it's, like then you should, if it's slavery, then you should be acting like it, but you're not. It's like, you're living your life in a normal way, which by the way, is how most people dealt with slavery. And ultimately the way that it was accomplished with both through civil war and through the political process. So that's actually just how living in a literal society works in a multi-ethnic heterogeneous society with various different political coalitional interests. So I don't have a lot of sympathy for that rhetoric because if it

was true, they would be acting totally differently. Well, it's instructive to think about how they ended up with Mike Pence on the ticket, which was their pick, and how they ended up with these particular Supreme Court justices who were ideologically completely committed to overturning Roe versus Wade, which of course they ultimately did. And that's because at the time, Trump genuinely feared that they may not vote for him. He no longer fears that. No, and he shouldn't. And he didn't have to go through a real primary process. When you recall the Republican primary, one did exist on the Democratic side, but he didn't participate in the debates. So he basically sort of remained above that primary

process and wasn't subjected to, you remember some of the back and forth between like Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley on the stage about how they'd be on abortion, et cetera, et cetera. He didn't have to go through that process, didn't have to make any promises to anyone about anything. And so now he realizes that this is the most unpopular part of the Republican Party platform, especially post Roe versus Wade, because that's the other thing. The numbers have shifted against him as people have reckoned with what this reality actually means. And so he's doing everything he can to cut his losses here. But, you know, I guess I say I have more sympathy for them because, again, people like Donald Trump, people like certainly Mike Powell, all of these Republicans who, you know, made,

raised so much money and garnered so much support and, you know, became so famous in this movement claiming that they view things the way that Seth Dillon lays out here. Like at the end of the day, it turns out to be completely hollow Like at the end of the day, it turns out to be completely hollow, which the pro-life movement, I think, long suspected that that was the case. But I see it much more as the moment that this became politically inconvenient for the Republican Party. They, you know, all the stated principles of the past suddenly are just completely wiped clean. And, you know, again, stated principles of the past suddenly are just completely wiped clean. And, you know, again, on the political calculus, I don't think that this is really going, Kamala Harris is going to be favored on abortion rights, period, end of story. If this election is about abortion rights, she's going to win massively, right? It's not going to be even

particularly close. The thing that keeps him in it, obviously, is that there are a host of other issues that people also obviously very, very concerned about. But this has been a really energizing factor on the Democratic side. But yeah, there's no fear from Donald Trump that this coalition is going to go elsewhere. The Democratic Party is 100% pro-choice at this point. There is no real third party candidate that's just running on a like, I'm pro-life, that's my thing. Like, vote for me if your protest vote that doesn't exist. So they have nowhere else to go. And probably even the most stridently pro-life person has an other set of issues that are more likely to align with Donald Trump and the Republican Party. So yeah, he feels like he can just throw them under the bus, even in spite of

the fact that back when he was trying to win their vote originally in 2016, he was saying like, you know, we should criminalize the women and really trying to position himself as being very, very pro-life when it was not really true. I understand what you're saying. I think, first of all, I spent too much of my childhood getting preached at by evangelicals. So I find them especially triggering on this. But it just comes down to this. They don't want to reckon with the fact, with this most basic insight, we live in a society. I'm sorry that, the funny thing is, the reason, and again, this is why I don't believe them whenever they're, all this moral grandstanding language.

For years, they let Republicans adopt the politically popular message of leave it to the states because, no, but they did. That was the- I don't really- HW., that was the message from him. That was George W. Bush. There was a lot of heartbeat build. There was a lot of, it was easier for Republicans to talk about this when it was theoretical. Yes. And they were much more strident.

And, you know, they would go to these, like, confabs that were all about, you know, focus on religious right, whatever. And they would say very extreme things. And not all of them, right? Not 100%, but many of them. Fair. Yeah. And so now when Trump is like, we're great for reproductive rights, you don't hear even those people who really made their whole identity about being associated with this issue, you don't hear a damn peep out of them. Fair enough. But more what I'm saying is, oh, for years, why was it politically acceptable to con the American people into believing that the Republican Party said leave it to the states?

But then, immediately after Roe, Mike Pence is like, no, we didn't mean leave it to the states. We actually meant we want a national abortion ban. You're like, well, hold on a second. Also, a friend pointed out to me, they never would have said leave it to the states if they knew that America would become 10x more secular in the decade period of the 2010s. And that actually, when you do leave it to the states, even hard red states are like, yeah, we're good, actually. We're going to keep the Roe consensus. And then second,

here's another thing. Again, we live in a democratic system. We had a Republican primary. There were multiple candidates in that race, Ron DeSantis amongst them, who signed a heartbeat bill. He lost. So what do you want? You know, it's like, if you're so good, you should have voted for him, but you didn't. Most of you, data tells us, you voted for Donald Trump. Well, what do you want to say? The guy who is transactional in all of his political relationships. So, you know, okay, if you're so powerful, then you should go elect somebody who actually agrees with you in the Republican Party. Here, even J.D., who got the SBA list endorsement, I mean, he's not an idiot. You know, you can read a poll and you can just say, all right, if we want to win, there's certain things that we're just going to have to say or we're going to have to change our position on.

And so the point is, is that, and this is always a problem with taking moral issues and trying to blend them with a democratic society. And I don't know why it is acceptable for every other group in all of politics, people like me, don't like weed, or hold other, you know, very unpopular positions who just sometimes have to resign it and say, you know what? Public doesn't agree with me on it. So be it. Why is that so difficult? Because again, I feel weird defending the pro-life position because I don't agree with them. But I see it almost in the total reverse, which is they see it as like a core civil right. And there's a reason we have a constitution and we have certain core rights that are protected, that are supposed to be above and beyond the slings and arrows of just, not just, but of a Democratic popularity contest.

And so if you view it through that lens, then you're like, no, this is core to me. I believe this is like a civil rights type of issue. And no, I don't think we should be voting in Mississippi about whether or not black people should have rights. That should be something that's enshrined and that's guaranteed. I relate to that because I feel that way certainly about the pro-choice position. I don't think we should be voting on whether women in Texas should be able to be forced to bleed out in the parking lot in order to obtain a medically necessary abortion.

I don't think we should be voting on whether that young woman in Kentucky should be forced to bear her stepdad's baby who raped her when she was 12 years old. I don't think that these things should be up for a popular Democratic Party, Democratic process debate. And so I see where they're coming from, even as I disagree, because they're like, you all claimed, and I know there was some rhetoric about leave it to the states, blah, blah, blah. But the overwhelming message from the Republican Party was that abortion is a moral wrong, period, end of story. Remember, what was that lady's name who did the whole on the debate stage,

Fiorina, what was her name? Carly Fiorina. She did the whole thing on the debate stage about the, you know, it was a fake video, but anyway, about the babies and they're being torn down and the fetususes torn apart. They painted this as a visceral, moral, civil rights type issue. And so, yeah, I think it actually shows a lot more character.

The people like Seth Dillon who were saying, no, you claimed that this akin to like slavery, akin to a genocide, akin to a Holocaust. And then the minute it's politically inconvenient for you, you just wave your hands and move off of that rhetoric completely. Like, yeah, we didn't really mean that. We just, you know, California, do your thing. We don't really care. Reproductive rights, et cetera, et cetera. So Mike Pence, as an example, I was never, maybe this is because I always, you know, suspected, like, I was listening to their rhetoric about how this is moral wrong. Like, I never thought, oh, they just want to leave it to the states. I thought, no, they want this to be banned everywhere because that's what their rhetoric indicated. And Mike

Pence was very consistent on that. You know, Mike Pence is an abortion hardliner and always has been. So I do think it's unprincipled. I do think it exposes that they didn't really mean it. These politicians didn't really mean it. And they're more committed to the personality of Donald Trump and whatever than they are to what they previously framed as a core moral issue. Fair enough. I would just say, hey, what does the civil rights movement teach us? Throughout the 1950s when civil rights was very unpopular, you think the civil rights people were just like, oh, actually, we're going to morally grandstand, or are we going to continue to work through the democratic system and eventually accomplish our goals? So you guys got what you wanted. That's the thing. For years, Roe versus Wade, Roe versus

Wade, you literally got what you wanted. But apparently that's not enough. So I just have a lot less sympathy for all of these purity tests and others, where if you were to ask them about any other issue, they would say exactly what I said. But for this one, I mean, look, I do get it, right? Me eating weed is not the same. But in a democratic system, which is not supposed to consider religiosity, then yeah, actually, you know, it does look like that. So they, you know, at the end of the day, you have to contend in the American political system. This is something which I think they would lecture to any leftist who were to have the same similar like moral arguments about defund the police or any other national argument. Yeah, right. There you go. Yeah, exactly.

And I guarantee. That's part of why I'm also sympathetic. But they would have a different view of that. Trump has them between a rock and a hard place. And he knows that. Like, they're checkmated. They have nowhere else to go. And so he knows they're going to suck it up and vote for him.

Right. And Democratic Party knows that most of the pro-Palestine activists at the end of the day are going to suck it up and vote for him. Because Democratic Party knows that most of the, you know, pro-Palestine activists at the end of the day are going to vote for him because Trump is going to be worse. And yeah, it's like a checkmate kind of a situation that they're in. So I do have empathy for them. I did not expect to have this show be me going to the mat defending Seth Dillon of the Babylon Bee and Sagar and going after him. But I guess that's what makes the show interesting. That's what makes the show interesting. And I think this is probably, I think we have not a huge pro-life audience, but there's some people in here. I would just ask, you know, that you

consider everything we talked about here. So, because I think at the very least, there are going to be a lot of conversations like this. And, you know, amongst normal folks who I know who don't engage with the political process at all, you know, abortion is a noose around the neck of Republican Party. They just they have. And I said it and I was so and that's another thing. These people attacked me so much after Roe versus Wade when I was like, hey, this is a problem. It's a problem. And then after 2022, they all wanted to retcon the losses as it was just Trump's fault. And it was stop the steal. I'm like, no, no, no, no. It's not just stop the steal. It was abortion. Okay. It was the whole picture of being a fringe extremist party.

And all of those things went together. And to your point about, you know, I mean, Trump has no one to blame but himself for this outcome. Yeah, I agree. Yes. He is the one who put those people on the court. He ran on it. He did it. And there you go. So, yes, you can say the words reproductive rights all you want. No one is going to trust you or any other Republican Party member with their reproductive rights. Not happening. Yeah, that's very true. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results.

Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment

and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator,

and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other.

It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room.

You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways. Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding, but the price has gone up, so now I only buy one. The demand curve in action, and that's just one of the things we'll be covering on Everybody's Business from Bloomberg Businessweek.

I'm Max Chavkin. And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. Every Friday, we will be diving into the biggest stories in business, taking a look at what's going on, Randall Williams, and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull will take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick. Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing. So listen to Everybody's Business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so some good news here, and it's something Sagar and I, no doubt, I think, agree on.

Let's put this up on the screen. So we've talked about this rent collusion price-fixing algorithm that has been used by RealPage. It's this software company called RealPage. It's basically, you know, I'll get into a little bit of the technical details, but they go into a city. They have many of the landlords in the city feed in their data about what they're renting their apartments out for. And then the algorithm uses that data to recommend and basically to pretty much force on these different landlords the optimal highest rent price. And so, you know, the collusion isn't happening directly in person. It's happening through like, you know, the backdoor of this algorithm, but it's happening nonetheless. And so we've seen indications that this may happen.

Now we have the official announcement that the Justice Department, together with the Attorneys General of North Carolina, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Minnesota, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington, filed a civil antitrust lawsuit today against RealPage, incorporated for its unlawful scheme to decrease competition among landlords in apartment pricing and to monopolize the market for commercial revenue management software that landlords use to price apartments. RealPage's alleged conduct deprives renters of the benefits of competition on apartment leasing terms and harms millions of Americans. I just want to read a little bit of what the attorney general and deputy attorney general had to say about this, because I actually

thought that they framed this really well. Merrick Garland said, Americans should not have to pay more in rent because a company has found a new way to scheme with landlords to break the law. We allege RealPage's pricing algorithm enables landlords to share confidential, competitively sensitive information and align their rents. Using software as the sharing mechanism does not immunize the scheme from Sherman Act liability. And the Justice Department will continue to aggressively enforce the antitrust laws and protect the American people from those who violate them. The Deputy Attorney General added, training a machine to break the law is still breaking the law. Today's action makes clear that we will use all our legal tools to ensure accountability for technology-fueled anti-competitive conduct. Kudos to them for bringing the suit. Kudos to all the states

that are involved here. It's nice to see. I'm not sure if the Attorney General of North Carolina is a D or an R. Most of them are Democratic states, but you've got Tennessee in there, too, which is also encouraging to see. Because this is part of what has helped to drive rent increases. Based on this algorithm saga, they have even found that these apartments can make more money if they hold some of their rentals off the market. They basically charge too high of a price for them to lease out all of their apartments. But they found that marginally to be more beneficial.

So not only are you jacking up rents, you're also effectively taking some rental stock off of the market. And it's having increasingly devastating impacts on specific rental markets where this has really taken hold around the country. Ironically, this is probably the most net benefit to red states and specifically to a lot of these swing states. So I talk a lot about here about population inflows. And part of the reason red states are actually flourishing right now

is not just, or I guess purplish states, places like Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, obviously more of a red state, is because they don't actually have a lot of housing regulation on their books in the same way. So you're allowed to build a ton of housing. The problem though, is that you have huge influxes of people that are coming in. And part of the not only natural rent decrease is happening, it's that a lot of the construction is specifically financed by these large corporate landlords that own these gigantic, you know, the glass buildings, anybody who's been in a downtown area of Nashville and Austin or any of these places, North Carolina, anywhere, Raleigh, knows what I'm talking about. Well, those apartment buildings then are specifically the ones

who are using these types of algorithms. And then that is also being backpacked on by a lot of the other landlords that are in the area. And I mean, at a certain point, you can't fault a landlord, I guess, for wanting to have higher price. But what you can fault is- I can fault a landlord.

I mean, look, listen. I can definitely fault a landlord. Here's my one. There are most, a lot of landlords in this country- Not these ones we're talking about here. Not these ones. Okay, one. There are most, a lot of landlords in this country are just- Not these ones we're talking about here. Not these ones. Okay. I'm just saying, like, a lot of landlords are actually just people who own, like, one extra property.

You know, it's the tail end are the real problem, and they're the ones who set up all of this, like, private equity machinations that make everybody else have a worse name. But the point really is just that this is in the general interest of the government because in this particular case, especially red states and others, if you want to keep that population inflow coming, for example, Arizona, North Carolina, and Texas are the three places where you see young people specifically coming and really flourishing actually because of the comparative income versus housing ratio. You cannot let the same thing happen there that happened in New York, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles. So this is genuinely in their best interest. And because, I mean, that's one of the things I was really heartened by from work from home is we have to make sure that other areas of the country are also dynamic and attractive to people who are young. And so that you don't just get like

super majority concentrations of like the best and the brightest, quote unquote, who flock to these places. Because the other problem is for every person who makes it in DC, there are nine or 10 others who are saddled with 200 grand in student loan debt and barely trucking along and able to make rent. And those are the people really who are the most preyed upon by this system. Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. And so it's 100% in states' interests. It's in the interests of certainly the consumers, renters. But we also have to acknowledge these private equity companies that own some of these firms or the giant corporate landlord management companies. These are major political figures who throw a lot of money around in politics as well.

So that's why there's no guarantee that even though you look at this and you're like, of course, this makes all the sense in the world, there's no guarantee that something like this would ultimately happen. Let's skip forward to D3. Just to show you again a little bit of the impact here. Credit as always to our friend Matt Stoller

who runs the big sub-stack and does a fantastic job covering these types of competition issues and actions by the federal government. Previously, when it was starting to look like, actually, the FBI raided one of these big corporate landlords, something we covered and took note of on the show, this is the Atlanta area. And all of these dots on the map are properties that are using this real page software. So again, it's basically just a fancy collusion scheme that uses an algorithm rather than in-person price fixing to get the job done and is extremely sophisticated. So you can see how widespread in certain markets are. And to your point, obviously, Atlanta is kind of politically important right now.

So, you know, makes sense that Democrats would want to show some action with regard to taking on the high cost of housing and rent. Kamala Harris mentioned RealPage as well. I don't know if she used the name in particular, but she referenced this algorithmic price fixing and rental collusion. Put D2 up on the screen just in terms of some of the specifics from the complaint that we can get into here that were noteworthy. So this is Lindsay Owens on Twitter says, pricing advisors ensure landlords are taking the high prices the computer spits out and escalates cases where landlords aren't obeying the machine, then calls them into the principal's office to give them a refresher on goals.

So just pause here for a second before we go to the next one. What she's underscoring here is, yes, this was algorithmic, but also there were a lot of human beings involved here in enforcing the collusion level pricing. Because one of the quote unquote problems that the landlords and, you know, real page face is when you have actual human beings who we're thinking about, you know, whoever it is, that single mom in that apartment struggling to afford rent, they may get a little soft hearted and not want to do the whole rental price increase that the computer system is telling them they should do. So they have all of these in-person mechanisms to pressure landlords to guarantee that they are taking those high prices and gouging their own customers as much as possible. Go ahead and put the next piece up on the screen. She gives another example here. She says, in addition, a team of staff makes tens of thousands of calls to landlords every month

to collect non-public, competitively sensitive information, including occupancy rates, prices, floor plan, info on concessions, lease terms, and more. So again, it's not just the machine. These are real human beings. So we're gathering that data to be able to more effectively collude. Put the next piece up on the screen. She says, it takes a lot of elbow grease to execute a price-fixing conspiracy at this scale, and thousands surely played a role, but the algorithm is also more sinister than I expected. The software is designed with auto-accept features to ensure landlords adopt pricing recommendations. So again, to take any sort of like human compassion out of the equation, you can just check the auto accept box and then the high prices are automatically put into action without any

sort of human being having to feel bad about what they're doing to these consumers. But the next piece up on the screen, she says it also has a hard floor to ensure prices don't drop too low. Sold out mode that recommends the maximum rent charge by a property's competitors, even if the floor plan's previous price was far lower, and revenue protection mode to ensure prices don't dip in downturns.

So effectively, again, we can, she goes on a little bit from there, but those were some of the key points. You know, effectively putting in mechanisms to make sure that rental prices aren't actually responsive, really, you know, effectively putting in mechanisms to make sure that rental prices aren't actually responsive, really, to markets, that they maintain high prices, even if you have a market dip that ordinarily would make it so that rental prices were more affordable. And, you know, if you look

at the prices in these metro areas where RealPage has been a factor, you can see that real page has accounted for a significant portion of rental price hikes. Housing is one of the key issues that we hear over and over and over again. Clearly, Kamala Harris has realized this is also a problem, and that's why she's attaching some political significance to it as well, because what could be more core to that aspiration to live a secure middle class life than just being able to afford a decent home, be able to make rent in a it more, she'd be better off. There's some talk of it, I think, in some of the more recent ads, but there's a lot of questions too about who she would even have in her admin. I mean, people like Tony West, her brother-in-law and top advisor would definitely not be, you know, for this stuff. Because that's the irony is that a lot of these startups and other places in Silicon Valley rightfully pitch themselves because they're like, you know, you can actually make a lot of money in terms of fees. So she does remain very, how would I say, very like almost like a blank

slate. You can see almost anything that you want to see in terms of what her housing policy would look like. One of the things that was really encouraging is she brought on Brian Deese, who has been one of the people in the Biden administration who has been most aggressive about this sort of like competition policy. And that was something that, you know, Matt Stoller, so the world and David Dayen, et cetera, really took heart in because certainly Tony West is a troubling figure in the other direction. But Brian Deese, who brought on as an economic advisor, and like I said, has been one of the best actors in the Biden administration. So that was seen as a really encouraging sign, as was, of course, picking Tim Walz as vice president in terms of the agenda that he's pushed forward in the state

of Minnesota. So she has leaned into, in that economics piece she gave, she leaned into housing affordability and both on the side of the competition piece, which is important, and also the building more piece, which is also important. I think you have to put those two pieces together. Will she actually do it? That's another question. Yeah, great question. That's another question. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids,

promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie.

In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free

on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind VoiceOver, the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships.

I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room.

You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to Boy Sober on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways. Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding. But the price has gone up, so now I only buy one. The demand curve in action. And that's just one of the things we'll be covering on Everybody's Business from Bloomberg Business Week. I'm Max Chavkin. And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. Every Friday, we will be diving into the biggest

stories in business, taking a look at what's going on, why it matters, and how it shows up in our everyday lives. But guests like Businessweek editor Brad Stone, sports reporter Randall Williams, and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull will take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick. Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing.

So listen to Everybody's Business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's go ahead and get to some of the polling around Kamala's economic agenda, which has been really interesting. Because after she announced some of these things, there was an entire mainstream economist freak out. In particular, about her announcement regarding a price gouging ban. Now, just to be clear, first of all, she was very vague, which I don't appreciate. I would like to know more specifics about what she actually means here. But she seems to be modeling this after some Elizabeth Warren-backed

legislation, which is very similar to state-level legislation that already exists in a majority of states across the country, including many red states. So this was nothing really radical, but there was a whole freakout about it. She was called a communist and price controls, et cetera, et cetera. You know, I might be in favor of some price controls, but there's no indication that Kamala Harris is. However, this is one of those instances where there is such a clear divide between elite economic consensus and popular economic consensus. And so there was a poll that really dug into a bunch of her different economic proposals. You can see it here up on the screen. So the purple bar is those who either strongly or somewhat support an issue. The gray

is not sure. The red is strongly or somewhat opposed. And you can see that on all of these issues, they all garner majority support. And the opposition, the highest opposition is 27 percentage points. Specifically on this question of quote unquote price controls, she's got capping increases on food and grocery prices. It gets 65% support, okay? Overwhelming support. Total opposite, again, of the picture that was painted in the mainstream press, and only 24% strongly or somewhat oppose.

The most popular, and again, this is why you hear Democrats talk about this a lot, the most popular pieces of the agenda she announced had to do with getting down the cost of prescription drug prices. So the most popular policy getting down the cost of prescription drug prices. So the most popular policy, increasing the number of drugs eligible for Medicare price negotiations, capping the monthly cost of insulin at $35, expanding the earned income tax credit, capping out-of-pocket annual expenses for prescription drugs, directing the federal government to work with states to eliminate medical debt. So many of those top issues have to do, again, with the cost of health care. Then you get to prices with regard to food and groceries.

Then you get to expanding a tax credit for housing developers who build affordable rental units. So now you're getting into housing. And it goes from there. Actually, they tested on here. I forgot this. They tested preventing corporate landlords from using algorithmic price-setting tools, which is what we were just discussing in the previous segment,

and that also gets 62% approval. Put the next one up on the screen. We can show the partisan breakdown here, which, of course, there is some partisan divide. However, many of these issues were even popular among Republicans, including that capping increases on food and grocery prices. Republicans, you find even among ordinary Republicans, 52% support a policy that was derided as being a communist policy by many Republicans and especially many sort of mainstream economists. So you can see pretty broad support for a lot of these issues. I'll put the next one because I think there are a few more on the next one. The most divisive, partisan divisive issue, just because I think of the way that the Affordable

Care Act is so thoroughly branded and associated with the Democratic Party, is extending subsidies towards costs from the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Republicans very much opposed to it. Democrats very, very much in support of it. So that was the most politically divisive issue. But overall, you can see, in spite of the freakout from elite economists, this is an agenda that is actually very popular. And as we said before, Sager, we'll see if she leans into it, see if she actually, you know, tries to pass some of this agenda when she's president, or if it's mostly just a messaging ploy. We do definitely know. Can we put D7, please, up on the screen? Already, they're telling Democrats on the Hill who were trying to backlash on the grocery store plan. They said, don't worry, guys, it will never pass through Congress. So it's not a big deal. I guess

I haven't gotten to talk to you about price controls. Now, look, I don't support price controls unless it's basically in a time of war or an extremely bad situation. I think there's a lot of different things that you can do before even getting there. Some of the things the Biden administration has done, which I definitely support or have expressed support for, breaking up meatpacking. There's a whole lot of stuff that we can do before we have to literally resort to a straight up price control. But, and this is what I always tell Republicans as well, is you should never underestimate the American people's appetite to screw over big business of any kind. And so when people are paying higher grocery prices, what we have acknowledged and seen repeatedly is a lot of

people with tremendous anger at the food system and at the government. And this is a really interesting point. Why do people feel angry at the government when food prices go up? Well, it's because they intuit that there is a connection, right? And it's the Federal Reserve. And so that's where we have to divorce ourselves of this idea that this is purely a result of the free market. I mean, I talked about this with Ryan. Listen, the agricultural industry is the most pampered industry in America. The farm bill, the amount of subsidies these people get, the amount of monopoly power that we de facto allow them.

Think about the amount. I mean, if we own a small business, I would get on the ground and kiss it if we got the same level of tax breaks that these food producers do. And I'm not even mad about it per se because the argument is what? Well, you know, they're feeding the country. Fine. But then we also get a little bit of a say

in how you do business. And that is where there's a lot of problems lost in the discourse. So for example, there's a price gouging law on the books in Arkansas, red state. And I looked into it. It's kind of interesting, which is they don't tell you what you can and can't do, but you have to justify any price of X percent increase. There's also a lot of talk about grocery stores and how they operate on low margins. That's definitely true of grocery stores. What people forget is that it's about the food supply before the food even gets to the grocery store. Go and check the processed food industry and a lot of the rolled up producers, they're actually printing money. And they're share buybacks.

They just had some $33 billion deal to acquire Cheetos and Eggo waffles. My point is just that these people make a ton of money. They actually, there is quite a bit of price increase happening. Some of it is attributable to supply chain costs. But again, though, what people can intuit, if people watch our show from 2021, there was a lot the government could have done to bring down prices and nothing to do with price control. And I would guarantee you, you would support those things. Things like increasing the amount of truck drivers on the road or using the Army National Guard or anybody else to clear the port, you know, the port backlog that we had, which led to supply shortages. So

when people say, oh, I want to keep the government out, it's like, well, first of all, they're already in. So it's like, let's be honest. But second is that, you know, we have a very dishonest conversation around a lot of this stuff, which personally drives me nuts because it actually, it loses most of the nuance in the conversation that should exist. I think part of why there was this like economist freak out over this particular policy, which again is like very similar to policies that are already on the books in a majority of states, which just gives the federal government a tool that they could theoretically use if you see clear examples of price gouging to be able to stop that, which I think is something, again, overwhelming majority of Americans clearly support. I think part of why there was such a freakout about this is because

it spelled the loss of a debate that had been ongoing about some of the causes of inflation. You know, when people like us were initially saying, you know, part of what's going on here, not saying it's 100% of the whole story, part of what's going on is that some of these companies realize that people are expecting inflation. And so they are price gouging. They are admitting on their earnings calls that, like, yeah, we're able to spike prices way higher than our elevated costs. And you could look at their earnings and you could see their profit margins going through the roof while they're, you know, crying poor about the supply chains or whatever their increased costs might be, or mostly crying poor about like, oh, you know, labor force is getting more expensive or whatever. A big component. In fact, some research shows the main component, a majority of the price increases actually came from this type of unchecked

corporate greed and price gouging. Now, part of why they have the power to do that is because you do have so much consolidation in these various industries. That's why it's important both to have tools like anti-price gouging legislation, yes, at the federal level and at the state level, great, and to aggressively go after these industries that have consolidated so much so that you have more competition. Really, this is not about some communist scheme. It's actually, if you talk to Matt Stoller, I think he's right about this.

This is more about having actual, real, capitalistic, competitive markets. That's what's lacking in a lot of these industries. So yeah, I think that's part of why there's been such a freakout about it because it shows Kamala Harris siding with that argument that, yes, a big part of this was corporations. Yes, a big part of this was greedflation. And Biden, you know, he never was comfortable. First of all, he's not capable of making the argument. He's not capable of making the argument. Second of all, he's never comfortable making the argument because he's just such a, you know, dyed in the wool standard, like,

you know, his whole worldview formulated in 1982 or whatever. And so he would come out and he would do these little things, these little pressers around the meatpacking industry or whatever. But he there was an argument internally within his administration about how much to lean into this conversation. And he was never comfortable being like, to be honest, villainizing greedy corporations and corporate CEOs. He was never really comfortable doing that. Kamala Harris appears to be more comfortable doing that. I wanted to mention there was a poll that from YouGov that showed that asked Americans who they trust more on lowering food costs. And it was basically a tie. It was 39 Kamala Harris and 38 Donald Trump.

I think that is a dramatic, likely turnaround from how people would have rated this question with regard to Biden. And it's one poll, these polls, you know, can be really significantly off. But if she's even in the ballpark, that's a big problem for him because he's really betting on inflation

being a key, key a big problem for him because he's really betting on inflation being a key, key driver of support for him in this presidential contest. And if she's pulled even with him or if she has a chance through leaning into these policies to really pull ahead, that's really a death knell for his presidential campaign here because it is such a key issue. And for whatever reason, people feel much more confident about Kamala Harris on this issue than they did about Joe Biden. It's just Trump, though, benefits from the 2019 inflation numbers. And that's something that I hear J.D. always bring up in the interviews. They're like, look, look at the inflation under

Donald Trump. Look what the inflation was under them. They had inflation under control. Now, you know, whether they had anything to do with that or not, listen, presidents are always beneficiaries of macroeconomic conditions. So I think that's still a very powerful argument. She did roughly tie him on the economy, which is crazy because it used to be that Trump would have like a 50 or 60 point lead or whatever. Maybe I'm exaggerating, but it was a lot over Joe Biden. Yeah, 20 points maybe. It was a lot. Double digits for sure. That's something you rarely see in politics, actually. Whereas I've seen some polls where she ties, some where he still leads by five, maybe 10.

But it's single digits, nothing like what it was. Much less than it was under Biden. In general, though, I think there is still a deep discomfort on their, her part and others where this is the elite Democratic candidate. Like she is connected to the machine. And when the machine is full of a lot of billionaires and others who have a single kind of minded view of the way that they want to talk about prices and everything else, that's where I think her campaign has suffered. And I think that the the evidence already in that Politico article of guys, don't worry, it's never going to pass.

That does show kind of what is ruling this so far. but we'll see. I mean, I could be wrong. I could be totally wrong. So I'll say I've seen mixed indications, right? Tim Walz, positive indication. Brian Deese, positive indication. Tony West, negative indication. At the DNC, it was even there, it was a real mixed bag. First night, positive indication, a lot of labor, a lot of talk about middle class, economics, populist economics. I was like, yes, great. They get it. Then you get to Kamala's actual speech. She doesn't spend that much time on it. It's a lot more like most lethal, you know, military history and let me be a neocon and a lot of bio and all those sorts of things. The first ad she put out after the DNC also was sort of like it was a bio ad didn't really, you know, biographical ad, didn't really

lean into a lot of the very popular economic agenda that she has announced. However, she's put out a new ad that leans more in this direction. Let's take a listen to that. Every day across our nation, families talk about their plans for the future. They talk about how they're going to achieve them financially. And prices are still too high. When I am elected president, I will make it a top priority to bring down costs. We should be doing everything we can to make it more affordable to buy a home. Under my plan, more than 100 million Americans will get a tax cut.

I will help families letting you keep more of your hard-earned money. As president, I will be laser-focused on creating opportunities for the middle class that advance their economic security, stability, and dignity. If you want to know who someone cares about, look who they fight for. Donald Trump fights for billionaires and large corporations. I will fight to give money back to working and middle-class Americans. So there you go. That's the messaging she's putting out there on economics. I will say the reason I'm somewhat hopeful is not because of who Kamala Harris is or been or her political level or whatever. I have no idea who she is. I don't think she has a lot of core ideological commitments, if any. However,

what gives me hope in this regard is the fact that you had Joe Biden, who was, if anything, more ideologically like centrist committed and who ends up making some positive steps on corporate power in particular, but also on labor, not because he's like, you know, out of the goodness of his heart or whatever, but because it ends up being where the new center is as evidenced by those polls. And also because it ends up being very politically popular. And I think that's, you know, how you end up with Kamala Harris taking on a lot of the same agenda, reframing it, repackaging it as being her own, even as much of it is carrying over some of the Biden policies and upping the ante on a number of Biden policies, just basically because

she wants to win and she can read a poll. And when she gets in office, she's going to be wanting to position herself well for reelection. So it's not her, you know, morality that entered my expectation that she's going to have any core ideological commitments. It's the fact that the politics of this are sort of undeniable at this point. And you see that also reflected in, you know, the J.D. Vance's and the Josh Hawley's and whatever of the world or Chuck Grassley, even of the world who over on the Republican side, you know, they have also felt the the need and the political benefit of shifting rhetorically on some of these issues as well, to the extent that, you know, J.D. Vance is out there praising Lena Khan. That's not the whole of the Republican Party. There's not a lot of indication that that would have a lot of sway within a Trump administration given his previous track record. But even the fact that they have rhetorically signaled in that direction, to me, is a noteworthy shift and an indication that the politics on this stuff has really, really changed.

Yeah, we'll see. Certainly. I believe we have David Sirota standing by, so why don't we talk to him? Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight-loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right.

It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation.

To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't

being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways. Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding.

But the price has gone up, so now I only buy one. The demand curve in action. And that's just one of the things we'll be covering on Everybody's Business from Bloomberg Businessweek. I'm Max Chavkin. And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. Every Friday, we will be diving into the biggest stories in business, taking a look at what's going on, why it matters, and how it shows up in our everyday lives. But guests like Businessweek editor Brad Stone, sports reporter Randall Williams, and consumer spending expert Amanda

Mull will take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick. Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing. So listen to everybody's business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So as I mentioned at the top of the show, our great friend from Lever News, David Sorda, is out with a fantastic new podcast called The Master Plan, all about two years worth of reporting into the plot to normalize and legalize corruption in America. And David joins us now. Great to see you, sir. Good to see you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, of course. So just tell us a little bit about what you found here. So I heard your discussion in the previous segment about

the push and pull on policy and the conflict between donors and voters when politicians think about policy. And our series, Master Plan, is about the secret plot to legalize the kind of corruption that makes those conflicts inherent in our politics today. By deregulating the campaign finance system, by gutting anti-corruption laws, we now have a politics in our country where it is essentially a politics dictated by donors with voters playing very little or at least disproportionately small a role in political decisions and policy decisions. And that's not by accident. That is the result of a very specific plan executed by very specific people with a very specific agenda to deregulate the campaign finance system and anti-corruption laws to make money determinative

of our political outcomes, of our policy outcomes. That's what this show is all about. It took us two years to unearth this story. It really does explain everything that we're living through today. And David, just before I get Sagar in here, we have a little bit of the promo trailer

that you did to give people an additional taste of the reporting here. Let's take a listen. When you wake up in the morning and see the recent headlines about the Supreme Court. A judicial decision sparking a political eruption. I'm guessing you feel overwhelmed and bewildered. The Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. Well, it's terrifying. I don't know what's next. You hear about the court helping corporations trample your longstanding rights.

This is a sweeping decision by the Supreme Court to overturn the Chevron precedent. What this does is it ends 40 years of regulating big business. You hear about the justices making it literally legal to bribe politicians. In a 6-3 opinion, the court ruled that gifts to public officials can only be considered illegal bribes if they're given before the official act. It seems like every few months the Supreme Court makes it easier and easier to bribe government officials. You even hear about the Supreme Court actually declaring that the president does not have

to follow the law. It's the first time the Supreme Court has ruled that former presidents can be shielded from criminal charges. In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law. As you're doom scrolling, do you ever stop and ask, what the actual is going on? And how in God's name did we get here? Well, we have an answer for you. It wasn't a random coincidence, and it wasn't just by chance. What's happening right now is the culmination of a very deliberate and very secret scheme

executed by specific people with specific goals. I'm David Sirota. As a longtime journalist and author, I've spent decades working in and covering American politics. Our team of reporters at The Lever is about to expose the never-before the never before reported details of this plot in our upcoming new investigative podcast series master plan they are actually trying to open our political world to right-wing dark money something very weird is going on that doesn't flop it's gotta be where's all this money coming from we've spent two years reporting this story so you're not gonna want to miss it go to masterplanpod.com to sign up to

be the first to get the series when it launches in August. You can also find the trailer and subscribe to the podcast feed right now by searching Masterplan in your podcast app. David, can you give us a little bit of a preview of some of the things you guys uncovered? Sure. So what this does is we start at Watergate. And I think a lot of people know about the break-in, obviously. I think fewer people know that it was the first major campaign finance scandal of the modern era, that corporate money from blue-chip companies

at the discretion of top executives ended up funding that break-in. And that prompted what was considered the first landmark period of anti-corruption reform, but actually ended up being the last gasp of anti-corruption reform. There was a campaign finance law that passed in the wake of Watergate. They were quickly gutted. In fact, loopholes were put into the post-Watergate anti-corruption laws to create the explosion of corporate PACs. And what ended up happening was out of that came something called the Powell Memo. The Powell Memo was written by Lewis Powell right before he became a Supreme Court justice, which essentially urged a corporate takeover of

American politics. And what we show is that in a series of task forces, that major corporations and their executives ended up executing that blueprint with a focus on deregulating campaign finance. Soon after the Powell memo, there were landmark Supreme Court decisions equating what was then a radical theory, equating money with speech, and then extending those free speech rights to corporations. In fact, that decision about corporations having the same free speech rights as human beings, that was engineered by none other than Lewis Powell. So we trace from that point up to push, there was a push for reform by John McCain amid the corruption scandals of the 80s and 90s. That was subsequently overturned when John Roberts and Sam Alito joined the court and worked with Anthony Kennedy. Anthony Kennedy, a former corporate lobbyist, as many people do not know. Anthony Kennedy engineered the Citizens United decision, which essentially pretended

that corruption does not exist. And under that premise, basically said that unlimited spending by corporations and billionaires is now allowed. That is a very short summary of how far we've come. But the point is, is that all of that was engineered with a specific agenda, from specific people, with a very specific plan about how to do this. Now, you may wonder, why would anybody want to deregulate the campaign finance system? Why would anybody want to gut anti-corruption laws? The answer is that if you're talking about the threat to democracy, that's what we're talking about here.

That money is the way to short circuit the one person, one vote paradigm that's supposed to undergird our democracy. We were talking about, I saw you both at the convention, right? The convention had this incredible tension where there were delegates on the floor of the convention, rank and file folks at the grassroots level, effectively representations of voters. But up in the suites, there were corporate lobbies looking to schmooze and influence politicians. What money does, what all of this money does, is it makes the people in those corporate suites

who wield that money arguably more important than the people on the floor of the convention. At least their interests more important in the eyes of politicians. Yeah, and there's a lot of research to back up that that sad reality has already become the case. You mentioned the distance between, not very much physical distance,

but sort of reality distance and influence distance between those on the floor and those in the suites. Chris Cuomo got a lot of attention for making this point from his new perch over at News Nation. Play that clip and get your reaction on the other side. A big theme here at the DNC is that they're gonna go after corporate gouging

and they're gonna go after corporations, whether it's in taxes, largesse, loopholes. The RNC, we heard the same thing. They're going after the elites, the two sets of rules. Let me reveal a reality to you that has to be spoken to here, okay? These are the soldiers. These are the men and the women that go back to their constituencies and their communities and they fight. They take time from their jobs. They take time from their families. Republicans

and Democrats alike, that's what they do. They need to charge these people up. They need to be able to get them on board. But there is another reality that is literally looking down on them. Greg, look at the ring of sweets, okay? This is not unique to Democrats. There is a game of money. When people talk about uniparty, we are strangled by the money reality in our politics. Those sweets start at 500 grand. You think there's like a teacher group up in there? You think it's like the Cub Scouts of Columbia County, South Carolina, that's up in those boxes? Some of them are lobbies and good things. The media boxes, you think they're free? Why do you think I'm on the floor?

News Nation is not a broke company. Nextdoor is a massive organization. We are corporate media. We don't have one of those boxes because that's the game. You pay to play. Those boxes are filled with the same people that they say they're going to regulate. They are literally looking down on the faithful and being told, yeah, yeah, we're going to break down on them. Now, when he was in one of those boxes with CNN, he didn't say anything about it.

But now he's in a different position. He's got something to say about it. But, you know, welcome to the cause. We'll take it. What did you make of it, David? I'll be generous to Chris Cuomo and say, yes, he's late to the cause. Yes, it's probably opportunistic. But the fact that he sees an opportunity for himself in speaking to something that clearly lots and lots of people are concerned about and lots and lots of people know and see is a problem. I think that speaks to how aware, inherently aware most people are

that our politics, whatever you want to call it, oligarchy, plutocracy, kleptocracy, our politics is barely a democracy anymore when money controls so much, not only of the policy that come out of our government, but of the discourse itself. And I think, look, you saw that last week and over the last few weeks, Kamala Harris made a couple of statements about price gouging and corporate media freaked out. Now you've got legislators telling media that the proposal, any kind of proposal on price gouging is dead on arrival in Congress. That is money talking.

And I could, look, I could give other examples. I mean, the one that sticks out to me is it's not just what we're talking about and what Congress is legislating, it's what we're not talking about and what Congress never touches. I mean, think about this. Think about how huge a healthcare crisis that we have in this country. We have health insurance companies systematically looting this country,

immiserating millions and millions of people. And this topic is basically not even a conversation in our politics at all, at the same time that the health insurance industry is one of the biggest funders of American politics that we have. That's not a coincidence. And what it leaves us with is a politics where the parameters of what we can talk about, what we can hope for, what we can expect on policy is much more narrow than it should be. I just, I keep going back to healthcare because everyone who's listening to this has struggled with or faces the potential struggle with being bankrupted by our health insurance system, our healthcare system. And yet it is barely a topic of conversation

and not something that politicians want to touch. That is the power of all of the money that has been allowed to flood into our politics. That is exactly what the master planners wanted. They wanted to deregulate the campaign finance and anti-corruption laws in order to make sure we're only talking about a few things, not talking about the things that enrich them. Yeah. Well said. David, I wanted you to reflect a little bit on the Democratic Party in all of this. It's my sense

that there used to be, the Democratic Party has always, you know, in this free money, big money era, has always courted that money. They've always said, listen, we got to play by the rules as they exist. But gosh darn it, when we get in there, we're going to change things. And now, outside of the Bernie Sanders of the world, I really don't hear that anymore. I feel like they've just accepted this. They've found the way for themselves to benefit and profit off of, you know, the interest groups that are more Democratic aligned, that they get a lot of cash from. They've discovered, especially in the Clinton era and then the Obama era, that, hey, we can raise just as much corporate and Wall Street cash as the Republicans. So this isn't really a problem for us. It becomes an incumbent protection plan. It becomes the way that people

like Nancy Pelosi, I mean, this is the entire source of her power, is how well connected she is within the donor community. So my sense is that Democrats have just basically ceded the issue and accepted this level of corruption in politics and don't really have any plans or really any qualms about it at this point. I'm glad you bring this up because it's an important point. And I would agree that the current system, that the people in both parties

who are in elected office are the masters of the current system and therefore are the most resistant to changing the system, right? They're the winners of this system. That said, the Democrats are the ones who are co-sponsoring and authoring the legislation like, for instance, Sheldon Whitehouse's Disclose Act. The Disclose Act should be a bipartisan bill. The Disclose Act basically would say, we can't even roll back Citizens United. We can't roll back unlimited spending in elections.

It's not public financing of elections, which to my mind is the only solution here. And we can talk more about that. But the Disclose Act would simply just says, listen, dark money, anonymous money, the money that's buying elections that we don't even know who it's coming from, that has to come out into the open. And it's the Democrats who are sponsoring that bill. It's not the Republicans. Mitch

McConnell has done a terrific job essentially polarizing the issue of disclosure and campaign finance so that there are essentially no Republican crossovers. There basically are no John McCain's anymore. John McCain was the one, the last person in American national politics who really elevated this level to a national issue. So I would say the Democrats at least signed their names onto something like the Disclose Act. But I would also agree with you that they have not made it a priority, that it's something that they sort of know that they should be on, that they've been on in the past, that they've pushed in the past traditionally. But are they willing to put real political capital behind it? Are they willing, is Kamala Harris,

if she gets elected, is she willing to make that a major priority? I don't think there's any indication of that. And I think it speaks to what you're saying, which is that there are periodically, there's some rhetoric about this, there's some tip of the hats about this, but there's not a real push to change the system. Not like we saw with John McCain back in the late 90s and 2000s. And I was talking to a friend last night, I said, where is the John McCain of this era? I mean, I'm not a huge, like, John McCain is the greatest guy in the world. I agree with everything he did. But I can still remember, and maybe that says how old I am. I can still remember

when in 2000, in 1999, John McCain really elevated that issue, corruption, to a national issue. And I don't think it's happened since, even as the system has gotten more corrupt. Very true. Yeah. I think, you know, the campaign you were associated with, Bernie Sanders, I think also deserves credit for really carrying that message and pushing that forward. But, you know, he didn't end up the party's nominee. So that limits how far and how hard you can push that. David, just give people details where they can find it and how hard you can push that. David, just

give people details where they can find it, how they can subscribe, what they get, all that good stuff. So you can go to masterplanpodcast.com. That's where you can get the podcast. If you subscribe to The Lever at levernews.com, you not only get the premium version, which includes bonus episodes, bonus multimedia, transcripts of episodes, and I should say early episodes. So if you want to binge the episodes that we're putting out early, it's all there at levernews.com. Become a subscriber. And I will just add one thing. You will see as a subscriber, we put some of the documents that we found on our website for subscribers. Some of this stuff will blow your mind. What's amazing to

me in doing this reporting is they wrote it all down, right? Like if you dig far enough, they wrote down their entire plan in secret memos, White House memos and the like. It's all there on our website. Yeah. Well, I've listened to the first two episodes and you guys did go deep. I'm listening to Nixon secret audio recordings and learning about Rosemary's baby with the secret donor list that they hit as well. So really, really highly recommend. Kudos to you for putting this together, David. I know it was a lot of work. And as always, great to see you, my friend. Good to see you, man. Thank you. Thanks to both of you. Yeah, it's our pleasure.

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