Pod Save America - "Too Woke To Fail.”

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

Biden steps in to prevent a bank run after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Republicans blame the failure on woke culture. Senator Cory Booker stops by to talk politics and LA’s best vegan fast food. Lovett talks to the transgender teenager who stumped Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin at last week’s CNN town hall. And later, Jon, Jon, and Tommy run through the week’s top stories in another round of One Line With Cocaine Bear. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. 

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. On today's show, Biden steps in to prevent a bank run after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Republicans blame the failure on woke culture, and Senator Cory Booker stops by to talk politics and sample LA's best vegan fast food. That's what happened. You bet it is. Confliction in terms. No, it isn't. Sure. No, it isn't. Okay. I don't see you finishing anything.

It's in the trash can over there. Is it because I had McDonald's on my way in? No, not for us, Andy. Lovett also talks to the trans teen who stumped Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin at last week's CNN Town Hall. And later, we'll run through the week's other top stories with another round of One Line with Cocaine Bear. The bear head is back. More relevant. But first, for everyone in the Los Angeles area, the love it or leave it weekly residency continues.

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This is my water. All right, fine. Keep going. The Biden administration took emergency steps over the weekend to prevent a broader run on the banks that began with the rapid collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the second largest bank failure in U.S. history that was then followed by the collapse of New York's Signature Bank, which became the third largest bank failure in U.S. history. On Friday, the FDIC, which is the government's bank regulator, took control of SVB's assets. By Sunday, there was widespread fear that the thousands of startups and small businesses that had money in SVB

wouldn't be able to access their deposits for a long time and might never get all their money back, which led customers of small and medium-sized banks across the country to wonder if they should take their money out of those banks. I was outside a Silicon Valley bank with a shotgun and a wheelbar banks across the country to wonder if they should take their money out of those banks. I was outside a Silicon Valley bank with a shotgun and a wheelbarrow over the weekend.

Out of work. You couldn't find a branch of a bank if you're left to vent it on. I know how to bank. I know how to bank. Anyway, to stop all this from happening, to stop a larger bank run from happening, the federal government announced that every Silicon Valley bank customer and signature bank customer would have access to all their money right away. Here's President Biden on Monday. All customers who had deposits in these banks can rest assured, rest assured they'll be protected and they'll have access to their money as of today. They'll have access to their money as of today.

That includes small businesses across the country that bank there and need to make payroll, pay their bills, and stay open for business. No losses will be, and this is an important point, no losses will be borne by the taxpayers. Let me repeat that. No losses will be borne by the taxpayers. Instead, the money will come from the fees that banks pay into the deposit insurance fund. Because of the actions of that, because of the actions that our regulators have already taken, every American should feel confident that their deposits will be there if and when they need them. All right, let's start with this.

Tommy, why did Silicon Valley Bank fail? So Silicon Valley Bank, their SVB, as we'll call them going forward here. Too much to say. You're right. They built a big business for the last 40 years around catering to tech startups. And for a long time, it was a great business. I want you guys to think back to 2021, a couple of years ago. Okay. Stock markets making record highs, companies are IPO-ing, venture capital businesses booming, interest rates are close to zero. And It was very easy for new companies, startups to raise money. And many of them, I think majority of them actually deposited that money at

SVB. So SVB tripled their deposits from the end of 2019 to the end of 2021. They then did what all banks do with deposits, which is try to use some portion of them to make more money. They can make loans or in this case, SVB bought, they put something like half of their deposits into long-term bonds like treasuries. Gets you a yield, a slightly higher interest rate, but the challenge is you don't get the money you put in back until the bond matures or you sell the bond. So that is where they made a huge mistake because the Fed, as we now know, in November of 2021, I believe, started raising interest rates to manage inflation. That reduced the value of all these long-term bonds that SVB had purchased. And at the same time, the Fed

interest rate increase cooled down the economy. It got harder for startups to raise money, so they got less deposit at SVB. So what happens is more companies start pulling out their funds. They deposited at Silicon Valley Bank to pay bills, pay staff, et cetera. And two, fewer new companies start depositing money at SVB. That created a crisis for SVB. Depositors want their money back, but they had bought these long-term bonds that didn't mature for a while and they'd gone down in value. So SVB had to sell $21 billion worth of bonds at a 9% loss. And then they very stupidly said, Hey, this just happened. Now we're going to create some new stock and sell it to close the gap. Uh, and everyone said, what, what are you talking about? Hey, we're short on some cash. Uh, everybody be cool about this. Be cool about this.

We'll get you. We're good for it. Everybody chill out. We're in a tough spot right now, but, uh, I just want all of our customers to know things are going well. My favorite anecdote about this is there was like a Silicon Valley Titan group chat, apparently, where they all started talking about what was happening. And then people like Peter Thiel, venture capitalists all said to their portfolio companies that they'd invested in, get your money the hell out of SVB and do it right now, which led to a bank run. And now the 16th largest bank in the country does not exist. And now this is different than the crisis and the financial crisis in 2007, 2008, in part because this isn't a situation where all of a sudden SVP let everyone know like,

hey, this thing we thought was worth $5 billion is worth nothing, right? Oh, it turns out these derivatives are fake. This is a situation where the money just was not accessible to them or it would have to be accessed at a huge loss. Yeah. Well, what happens is when interest rates go up, the prices of bonds go down. So they basically had to- Especially these long-term bonds. These long-term bonds. So they had to sell the bonds that were on the books to be able to give the depositors the money they wanted. The 2008 financial crisis was a credit crisis. You had these mortgage-backed securities were a bunch of shitty mortgages

where people weren't paying and they were going bust, bundled up and sold as if they were AAA-rated bonds. And obviously that was not the case. And those stopped being able to be used as collateral for loans. We're getting a little wonky here, but this is very different. This was just like they bought long-dated bonds

and they needed money in the short term right one more wrinkle here pundit stop eating the vegan food that cory booker threw out pundit pundit no vegan food good girl all right as part of the um 2008 uh dodd frank reform wall street reform um banks are supposed to have a certain level of capital and liquidity and then there are supposed to have a certain level of capital and liquidity and then they're supposed to be periodic stress tests which is the government looking at the bank's balance sheets to make sure they're okay well in 2018 a bunch of republicans in congress along with a good number of democrats too many democrats um decided that they wanted to exempt a lot of banks, small, medium-sized banks, though

Silicon Valley Bank, they tried to say was a small bank, which is the 16th largest bank in the country. It was not. But anyway, they all got exempted from these requirements. Now, would, if they were still getting stress tests, if they still had certain capital and liquidity requirements, would this have happened? We don't't know we don't know in part because what caused this is not some fundamental fact about how stable they were as a bank there was a bank run there was a bunch of people who got themselves all pretty fucking spooked on a group text with a bunch of elon musk friends literally a group of people and like it like it's not like 200 people like 20 people could have caused this yeah i'm look i'm no bank regulator i'm no dodd i. I'm no Frank. Neither Dodd nor Frank here.

Frank's not Frank anymore either since he was on the board of Signature. Really? And picking up after a joke we had to cut because Lovett made it. So, yeah, I mean, John, to your point, they raised the threshold for the tougher stress tests from $50 billion to $250 billion. One of those stress tests. Just missed it. billion to 250 billion. One of those stress tests was asking banks to undergo a look at what would happen if there was a big spike in interest rates. Seems like that would have been useful here. And you said to 250 billion, guess what Silicon Valley Bank had? 200 billion. Just

missed the cutoff there. Well, what's ironic about all this too, though, is that one of the reasons even these banks pushed to be exempted is so they'd have the freedom to make more money and make more profits. Part of the claim being they're not as risky or they're not as systemically risky as Bank of America or the giant banks in this country. They're just regional banks. But the second this regional bank was threatened, any person who had a huge amount of money in there and the banks themselves started claiming, oh, my God, this is systemic. This is so dangerous. All caps, Twitter freak outs from every venture capitalist. And by the way, it was a

lot of these people that had a ton of money locked up in Silicon Valley Bank, basically spending the weekend wish casting that on Monday, there'd be a larger bank run across the country so that they could claim how needed it was for them to be bailed out. Which, by the way, would probably have precipitated a bankrupt. Yes. Right? Because this whole thing is built on confidence. And we should say, Kriya Media had a little cash in there. Yeah, we did.

They had our credit cards. They had our credit cards. Now our credit cards work. But this is interesting because a lot of people, oh, these VCs made all these portfolio companies do it. And that is true. But there were 40,000 customers, 30,000 customers at SVB all across the

country. It wasn't just like tech startups and VCs. We used that bank just because it was a bank. Yeah, that's where we paid our credit cards. Just like you use any bank. Now my credit card doesn't work. Now I can't get the massages I'm used to. Not helping the cause. Those are corporate massages. Those are good for the business.

That is helpful. The David Sacks suite right there. Anyway, everything's fine now. But love it. Some people get the money back. I think so. I didn't check this. Are we good?

Okay. Some people have argued, love it. Most of SVB's customers would eventually get most of their deposits back once the government sold all the bank's assets. So even if the government had never stepped in, people are saying like, we should have just let the process go. Usually when a bank fails, eventually there's a process with the FDIC and the depositors over $250,000, which in this case were mostly businesses and startups, would get their money back eventually so why did the government step in to do what they did so so two things first of all that was an open question over the weekend right how much how much would they be able to actually return to people if they just started

selling off all these assets but part of the issue is that a lot of basically so people know this just to so like there's a bunch of people who ask for the money the bank's like i don't have your money right now yeah and then the FDIC takes it over. And this process would be the FDIC selling off all of the assets of the bank, wiping out all the investors, wiping out the board, looking at how much money they do have, looking at the people who got there first, got their money out and then everything's chaos. And then people who get a hundred percent and people get zero percent. So, so at some point over the weekend, the, the, what, what people were, what people thought might happen is starting on Monday, basically half of the money might've been returned. And then over the next few months, the rest of the assets would be sold off and people will be slowly be made as whole as possible.

I think, first of all, there was a lot of fears that that would cause a bunch of businesses to go under, right? There's a lot of companies that rely on lines of credit from this bank. There's a lot of companies that rely on the money they had in this bank just to function. Companies going from having the ability to pay six months or a year of payroll to having two months, three months, or maybe not enough at all or zero. And again, a lot of people were saying, well, you know, then the VC should help their portfolio companies. Yeah.

If you're a company that has a venture capitalist that can help you out. But again, there's a lot of companies there that didn't have that. Now, and look, like, yeah, so, right. There's a lot of companies that didn't have that. And then look, if there's a, if what you're talking about is a situation where a really strong and good business suddenly finds that all their money is either half gone or locked up in some way, and they're going to have to shutter, they may go to their investors or some big backer and say, hey,

find some way to help get me through this period. Give me a low interest rate loan to cover my payroll. Put more money into this business just because you believe in the company and don't let this moment cause the company to evaporate. That might have saved some, but I think the issue there is, first of all, you would have seen regional banks across the country have people pull their money out and put them into the big banks that are backed basically by the federal government. You would have seen a ton of people losing their jobs. And because it does seem as though the assets that this bank has over time are enough to

make people whole, if this bank is then sold to some other bank and those deposits are in some way guaranteed, basically none of that has to happen and it doesn't cost the taxpayers anything because the assets are there. They're just locked up. That's my understanding of it. It's also just worth noting that SVB provided financing to over half of the companies that do residential solar energy. So if SVB just collapses, a bunch of these companies wouldn't have had a way to pay the men and women who go on your roof and install solar panels. And those companies could have just failed, you know, or like the custodian who cleans the office at night, right? I think that's where, that's the connection people

have to understand that this wasn't just the VC companies, the venture capitalists making the investments. It wasn't just the CEOs. It would have harmed all the workers at these companies. And again, 1500 companies that were customers of SVB or climate and renewable energy startups. So it's a huge amount of companies there. And there were companies like Etsy, Roblox. There was a big breadth of companies there. And again, if they hadn't stepped in, we would have been fine. But there's a lot of companies that just wouldn't have been able to make the payroll in the time that they had to wait to be made whole again. It'd be a mad day.

It'd be a scramble for businesses that might have a real path to being successful, having this moment where they would just disappear and those jobs would be gone. I will say, like, that doesn't make this any less fucking galling. Like, it is absolutely true that like that the reason that this bank wasn't held to higher standards because because the of these institutions, their executives, campaigned against stricter regulation, it is galling that a lot of these VC people that spent the weekend begging and demanding that the government save them are the very people that decry regulation and claim that the government is overreaching and claiming that that— Some of them specifically told their portfolio companies to get their money out. They precipitated a bank crisis and then whined all weekend on twitter about getting uh made whole in part because they were just late on the list they were they were they were too late in the order of

people uh uh trying to get their money out as were we right well yeah just for the record we tried to get our money out on friday we're no dummies because we saw it happen on twitter like everyone oh my god but again that's all peter teal tweeted i think if it had just been the jobs lost We're no dummies. Because we saw it happen on Twitter like every other week. Oh, my God. Yeah, man. That asshole Peter Thiel tweeted. I think if it had just been the jobs lost and the businesses shuttered, the government might not have stepped in. I think why they finally stepped in was this risk that you brought up about the systemic risk about the run on all small and medium-sized banks. Because if the government just made all these startups and small businesses wait months to get their money back and they shut down as a result, if you're another small business who's a customer at another bank that's SVB size or smaller, you probably would have said to yourself, like, why would I keep my money in this bank anymore if there's a risk that I lose it all if this bank shuts down?

Why not move it to a big bank that is heavily regulated like J.P. Morgan or Bank of America? move it to a big bank that is heavily regulated like JP Morgan or Bank of America. So then basically what you would have had is a move to all like the four huge banks in America and all these small and medium sized banks would have shut down. And that wouldn't have been, at least we're at risk of shutting down. That's what the government thought. And, you know, these big banks have gotten bigger by dint of their size. They're basically like quasi governmental in that their failure would be so cataclysmic it can't be allowed to happen. And that gives people an implicit promise that their money will be safer there than at regional banks. And all of a sudden, there's no more regional banks.

Do you know how many clients JP Morgan and Bank of America have gotten over the weekend? They can't intake them all. That's the other thing is that they can't take the info. It's also just important to point out that the bank itself was not saved. SVB is a publicly traded company on the stock market. If you own stock in SVB, it is now worth $0. All the employees, I think they have 45 days to get paid to finish out the orderly taking down the company, basically, and then they're all fired. The assets are getting

stripped. They're getting sold. The bank is gone. There was a very funny, I will say this, there was something, basically, there's this insipid debate about whether or not this counts as a bailout. And I did think it was funny that someone said it's only a taxpayer bailout if it's from the aig region of manhattan it's just semantic well let's talk let's get into that um so people are arguing on twitter about whether or not the the action actually constitutes a bailout uh nicki haley's campaign put out a statement with the headline, Nikki Haley slams Biden bailout. This is one flavor of criticism shared by some on the left as well. Meanwhile, the MAGA wing of the Republican Party is actually blaming woke culture for SVB's failure. Here's Ron DeSantis.

Maria, it just appears to me, I mean, this bank, they're so concerned with DEI and politics and all kinds of stuff. I think that really diverted from them focusing on their core mission. What do you guys think of the MAGA position that SVB collapsed because it had too much diversity? Silicon Valley Bank changed their fucking pronouns. That's the problem. These liberal woke bank banks. The board was 12 people. 10 10 are white it's majority male the average age is 63 so i don't know that they spend a ton of time this was well we all know only only only people of color and lgbtq americans invest in long-term

bonds well that and that's what that's what like if you really like if you unpack what they're saying it's like, I'm sorry. Uh, people of color, women don't understand like the most basic premise of banking in risk. Like, give me a break. Oh, here, here's the thing. SVB didn't have a chief risk officer for eight months last year, from April of 2022 to January of 2023. That might've been a bigger problem than the couple hours, a quarter the CEO was spending on DEI initiatives.

Silicon Valley banked through the first brick at Stonewall. This was from the Wall Street Journal. One of their opinion honchos said this. SVB notes that besides 91% of their board being independent, 45% women, they also have, and this is the quote, one black, one LGBTQ plus, and two veterans. I'm not saying 12 white men would have avoided this mess but the company may have been distracted by diversity demands it's funny you know we never used to have uh financial panics when it was uh right it was all i just i just like i want famously i just have every i have every confidence that uh the that the gay person they're

referencing was an absolute cutthroat fucking banker. Like, let's not, just, you know. I first saw this woke bank line of attack from Charlie Kirk, the little baby-faced TPUSA fascist, and I thought, you know, you can always count on Charlie to make the kind of dumbest,

most racist argument in every instance. Then it hopped to Don Jr., then the contagion spread to Ron DeSantis. And it's so stupid that it should be disqualifying. Of course, we live in a world where the dumbest argument gets the most time on Fox News or anywhere else. But it is incredible that these guys settled on this argument. Cory Booker refused to engage with me. He scolded me for even bringing it up. Really? Yeah. So stay tuned for that. I hope the i hope all the uh all the tech bros and all the finance bros who have fallen in love with ron desantis because you know they don't think it's

it's appropriate to say that they like trump right but they still want the free market conservatism part of the republican party so they're all ron desantis fans now and then they were all screaming over the weekend hoping that there'd be that the government would step in well your republican heroes like ron desantis and and nicki haley all think it was a bad idea to step in. Well, your Republican heroes like Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley all think it was a bad idea to step in, and Ron DeSantis is saying that the bank failed because it was too fucking woke. So just remember that when you start supporting Ron DeSantis

and Nikki Haley and the rest of them. Yeah, David Sachs. I'm sure they will. I'm sure they'll be very humble. Oh, very humble. Very humble. Well, they're all saying this bailout is different and there's no moral hazard here.

But David Sachs, the sort of right-wing tech investor goober who came up with Peter Thiel, I think has signed up to maybe be finance chair for Ron DeSantis or at least to raise money for him. He's come out in support of him. So yes, I duly noted as well. All right. So let's talk about this argument that this was just a government bailout for big banks and rich venture capitalists. I think that's mostly true. government bailout for big banks and rich venture capitalists. I think that's mostly true. I mean, certainly, like, the bank itself was not saved. SVB was not saved, right? So that's not accurate. It is true that if the government had not come in and protected depositors, I'm sure a lot of rich venture capitalists would have gotten screwed. SVB was unique in that 93% of its deposits were not insured by the FDIC, meaning that the vast, vast majority of its deposits were over $250,000. The normal bank has about half of its deposits to be FDIC insured.

But it's not- But a vast majority of those deposits, uninsured deposits, were not from individuals. They were from companies. They were from companies. They do private wealth management. They do M&A business. It's a weird, big, sprawling bank. But I do think the... So if the government hadn't come in, yes, a lot of rich venture capitalists would have gotten screwed. But so would, as we talked about earlier, tens of thousands of employees who just work at these companies, like the people installing the solar, et cetera.

Then there was the broader contagion problem, where if you have people yanking your money out of SVB and then other small and medium-sized banks, those fail. That's where it becomes a systemic, broad problem. Yeah. I mean, guaranteeing the uninsured deposits of businesses, of huge numbers of their customers with far more than 250,000, it is a way of protecting the jobs of regular people who had nothing to do with this crisis. It is also a way of protecting those wealthy people. And it is a way of protecting the other regional banks that were at risk of failure. So like, yes, this is a, it's actually a much less ghastly version of what happened in 2008, 2007, which is, you know, basically these giant corporations at the risk of what happened in 2008, 2007, which is basically these giant corporations at

the risk of failure basically say, help rescue us, or a lot of people that aren't responsible get hurt, and by the way, you'll help us too. The administration is saying that it is not a bailout, and it's also not going to be borne by the taxpayers, and there's been some disagreement there. Here's what's going on with that argument. So first they will sell off all the assets to the bank and then they will try to make the depositors whole, right? And if they can't make the depositors whole based on just selling off the assets, they will dip into what's called the deposit insurance fund, which is run by the FDIC. And that fund is a private insurance provider that is funded exclusively by the banks. They have a fee on the banks that goes into the deposit insurance fund and then if they need it,

it will go to make depositors whole. In fact, that is the fund that helps make people whole under $250,000 right now. That is a fund that is backed by the treasury in the event that it suddenly runs out of money. But the fund currently has more than $100 billion. They don't expect to use much of it at all. In fact, they might not need any of it if they just sell enough assets, right? But if it does run out and Treasury has to step in, Treasury is then repaid by charging the banks even higher fees. So I don't like, yes, it is backed by the taxpayers, but taxpayers are not going to be paying for this.

Well, yes, I think taxpayers are not going to be paying for this, but it is basically taking the risk that this bank incurred to make more profits and distributing the cost of it across a huge part of the economy rather than making it be borne by the people who had money in that bank. I mean, it is just distributing. Like, look, the term bailout, who cares? Like, whether you want to call it a bailout, that's like a pure political question. It's, you know, one person's terrorist, another person's freedom fighter.

But yeah, like when something like this happens, basically, we are saying, Silicon Valley Bank said to its customers, heads you win, tails you win. And in the event of tails, we will make sure that a bunch of people else that had nothing to do with this help back and protect you. I think that's right. But also, that's kind of like, conceptually, how the FDIC always works. Right. You know, the sort of the risk is borne out. But up to 250. Under 250, it's still socialized losses. But that's a deal we've all made. Right. That's why you understand. Right. These people, these are on insurance. Right. Basically, it was an honor.

You can't buy fire insurance after house burns down. This is a bunch of people whose houses are on fire. And they're saying, if you don't insure me, I will burn down your entire neighborhood. No, no, no, no, no, no. It's not their house. It's the bank's SVB's house. The depositors are the ones getting helped out. Right.

In 2008, the bankers who screwed up everything kept their jobs. I think my analogy is good. The banks continue to exist. I like my analogy, listener. It didn't really work. The banks, those bankers kept getting bonuses. The rest of the economy is getting crushed, right? And all these banks that got huge capital injections, right?

SVB no longer exists. The people who work there will be fired. The people getting paid are depositors, not customers. No, but that's what I'm- But the depositors aren't buying, you know, I just think- No, I don't care. I don't want to focus on your analogy. I'm just saying, I think it's a little, it's a distinction that's getting lost.

Well, I'm just saying like when, yes, of course. I think it's like, it's not, this is not. Depositors aren't a homeowner. There are people that are renting space there. Sure, fine. But it's still, anyway. Look, there's some policymakers, including some very progressive policymakers, that have said, look, the solution here is that the cap, the FDIC cap of $250,000 is too low and that it should be higher. Right. It is a change in the rules like that is fair. But I think the moral case here and the

reason why it's different than 2008 is in 2008, it was, you know, people were making risky bets and mortgage backed securities and stuff like that. This is like if you are a depositor, if you are just a customer of a bank, you cannot be expected to go around and look at the books of every single bank around the country and be like, well, I'm going to put my money in this bank, you cannot be expected to go around and look at the books of every single bank around the country and be like, well, I'm going to put my money in this bank, but I don't know if it, if I, if the bank goes down, I'm going to lose it. You know, that's why I think it's a, of course. I mean, look, this is a, I'm not saying you're saying, I'm saying there's a lot of argument out there about this. I'm just laying that out. I'm not arguing with you.

I'm not claiming the people who are having their, who are at risk of losing the money they put in that bank are really at fault here. Like it isn't,'t it i'm not saying that the bank i'm not i'm not taking the side of i'm not saying they are culpable as the bankers some people are uh right but but i will say that this is a situation where people you know put their money in a place it turns out it wasn't as safe as they had hoped and they are trying to be insured for after the fact right that is what this is and when you insure something after the fact, you're basically just saying to everyone, hey, chip in. I would like to have had insurance this whole time, and I didn't. Yeah. Well, I think this, I mean, this goes to the, what some of the questions that are going to be asked now, which is what else can

the Biden administration, Democrats in Congress do to prevent this from happening again? Make it clear they're not on the side of big banks. I mean, the questions that we're just debating right now, it raises the issue, like, if there are a lot of these banks that could, if a failure of a large bank, right, maybe not as big as one of the big, big banks, but as large as Silicon Valley Bank, if a failure like that could spark around the banks and sort of jeopardize the entire banking system, then, like, should we insure more than 250 000 dollars for people i mean because

individuals are one thing like some rich person that has 10 million dollars in the bank who cares but if like businesses are all over the place and they're putting their money in banks like yeah maybe yeah there's there's i do think there's like a lot to figure out some of it is that right like should it should there be better liquidity? Should they basically do the reforms Elizabeth Warren wants and undo the repeal that they did in 2018?

I mean, that's number one, right? Should the cap be raised? Seems like a good idea based on what some of these experts are saying, fine. But there is another problem here, which is this is a bank run that really may have been set off by-

By Twitter, but not even just by Twitter. OK, Twitter by assholes on Twitter. Sorry. But like before they even got to Twitter, five people, 10 people, 12 people on a chat. Now, that's a very specific thing about this bank. But the fact that like that conversation and a sudden run on this bank could have possibly triggered a larger run on a bunch of other regional banks. Like the speed of it and the ability of these people to communicate and try to get their money out all at once is very scary. It is very dangerous. Yeah, I would say those people acted greedily, but not irrationally.

You know, they saw this systemic problem of these long dated illiquid bonds and the near term problem of people wanting their deposits back. And they were like, oh God, something bad is going to happen. And they were right. But they also precipitated that bad thing happening. Every single bank on the planet is kind of a confidence game like that. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. Every bank is susceptible to this kind of event happening. Like the higher capital requirements, the stress tests tests they're all put in place to to prevent that but like but ironically it's not they don't prevent it because if the run were to happen it would prevent the run from doing damage they try to prevent it by giving people enough confidence to believe their money is safe so the run doesn't take place the run could kill any bank absolutely well and that's ultimately the the purpose of the action that the administration took was to shore up confidence in the system because this whole thing is built on confidence. And if

there's a bank run and it starts spreading, you know, that's... And to be clear, I want our money back. The most important thing the Fed did... And that's important to me. The most important thing the Fed did, though, was set up this emergency lending program to make sure that all the other banks out there, not SVB, are able to get the liquidity they need to meet depositor needs. Because I assume, look, if these bank risk compliance officers didn't see that zero interest rates weren't going to last forever and bought a bunch of 30-year treasuries to get 25 basis points of extra yield, they're morons. But it does seem like a lot of other banks sort of made that problem too. And they need to have a way where they're

not writing down huge losses on these bonds that people will then see and then withdraw their money fearing another SVB happening. So that is like the key thing they did. And that is important because there were certain factors that made Silicon Valley Bank a specific problem here, but it's a problem with other banks too. It's not just an SVB problem. Yeah. I mean, Silicon Valley Bank, I think they served half of venture-backed companies and 44% of venture-backed tech and healthcare companies that IPO'd last year. So they were very, very tied to the tech industry, which was also very, very tied to low interest rates in their ability to fundraise because people couldn't get yield anywhere else. Yeah, it is also, I do think it also,

after the fact, you look back on it and you're like, that is obviously an inherently risky proposition to have an entire industry, a famously risky industry concentrated in one bank. And I imagine over this weekend, there were people that were trying to figure out if they could be a business on Monday, calling backers who also have their money tied up in this bank, trying to figure out what they were going to do come Monday morning. Yeah. And SVB was known for providing what's called venture debt to companies, which is just another way of getting financing. And I read that some startups had to keep their money at SVB because

they borrowed venture debt from SVB. So they were kind of stuck in this system. It's very risky, kind of self-perpetuating system. Well, I wonder how many, like what the Biden administration could do on its own, because I would bet that the chance of legislation to solve this from all the Republicans who are yelling about the this bank bailout i don't think they'll be uh don't think they'll be on board with regulations to make sure this isn't happening again so this is going to be on the fed and the fdic and the vitamin in the treasury it is just like another reminder too it's like man you have this crisis that plays out over the weekend that reveals a bunch of like really serious policy

questions that we need congress to address and these fucking dummies are like oh it's woke capitalism they spend all their time so unserious spent it's so unserious you have ted cruz railing against biden for it for a completely non-mandatory rule on just if a fucking company if a if a if a if um a retirement fund wants to invest in environmentally friendly or socially responsible investments, they should be able to do it. They call it fucking communism and attack it. And meanwhile, this is a real problem, but we won't be able to do anything about it. It's actually worse than that. The Intercept just reported that two of Kevin McCarthy's top aides were among the lobbyists who helped SVB get rid of those higher capital requirements.

So it got us into this mess in the first place. Yeah. Their CEO was lobbying Congress the whole time. And Elizabeth Warren was talking about trying to claw back. Okay, great. We're going to wipe out this bank. We're going to wipe out the people that own the bank. What? Wipe out the people. Wipe out the people that were trying to profit off of all this. But these huge, huge payouts to their top executives for all the profits they were earning on this risky scheme.

Let's see if we can cloud those back. Last week, CNN's Jake Tapper hosted a town hall with Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin about the, quote, war on education, end quote. The town hall started with a transgender teen asking Governor Youngkin about his anti-trans bathroom and locker room policies. Governor Youngkin about his anti-trans bathroom and locker room policies. Governor Youngkin, your transgender model policies require that students play on the sports teams and use the restrooms that correspond with their sex assigned at birth.

Look at me. I am a transgender man. Do you really think that the girls in my high school would feel comfortable sharing a restroom with me? Joining us now is that very student. Nico, welcome to the pod. Hi, thanks so much for having me. Thanks for being here. First of all, in asking that question, you weren't officially out, right? No. I mean, I transitioned right before sophomore year, but my freshman year was totally online. So, you know, some people knew some people didn't. And that was definitely like, doing that, I realized like, Oh, God, like, you know, not only does, is it like, you know, people around the country around the world finding out, but like, people in my school are finding out and that was, you know, a decision I made that I'm living with. And it's been okay with and it's been okay so it's been

okay how's the response been I I mean on my end in person I've gotten nothing but positive you know feedback so hopefully that it stays that way but I've gotten nothing from but love you know in my personal life so So one thing that's so striking about you asking that question is it's rare to see a Republican politician confronted face to face by a person who would experience the harm of what they're trying to pass of the policies they're supporting. Why did you want to talk to him directly? And what did you think of his answer? Well, I think that a lot of politicians, especially Republican politicians, as they're the ones that are really pushing these kinds of bills, see, quote unquote, transgenderism as a concept, a movement, an ideology, whatever. And because they're not often faced by these people, these kids, these adults, whatever, face to face, they don't see them as people. And so I think that being able to really stand there and look them in the eye and say, here's who I am, you know, this is a person you're affecting, helps not only them, but, you know, people understand that this has a real consequence.

It has a personal consequence that these policies are personal right um and i mean i won't lie his his answer was not really an answer i i yeah he never addressed my question and um he clearly had something rehearsed that he wanted to say, and he found a way to say that. Right. And one thing that struck me about his answer is that that's just not what his policy is. Right. He was talking about how we need to get more gender neutral bathrooms, you know, that makes everyone feel safe. And that is just not something he's pushing in Virginia. It is absolutely not something he's putting funding towards. That is just not something he's pushing in Virginia. It is absolutely not something he's putting funding towards. What he is trying to do is force kids to transgender kids to use the bathrooms that align with their sex assigned at birth.

And he clearly didn't have an answer whether that was something that I should be doing. But he's still pushing a policy that would force me to do that. Right. That was what it is striking, right? Because you're like, well, hey, man, what do you what do you what are you trying to do? Like, where do you want me, a human being to go? Why is it that you want me to go into a room that doesn't match my gender? Why is that good for anyone? Why is that what you want? And he really couldn't answer. He really couldn't answer the question at all. And it does seem like the question is on some level, like, do you want it to be safe for someone like me to go to the bathroom? Yeah. I mean, gender neutral bathrooms are awesome,

right? There are, it's not something that I need, but for a lot of people, that is something that they want. That would be awesome. But if not every bathroom is gender neutral, right? If every bathroom was gender neutral, that would be one thing. But this sort of like, we're gonna make some whatever ends up with a situation of that could be, you know, forced outing of trans people in public at school, at work, whatever. And in many ways, you know, this might be an extreme statement to make. But what he's really proposing is a separate but equal solution, right? Which we know is not okay. So Glenn Youngkin was really trying to be very nice to you. He was trying to be all buddy-buddy.

Did you talk to him after? Did he try to continue his sort of evil policies but nice-to-your-face sort of energy? So during the commercial break before I asked my question he you know came around he was shaking hands with people you know he came and said hi to me and my dad he did not reach out again during a later you know commercial break or after the show and i wasn't going to track him down and try and have a conversation with him um so there was know, we were cordial and then I asked the question and then we went our separate ways, so to speak. Okay.

Um, what year are you? How old are you? I'm a junior. You're going to college? You're a junior? Have you applied to college yet? What are you doing? What's happening to you?

Where do you go from here? Um, in life? Yeah. In life. I don't know. You know, I mean, it was kind of surreal. Actually, I, you know, was at that town hall on Thursday, in life. I don't know. You know, I mean, it was kind of surreal. Actually, I, you know, was at that town hall on Thursday. Saturday morning, I took my SAT.

That was this that was all this week. You took the SATs this week. I took the SATs less than 48 hours after doing that. Yeah. Are you are you do you feel better about the math part of the English part? I find the English part easier for sure. But you know, I thought I did better about the math part or the English part? I find the English part easier for sure. But I thought I did okay on the math section. Okay. All right. All right.

Well, Nico, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for being willing to face off with Glenn Youngkin. Yeah, of course. And thank you so much for having me and letting me use my voice. Joining us in studio is a senator from New Jersey and an all-around friend of the pod. Welcome back, Senator Booker. It is good to see you. It is good to be at your table here. I don't know if this is, you know, Pesach table or... Sure, yeah. I feel closer to Winsperum.

So we are sitting... Also, we're sitting like Kim Basinger and Michael Keaton in the Batman movie, where they sat very far apart. But it's okay. We're going to get through it. So Senator Booker has graciously agreed to sit down for an interview. But as we do it, we do have a bunch of vegan food options because you are a world famous vegan. I don't know about that, but I am definitely a vegan for many years now.

Vegetarian since 92. Since 1992. Yes. Since Bill Clinton was on the hustings. Since the question, yeah, since whether Jerry Brown could make a comeback if he'd been a vegetarian. Yes.

We are going to rate several vegan burgers. And what inspired this? This is a, I mean, I'm pretty stoked right now. We're trying to monetize YouTube. Okay. The other thing is they're really cool vegan options now like that are really innovative and delicious. And so we are going, as we discuss a range of topics, we are going to sample a few vegan sandwiches and burgers.

We're going to rate them from 1 to 10. Yes. With 1 being will sustain life and 10 being good enough to trick a middle-aged Republican who thinks sushi is for queers. Ouch. Can I just say something though? Sure. Two things, two points I want to make. They're important to this. I feel, I think it will be. One is this is vegan junk food. Yeah. And you're going to point that out. Yes. You could be a very unhealthy vegan. And I have been that person before. When I first became, I was vegetarian since 92, became a vegan in 2014. When I became a vegan in 2014, people were sending me cupcakes and vegan pancake mixes. And I just, I ballooned,

it became a lot heavier and was not healthy. So I want to say net, net, there are these people who say there's a better diet or work. There are definitely things we know about health and wellbeing. That said, the carbon footprint, if you're concerned about climate change and issues like that, the number one reason for deforestation in our world right now is animal agriculture, to clearing lands for grazing. There are a lot of effects. If you're just a climate activist and you're not talking about the food system, then you're not talking about one of the top causers of global um climate change so so i can

see that this is vegan junk food but you want to try this this is called guess what chicken butt guess what chicken butt this looks amazing this looks really good i'm into this i'm into this now when is the last time i'm gonna as you chew i'm gonna ask a question until you seem to be done chewing. I was born on Long Island. That's unrelated. I'm just trying to give you time. I love Long Island.

It's like the New Jersey of New York. Yeah, I don't know. That's true. That's just the reality of the situation. When is the last time you had a chicken sandwich that was chicken? So this is going to freak you out. At least it freaked me out. I'm sorry.

This is not going to freak you out. It freaked me out. It might freak me out. At least it freaked me out. I'm sorry. This is not going to freak you out. It freaked me out. It might freak me out. Today was the first day. Today. The first day that I ever ate chicken, 30-something years. But the reason why is I went to a company that does lab-grown meat. Oh, cool.

And so I was kind of freaked out. I wasn't sure. They take a cell, a biopsy, and they grow it. And so I finally agreed to try it. Hell yeah. And I was kind of freaked out. I wasn't sure when they take a cell biopsy and they grow it. And so I finally agreed to try it. Hell yeah. And I was blown away. I am so excited about, we got to, I've been, we got to figure out the branding. We got to figure out the name.

People are not going to want lab grown meat. They're not, the word biopsy should not be anywhere near a chicken sandwich, but I am so into, because here's the thing, you know, at first it's like, okay, I it's like, okay, I'm going to rate this chicken sandwich. I will let you rate. Remember, one is just sustains human life. Ten is fool a Republican who doesn't believe in sushi. How delicious is this? So I'm going to tell you right now, chicken nuggets and fried chicken sandwich, you cannot tell the difference.

You can't tell the difference. You cannot. You can't tell the difference. It's like if you want to cut your – there's no cholesterol in uh in in plant-based anything so if you have some issues eat that you can't tell the difference you get i agree i think what are you saying 10 are we saying it's i'm saying a 10 we think it's a 10 it could fool somebody and i've done these tricks before with my friends fooling them but so i am so excited about the lab grown meat because i think a lot of like vegan and vegetarian like you know there there's, I don't know

how you feel about this, but sometimes there's vegan and vegetarian food that tries to recreate. And then there's some, some that just try to be its own thing and its own version of delicious. But the thing about the lab-grown is here's my dream. Here's what I think about. Here's why, here's my North star filet mignon steaks, the size of pizza boxes coming off a conveyor belt. Possible? It is. But you know, when we hear something like lab-grown meat and biopsies, we get grossed out.

But if you saw the way factory farming works in America- No, I'm with you. Literally, if you just said, I'm going to go out and look at how my pork, my bacon, you would be, I would use a word for some Americans who are avowed meat eaters that I would never want to try to shift, but you would be traumatized that seeing what happens to these animals compared to how our grandparents raised livestock. We cram these animals in on top of each other, that the majority of the antibiotics we use

in this country, the majority are used prophylactically, preventatively injected into animals. And what that's creating is antibiotic resistant strains that are killing Americans. We are now up to tens of thousands of Americans that are dying every single year because of antibiotic resistant strains. And so I was one of the people fighting against the wet markets in other countries that allow these things to gestate and potentially lead to pandemics. But the way we are raising agriculture, such a perversion of what our grandparents and great-grandparents did, is creating a petri dish to cultivate antibiotic-resistant strains that could threaten human existence.

So this is such an aberration of the way we've raised livestock for millennia that we're creating, again, another threat to human health and to this country. Let's talk about another topic. You have Silicon Valley Bank, Thursday and Friday, everything gets shut down. Over the weekend, you have a bunch of venture capital people saying it's going to be everywhere. It's going to ruin everything. It's coming after all the banks. You have to do something. You have to do something. The same industry leaders that were railing against the kind of regulations you were trying to deregulate, who were railing against the regulations that the Trump administration

repealed in 2018, which you opposed. Where are we today? What did you think of the Biden announcement this morning? What's your response to what happened to this bank? So again, first of all, it's not shocking. What happened in 2018 lifted the stress testing and the transparency that could have allowed people to realize there was a crisis before the people who are incentivized to hide the crisis or who are doing the bad behavior. And so this is, to me, a logical outcome of when you, and by the way, all regulation, we can say regulation is as if it's all one thing. In this case, it was to prevent what we saw during the global financial

crisis. And this is a natural, almost expected, especially when things are supercharged now by social media and online banking. With the regulations, if the regulations that were in place until that law was signed by Trump, if those were in place, would this have not happened? So everything that I'm seeing is the answer to that is that this would have been a preventative safeguard that could have exposed the vulnerabilities of this bank at the time. That's everything I'm seeing. And I'm moving to hopefully get support on both sides of the aisle to reinstate, and Elizabeth Warren and others of us that fought hardest against what the Trump administration did, to reinstate those 2018 safeguards to prevent this from happening again.

Because what you kind of see now is, remember those too big to fail? Well, these aren't the big banks. These are regional banks that are showing that they too possess contagion if they are able to spread. I think the Biden administration did the right thing to step up. This is not costing taxpayer dollars the steps that they're taking. But if we don't learn from this, then we are setting ourselves up to have more crises in the future. It is a strange situation because this isn't like 2007, 2008, because this is in a situation where all of a sudden this bank had much less in assets than it did two days before, three days before. It wasn't that they were sitting on top of these sort of complicated, poorly understood derivatives. They have the money.

It was just they were not able to access it, right, because it was in bonds and it was in these sort of longer term investments. And all of a sudden, Peter Thiel and a few VC guys are telling everyone that has money in the bank, go get your money, go get your money. And they just can't get it out in time. Is that right? Well, first of all, that's what I mean by we're living in a different era where social media spreads rumors and misinformation, but also fear. So this is a new part of the combustible atmosphere we live in. But I think we're drawing conclusions about the culpability of the people that ran this bank. You have interest rates in the Fed moving interest rates up. That does affect the balance sheets of these banks where

the banks should be taking responsible action, seeing that interest rates are going up. So again, I don't want to create any conclusion, but there is enough evidence to see that, to suspect perhaps that these folks who should be soaked, shareholders should be accountable, board members, the people who are running this institution should have had enough information. Again, this is what it's pointing to, to prevent this from happening. But again, add to that the fact that fear was injected into this, legitimate concerns were injected into this, that created this process and this problem, that then spread to people's concerns about First Republic, about Signature Bank and others.

And so again, we have to learn from this. And that's why I get very bothered by, and I was with somebody recently, simplistic conclusions like, oh, we need less government regulation. Oh, we need more government regulation. We need to be smart. We live in an interwoven, interconnected society in which the job that somebody might have for a company is directly affected to banking systems or actions taken by the Fed. This is all a far more interrelated system that we need, taxpayers deserve, Americans deserve safeguards on this system. So irresponsible behavior by bank shareholders in California is not affecting

the job prospects for people in New Jersey. Now into this very complicated situation. Can I just interrupt you for a second? Please. These are the kind of things I do. Yeah, let's grab these shakes. No, but I want you to taste this one in particular. Oh, this one in particular? Yeah, because I know that that is, it looks like either an Oreo shake. Okay. Or cookies and cream shake. I know this is, it looks very vanilla-esque, but I want you to push that straw in there, my friend.

Because have you ever had a vegan shake before? Yeah. I've lived a full life. You know, I mean, I've had a vegan shake. So you're not one of these kind of anti-plant-based person. No, no, no. No, no. I have a – what would be the word?

I have an – I love food. Yes. Okay, good. And all its kinds. Okay. I love your crossroads, but I like a, I have an, I have a, um, what would be the word? I have an, I love food. Yes. And all its kinds. Okay. I love your crossroads, but I, I like, I like a steak. You know, I eat it all. I love it. I eat high, I eat high end.

I eat low end. Okay. Cheesecake factory. I have to say. What's that restaurant where the chef was abusive in Finland or something? Noma? I'll eat there, but I haven't. Okay.

You know, one of those Michelin places. Yes. All right. But you'll go to Benihana's too. You bet I will. You bet I will. Wood and half. I respect that. And please just give people the same ranking because a lot of my friends, again, don't understand how good that is. All right. This is some sort of vegan Oreo shake. And if you don't want to give the brand away, say cookies and cream. It's cookies.

Oh, okay. Yeah, you're right. Cookies and cream. Yes. It could be Hydrox. We don't know. But Oreos are very vegan, I should tell you. They are.

They're vegan, right? Yes, yes. And very good. And they're constantly coming up with new Oreos. It's unbelievable. I walked into a supermarket and I just saw a wall of every imaginable types of Oreo from red velvet cake

to like, you know, I think there was like Lady Gaga, uh, Oreos or something like that. I'm going to say, I'm going to give this a nine. I'm going to give this a nine. I think, I think it's great. Um, but you know, uh, uh, I wouldn't be able to, uh, I wouldn't be upset if a cow had gotten involved. You wouldn't be upset if a cow had gotten involved? Well, I just think it might have improved. I'm just being honest. I'm saying it's a 9 out of 10. But you are – I know your heart.

All jokes aside, you're a man of empathy and compassion. So if this cow was a free-range grazing cow, regenerative farm, that's great. But if you knew sort of the darker side of the industry that they don't want consumers to know, you would be concerned about factory farming. I know, I know, but we all know, and yet we all continue. Isn't that the reality? Isn't the reality that a lot of people know and continue? That's part of it too.

You know that. I think- You know it's true. You know that a lot of people know how bad it is. A lot of people will see Food, Inc. and they will go to McDonald's on the way home, right? We know that that's going on. So there is an ability we have to put this problem out of our minds, myself included. So I'm a big believer that empathy is the most necessary agent, ingredient in change,

that you have to get people to know first, to confront the moral urgencies. This was the brilliance of the civil rights movement. You had them saying, there's no way. Birmingham, Alabama will never get rid of segregation. And these creative artists of activism, in one day, really two days of demonstration in front of Bull Connor, brought the national spotlight to people to understand this. And all of a sudden, 12 days later, segregation fell.

So I believe that is the case. The challenge we have is trying to expose to all of us. You don't know who made that t-shirt. You have no knowledge whether that was fast fashion with child labor, or was it made in a way that resonates more with your values. So I just want to go back to Silicon Valley Bank for a second. I'm so sorry. No, no, no, no. I pulled this way afield. No, no, no.

I'm glad you did. But it is related, right? Because I think one of the allegations now is that Silicon Valley Bank, the reason it failed is that it was too woke. You have Ron DeSantis saying it might be in part because of DEI. I want to read you a quote from the Wall Street Journal, the minds of the Wall Street Journal. SVB notes that besides- Hold on. Let me just make the assumption this is their editorial page. Editorial. This is not their news side. This is an opinion piece. As an avid reader of their news side, I know that this-

Yes, yes. By one of their opinion writers. SVB notes that besides 91% of their board being independent and 45% women, they also have one black, one LGBTQ plus and two veterans. I'm not saying 12 white men would have avoided this mess, but the company may have been distracted by diversity demands.

Senator Booker, do you think, quote, one black may have been responsible for this crisis or might it have been one lesbian? I mean, are you prepared to decide are you will you tell us now if you believe this was caused by a black person or a lesbian okay so the absurdity one person right the absurdity of that is could be a black lesbian the absurdity that is plain and and you and i can can sit here and and continually and i i get i get rankled uh uh whenled when I turned on to hear Governor DeSantis' speech.

He won the election pretty sizably in his state. And I expect it to be what executives need to do, which is remind people of our – we just come out of a partisan election. Remind people of our common cause, our common mission. And I was surprised to see how hard he went against this idea that I still don't fully understand of what it means to be woke. But I'm warning us, because I imagine you and I are members of the same political party. I worry us that if we spend our time, again, my father used to tell me when I was a kid, there's two ways to go through life, a thermometer or a thermostat. If we spend our time as a thermometer, just reacting to them

and not working hard on being a thermostat and setting the temperature, we perpetuate the dynamic that is dividing our country. So I think what I'm interested in on this topic, jokes aside, is I hear you, right? We need to fight on the ground, we think, where we can do the most good and bring the most people along and persuade the most people. I agree with that. But what we see now is there is an effort, DeSantis is part of it, which is to paint basically anything they disagree with or anything that involves change as woke. That involves going after schools, teachers, parents of trans kids. Yes, yes.

It involves going after Disney. Yes. And by the way, that's where words hurt. We have a suicide rate amongst LGBTQ kids that is the result of creating environments of which they're not safe. But the reason I'm bringing it up is, I hear what, we should,

I hear what you're saying about not getting dragged and not being defensive, but we need to have an argument when Republicans try to take on the mantle of going after corporations, which is laughable, right? When they say, oh, we're gonna hold these big, when they do that kind of right-wing populism,

what do you find, before you say, I'd rather be talking about the child tax credit, I do you find, before you say, I'd rather be talking about the child tax credit, I'd rather be talking about baby bonds, I'd rather be talking about gun control, whatever it may be, before you get there, what do you find is the most effective way to fight back, to win, rather than change the subject, but to win the argument when it comes to Republicans claiming, when it comes to Republicans launching these sort of myriad attacks on basic freedoms, bodily autonomy, the right of parents to raise their kids, doctors to prescribe medicine. Right. So first of all, I just want to say that one of the best pieces of advice for well-being is that you do not have to attend every argument you're strategic, that you don't let people own your emotional state,

and you fight and apply your energy to things that will advance good for people. That's really got to be the bottom line. And I'll give you a great example of my frustration. I'm not telling you that I'm some Zen master, but I will tell you that let's take Washington, D.C. and their autonomy, their ability to access what is a fundamental ideal in America, representative government. One of the instigators for a revolution you might know about called the American Revolution was ideas like taxation without representation. ideas like taxation without representation, okay? We have a body of population in the continental United States of America that is a larger population than at least two states commensurate with three or four states that pays more in federal taxes than I think any state, if I have my data right, that serves in the federal military at some of the highest rates in the country. This is a group, Washington, D.C. is a community of some large size,

but they have no ability or to escape the ability of Congress to tell them what to do. of Congress to tell them what to do. So last week, it really was a two-week buildup, they finish a 16-plus year process to overhaul their criminal code that wasn't done by politicians. It was done by an advisory board and a commission. The commission had prosecutors, had a lot of criminal justice and they came back unanimously, the commission unanimously, and they sent it to the city council, which was unanimous endorsing this. Very smart politicians, not policy people, policy people exploited that criminal code change to say that they're lowering penalties for carjacking. Thank you. Thank you very much. I mean, I'm emotional about this because it was one of my lower points in the United States Senate to watch all this happen. And by the way, when I read those headlines, I was like, you know, I live in a city that we battled crime for a long time.

Why would they be lowering penalties on carjacking? Again, the Republicans presented this in a way that would excite people on both sides of the aisle who are concerned about safety and say, oh, this is some kind of woke, far left, radical undoing of crime. So my team looks, you know, God forbid, reads the actual legislation, and I'm stunned. This legislation didn't just increase penalties for significant numbers of crimes. It doubled, tripled, and quadrupled penalties for certain crimes. It created new criminal penalties that didn't exist before to protect vulnerable people, victims of child exploitation. They closed the loophole that every state has closed now, except for South Carolina, to criminalize choking and domestic violence. They actually put things in two new crimes to protect police officers from harassment. And then they did actually lower penalties for carjacking and a number of other crimes, but they brought them in line with other states. I do not understand how the Democratic Party, that we, can be on the defensive about crime when in the last Congress, we approved more money to support local police officers than any single administration going back to Bill Clinton. I'm ready now to try

to fight to head off what the Republicans are trying to do on a police reform bill. And yet again, for the second time in 30 years, have their elected representatives be overrun by people that don't have anybody representing Washington, D.C. in their body. Senator Booker, before we let you go, can you please write that shake on a scale of 1 to 10? We've got to do one more. We've got to do one more. You're like...

I feel like anything you put enough sugar... I know, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. ...and fat in is going to be a good shake, but... What do you think? I think it's like 11. It's 11. Nobody's going to turn...

It's an 11. Nobody's going to turn this down. It's so good. This is what we have to get in front of people. This is what's going to change hearts and minds. Again, if we as Americans could say, these are our values, this is where our food system is, let's try to together bring our values together. Let's elevate farmers who are going out of business at alarming rates, have suicide rates around three times higher than us. Let's help empower farmers to lead on climate change, incentivize cover crops. Let's take care of farm workers and food workers.

If we can just create a food system that reflects our values, everybody would win. From rural America to the kids in the bodega, we'd have better choices and better access to healthy food. New York strip stakes the size of ping pong tables. That is possible. That's a world that we can live in. Senator Booker, thank you so much. You are a prisoner of hope and I appreciate that. People need to imagine. And you're on such a high note. Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much. Thank you always. All right. Before we go, we thought we'd cover the week's other top stories in another round of One Line with Cocaine Bear.

Here's how it works. The producers compiled a list of news stories that are all written down on slips of paper in this bear head in front of me. Please watch us on YouTube if you can't see this. Just if you're just listening. And we will draw the pieces of paper out one at a time and offer a quick reaction. Tommy, you want to kick us off? Sure.

And I do promise we will turn the bear's head over so it looks more like a bear. Drumroll, please. Mike Pence at Gridiron Dinner. So during a speech at the Gridiron Dinner on Saturday, former Vice President Mike Pence addressed Donald Trump saying, quote, history will hold Donald Trump accountable for January 6th. Make no mistake about it. What happened that day was a disgrace and it mocks decency to portray it in any other way. President Trump was wrong.

His reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day. My take on this is like, thanks for stating the obvious, Mike Pence. Why would you do this at the gridiron dinner which for for everyone back home who doesn't know it's uh the most pompous everyone back home everyone uh it's like this this uh white tie tails super stuffy establishment media event where reporters like literally do skits and sing each other fucking songs and things. And of all the people you need to convince that Trump endangered everyone on January 6th, like everyone in that room knows. And he does it in a room with no video. There's

no video of this thing. Well, so there was, of course, a Politico story like inside Mike Pence decision to attack Donald Trump. And they have this line. His team also believed it would help Pence win over his most skeptical audience these days. Washington insiders and journalists who've given him short shrift

in the early 2024 primary. I don't remember Gordia Borgia trying to hang him on the Capitol lawn. Did I beat you? Yes, yes. That's what I was about to say. We got a joke on.

I was in the middle. I was in the middle of a sentence. All right, you do your sentence. No, no, no. It's okay. It's okay. No, I want you to do it. What was your sentence going to be?

You got it. I'll hop up on vegan food over here. You got it. You got it. You're up, bear. Go ahead. DeSantis in Iowa. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis visited Iowa last week for his book tour, prompting the New York Times headline A Glimpse of DeSantis in Iowa. Awkward but still winning the crowd.

There's a paragraph that's worth reading from this article. Oh, God. The interaction underscored both the promise and the potential pitfall of a presidential bid for DeSantis. His preference for policy over personality can make him seem awkward and arrogant or otherwise astonishing in person, depending on the voter and the success or failure of his one-on-one exchanges. Many Republicans view his style as an antidote to the character attacks and volatility that have underscored Republican politics during the Trump era. I love this because it is the most, I would say that it is the most generous description of a person who has the charisma of an old hat. I loved the bit of color in this piece where he was doing an event with Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds.

She was supposed to be asking him a bunch of questions. He went out on stage, and before he could sit down with her, he spoke for 30 minutes. And then finally, at the end, she said, she put out her hands and said, come over here to come sit and talk and do questions. And this is like a roadshow they've been doing. She was also at his Florida event. Like, he should know better.

You don't insult the Republican governor of Iowa when you're going to run for president. And then she asked him a question about his family and he responded by talking about policy so i you know who knows some of this stuff may not matter may not matter may not matter but it's uh it's a thing all right let's see what we got here manhattan da close to indicting trump okay here we go the new york times has reported that the manhattan district attorney's office has signaled to donald trump's lawyers that he could soon face criminal charges for his role in the payment of hush money to Stormy Daniels. And they gave him one last chance to testify, which he has declined.

But Trump's former fixer Michael Cohen testified in the case on Monday and said to reporters before the trial that trial that Trump quote needs to be held accountable for his dirty deeds. We got him. We got him. We got him. It does sound like he really is going to get indicted here. Yeah. Now they're going to do a fine. Give him a stick.

He'll pick up some trash on the side of the road. Be president in no time. I'll tell you, every time I keep, every time I read these stories, though, they say it would be it's a novel legal theory, an untested legal theory or a novel legal theory. There's something about falsified records. And then the other charges he had to knowingly break election law, which is by, you know, by shutting up Stormy Daniels, it would be an you have to prove that it's an in-kind contribution to his campaign by by, you know, preventing the bad press that would come from

the Stormy Daniels story. Yeah, listen, we got Capone on taxes. Get him however you want. Go for it. Have at it. If it works, great. If it doesn't, I'm not hoping for it. I'm not expecting it. If it doesn't,

we got a bunch of other indictments to choose from. But I do remember from the John Edwards days that there is this thing, when you try to pay someone off for sleeping with you, it's sort of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. If you do it from your personal funds,

it's an in-kind contribution. If you do it from the campaign, it seems kind of illegal too. I feel like there's no good way around it. That's not Trump's fault. It gets complicated. Just saying. That's a take.

Would you? Where can I pay? There's no... I'm telling you, it's illegal. Where can I pay? If I want to shut someone up, where should the funds come from? You can't give her $100,000 from your personal funds. You can't do it from your campaign funds.

It's got to be a rock and hard place. SVB could give you a lot of credit. Yeah, what about SVB? Just saying. Let's see what we got here. Randy McNally on Instagram. Oh, there you go okay so tennessee republican lieutenant governor randy mcnally real name is confirmed that for a little while as a quote

he has been liking and leaving comments on social media photos of an openly gay tennessee man who often poses nearly naked i just want to say, words don't really do this one justice. You gotta look at it. You gotta see the pics. Cause there's, they're, um, intensely naked.

It's, they are, they are like, you brighten up my room. It's a, it's a hyper sexual photo of a basically naked young queer man. And the, uh,

the, uh, anti-gay, anti-trans lieutenant governor of tennessee responds good luck on all your future endeavors uh your date your rainbow and sunshine to me and from his from his official official account little blue check next and in the individual who posted the photos said that they had also dm'd but uh he wanted to keep those private yeah which is interesting That's the other thing. The lieutenant governor constantly calls him Finn,

but Finn is not a name he uses publicly, which means it's from their private relationship. He says they never met. Star-crossed lovers. Randy. That's an easy mistake to not make. All right, love it. I'm so glad you got this one. It says here, all right, Warren apologizes to Harris. All right, love it. I'm so glad you got this one. It says here, all right,

Warren apologizes to Harris. Last month, Elizabeth Warren went on a local Boston radio show and avoided endorsing Vice President Harris on the Biden 2024 ticket saying, I really want to defer to what makes Biden comfortable on his team. She immediately called VP Harris to apologize, but CNN reports that Harris still hasn't returned her call. CNN reports that Democratic leaders are urging folks to stop the Harris pylon and unite for the campaign ahead. You tell Warren to do that just like the DNA test? Excuse me. Excuse me. How fucking dare you? I want you to know that that is retribution because I interrupted his little Gloria Borger joke earlier. Don't be a cocaine square. That was a funny joke. That's not retribution. I'm really excited I came up

with that joke. It was good. Yeah, it was good and deserved. uh look i think obviously this is a very sensitive topic which is why i'm going to focus on congratulating everything everywhere all at once for winning its academy awards what a success um i i don't like it that they're not talking i think they should talk it out i think they should go get a brunch sort it out i i totally believe that like warren said it was a mistake and she what she was trying to say was like i don't want to tell joe biden what to do it was a mistake but like i don't think i do not think that was intentional i think there's a situation where are where are we mad at but are we mad at this with warren are we mad at the situation you know you know i think warren

just said she kind of like garbled her words and made a mistake and immediately called to try and fix it. I don't think she was trying to start a new VP news cycle. New take. I'm calling this whole story sexist. I wonder what Boston radio show was. Probably not Howie Carr. It was probably not Howie Carr.

Yeah, she's right. Her mistake was answering the question. She just said, go socks, and then she got out of there. That's how you get out of everything in Boston. All right, that's That's right Her mistake was Answering the question She just said Go Sox And then she just Got out of there That's how you get Out of everything It's awesome

Alright, that's all the news That's it That's all the news Thank you to Corey Booker For stopping by Thank you to Nico For joining And giving it to that

Glenn Youngkin man And giving it to that Glenn Youngkin man And we'll talk to you Later this week Bye everyone Pod Save America Is a Crooked Media production The executive producer We'll talk to you later this week. Bye, everyone. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production.

The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our senior producer is Andy Gardner-Bernstein. Our producers are Hayley Muse and Olivia Martinez. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis sound engineered the show. Thanks to Hallie Kiefer, Ari Schwartz, Sandy Gerard, Andy Taft, and Justine Howe for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Milo Kim, and Amelia Montu. Our episodes are uploaded as videos at youtube.com slash podsaveamerica.