Factually! with Adam Conover - Everyone Can Screw Us Now Thanks to Trump, with Julie Morgan

Episode Date: October 29, 2025

Everyone in their right mind already knows the gift: Trump ran on helping working people, then immediately threw working Americans to the wolves in favor of helping the ultra-wealthy. But it���s not just Trump who is screwing us; he’s made it easier for businesses to exploit the average American as well. He recently eviscerated the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has stood in place to defend average Americans from unethical and predatory business practices. So what happens now, and how can we look to defend ourselves with the wolves circling? To answer this, Adam sits with progressive Julie Morgan, of the progressive think tank the Century Foundation, who worked in both with the CFPB and the Department of Education.SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast I don't know the truth I don't know the way I don't know what to think I don't know what to say Yeah but that's all right That's okay I don't know anything

Hey there welcome to Factually You already know you're listening to Factually so I thank you for joining me again. I'm Adam Conover, thrilled to have you here. Let's talk about the president again on this week's show. You know, kind of a important guy, a lot of stuff happening. But there's also a lot of stories that have fallen through the cracks. And one of them is his war on affordability in America.

You know, you might remember that when Trump was running, he ran on helping working people. Remember that? He was going to bring down costs, restore the manufacturing economy to bring in good, stable, middle class jobs. How much of that has worked out? Well, so far, costs are up due to the tariffs and manufacturing in America is actually down. And at the same time, and most importantly, he's made it easier and easier for companies to screw you over. And he has done so purposefully.

For instance, he gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency that is dedicated to keeping you and your money safe from financial predation by giant corporations. He slashed funding by half and fired all of the employees. So we're starting to get a pretty good idea of who actually gets economic freedom under Trump. And it's not normal people. It's powerful businesses who he is giving the freedom to exploit us and exploit you without consequence. And the worst thing about this is that Americans were already getting screwed by big business. We were already being screwed by gigantic loans that we can never pay back by the medical industry, by the real estate industry, by the financial industry. Americans needed help, and instead of helping them, Trump is letting those industries lose

to screw them worse than ever. So exactly how has big business been unleashed in the last six months? What can we learn from what is happening? And most importantly, how can we protect ourselves and begin to build a movement to fight back against corporate power in this country? Well, to discuss, we have an amazing guest on the show today. Before we get to that interview, I want to let you know that if you want to support this show and all the conversations you bring you every single week, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover.

Five bucks a month gets you every single episode of this show ad free. You can join our online book club as well. Right now we're reading Rashid Khalidis the Hundred Years War on Palestine. We're having a great time reading a very grim but important book and we're all going to get together on Zoom and discuss it. If you'd like to join us, once again, patreon.com slash Adam Conover. And of course, if you want to come see me do stand-up comedy, on November 15th, I will be in Brooklyn at the Bell House for New York Comedy Festival. Can't wait for that show. on out. I'd love to see you there, Adamconover.net, for all those tickets and tour dates. And come give me a hug at the meet and greet after every single show. The meet and greet

is free, but the drinks are not. What does that even mean? Let's get to this week's show. I am so thrilled to have her on the show. Her name is Julia Morgan. She's a serious force in progressive policy who's worked at both the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Department of Education. She is now the president of the Progressive Think Tank, the Century Foundation. Please welcome, Julie Morgan. Julie, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having me. Let's jump right into it.

I mean, Trump ran on affordability much more effectively than the Democrats. He said everything's too expensive. I'm president low prices. And a lot of people voted for him as a result. But what is he doing now to actually let, you know, big businesses, you know, charge Americans more, gouge us more, you know, hurt our pocketbooks? Yeah. I mean, Trump ran on lowing prices for Americans.

and, in fact, we're seeing just the opposite. So whether it's through, you know, inflation, the tariffs, tearing down federal programs that help people, he's putting a squeeze on American families and tipping the scales towards big businesses. So, you know, we've seen, like, big swings at tipping the scales, like the tax cuts that the Republicans just pushed through. But we're seeing it in lots of smaller ways, too. So I think about, you know, the student loan program where,

in the big reconciliation package that the Republicans push through, they dialed back on federal student loans, which is like both a hit at families because they're not going to have access to those cheaper loans. But it's also a huge opportunity for the big businesses who are waiting in the wings with their private student loan products and have been hoping for this opportunity for a long time. So they're actually, the federal government is now offering less federal student loans

than it used to. And so people are now going to have to turn to private student loans, which are the kind where, I mean, I have friends who have student loans of the type where, you know, they pay back as much as they can every single month and the balance only rises. They're like underwater. And they're like, all I can do is wait until I'm like 70 and then, you know, there's some sort of forgiveness or whatever you declare bankruptcy or whatever. They're like, there's literally no way to pay it back. those are folks who take out the private loans. The federal loans don't do that to you to the same extent or do they? I mean, for my perspective, the federal student loans are problematic too, but they do have forgiveness provisions in there once you've been paying for a longer period of time or if you've engaged in public service. The private student loans don't have those provisions and they typically have higher interest rates.

But, you know, the private, like sometimes when we talk about private student loans, we're kind of talking about. about the cream of the crap, like the Naviance or the Sally Mays who want to make a loan to, you know, a grad student who's going to law school and is going to pay that loan back over time, people who are going into professions like social work or teaching, which are really good for our society, but have lower salaries over time. Those people are going to get loans that are more expensive and potentially even more predatory. Right. And they're not going to be able to pay them back, right, because those are not highly paid profession, social work or teaching, unfortunately. That's a big concern. That's a big concern. And until now, you know,

those people have been able to rely on public service loan forgiveness where if they took on a loan from the federal government, you know, after 10 years in repayment, they could get those loans forgiven. If they're turning to private sector loans, they're going to be paying them off for the rest of their lives. This is also just a retreat on something America has done. for most of the last century, which is help people educate themselves. And I think about my grandfather's generation, he went to school on the GI Bill, you know, as did his whole generation, because the government was like, oh, if we just pay for people to go to school, or if we make it accessible, we have various ways to do that, whether it's

subsidizing the university itself, subsidizing the cost of tuition, whatever, that's, hey, guess what, that's good for society if as many people as possible get an education. Seems like that used to be something we believed in this country, just in education itself. And this, like to retreat from that and say, now if you want an education, you have to put yourself in debt, not even to the federal government, but to like some fucking company that's worse than Chase Bank, you know, that's worse than a credit card. Yeah. I mean, I think it's a really good point.

And it's also just a point about like how far we've gotten from what most people would think is a normal situation. Yeah. So like, you know, even under maybe the past. 15 or 20 years of higher education policy, we moved from what you're describing where the federal government was like, this is an investment in our communities and in our economy. And we're putting money in and people are able to get an education debt free to a place where we're kind of just trying to like, like, we're all arguing over like slightly more affordable versions of debt for

people, right? Yeah. We're really far from what people would think is normal. And I think, you know, to your first point, like that's where Trump entered. the space was people being really fed up with this larger problem, and he's only making it worse. Now, we also need to see an answer on the other side who's actually going to make it better and not just make, you know, kind of like a slightly cheaper student loan. Yeah. And that's, we could do an entire episode about the abandonment of education by the American. I mean, just, it makes your, your country is stronger and can do more things if there's more smart people in the country. Like, what are we doing?

You have engineers. You get more engineering. Other countries, China's doing this. Europe is doing it. We used to do it. That's what built a minute. What are we doing? Okay, sorry.

That's a nice summary of that episode is how much we're fucking ourselves in terms of education. But right now what we're talking about is specifically not just Trump making things more expensive for people, but through inflation and tariffs and stuff like that, which is, you know, that's general government policy. but specifically driving Americans towards some of the most rapacious businesses in America or giving those businesses open season on Americans, say, hey, the door is unlocked, come in and, you know, pillage and plunder average Americans, including the people who voted for him. So tell me how he's doing that.

Yeah. And, you know, I see those things as two sides of the same coin, like the tariffs and the inflation are driving up the costs. And then on the flip side, you know, Donald Trump is giving the green light to these companies to come fill the gaps. So, you know, I was in a leader at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for a couple of years during the Biden administration. And we kind of saw this pattern again and again, right, where there were larger public policy failures that drove up costs for families, whether that was on, you know, big ticket items like education or health care or on things like their groceries. And there are these companies like waiting in the wings who are all too happy to be like, I've got a way to solve your problem. Like, don't worry, it's not dead. It's not equity.

It's this like whole new thing. And don't look too closely at the details. And then sooner or later you find that you're kind of hooked on this treadmill of high-cost debt. So Donald Trump has both created the conditions, right, through higher costs for those products to be, you know, really the only thing that people have. have to turn to. And really the way that they're kind of building a safety net for themselves as the safety nets being being unraveled by the Republicans. But he's also taking apart the agencies that would actually police some of those companies. So it's both creating the conditions and also like removing the cops on the beat. That's really kind of supercharging the situation

for families. Yeah, I mean, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was started about a decade to go a little bit more than that. Mm-hmm. That's right. And it was... Go for it. Tell me. Yeah.

So it was started in the wake of the last major financial crisis where we basically saw... Oh, yeah. Remember that? Yes. Okay. Where a whole lot of average people lost a whole lot of money because of the rapaciousness of Wall Street and financial firms.

God, you're bringing me back. Exactly. So some people said in government, hey, guess what? Maybe we should do something about that. That's the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That's right. I mean, we probably didn't learn as many lessons as we needed to learn out of that crisis, but one lesson our policy makers learned was that you can have a massive financial crisis that starts as a consumer protection issue. Because at the core of that, you know, there are a lot of reasons for the financial crisis, but a big one was that loans mortgages were being made to people who could not afford those mortgages. They were being taken advantage of by lenders. And so CFPB was born out of that in order to have, you know, a cop on the beat who's really just focused on enforcing the laws that are supposed to protect consumers from predatory financial products. So tell me real quick, just you said people were taking out mortgages that

they couldn't afford. Now, I remember back when we were talking about that time, there's an urge among some people to say, well, that's the fault of the consumers. They were taking, they were taking out loans they couldn't afford. They were running up their credit card, right? But why were those mortgages predatory in your view, rather than, you know, being the fault of the people taking out the loan? I mean, people would say the same thing right now, right? With buy not pay leader or with credit card debt, that's like, well, people can't afford this and they're taking it on. But the banks, the banks are selling it to people. They're selling it to them as a product that they can afford. And I think, like, rationally, when you go to a bank, it seems illogical that they would be making you

a loan that you can't afford, right? And for many people, like the American, the, the, the, the, ownership of a home is kind of the American dream. This is what they had been sold. And then they found themselves in these homes where like, yeah, maybe they could make the mortgage payment when conditions were perfect. But when their financial situation changed, they found themselves massively underwater. And the CFPB, you know, when Congress created CFPB, one of the first things it did was put in place some guardrails on how lenders make those mortgages to make sure that you know, it's not the financial incentives for their individual brokers that are driving the deals. It's actually what's in the best interest of consumers.

Yeah. I mean, there's a constant pushpole in society between, you know, selling something that is fine for some people, but other people are going to be really harmed by it. Alcohol is a great example of this, you know, that like, do we blame the alcoholic? Well, some people have such a problem, you actually can't blame them. And at some point, you need to like blame the company and say, you're marketing this to the wrong people. You're marketing something that's too strong. And that's why we have some restrictions on what you can sell. You can't sell Everclear for a quarter at the corner store. You know what I mean? Or whatever the fuck. And so the loans that were being sold at that time were to specifically to people who had no business taking out the loan and then was

structured in a way such that like when they couldn't pay, they were really harmed by it. And it harmed the rest of the fucking economy, right? Right. That's right. That's right. And I think it was, you know, a really strong lesson in how you can get from individual household crises to larger systemic risk, which is exactly why I think we ought to be paying attention to what's happening to borrowers right now where people are taking on, you know, loads of debt, not just to pay for a big ticket expenses like a house, but really to pay for their groceries and their rent and their daycare and their everyday expenses.

And we're really not, nobody's really minding the store on what that means for the economy writ large. Yeah, isn't there also part of this where, you know, we don't talk often enough about people need debt in order to survive. Like, in fact, every business, every person makes use of debt. I have a mortgage. That's me taking on debt. Every business takes on debt.

Donald Trump used to call himself the king of debt, right? Because he would borrow money in order to build something. Like, that's what every business, this is what everybody does. And so we need debt, but people who are at the bottom end of, you know, the poverty

line, they need it too, but often the only, tell me if I'm right about this, often the only debt that they have access to is extremely high interest, extremely predatory. Debt that other people wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't take that loan, but someone,

who's in an extreme situation, oh my God, I need enough money to pay rent. I need enough money to buy food. I need a baby formula for my kids, something like that. Right. They are, they don't have access to the, you know, good safe debt that Donald Trump or even IRA do. Is that, is that right? Yeah. I mean, I think there's a couple of things to impact there, right? One is, is what do we think people ought to be taking on debt for? You know, I think as a society, we're kind of comfortable with people taking on debt to buy a home. And we have these kind of like middle ground areas like higher education where some people are perfectly comfortable with it.

Others of us are a little bit ambivalent about whether that's something that you should take on debt for. I think we're all kind of in agreement or most of us are in agreement that you shouldn't be having to take on debt to pay for your groceries and your diapers in those things. Like there's something fundamentally broken about our economy when there are people who cannot afford the basics of their lives without taking on debt. And then there's, you know, what are the terms of that debt? Are the terms of that debt, you sure, yes, which is what we often see in the loans that are

the ill will to lower income people. Yeah. Thank you for unpacking that because it's, you're, you've corrected me well, which is that it's not a good situation in the economy for wages to be so low for people who are working and earning a living, well, because it's not a living at all because they're not earning enough. and then they have to take on debt for basic needs. Yes, that's bad. However, we are in that situation.

And the debt that those people have access to, payday loans, et cetera, is also extremely usurious debt. And that is a related problem. That's right. Can I add one more problem to your stack of problems? You know, I love a lot. I love a problem. Yeah, give it to me.

You know, I think the other one here is that with the adjudy, advancements in technology in terms of the way people make purchases and the way they make loans, both the people from whom you buy things and the people who would lend you money to buy those things have a lot more information about you than they ever did. And we're seeing those companies bring those two sets of information together. So it's an incredibly potent set of information to know exactly what a person likes to buy and then exactly how much money they have to buy it. And so we're actually seeing some of these lenders, including those in the buy now

pay later space, marketing themselves based on not just the idea that they can kind of like whatever, help people fund purchases, right, but that they can get them to buy more, you know, at higher prices and larger basket sizes than they would have bought otherwise. So the companies are starting to really, you know, try to turn that dial up a little bit on people. Yeah. And oh, that's, I hadn't thought about that. about buy now, pay later because, you know, the first time I saw those services,

I was like, well, that's kind of what a credit card does for a lot of people lets you buy now and pay later, except my credit card is something I have, you know? It's like tied to me. But if I'm online shopping, the buy now, pay later button, that's being, that's debt that's being offered to me by the store itself in partnership with Klarna or whatever other firm, right? So that means that they can offer me even more debt in order to get me to buy more,

like in that very moment. It's like every single online store is offering me an instant credit card. That's right. That's right. And the companies like Klarna are trying to drive you towards their app where they can both market you specific products. They have partnerships with merchants where they're trying to market you products like at the price and at the time that they think is most advantageous. And then they're offering you different terms on your loan. So like the original buy now pay leader model and the one that, you know,

the CFB and other regulators we're looking at just a few years ago was for payments, no interest, you know, sometimes a few fees, but often no fees. And that's sort of like, okay, like, you know, we should look into it, but it doesn't seem all that harmful. But now what we're seeing is things marketed exactly what you said. Like any loan is buy now, pay later, right? So we're seeing short-term loans that have high interest rates and longer terms being marketed through these apps where it's a person who doesn't, you know, maybe doesn't qualify for the better product, but they're being told, like, you can buy this right now and we'll provide you the financing.

And the financing also obscures what the final price is. And they're they're customizing the price to you based on who you are and what you've bought in the past. That seems like there's something about that that. that strikes me and I think most people as like really fucked up. Yeah. I mean, this is something we're seeing not just with, you know, in connection to lending, but across the economy that more and more companies in the U.S.

are getting involved in, you know, what's called surveillance pricing, which we saw in places like on Uber or Lyft, you know, your prices changed based on certain characteristics about you or about the time of day. But now we're seeing a show up in grocery stores too, right? Have you seen kind of like the. digital price tags in a grocery store? Not yet. No. Okay. Keep your eye out for those because those are meant for the stores to be able to change

the prices on their goods at a moment's notice based on, you know, the time of day, who's shopping in the store, what their inventory looks like. And it just kind of breaks this like fundamental sense of fairness in the economy that you could walk into a store, you know, one person walks in in the morning and pays one price and one person walks in in the evening and pays a much higher price. I mean, I can imagine it, I can imagine this working for bananas, right? You know what I mean? It's like we got some bananas up and we'll change, we'll make them cheaper as they get more brown.

Yeah, yeah, just like a sale. Yeah, exactly. If it's like, hey, we're doing a, we're doing a sale on stuff that's expiring or something like that. But if I'm walking by a shelf and the price flickers as I get close, you know, that's where it's. And I already object to every grocery store here in California wants me to put in my phone number. They don't give me the discount until I do. And by law, they have a little signup that says everyone has to get the discount, even if you don't put in your phone number. I put in someone else's phone number. That's what I do, because I don't want to be tracked, but I still

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podcast for full disclosures. Is it illegal for a company to charge people different prices based on who they are, this kind of surveillance pricing? You know, it really depends on the circumstances. And it's not my area of expertise, but I know there's a number of really smart lawyers who are looking at this right now and trying to crack down on it. And we've also seen efforts in state legislatures to crack down on it. to crack down on it as well because, you know, like I said, like it just, it breaks this kind of

like fundamental sense of fairness and I think contributes to this overall sense that we're kind of living in like a scam economy that's like no matter where you go, no matter what company you're interfacing with, they're running some kind of scam, whether it's like stealing your data through your phone number or jacking up your prices or whatever. Yeah. And I mean, look, I think we've always felt that we live under a, scam economy to some extent, but there is this sense that it's gotten supercharged. And specifically, this debt that you're talking about is everywhere now. There's a headline a little while back that pretty soon, or maybe they've already put

it in, you'll be able to use Klarna on DoorDash so you can get your delivery meal on layaway, basically. Like, that strikes people as really fucked up. Yeah. Yeah. I think it is, you know, if people aren't able to pay for their meals, and I always, I always remind myself that, you know, our stereotypical DoorDash purchaser is somebody who's, you know, like buying a burrito or whatever pizza. But some companies like dollar stores are partnering with

places like DoorDash in order to do delivery. So in some cases, people might be using Klarna to pay for a burrito, which is like troubling in and of itself. But in other cases, it might be people who are actually still just buying the basics and trying to get it delivered. Either way, it seems pretty troubling for where we're headed in terms of our society and our economy. Yeah, I mean, if you think just, you know, 20 years ago, I used to just get delivery. I'd call the Chinese restaurant. They'd send a guy on a bike. You know what I mean? And it would cost an extra five bucks or whatever. I'd give the guy five or they'd put $5 on my bill. You know, if you were a senior citizen, your grocery store would do delivery. You know,

you'd call them up and say, give me X, Y, Z. But now, not only are you using a separate app, that charges a separate delivery fee, now they want you to take out a usurious loan in order to do it. Like, yeah, yeah. This is the sense of which has got worse. I'd like to stack one more problem on top of that. Please give it to me, yes. Which is, you know, when you're ordering your delivery through one of these services like

Rub Hub or DoorDash, it's not just that you're paying the delivery fee. They're actually jacking up the prices of the goods themselves. So if you compare your Chinese food menu on the restaurant's website, and on the app, the prices are higher and that's being driven by the apps, not by the restaurants themselves. Also, this is not the DoorDash episode. First of all, that makes me really mad.

The other thing about DoorDash is you have to, you have to like play hide and seek with which one of these is a real restaurant. That's my favorite game. Is like, is Taco Zone? Is that a real restaurant? Or is this, you know, some fucking warehouse kitchen where three

chefs, like, you know, three poor line cooks are making like 10 different cuisines with different names out front. Like, it's, it really contributes to the sense that like everything is getting worse in America. So, uh, uh, and we've barely even gotten into payday loans and that, you know, that entire part of the financial system, uh, obviously extremely predatory. Um, so the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was set up in order to fight abuses like these and actually look out look out for consumers now you would think this would be kind of uncontroversial because everybody's a consumer we're a middle class country we're a capitalist country everybody has to buy shit and like you know consumer i mean turn on

the news everything is like is there a scam at your grocery store or whatever like this is something that people perennially care about um so you would think that people would be in support of this and yet the consumer financial protection bureau was under relentless attack from the moment that it was founded. Why is that? I mean, the way I think about it is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has never been controversial on Main Street. The only place it's been controversial is Wall Street, right? I mean, right from the start, big banks were challenging the CFPB's authority. And I think it was a fairly simple reason, right? You know, they're profiting from these predatory practices. So when I was at CFPB, you know, we were trying to put in place pretty

reasonable caps on the late fees that you get charged on your credit card. And the reason why was when we started to look into these late fees, we saw that banks, instead of using them as a way to recoup the costs of late payments, they were packing profit into those. So it seems like pretty obvious to me that where that you have an agency that is able to cut off these big profit centers that are illegitimate, really, right? You're going to fight back against that pretty hard, and that's exactly what we saw. So, you know, it was like every lawsuit against the CFPB

was packing in this provision of, you know, like the agency's funding is unconstitutional. And it went to the Supreme Court in the time that we were there, and the CFPB prevailed, right? So, and then, you know, we haven't talked about this, but the agency is essentially on ice right now because having lost those court challenges, the banks went to their best buds in the Republican Party, including Donald Trump. You know, and when he came into office, one of the first things he did was to put in basically a stop work order for all the work at the CFPB.

So, you know, now there's really no one there to answer your complaint or to enforce the law against. you know, anywhere from a big bank to like a small time lender that's trying to defraud people. Yeah, I mean, it was the one of the first agencies that Elon Musk went after, uh, fired everybody, kicked them all out, hung his own sign on the building. Um, and now it's just sort of like an empty shell from my understanding that like the, the agency has been affirmed as being constitutional. It's mandated by law. So they're just sort of like, okay, this has to sit here.

We'll just have it sit here empty out of. spite and not let it protect anybody. And the fact that this was driven by the banks who were doing the malfeasance. Like, you know, you were the cop on the beat or the CFPB was the cop on the beat. And the banks are the criminals going like, like, hey, cop, you're cutting into my bottom line here. Sorry to do it. That's exactly how they talk. A very, very hammy impression.

But that is. And like, then they shot the cops and killed them. And nobody stopped them. Like, the crooks won. And it's so disheartening because, like, this is, again, one of the foundation. Protecting people from predation is like what the government's fucking for, man. That's what I thought. Yeah.

Yeah. And I mean, one of the shames about, there are a lot of things that are bad about not having a CFPB, but one of the things that was so interesting about working there is that it's like, it's a federal agency where people can actually see the results of it in their daily lives. So if you had a complaint about, you know, a debt collector collecting on a medical bill that you thought you didn't owe, you could call the CFPB and you could actually get someone to work on your case, right? And the CFPB was engaging in these lawsuits against, like I said, anywhere from the biggest banks like Wells Fargo to these kind of fly-by-night companies. And they were getting money back and then putting that money back into people's pocket. So it really, you know, the Trump administration has shut down an agency that was like, you know, the complete opposite of what they said they were doing.

They said they were going after waste, fraud, and abuse. And in fact, they're going after like a very lean, nimble agency that's helping people every day. So this brings me to the political problem with why doesn't the CFPB have massive support from the Americans who it's helping? You know, I just asked Julie Sue this, who was the acting secretary of labor. And, you know, she, I think very sincerely worked in her time in government, as did many other people in the Biden administration, to help out the working class, like in a sincere way, doing things that I as, you know, in the labor movement had always wanted to see done, you know, and so did everybody else who cares about working class people. And yet we see Trump running in, you know, saying I'm for the working class and a lot of people support him, including the working. the working class and union members. And so there's this disconnect between what was done

and who people are supporting and whether they feel it was done. Now, in the case of the CFPB, it's even bigger because, I mean, everybody hates the banks. Like go walk down the street and like ask a random person in any state in the country and say, what do you think of the big banks?

They'll say a bunch of crooks are trying to steal all our money, blah, blah, blah. Everyone remembers 2008. Everybody knows what happened to them. Everyone says, oh, the bank. Bankers were never punished. Nobody went to jail. This was a constant complaint for 15 years.

The CFPB is like the actual agency doing it. And I'm sure you did plenty of things and your predecessors did plenty of things that actually made people's lives better. And yet this slur that the CFPB is, is, you know, bad for the economy or is doing, you know, unconstitutional doing things it shouldn't do. That became like the dominant narrative in the American political culture about it. There's a much stronger constituency that hated the CFP. than there were people who were supporting it. And again, Trump won, saying he was for the average American, even though he always said he was going to do the opposite and is now doing the thing.

So why do you think we have this disconnect between the work that was actually being done and the public sentiment towards the work and the people doing it? Yeah, I mean, I just don't think the public sentiment was against the CFP. You know, when Donald Trump was running for president, he wasn't running on defy, the CFPB, right? He was running on, I'm going to cap your credit card interest rates, which is work that would have been done by an agency like the CFPB. I think there was a broad understanding that the work of agencies like CFPB is really popular among people. And so when the question is, why does that popularity, why does that appreciation of the agency's work not

matter? I think the simple answer is money in politics, right? The lobbyists are incredibly strong. The banks are incredibly strong. And we have a president who is clearly there to enrich the wealthy and the wealthiest businesses and not to serve the American people. So to me, the answer there is pretty clear. But I think on your other point about, you know, working class voters voting for Trump, you know, I think that's a more more difficult question for us all to answer. To me, part of the answer is that we did we did do great work during the Biden administration. I'm really proud of the things that we did. And I also know, even on the issues I worked on, we couldn't match the scale of the problem that people are facing, right? Well, like,

right now, you know, we did a survey. We've got one and four people saying that they're skipping meals to pay their bills. You know, we haven't, we haven't offered policy solutions or changes, really, that people can see every day in their lives at a scale that actually matches their health care costs, the fact that they can't retire, that paying their rent is, you know, really difficult. That higher education is, um, you know, for many people, either like a dream or, you know, just a chance at indebtedness. Uh, I really like your second answer. I want to push back on the first one just a little bit though because, and then I want to come back to, uh, your second point. Because, um, I'm sure that, you know, there's probably some polling that we could, that, that has been

done about, hey, how many people support what the CFPB is doing if you ask them on a poll, right? Yeah. And say, okay, they're supportive of that and there's not that many people who are anti it, even though the people who are anti the CFPB or this kind of regulation are extremely strident and angry about it. But what there isn't is a strong constituency to like affirmatively protect it. Like there's a reason that Donald Trump doesn't really go after social security. Sometimes he talks about it, right?

but it's because he knows that like really most of America and his own voters will fucking flip out right if they touch it um like there is there are programs that the public rallies to protect you know and the fact is Trump was able to go after the CFPB destroy the entire agency and the public shrugged you know like I mean I gave a shit a lot of people like me gave a shit the the people who the Liz Warren fans of America were very upset, you know, all 50,000 of us, all, all the Rachel Maddow viewers in the world were mad about this, right? But most people in America did not even fucking hear about it. Like, they don't know it happened, but they do know about Social Security. And so I do think

there's a big gap there that we have to be really honest with ourselves about. And I think maybe what the existence of the gap is because of your second point that like we were not actually doing enough? So do you feel that like the mission of the agency or of the Biden administration generally just wasn't radical enough in order to protect people that it, that it was not aggressive enough? Well, we should talk about that, but I just want to come back to what you said. You said something about. We keep having to come back to everything. We should do. We should say our things one at a time is what we should do. We're doing right. We should. You know, you said something about people not hearing about it. And I do think that's something that we really need to

reflect on because the way the CFPB was dismantled was like at the same time that the Department of Education, USAID, all these other agencies were being dismantled. And then I, you know, I can't remember off the top of my head, but I'm confident that Trump was doing a number of other things that were dominating the news cycle. Because this is the pattern that we see, right? It's like, rip the Band-Aid off all at once. And then there's not the attachment. tension span to build a constituency around this one small agency. Yeah. And I, you know, I just think that's something that we're going to have to contend with

for the next four years because really important things are happening and they're happening under the radar. And, you know, like, as you were talking about the importance and the popularity of Social Security, I'm reminded of Medicaid because when you look at the polling on cuts to Medicaid, it's hugely unpopular. and they did it, right? They knew it was unpopular. You could see some of them wavering on the edge of, you know,

is this a bad idea? And then they did it anyway to fund tax cuts for the riches. So it's a pretty high bar to actually get people to pay attention to and to mobilize around stuff even when they really care about it. It's true. And yeah, there were, we should give a lot of credit. it to Trump for his insanely successful strategy of how to destroy things. But, you know, there's just a difference between something being like a third rail of

American politics, don't touch it, and something being like, hey, this is helping people, but like most people don't really know about it. Like, they're not feeling it in the way that you said. Sure. So what do we need to be doing in order to make people feel these, yeah, these helps? Well, I mean, I think that we need to be more aggressive about using every tool that we have to actually help people. Like, I mean, right now we're seeing the Trump administration be really creative about the tools that they have and use those to help the people that they care about, which is large businesses and the wealthiest Americans, right? There are tools that, you know, we have underutilized over time in making people's lives easier.

And maybe in some of those cases it was like because, you know, there's always a sense that like you'll get extra credit for adhering to norms rather than laws. I don't know. But, you know, I think we really need to see leaders at the local state and federal level look at the full toolbox that's available to them and say, you know, how do I use this kind of every day to advance like a better, a better lifestyle for people in the United States? I often think about higher education, which is an issue I worked on for a long time, where, you know, to me it hasn't been enough to just have an idea of what the perfect world looks like for people, right? Because we can have the perfect plan for a free college. And while we're fighting over what the details of that plan are and how to get it through Congress, college is getting more extensive for people. The loans are getting worse for people. And we've got to have like a sidecar plan of how to, you know, how to, how to improve their lives while we're trying to get to our ultimate vision. Mr. Monopoly here. Monopoly is back at McDonald's. Register in the McDonald's app so you're ready to get your bag.

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dot play at MCD.com to play without purchase. Ends November 23rd, but bonus play ends November 2nd. Monopoly is a registered trademark of Hasbro. Copyright McDonald's. What you're making me think of there, though, is how often folks on the left or folks who care about the types of thing we're talking about see our goals and aspirations as a horizon that will never reach. You know, like, of course, I'd say free college.

Do I think that that is something that I can actually get, you know, that we can actually do? Oh, really, the perfect example is a single payer health care, right? Like, we know that single payer health care is the best health care system, right? And we had a robust discussion about it. And the direction that the Democratic Party went was like, it's, yeah, it is the best system. You know, we're not actually going to be able to do it. Like, hold your horses. Like, don't, you know, don't shoot too high.

You know, let's just do the thing in the meantime, right? And, you know, the Affordable Care Act did many great things. But it certainly didn't make people feel as though, wow, health care in America is fixed, you know. Yeah. And I just compare that with the right wing, right? Who have now done every impossible fantasy that they ever, I mean, they fucking defunded NPR. Like, they've wanted to do that shit. for 50 years and no one thought they could

because like, well, they'd have to do so much other shit first and like, people care about their rural radio stations and like, ah, they're just, that's just talk. They're never going to be able to get around to that. And they did it because you know why? They were also able to ban abortion. They did abortion too, you know? They did fucking everything and that they ever wanted to.

They're destroying the Department of Indication, et cetera. And it seems like the strategy is like, hey, just believe it's possible. Like, throw every objection to the wind and just fire up the record. and ball and like go to town and so um is is the problem like uh you know a lack of of belief that the aspirations that we have are are possible you know because like sometimes i think this this small bore stuff i hear a democratic politician go we help 10,000 small businesses achieve alone at a lower interest rate and I'm like yeah I know you I know you're like the one person whose life you made better, but like, it seems like small potatoes, you know.

It's funny. It's funny because I think you often hear policymakers want to get credit for how hard it was to do the small thing. Right. Yeah. Because I'm sure it was hard, right? It was hard to drop, you know, drug prices from $8,000 to $1,000 a month or whatever, but it's still $1,000 a month for people. So, you know, I think we have to face that reality of like people aren't going to give us credit for how hard we try to do something if it's not, if it's not. If it's not the thing that actually solves their problem. But I think more broadly, yeah, we have to both have, like, have the bold ideas, have the conviction that those things can actually happen. And I think there's a piece that's like embedded in there is that in order to stick to those

bold ideas, you also have to be willing to call out those who are benefiting from the current system, which is where policymakers often fail, right? Because in order to get to a, you know, a better, more affordable, like, universally free system of whatever, you know, college, health care, there are some people who are going to lose out there and we have to be willing to let those people. And when I say people, I mean, like, big businesses who are going to lose out there and we have to be willing to let them lose. So I think of that. I think sometimes when people see politicians dialing back and saying, well, it would be nice, but we can't ever get there, it's, it's, it's, both about lack of conviction, or it reads both as lack of conviction, but also as, you know, like a lack of courage to stand up to those people who, those kind of powerful interests who benefit from the current system. And it, to me, it makes it apparent that you've got those interests as part of your coalition, and that's the problem, you know, that you've got, I use this example, again, that, you know,

Lena Khan was trying to take on consolidation at the FTC and, you know, the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party was like, throw her out. And as a result, the campaign, you know, the Biden Harris campaign didn't run on her accomplishments. And or at least their, you know, their attempts to make life better. They swept them under the rug. And, you know, she was actually trying to fight affordability, the affordability crisis. And instead they, you know, bent over for Wall Street and Silicon Valley. That was like, we hate. this woman. And I don't know, led to a loss. In my view, it's part of what led to it. Like, do we have a problem in, you know, our sort of like left liberal political coalition

in America where it's like, unfortunately, the fox is in the hen house. And we've just accepted that. And do we need to like be a little bit more discriminating of who is actually looking out for the people who are trying to get to vote, you know? Yeah. I mean, I think we definitely have a problem with money and politics. We were talking about this earlier, it applies on both sides of the aisle, right? And I think it's wild because when you look at, you know, the polling on these issues for the vast majority of people, when you ask them what the problem is, they're saying the accumulation of power with the wealthiest. They're looking for policymakers who are going to take on billionaires and who are going to take on, you know,

the wealthiest and most powerful businesses in America. So it seems pretty straightforward. forward, that that's where we need to be going. But we need policymakers to step up. Why is it that on the just left of center in any way, policymakers have trouble calling people out? You know, Trump doesn't, right? Trump will just insult anybody, including people who, someone who's his friend yesterday, right? As it says like, ah, these people are screwing you. And the public loves it, right? The public likes it when you call people out. But for some reason, on the left, it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Don't be too mean to Jamie Diamond or whatever, right?

Like, what, there's a, there's a certain, like, value of, like, politeness towards, uh, towards those in power that, uh, I don't know if it has benefited the Democratic Party politically, like, like, what happened to the, to the rudeness towards the people who are trying to, kind of screw average Americans? I don't know. It's hard for me to really say. It's hard for me to kind of get into the brain of. someone who values politeness over and doing the right thing.

Yeah. I worked for Elizabeth Warren. So, you know, when we saw big businesses that were arming people, we were all over it. And we were, you know, writing letters and holding hearings and doing everything she could to call it out. That's just kind of the like the political and policy culture that I grew up in. It's hard for me to understand the other view. Yeah. Well, so you now, you're out of government, obviously.

You now run this progressive think tank, the Century Foundation. Progressives, you know, a couple years ago, it sort of seemed like it might be the progressive moment in America, at least on economic issues. And now progressives could not be more out of power. And so what do you see your work as right now? And I mean, do you feel, how much ground do you feel that we've lost? Does it feel like we're going to be digging ourselves out of a hole for 20 years just to get back to the fucked up country that we lived in in 2019? God, that's bleak. Sorry.

This is sort of bleakness with a smile is a little bit my style here. But no, your job is to uplift me, right? That's so you got to, you know, make with it. Make with it. Yeah. No, I see the job. of an organization like mine over the next few years to be kind of twofold. I think we have to make people, including policymakers, kind of face up to some of the cost of living challenges that

we were just talking about. So, you know, I think at this point, you know, six months into Donald Trump's kind of like war on the working class, I think people are quite clear that cost of living is an issue and a concern for families. But I think we need to go a step further. So for us, really linking that to not just the cost of eggs or gas, but those basics, like, you know, getting an education, retirement, health care, like these are kind of the fundamental building blocks that we need to policymakers to address. And then, too, you know, looking at the side of the coin that we started out talking about around consumer debt, because that often goes, like, right under the radar in policymaking. Everyone wants to look at.

how to fix the health care program, which is great, but somebody's also got to fix the debt that people have accumulated for the last, you know, several decades in trying to just like get health care in the United States. So I see some of the work is just kind of like reframing what the problem is that we need to address, really kind of continuing to shine a light on the way the Trump administration is making that experience worse for Americans. And then the flip side of that has to be the policy idea. So what are we actually going to do? do to deal with a situation? Like how what do we think we can we can do through Congress? What can we do through administrative action? And then even like in the next four years, what can we do at

the state and the local level? And, you know, I mean, I think I think you're right that it's, it's a tough time to be a progressive in America, given what's happening at the federal level. But we're seeing bright spots, right? We're, you know, I'm watching the election in New York and seeing a bright spot where voters are responding really positively to somebody who has a vision of how to use the government in ways that make it more affordable for families. And I think I'm particularly paying attention to somebody who's pairing kind of this big like we can't government can do good things with a sharp focus on corporate power too, right? It's like both sides of the coin, which is really inspiring to see. And I think that, uh,

you know, Zordon's campaign is, it's not just focusing on affordability in this sort of narrow small potatoes way that we often see Democratic, you know, politicians run. You know, I think about, I can't, I quote Kamala Harris, but it's lovely, we need opportunity so that when you're starting that small business, there isn't too much red tape. And we, you know, we lowered prices by 50% or whatever, right? It's like these small potatoes versus Zoron's getting out there going buses should be fast and free, right? City run grocery stores. Look, I don't have a position on city run grocery stores.

I haven't like looked into that one in particular. But I admire the guy for saying, here's something that a lot of people are going to say is crazy. I think we should do it. And keeping the aspiration high and that people are responding to it, you know, that here's a big fucking thing I want to do. And I'm like, hey, I hope he gets, I hope he gets one of them done. You know what I mean? And just proves that if you could put one big target on the board and go for it and actually make people's lives better in a visible way. Like when we when we try to do affordability, when trying to make affordability better in like these small sort of invisible ways that don't ruffle any feathers, then people don't feel it.

But when suddenly something that used to cost money is free or something you used to take a loan out for, you can now afford out of pocket. like people go oh shit like they actually notice it their their lived experience is literally different and they connect it to the person who they voted for because the person said they were going to do that thing it feels like that's what we've been missing a lot lately yeah i think that's right i mean i think you're you're seeing um you're seeing mom danny like really target those pain points that people can see every day in their lives like what better thing to think about then transportation if you're if you live in new york the cost of transportation is a daily challenge right so he's really targeting kind of these these big ticket um you know either big

ticket or big pain point issues for families and yet you're seeing him you know he had this this homeo homostasis response from the democratic person whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa we can't have this guy you know this guy's going too far he's going to kill us nationally et cetera it feels like there's really a push pull in the Democratic Party right now between different approaches. So it sounds like you'd advocate for a more like muscular approach, you know, really focused on people's daily needs in that way, like an ambitious approach. Yeah, absolutely. I think it needs to be ambitious. And as we discussed earlier, I think it needs to not just be, you know, about using government to like buy good things for people, which of course I think should be part of what we do. But it also

means using government to curb corporate power because those are, you know, the two sides of the coin here. If you if you don't curb corporate power, you're not going to have the same impact on people's lives. And and people get it. I think when, honestly, I think people get it when when somebody's pitching kind of like a big government program and not talking about that side of the ledger. You know, people see the power dynamics in their lives. every day. They see it playing out on the news. And so it, it rings hollow when you're not kind of attacking both sides of that. Yeah, I mean, you need to be willing to attack corporations directly. Trump is out there blaming everything on immigrants who are not causing America's

problems. But you see Democrats out there blaming nobody, a lot of them, right? They're like, well, there's some problems we need to work on, you know, we'll pass a bill or two, rather than going you need to say, no, no, no, immigrants aren't fucking you. Here's who's fucking you, and I'm going to do something about it. Like, you have to name names, as you say, right? Yeah, I think that's right. And I just think, you know, the level of frustration that people have built up these days and the level of gouging that they're seeing kind of at every step of their lives.

Like, it's like you can't, you know, take your kid to a baseball game or a basketball game without getting that gouged by a vendor who's charging, whatever, $14 for a bottle of water instead of $2. When people have that level of frustration, they want policymakers to meet that and be willing to call out the people who are causing those problems for them. So what can we do more on a state and local level about these issues? We've talked about the New York City campaign quite a bit on this channel. But what else can be done elsewhere?

Well, I mean, I think there are a lot of things that can be done. From the CFEB perspective, it was always really cool to me to know that, um, our federal laws can be enforced by state attorneys general. So some of the same work that we saw the CFPB do under the prior administration around things like junk fees, that can be done by an enterprising state attorney general, too. You know, states have stepped in to do things like ban medical debt from people's credit reports in the same way that we tried to do at the federal level and got rolled back by Trump. And then, you know, we're also seeing some promise. efforts at raising some revenue on the state side that can be spent on things that improve people's lives. You know, I live in Massachusetts where we have a millionaire's tax and it was

really exciting to see, number one, you can impose that kind of tax and actually have more millionaires move to your state, right? And number two, you can spend it on big things that improve everyone else's lives. So I think there's a lot of stuff that we can see done. And some of that, you know, some of that will just make people's lives better in the meantime. And then some of it is a little bit of a proving ground for things that can be done in the federal level later. Yeah. I do have the worry, though, that like now when Democrats or or anybody who's not a Republican tries to do anything, they are attacks now by the federal government directly, you know, like putting in, literally the way the Trump administration operates is if there's

something that a non-Republican thinks is good, they think it's bad. Doesn't matter what it is. and they're going to attack it to try to destroy it. And, you know, God bless you for, you know, running a progressive think tank. But like, you can put out a lot of white papers. But, you know, when you're not in power, it's hard to do these things, right? And especially to make the case to the public. So how do we do that under such an inimical environment? How do we, how do people like me make the case to the public?

I guess the problem. Great question. Sorry, I did, I did, look, I'm a terrible interviewer, as many people have commented many times. My questions are long and they contain too many parts and you've pointed this out through your confusion. So the first problem is how do we put policy in place on the state and local level when the federal government is actively trying to end it? And then we'll talk about how we make the case to the public.

I mean, to me, there's no way to go but through on that. like we can't have our local and state policymakers in kind of like a crouching like don't hurt me kind of position um and you know i mean the trump administration is obviously as you said like very enterprising at trying to exact pain from people who are defying them um but they only have so much power there um and i think we're seeing that policymakers who stand up to them are um are getting results um so i think that's really important. And then I forgot the second part of your question. I'm sorry. Well, um, you, you say, you know, state attorney generals can enforce federal laws, uh,

that, you know, are meant to protect consumers. I'm like, that's great. But it sounds kind of small, boring, quiet for the moment, right? Um, yeah. And it feels like we need to be advancing like an alternative vision. And currently the only one I can, the only person I can think who's doing that at all is Zodan Mamdani in New York, who's saying, like, here is what, you know, anyone left of center can offer that addresses your problems that is better than Trumpism, you know, and I think we need more of that going forward, and I'm wondering how you think we might go about it. Yeah, I mean, I think you need organizations like mine to kind of, you know, carve out some time out of, like, responding to and analyzing what the Trump administration is doing, which can be a

full-time job if you let it, right? Yeah. To actually start to articulate some of those policy ideas for the future, you know, policymakers can do it on their own, but it's often organizations on the outside that have the expertise and the capacity to start, you know, to start looking at what might work in particular jurisdiction. So I think that's really important. And, you know, I mean, it's like, I don't want to talk about whether we need a project

2029, but, you know, that is what. That is what, you know, it seems like it can be useful to put out a plan and then, and then later you can do it, you know, like to be ambitious again and to put a target on the wall. Yeah, you know, they used the four years before leading into this administration to make their plans. In many cases, some of the things that I'm the most proud of from the Biden administration are things that we use the four years prior to actually get those, get those, not just get the plans ready, but. build the constituencies around them and build a plan to actually get something done. So we have to use this time to do that. Yeah. Just bringing us back to the point of, you know, these private companies that are,

you know, oppressing, emissorating, impoverishing Americans. They have so much power. They're wrapping people up in debt. They're donating massive amounts of money to our political system. they are almost in a way like trapping people in a sort of economic purgatory that makes it almost impossible for them

to participate politically, right? If they're worried about, you know, paying back the interest and the loan they took out to feed their fucking family. And so I apologize if I seemed a little frustrated as you're talking sometimes because I think about like, man, the policy proposals are great,

but like how do they get us out from under this pile of shit that people live under, you know? You talked about debt. You talked about debt as a problem when people are underneath medical debt, right? And I'm like, God, there's layers of shit there. There's the debt itself. Then there's the cost of the health care, which sky rockets and sky rockets. And then there's the fact that wages are historically down, right?

Like those are three related problems. If you solve one of them, it doesn't fix the other two. And so, and again, we're in a position where anybody who cares about this is completely out of power on the federal level. And so I guess I'm wondering, like, what more can we do as citizens even to fight back against, fight back against this pile? Because I'm like, we don't have like three years, you know, to wait to get started. What can we be doing right now to help each other in this fucking hellscape we live in? no totally um you know look i think for many of these issues like health care and medical debt is a good one there's there's like a big policy solution and i don't want to sound like i'm walking away

from the big one because i'm totally with you that we actually have to say it and mean it and push for it like whatever our massive solution is on an issue like health care but these are places where we have this kind of web of laws at the state level that both states policymakers and individuals can use to push things along, right? Medical debt can be taken off of people's credit reports. Most states have a set of laws around unfair or deceptive practices that is incredibly broad and gives the state a lot of authority to go after these businesses. Like what we found at the CFEB was when you start lifting up the hood on these businesses

that seem like they're engaging in some sort of unfair practice, they actually are. And like the law, you know, the law can be a useful tool there. And it's not going to, you know, it's not going to like solve the problem in one fell swoop. But I think to your point, like, particularly at the point we're at now where people are being so hammered by the Trump administration and so layered under debt, it's worth it for us to take those steps just to remove a layer of the burden that's on top of, um, of working families. in this country. And so, you know, I think we should be asking our policymakers at the state and the local level to really look at these issues and to not just kind of be proceeding like business as usual. But like we're, you know, like the majority of American families are experiencing a household financial crisis. We need our policymakers to step in and alleviate some of that burden. And I think it's important both for individuals' finances in the economy, but it's also important for democracy, for the points you raised, right?

Like, this is a really, a really critical issue across the board, and there are steps that can be taken at every level. Yeah, the level that I'm curious about, though, maybe you don't have a view on it, but, you know, you said policymakers many times, and those are important people, right? They have power in the system, and they should be looking at what they can do.

But I'm also looking about, like, us as citizens, as actors in the marketplace, you know? Yeah, and, you know, the things, thing that I learned from my union work is we didn't ask anybody to make Hollywood a better place. We didn't donate. We didn't pray. We wrote letters to law to policy makers. We asked them for their help. But we actually fucking did it ourselves, right? We, we collected our power and we forced the change to happen. And we could have done it without anybody else's help. And so I'm, I'm wondering about when we're talking about debt, you know, the phrase

debtor's union comes to mind. I just dropped my pen and hit myself in the face. I'm so excited about this. I've heard of this phrase. I don't know much about these, you know, what what possibilities there are for like collective organization. But like, is that something we should be looking at? Yeah. I mean, there are organizations that focus solely on this that are far more expert than I am on like which kinds of debt and when. But there has definitely been collective action in the past to put pressure on, you know, on certain creditors like, you know, debt strikers who were threatening to not pay their federal student loans in order to, you know, to put pressure on for better solutions.

Oh, yeah. I think those are really important. There are also groups that have pooled together funds in order to buy medical debt or student loans and forgive those loans. So there's a lot of things that can be done by, you know, small groups of very determined people on these issues. So, and I think, I think it's incredibly important. I'm glad to hear it.

Yeah, I think so as well. It just, again, we're, we're so much at this. I hope we're at the bottom of how bad things are going to get. And it feels like we need to be doing absolutely everything to dig our way out. As the Trump administration continues to shovel more shit down onto us as we're at the bottom of the, maybe we're at like the bottom of an outhouse, you know what I mean? like we fell, we fell. And then, you know, Trump's up there just shitting, just taking more shits.

We're just getting more and more covered. And we got to, we got to fucking start tying a rope together or something. We got to get out of this. Sorry to end on the grossest metaphor I've perhaps ever come up with as a comedian. I really thank you for coming on the show and for doing the work that you do. How do you suggest, how can people get involved, right? Like, is there action that folks can take in their day-to-day lives to have to help them and their community stop being fucked by these rapacious corporations that the Trump

administration is helping do it? Yeah, I mean, I would say really look for some of those organizations that provide collective action. I mean, I also, you brought this up and I should have followed up on it, but the unions, labor unions have been extraordinarily important in fighting back against corporate power and in seeking relief to debt, both for their members and for other people. So, you know, continuing to work with your union or joining a union, I think is incredibly important. But watch what's going on at the local level, join these organizations, start these organizations, you know, and we'll be doing our best of the Century Foundation to support that kind of work. Yeah. Where can people find your work on the internet?

We're at TCF.org. Julie, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I really can't thank you enough. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Thank you once again to Julie for coming up. the show. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. If you want to support the show, once again, patreon.com slash Adam Kahn over five bucks a month, gets you every episode of the show ad free for 15 bucks a month. I will read your name in the credits. This week, I want to thank Andreas Gowger, Patrick Flanagan, Kraton, Andrew M. Purifoy, and keep masks in health care. Thank you for the message. Keep masks in healthcare. If you'd like me to read your name or whatever username you choose, including a secret message like Keep Masked in Healthcare, head.

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Thank you so much for listening, and we're going to see you next time on Factually. M-Wa. What's going on? It's Lamarne Morris. And Hannah Simone. And we host The Mess Around, a New Girl rewatch podcast now on Headgum. Now, here's the thing. Every single week, we chat about an episode of New Girl.

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