The Problem With Jon Stewart - The Fed, Unreserved with Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee

Episode Date: July 15, 2026

As the Fed's new leadership navigates persistent inflation and economic uncertainty, Jon is joined by Austan Goolsbee, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, to better understand how America's most powerful economic institution actually works. Together, they explore the Fed's origins and mandate, examine what the Fed can do as prices remain stubbornly high, and consider how the economic operating system Americans live within can work better for everyone. Plus, Jon takes listeners’ questions about fact-checking Trump, understanding Fetterman, and farts! This episode is brought to you by: SMALLS - For a limited time, get 60% off your first order, plus free shipping, when you head to https://Smalls.com/TWS. SHOPIFY - Turns out you don’t need a real job. Build your own business with a free trial at https://shopify.com/tws AVOCADO GREEN MATTRESS -  Find an Avocado near you or shop online at https://AvocadoGreenMattress.com/TWS  — and check out their mattress and bedding sale! MAGIC SPOON - Get $5 off your next order at https://magicspoon.com/tws Follow The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on social media for more:  > YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@weeklyshowpodcast > Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weeklyshowpodcast > TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@weeklyshowpodcast  > X: https://x.com/weeklyshowpod   > BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/theweeklyshowpodcast.com Host/Executive Producer – Jon Stewart Executive Producer – James Dixon Executive Producer – Chris McShane Executive Producer – Caity Gray Producer – Brittany Mehmedovic  Producer – Gillian Spear Video Editor & Engineer – Rob Vitolo Audio Editor & Engineer – Nicole Boyce Music by Hansdle Hsu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The 2006 Chevrolete Equinox awarded the most dependable compact SUV in the U.S. by J.D. Power is designed for your everyday. And with available all-wheel drive, you can handle your to-do list with total confidence. Start your build at Chevrolet.ca. Details at J.D.Power.com. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the weekly show podcast. My name is John Stewart. I'll be hosting this week's episode. It is Tuesday, July 14th. We are heading into the semifinals of the World Cup coming tomorrow. It's going to be two, I think, incredible matches. We are back at war with Iran. So the world is, the world is stabilizing,

becoming more normal now. The Iran war will just be a low-level fire that is just burning for years and years underneath the surface of the Earth's mantle. It is Tuesday. Obviously, Lindsay Graham passed over the weekend. This won't air until Wednesday. Who knows how many more of the assisted living facility we call our United States government. How many more will fall till then? But we're not going to talk about that. This, you know, the new CPI report, the new inflation report came out and it's creating ripples about what the Fed might possibly do. And it occurred to me that I have no fucking idea how they do that, what they do and how they do it. And so I am very excited. We are going to get inside scoop, ladies and gentlemen, not from a Fed observer, not from a

Bloomberg analyst. No, my friends. From someone inside the belly of the beast, inside the room where it happens, a president of a regional Fed, Chicago, no less, the great city of Chicago. They, my friends, have sent us

one of their best representatives. Did he get to go see Mullaney at Wrigley Field? He might not have, but a hell of a show that was if you were there. But ladies and gentlemen, let's get to our president of the Chicago, Fed right now. Ladies and gentlemen, what an exciting day on the weekly show podcast.

We welcome back an old friend, a long lost pal, a king of the world of economics, Austin Gouldsby, who is now, beyond all expectation, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Austin Goulsby, how are you, sir? John, you thought they built the walls of the vault to keep people like me out of here. But listen, it didn't warn. I thought for sure they did. and to see you elevated, to have, to see you in the hallowed halls of the Federal Reserve of Chicago.

How many presidents, what is there, 12 of you guys? How many presidents of regional feds are there? Oh, I thought you meant ever at Chicago. Yeah, there's 12 reserve banks spread around the. 12 reserve banks. Spread around the country. How did now, did you run for president? Were you appointed?

How did this work? I was chosen. Each of those reserve banks is not a government. agency, they're a not-for-profit, and they have a board of directors that's made up of kind of local CEOs and civic leaders and bankers, and the non-banker board members choose the presidents at each of the, each of the banks. So this is, we're, let me tell you some, this is, I can't even believe we've jumped in so hot and so fresh. We're, you know what, we're not even dipping our toes in, Austin Gouldsby.

We haven't even gotten to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, but we're going to. Oh, but when we get to Eccles, the whole place is going to explode. We are diving right in. So you've got this 12 regional feds, and they're chosen by local leaders, civic leaders, and then that mixes with the board of governors. And that is a more probably not political, but politically appointed. Yeah, politically appointed, confirmed by the. Senate and each of those governors, the thing that's confusing is...

Oh, it's all... Austin. It's all confusing. DC political appointees. Their title is governor, but they're kind of more like senators and the presidents are more like governors because we're out and have a region. Those governors that are political appointees are appointed to 14-year terms and they're staggered.

Because from the beginning, they were trying to be as much as possible in a democracy. They were trying to keep it independent from political interference. And the Fed's independence is a necessary because why, Austin? Why? Because people hate inflation. That's the main reason that if you just look around economists before I, you knew me before I was ever at the Fed. economists are basically unanimous that the central bank of the country

needs to be independent from political interference because the incentives of the sitting government for the setting of interest rates, you know what it is. They're like, cut the rates, let the inflation come in the future.

That's right. They don't care. If you just look at countries or times in this country when the central bank is not independent, inflation comes raging back. The job market is worth, growth is worse, and that's why Fed independence is important. It's not, as I say, it's not like we're, the Fed is not getting a pirate flag or like

putting a snake on there and don't tread on me, right. We want to have our own stamps or something. It's only because if you don't have central bank independence from, from interference in setting the interest rate, you get a lot of. inflation and people hate inflation. And the case study of that, as always, as is the case study in any political discussion here, Richard Nixon, Richard Milhouse Nixon, you know, the tapes that keep on giving. Yes.

Richard Milhouse Nixon. He said to the veggie, hey, man, I have an election coming up, one that he was going to win, by the way, like 49 states to one. I don't even think McGovern got his own state. Yeah, no, exactly. But the thing is, that's the U.S. test case. I guess I would say there are a lot worse test cases. Oh, sure.

You know, as you look around the world. Argentina. Argentina, Myanmar, Germany. There's not, if the central government basically insists that the central bank monetize the debt to pay for what the government's doing, that ends in tears and that's why Fed Independence matters. And it does matter. And you bring him an interesting point, monetize the debt, and we'll get into that

in a little bit because that got a little tricky in 2008. We're running through it all, Austin. We're hitting all the – I haven't talked to you in so long, and it's so exciting. We're going to grab all the hits there. So they establish this now. Now, the Fed Independence – I don't even know if you're allowed to talk about this because you're as one of the presidents. But obviously right now, every president,

is going to try and influence at some level monetary policy. And also Congress is going to try and influence it through legislation. Let's face facts. Congress could change the dual mandate if they wanted to. Could they not? Wasn't it a congressional act that made it so that the Fed had those two mandates, one to control inflation and one for maximum employment? Yes.

Look, everything you said is true. Now you're out front. You're dragging me as a caboose, the douchevice, the douche. You will mandate the whole thing. Let's do a mandate this bitch. All right. Look, the Constitution says in there, I'm not a constitutional expert, but it says Congress is the one who coins money.

So I kind of think that at the root of the Federal Reserve Act, which is started in 1913, is the idea that Congress coins the money and is in charge of that. They created the system. The law says that what the Fed does, when it's setting the interest rate. And that's all the, when we go for monetary policy, what the Fed does at the Federal Open Market Committee is we go in a big, huge, tabled room, giant table. The shades come down.

Really? Yeah. FOMC. FOMC. Literally sits around a big table. Literally around the biggest table. How often? Every six weeks.

What? Yeah. Every six weeks, we go to Washington, D.C. the shades come down so nobody can spy. It's like the situation room. You got to leave your phone outside. There's no devices in there. And then if you're an econ nerd, John, it's the coolest room in the world.

They're going to just literally go around the table and they're going to be like, okay, Jay Powell, what do you think about the economy? Day one, it goes two days. Now, he's not FOMC, though. No, he is. Board of Governors or is Board of Governors part of FOMC? They're on it. The FOMC. is a collection, the 12 of us and the seven of them. FOMC is the Board of Governors,

seven appointed members, and then the 12 presidents of the regional feds that have been selected by regional civic and business leaders. Nineteen people. Yes, but now I'm going to add one in the weeds and I already feel like punching myself for doing it. But not all of the 12 are voting at any one time. How many are? Five of the 12 are voting so that it adds up to an even number, which I still don't understand. Awesome. Are you kidding me? There are 12 voters at any given moment.

Five from the banks and seven from the governor. Now, do they do that to lessen the influence of the non-political actors? I think so. I think so. And who decided that it was that? Was that a congressional act? Yes. Yeah, that's the Banking Reform Act of 1934, something like that.

But what's important is the idea. So not to go back in the financial history, but Andrew Jackson kills the second bank of the United States. We have a national bank. He kills it. Along with thousands and thousands of other people. But that's beyond, we're not going to talk about that with Andrew Jackson. Yes. Go ahead.

Look. I'm not disputed. that. And I thought you were saying by killing the National Bank, it killed a lot of people. And that might be true because the panic of 1837 follows the shutdown of the National Bank. We then go for 70 years without a National Bank, panic of 1907. Now that's where we went to Morgan. That's where we went to Morgan, exactly. J.P. Morgan himself in the panic of 19. 1907 basically steps in as the lender of last resort to prevent what would be a great depression. He backstops the United States government who has what you would consider there a liquidity crisis.

They have no money. They have nothing to lend. The government, but it's more, I think the story has an interesting wrinkle because he doesn't do that out of just gratitude for the nation. Sure. They never do. He backstops a series of financial institutions, and he chooses his friends when he does it. Okay. So when the crisis comes, you have to decide, no, no, you guys are doomed. We're not going to throw good money chasing after bad. So he chooses the people that he likes, and he's like, okay, I'm going to give you the loans, and the ones he doesn't like, they die.

Wow. Congress creates the Federal Reserve Act, A, because they want to have a lender of last resort, and B, they don't want to be beholden to one private individual choosing winners based on whatever criteria. They want to choose the winner. J.P. Morgan shouldn't get to choose. They should get to choose. In a way, but they outlined that vested in a federal reserve system. and importantly, they're deeply uneasy in 1913, just as people are today, that Washington, D.C., plus the banks on Wall Street, are going to control the entire financial system of the United States with no input from the rest of the country.

And that is why they create 12 reserve banks spread around the country to represent. And we have boards of directors made up of these regions. and we aren't political appointees, and we come to these FOMC meetings with a totally different perspective than political appointees. And that actually, even though it's Kluji, even though, yes, we got five votes

and they rotate in and out, that actually was a stroke of genius, and it's a reason why the central bank, the Fed, has existed for 100 and whatever, for 13 years, and it wasn't shut down like the first and second banks of the United States were. Folks, I'm going to tell you something. I know a little secret about a lot of the folks that listen to this podcast. You like animals.

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slash TWS. So let's see you go to this meeting. It's every six weeks. Yes. Austin Gouldsby is the president of the Chicago Fed. So I'm assuming your purview is kind of the manufacturing center of the United States. So to that point, so you've got a San Francisco Fed and they're in charge of, I guess, growing weed. I don't know what they do out there.

It's something San Francisco-y. St. Louis. Yes. Boston, New York. There's kind of some crazy, I guess that the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader were both from Missouri. And the Federal Reserve Act, I think, kind of came down to one vote. St. Louis and Kansas City. Two of the 12 are in Missouri.

Right. St. Louis, Kansas City, Atlanta. So they've got it. It's all spread around. So Austin Gulesby's purview is now, I would say, all those, probably what, Michigan? Is that, do you represent the interest of manufacturing? We got most of 90% of the economies of Iowa, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, heart of the Midwest.

Now, importantly, if you go look at the economy, most of the economy in any place is kind of macro, is the same everywhere. It's the thing that is distinctive of Chicago's district. It is the most manufacturing intensive of all the districts. You're quite right. But manufacturing is still not the majority of the economy. So we don't just represent. You're taking a macro view.

We're taking a macro view, but it does inform when we've got into all the tariff discussions and liberation day of the seven most affected states by tariffs, four of them are in my district in Chicago. So when I'm out talking to business people, talking to civic leaders, their hair is on fire and they want to talk about supply chain. They want to talk about if tariffs apply to their components and supplies, how it's going to end up turning into inflation because their costs are going to go up. And so I'll try to bring that when I go to the meetings. I'll try to bring that perspective. The different research that you've done. So now everybody I'm assuming is doing that. Maybe not at the level that Austin

Gouldsby is doing it because your diligence and your tenacity is second to not. And I am in the greatest of all the Fed districts. Of all the Fed districts. And Missouri is doubling up on everything. Everybody's around. Everybody's trying to do that. So they all get together. And it's every six weeks.

So I imagine the nuance of it because economic conditions over every six week period are probably not that different. Certain storms can come certain others, but you're getting together. The thing I want to ask is, so everybody's got all this incredibly nuanced information

about the economic conditions that are affecting their general regions. But the Fed really only has kind of the more broad-based sledgehammer tool of interest rates, no? Totally, yes. And only one small part of interest rates. So we set an overnight rate, which affects short-run-ins. interest rates. But a mortgage is like a 30-year mortgage. And the determination of those long rates, as they call it, the market has a lot to say about that. So what we do is important.

But as I describe, it's kind of like, we're this big of the universe. But boy, in this part of the universe, what the Fed does makes a huge difference. But there are a lot of things that are outside the Fed's purview. So what is downstream? of the feds because that's all anybody talks about. Nobody talks about the variety of other interest rates that may be raised at other levels. And I guess we can get into who raises those or who closes those or if those are just downstream of the overnight interest rate that the Fed would open up. They are downstream of the overnight interest rate. So when the Fed does things, it does affect those. But one of the most important things that affects mortgage rates or 30-year treasury rates or all of this, if we get down in the weeds, are what do people think the inflation rate is going to be over the next 30 years?

Wait, are people really trying to figure that out over 30 years? They're trying to figure out the inflation rate. Yeah, whoever owns the 30-year mortgage that you got, that person cares a lot about what inflation is going to be over the next 30 years. because if they lend to you at 6%, and then inflation is going to be 9% for 30 years, they're going to lose money every year for the entire time. So the Fed does a thing on these shorter rates that influences longer rates,

but other influences include what do people think are going to be inflation, how do people think growth is going to be, what do they think is going to be productivity, all of this stuff. These are all projections. All of those involve a projection. Let me ask you a question. How accurate, because this is the thing about economics that I'm never quite sure about.

My sense, my sense when I talk to economists, is that they think they're arithmetic, but they're really probability calculators. Nostradamus kind of thing. They think that they are doing a strict science as opposed to an art. science. Yeah, I'm more on the art science. I think you're right that it's art science. And most most researcher academic kind of economists basically don't think forecasting is is doable. They think it's extremely hard and a fool's errand, you know, a bit of a fool's errand. And yet, we have to, we have to make decisions every six weeks. But what is the track record over 30 years?

And in other words, generally speaking, were the economists in 2000, or I would say now, but 1995, were they in the arena of where we are now? In other words, the people that were setting monetary policy in the 90s, in the 80s, in 2000, I won't go with Volker because that obviously was a crisis situation and, you know, and we'll take 2008 out of it. But the projections that they're using to base these on, are they generally accurate? What's the margin here? They're the cleanest dirty shirt we have.

Okay. So I would say there actually is evidence that the Fed's forecast were better than the private sector forecast. But that doesn't make them good. You know, that doesn't make them good. Why are they all such dicks about it? Why? Why is that awesome? Look, the, anybody who's overconfident, I can say this because I wasn't a forecaster, so I came in. So I'm inherently different rule.

Skeptical of black boxes to begin with. And I have this theory about human beings that, like, dates back to Caveman Times. That's, they're kind of like, you either believe in magic or you don't believe in magic. And there, and this plays out. out in many venues in academics. If somebody came and presented a paper that was so complicated that no one could understand it, there are some academics that are like, that person is so impressive. I couldn't even understand it.

And others like the Nobel laureate, Gene Fama, who was at the University of Chicago, his thing inherently doesn't believe in magic. So he'd be like, this whole thing is bullshit. I can't understand. One word that guy said. And I'm more sympathetic to that. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's the correct interpretation. But that makes you skeptical of forecasting in general.

Right. And yet, and yet, it has to be done. It's better than it has to be done. It's been better than random. And for all the, for all the criticisms, for all the criticisms of the people who say, look, you missed this one, you screwed that one up. it's not like their forecast were better. Right.

And like I say, so the, I kind of love the idea, though, that economic textbooks, there should be a title of an economic textbook, and the title is better than random. I'm a author of a textbook. I'm going to make that the subtitle. I'm going to make that the subtitle. Better than random. Better than random. I think that's the highest bar that we can try and aspire to.

So you've done this. Everybody sits down. And it's only that. And what it seems like when you're in the meeting and you've got your 12 members of the regional boards, only five of which vote, you've got your seven board members. And they're going to decide 25 basis points up, 25 basis points down, we're going to hold, we're going to put, we're going to do a push, we're going to all these different things, right? But what almost matters more than that is what everybody thought they were going to do. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair.

The expectation. And the expectations and the communication and like, how are we talking about it? All of that stuff. I get impatient with the Fun House mirror nature of this. Well, we think that they think that we think that this is going to have. I don't like that. As you know, Paul Volcker was an old friend of mine. Do you guys talk about that in the meeting?

Sometimes. In the meeting, you'll say that. They think we're going to do this. There are some people come from different backgrounds. And some people are markets people that came from a finance background. I was an economist. There are business people. It feels like we're only ever supposed to talk about what we ourselves think,

not what the committee thinks or what anybody else's opinion is. But you live in the world. But you live in the world. And my observation is that some people, people put a higher weight on what does the market expect. And for myself, I was old protege of Paul Volcker, went through the financial crisis, working very closely with him. For those who don't remember, Volker was, he came in after the Nixon debacle where

they lowered rates artificially. Inflation got really sticky in the late 70s. There was the oil shock. And Volker came in and raised rates, what, to maybe record levels for the United States. It's literally to 20%. 20% You know, for years.

And it was a brutal, and it was a brutal period. Terrible recession. And it was the only way that we got rid of inflation. And so in central bank circles. And got Reagan elected, basically. Yeah.

They look back at Paul Volcker as the, as the superhero of central banking. And he was like six foot eight. He was a giant in every way. He used to say, our job is to act. The market's job is to react. And let's not get the order mixed up.

And I try to carry that. That's interesting. So I do think it matters. The psychology of the market matters. But there's nothing in the Federal Reserve Act. The law says that we are to maximize employment and stabilize prices. And those are the two jobs. There's nothing in there that says, make sure the stock market is happy.

Make sure nobody's disappointed. And I don't know. We've had this conversation. We had it 15 years ago. And let's have it again today. The stock market is not the economy. And the ultimate evidence that that's true is you remember that day at peak COVID that they announced the job numbers for April.

They announced it on my mom's birthday. Do they always do it on your mom's birthday? No, it just happened to be this year. It just happened to be my mom's birthday. That's how I remember what the day was. It was they announced that the United States had lost 20 million jobs in a single month. That's right.

It was the worst day in the history of the job market, the stock market, went up that day. Of course. Because they thought it would be worse. Who knows why? No, you know why. But like the stock market is not the economy. Everybody need to remember that. Because what they thought, it's always, I mean, this happens just recently. There was a, in the midst of this difficult economy, I think it was maybe last month or two months ago, there was a really good jobs report. And in the really good jobs report, the market went down. Or no, I'm sorry, reverse that. It was a terrible jobs report. And it shot up. And the market goes up. The thinking of it, I think, is, oh, shit, they've got a dual mandate.

So if they're not worried about hiring, right, they'll be more likely to do what we want on interest rates. And therefore, we won't have the competition of treasuries and other things. People will think the stock market is our best avenue. Maybe. But look, just be careful trying to get into people's heads in the market. Why would it go up? What would be the reason? Well, that would be why.

I mean, it could be two reasons. It could be, hey, they think it means the Fed is going to do something, or it could be they had already priced in what they thought it was going to be. And actually, this was better or worse than what they thought it was going to be. Another expectation game. Yeah. So that's why you're just got to be careful about that. I have a friend who's a pretty famous doctor down at the University of Chicago. And she started her first job before medical school.

She was working at the Wall Street Journal who had some kind of a TV program. And her job was to call the people in the market and say, you know, copper's up 5% this week. Why is that? And she would get the explanation. And then she had to run over and they would record it on the tape and then they'd send out the tapes to all of the branch affiliates or something. And she said she decided to go into medicine when she came in and they said, gold is down 5%. Why is that?

And the guy said, well, it's because the traders think that this and the Fed is going to move. So she runs in and just as they're about to hand it, somebody says, wait a minute, gold is not down. It's up. Go back and call the guy. So she runs back down and she calls him up. And she says, we said, you told me why gold was down, but actually gold is up. Why is gold up?

And the guy said, same reason. And at that point, she said, I'm out of here. I'm going to become a doctor. I'm going back into where not as many people will die at my hand. Yes. Then would if the economy tanks down. Yes. That is, that, that's phenomenal.

Folks, you know, I am nothing, if not a generator of, ideas that may never work. Obviously, we've talked a little bit on this show about the crumple, which is the portable dog bed that you throw on the ground that makes a different topographical shape each time you do it. Or maybe I'll make an app. Maybe I'm always thinking of different apps. Or maybe I'll make an app that helps people create and run their great business ideas. Oh, wait, I don't need to do that because it's already existing. Shopify. Somebody probably sat around having a Shopify idea about an app that would help people bring their ideas to fruition, like the Crumple, and then they made that.

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With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So go make it one. Start your free trial at Shopify.com slash TWS. start your free trial at shopify.com slash twes so now let's get into so the fed is is charged with this idea of you know if employment if we're in a deeper session they might say we're going to cut rates because that will stimulate the economy and then hopefully as the money pours into the economy people will start hiring again uh if employment is steady and looking good but inflation is sticky and above that 2% mark, which it is now,

like although the new, I guess, CPI came out, it was lower a little bit than they thought it had cooled a little bit. But if that's the case, they might raise interest rates because employment looks robust, but they need to bring down. The problem is when they get into where employment doesn't look great, but inflation is still up. And then you're in that weird, I guess they call stagflation. Thagflation, right.

Look at you, John. I read the synopsis. You got the whole thing wired. The basic idea is that the most cyclical parts of the economy, whether they're durable goods, manufacturing, autos, stuff like that, business investment, construction of data centers, or what have you, these parts of the economy also tend to be the most interest rate sensitive. So that's why the Fed kind of becomes the tip of the spear. Why use the interest rate to counteract the business cycle? Because these really cyclical. If the economy's overheating,

then you raise the interest rate to try to cool it down and ease inflation. If it looks like you're teetering on recession, then you reduce the interest rate and try to get people buying more cars, building more houses, doing more business investment. When it goes wrong, the economists call that the divine coincidence. It's not. It's only a coincidence. Nothing to do with what you did. The coincidence part is usually those two, the dual mandate, they aren't in conflict.

Mm-hmm. Okay. When the divine coincidence starts going wrong is when both things start getting worse at the same time. And we're somewhat in that cycle now. Not like we were in the 70s, but somewhere in that cycle. Okay. Because things like oil prices going up, they drive down employment and up prices at the same time. Supply chains getting interfered with and wrecked. Anything that in our language is happening on the supply side. Right. That's a stagflationary direction shock. And that's the nightmare of the central bank.

Now it's the 70s. That was the oil shock. Now it's the 70s. Now it's the 70s. Though, as I say, it's not the 70s. This is stagflationary direction. But if you could pull out your magic crystal eight ball and call the 1970s and say, hey, you guys dealt with stagflation, what do we do?

They would say, oh, man, it's a nightmare. What's your unemployment rate? And you're going to say, well, it's a little over 4%. What? They're going to be like, what's your inflation rate? Well, you know, it's up to 4%. They're going to hang up on you and say, like, why are you bothering us? You're doing great. Yeah, exactly.

We have unemployment. That's almost 10%. And inflation is 14%. And so let us never go back to the 70s. But this dilemma of what do you do when both things go wrong? That's a tough spot. And this is where in your, so in those meetings, so you're in that place now where it's managing, like you say, it's creeping up because of a variety of things, whether it's the Russian

war or the Iran war, the straight war moves, or anything else, people are suffering at these higher grocery prices. Inflation is weirdly steady, but not seemingly moving in any real direction. Yeah, it's not coming down, right. Employment, same. It's kind of steady, but not really, you're not seeing robust other than data centers and AI. You're not really seeing the rest of the economy having much, being very robust in the way that it's creating things. Yeah, look, that's what I describe that as the job market is stable without being good.

And there's a weird combination that people throw around this phrase, low hiring, low firing. It's worth taking a second to realize that that's, That's extremely unusual. Usually if there's low hiring, there's a lot of layoffs. Or if there's low layoffs and low firings, there's a lot of hiring. That both of those are low at the same time is really weird. The hiring rate is so low, it's characterized. If I told you we're in the depths of a recession, that's what you would think by how low

the hiring rate is. But if I told you the layoff rate, you'd think we're in a huge, boom, that's how low the layoff rate is. So it's stable without being good. Do you have a sense of why? Is that because the economy is being boosted by one particular sector to the, in other words, it's got a high ceiling, but it's really shallow? Interesting.

I was going to say something totally different. I attribute that combination to a lot of uncertainty that businesses say, Yikes. I don't know what the rules are going to be. I don't know what the tariffs are going to be. I'm not going to get rid of anybody because I might need them right away, but I'm not going to hire anybody. So that's where my head is. Your idea is smarter than mine, by the way. I like your idea. No, no, no. Actually, your idea is a, I do think we should think through if the, let's call that a sector, sector specific. if it's all data centers, this could be a,

this could characterize it if it's kind of like, we've got a bunch of workers that are trained for one thing and now it's going to take a while for them to get retrained and shift to somewhere else. We better think that through it.

But the uncertainty plays into that as well because people I think are also not sure is the promise of this AI going to be a boon for us? Yes. Or is it going to be a disaster? And if you talk to young people, It's kind of like, hey, should I even invest in this skill set? Mm-hmm.

What was a great job, you know, I'm trained to be an accountant. In eight years, are there not going to be any accountants? Like, it's all going to be done in the computer. So that might also be a part of it. Honestly, I think the economy of the future is just all of us kind of trading health care with each other. No, you're 100% right. all just going to be us changing each other's bedpans for money. And that's it.

So the thing is, that health part of the economy just gets bigger and bigger as a share of the GDP over time. So they used to have this joke, but it wasn't even really a joke in the job market. There were more and more economists coming and presenting their papers about health economics. And somebody said, God, in 20 years, everybody is going to be a health economist, but that's because the entire economy will be health. That's right. So it would make sense. I think there's something to that. Now, when you guys, so when you're in the meeting and you're talking about the various nuances of things that are going on and you say to yourselves,

where our only option is that 25 basis points up, 25 basis point down, holding it steady. and you're feeling the political pressure because you're humans and you live in the world and a president is using his bully pulpit to do whatever he's doing and the guy sitting at the front of the table is somehow being investigated for mortgage fraud

and the other woman is being investigated for mortgage. So you're feeling all those pressures. You have to be. Do you ever think, I wish we had different tools? I wish we had other options. Yes, but also no. in the following sense.

In the following sense, I'm going to explain. That sounds like a cop out, but it's not. But it's not. The answer is yes and no. The answer is more like no. Okay. But it's for a weird reason. That's why it's yes and no.

Okay. It is frustrating. A, let me start by saying my experience at the FOMC is that I consider this now the world's greatest deliberative body. it's definitely not the U.S. Senate anymore. I mean, turn on C-SPAN. Turn on C-SPAN. That's for sure.

The people, my experience is that everybody sitting around the table takes the job extremely seriously. That we're out of the business. Look, you know, I was in the political elections business. You're out of that business. You've joined the Knights Watch. You're out of that. Everybody around the table, my experience, experience is they're taking extremely seriously the dual mandate. It's all about the economy.

And whether it's the president or the markets or others, there are these pressures. But people are really around the data. Is there a predictability of how people will tend to vote, given the who appointed them? In other words, if a Democrat appointed somebody or a Republican appointed somebody. That's a good question. You worked for Obama. I imagine the experience that other people have has touched upon the political world at some point. Kind of not. I would say you're going to get, it comes out with a leg, but they released a word for word transcripts of the meetings. Right, but nobody understands any of them. It's all, none of it makes sense. But you're going to see, it's not about, it's not about partisan politics. It's absolutely not.

And so I'm pleased by that. Now, the other thing I'm thinking, my very first meeting, I told you, you got to leave all the phones, everything. Sure. It's very secretive. I come in. I've been in the room for five minutes. And I'm like, this is the coolest thing. This is the coolest room I've ever been in.

And then I hear do do do do do. And I'm like, what idiot has brought their phone? do do do do and I realize it's in my pocket. It's in my pocket because I've just started at the Fed and I now have two phones. So I had left my phone, but I didn't forget my other phone. Not your Fed phone. So I'm like, oh my God, I'm going to be arrested. I've been there five minutes.

I pull it out. It says spam likely. I'm like, oh, God. So I've never made that mistake again. Now, did anybody, like, did Janet Yellen turn and go, what the Fuck, Gouldsby. It was J. Fowell. Everybody gave me this stink eye beyond belief.

But I deserved it. I deserved it. Understood. I've never made that mistake again. So this is a deliberative body. They do the good work. It's a deliberative body and people are not responding. My experience.

Even the new guy, even Warsh, who you knew. But Trump clearly appointed him to do a job. If Kevin Warsh, look, I went through the financial crisis. He was at the Fed when I was at the Council of Economic. economic advisors. I felt like we were kind of wartime foxhole buddies. 2008. Yeah, 2009, 10. I think he left in 2011, maybe it was 2012. I saw him in a moment of very high economics dress, and he was level-headed.

And if he comes to the job, which he has seemed to with the seriousness of purpose, that kind of the room demands, it's going to be fine. As I always say, the Fed is technical, and its founding was rooted in conspiracy. So I understand why. Sure. And collusion and monopoly and oligarchy. And collusion and the tenant. I understand that.

But now the Fed is not the bad guy. We are the Guardians of the Galaxy. And we're all coming down there. Whoa, slow down. Slow your roll, Magneto. Listen. Listen to this. In this part, and we're not even the raccoon one.

You know, we're the good ones. We're the good ones. We're all coming down there trying to do the job as best we can. And we're not magicians. We each come from different perspectives and different parts of the country. And that we hash it out. And those independent views is really critical. And we're back to the thing about Fed independence that the more you,

uniformity, and the more that outside voices got to dictate, here's what the decision should be, that would be a mess. If you want inflation to come back, that's how you would do it. Inflation come roaring back if you don't have independence. Oh, you know, I like to sleep because I'm old. That's a new song I'm been working on. You know, I'm in a band. We do original songs. I have not presented this song yet to the band to see what they think of it, but I might. It's called I like to sleep because I'm old.

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Avocado products are made, not manufactured, and thoughtfully crafted with real materials to deliver lasting comfort and support. you can experience them in person at an avocado showroom or a premier retailer near you or shop online at avocado greenmatress.com slash TWS to check out their mattress and furniture sale. It's avocado green mattress.com slash TWS. Avocado green mattress.com slash TWS. Period. So let's talk about the two different, a broader kind of macro conversation on the economy. We'll talk about the two moments that I thought were very instructive of how the government handles these types of crises.

We're not going to go all the way back to 1907 or 1913 or any of those things. We're going to go 2008. You were there. So you understood how the government reacted to that. And then we'll go to COVID and the pandemic. Because I thought those were two really different responses from the government. And I certainly know which one I prefer. And I'm curious what you think of both.

2008, the response comes in that the world liquidity is an issue throughout the whole system. It's about to seize up these banks are, the mortgage-backed securities are failing and everything's about to collapse. And the Fed actually takes on a much more robust role than they had in the past. Not only were they just about the interest rates, they started taking on loans, right? They sold treasuries, I guess, to take on, they started loaning. Yeah, they start buying up. Yeah, they start buying a bunch of bonds, the equivalent of making loans.

Right. But they're buying up these assets. Right. And I guess they offset that with treasuries. Would that be the way that they would hold on to that or no? Not exactly. Yeah, they're allowed to expand the balance sheet in the same way they would be allowed to print money. But they're doing it beyond where they had ever previously.

Oh, for sure. Yeah, okay. Well beyond. And by expanding their balance sheet, now they've got an issue with somebody's got to pay the interest on their own balance sheet. Would they not? Yes. Yes. Yes.

And no. I mean, in a way, it feels like. Like you're getting... No, but I should have completed the thought of when you said, do you wish you had other tools? The reason why overall, yes, it's frustrating, but no, I kind of don't, is the Fed is not the policy process. The Fed is not politics. We're not doing fiscal policy. That should, in my mind, be decided by the Congress, the president, the American people.

all the really important things should be decided in that. And the more they try to put that onto the Fed. And it was my fear. I wasn't in the Fed when COVID struck. But my fear on the Fed's behalf in COVID, where if you remember, the Congress said, we're going to spend trillions. That's right. And all kinds of loans.

Who's going to run this? Who's going to run this? They were like, well, the only people. competent enough to run it are the Fed. Let's have the Fed do it. I was really nervous on behalf of the Fed because having been through 2008, if anything goes wrong with the program, you know they're going to blame whoever ran the program. So I thought it was an effort for Congress to kind of be like, oh, let's have the Fed do these

loans, and then if people can't pay them back or if it costs money, if there's fraud, if whatever, then we'll say, ah, the stupid Fed, we asked them to do it and they screwed it up. So that makes me nervous in the FOMC context. If we had more, if we had more tools that were literally fiscal policy tools like taxes or stuff like that, then we would be Congress. You know, like the Fed shouldn't have that. We, we, there is no bad weather. There is only bad clothing.

That's our motto. And our thing is the fiscal, those are just the conditions. You tell us the conditions we get the right jacket. So, but the difference is in 2008, the Fed gave the jackets to the big boys. They basically existed their money hose that they were doling out at. Went to the financial institute. not the individuals. And you...

Correct. You highlighted this at the time. You highlighted that at the time. Maybe so mad. But you remember, you asked me, why not bail out the homeowners and then wouldn't they, by domino effect,

wouldn't that save the mortgage-backed securities? Why save the mortgage-backed securities? And I said that would be viable. Yes. If you remember, the thing I said, You weren't in charge, though. I wasn't in charge, but you remember what I said. If we had done that, we would never get back the money.

And you said, what do you mean? Get back the money. I said, if we had used the $800 billion and put it into mortgages, it would be very hard to get people to pay back the money. But the banks were putting it in and we're taking warrants. And you incredulously said, do you honestly believe? that the banks are going to pay back this money? And I said, yes, I think it's designed

so that they will pay back the money. And they did. It's not to say it's free. Let's not do that again. We gave them life. We gave them extraordinarily valuable life insurance at a crucial moment. Like when the mafia said,

we're coming to kill you. Then we're like, we'll give you life insurance. But it's still worth thinking about that context of if financial crises, if you look around the world, financial crises usually cost the taxpayer in the country. Correct. Five to 10 percent of GDP lost money to save it. That the tarp ends up costing the U.S. government close to zero.

Let me push back a little bit on this. Yeah. So when you're looking at it through the lens of what it costs the government, but the government is not an entity that is disassociated from the needs of its people. I agree with that. So in 2008, that was horrible, horrible recession. They push all this money out to the big banks. Now, you're right.

A lot of that came back to them after they paid back those loans. But what didn't come back were the people's homes that they lost. And the jobs. I agree in the foreclosures. Right. I'm totally sympathetic to that field. But let's go to pandemic. Yes.

You're right. The government may not have recouped some of that. But the economic activity of doing demand side stimulus rather than supply side, rather than the Fed pumping money into the big boys, but the Fed helping to pump money into the individuals, helping to run that program, that economy did. not have the unemployment that you would think of. It bounced back much more quickly. People didn't lose their homes. So isn't that what the government, the government is not there to run a zero balance sheet. It's there to respond to the needs of the people in crisis. I made that.

Now you're fully in the fiscal policy space. Come on, Goldsby. Just admit it. As a Fed person, I have no opinion on that. Before, I was at the Fed, I agree with you. As somebody described, you wouldn't want to lose World War II because you had to run a zero. Oh, we needed to. Yeah, no, exactly.

Like, ah, let's have a zero deficit. The debt has exploded since the TARP anyway. Yes. There's no question. That's true. Come on, Goulsby. Come to team, come to team Keynes. At the same time, that's not the Fed.

Goolsby, come to Team. Keynes, just do it. The Fed doesn't decide that. We just set the short-term interest rate. You know what I mean? So as you come to the say, should that be in the Fed's toolkit, for example. So who decided for the Fed to start that program of zero interest rate windows? Like, was that Congress? Zero interest rate windows. Tell me more. Tell me more. Didn't they allow the big banks to come in and take out. Oh, oh, oh, the discount window loan. So that's, that's the lender of last resort. Right. And that's created by Congress. Congress creates that. But they have discretion over who they are lending to. And I'm assuming they have discretion over the kinds of.

Kind of. Not really. They have to outline a criteria. Okay. Back to the old Jay Pierpont Morgan days, we're not supposed to be expressing like, hey, here's a bank I like and let's give you money. Right. But that is what they did. And they did choose to give it to the big boys instead of the people. So my question to you is, in hindsight. No, but the Fed, it couldn't do that.

It would have to be Congress to do that. Right. The Congress decided, okay, we're going to get the Fed to run that program and they do that. Which do you think was a better use of the powers of the Fed and the government because I have a very clear... You keep wanting this to be the fit. Yeah, you're right. Now, the word better is doing the work.

No, no, no. That's very fair. The better is doing the work because... That's very fair. Here's a big difference between the COVID times and the great financial crisis times. That was bank-driven crisis. Part of the thing that infuriated me, infuriated everybody about the bailouts is, wait a minute, we're bailing out exactly the people who are at fault for creating this.

And that made for a dynamic that was a wait a minute, even if you told me this thing would be better for the economy, I don't want you to give these people money. And then the Tea Party's rise was, I don't want you to bail out the homeowners because I think they're at fault. They were over their heads. They were buying houses. They never had any business buying. So that conflict was a little different when it came to COVID because it wasn't anybody's fault. So I feared with the PPP loans and the unemployment insurance and a whole bunch of stuff, I was like, whoa, geez.

When we were going through the financial crisis and the stimulus following the financial, crisis, we had massive monitoring to make sure there's no fraud because everyone perceived, if there is a lot of fraud, the legitimacy of all of these programs are going to be undermined. Somehow, because it was biology or, you know, spreading, people just kind of wanted to say, let's not speak of this again. Let's just like, let's get on with our lives. I think there's no question that you're read of the evidence

that the unemployment rate went higher under COVID but came down like pretty quickly. And we recovered very quickly. And we recovered quickly to the extent that that's a lesson for dealing with other massive monumental shocks, it came a different way.

It went from the bottom up, not from the top down. That's the point. And you can go bottom up with less money than top down. It always works that way. And it didn't turn into a financial crisis, which it easily could have. And by the way, the caveat to all of that, the CODA, is what they told me, because I, you were not the only person I complained to about that, about why aren't we bailing out the homeowners, why are we bailing out AIG and all these idiots that did it.

And what they said to me, the toughest pill to swallow in all of this was we couldn't bail out the homeowners because of moral hazard. Yeah. And then you'd be like, hey, what about the moral hazard of the banks? Well, that's what I said. And the answer to that was we had to land the plane. Yeah. Look, my thing wasn't rooted in moral hazard. And I still, to this day, despise that we got to, I understand why we had to do the bailouts once everything's on. fire. But we shouldn't be happy about it. I mean, it's still awful. I still think it could have worked the other way around. I still think it could have worked the other way around. I do think it could, but we would have had to have had kind of a national commitment to we want to spend the money to do this in a way that we did have when it came to COVID. Everybody could see, let's not

lose World War II for the sake of balancing the budget. Well, Austin Gouldsby, let me tell you, something. You know there's nobody I like talking about this shit more than you. You know I love this. This is, I can do this forever. Way into weeds. Just remember. Yeah, go ahead. The Fed doesn't just set interest rates. We're also $6 trillion a day of the payment plumbing when anybody's doing wired transfers and making payments. All the cash in the economy is printed by the Bureau of graving and printing. It's getting distributed by the reserve banks. And if you ever come out to Chicago, I'll take you down. We'll go see the fault. We got tens of billions of dollars in there. You know I'm doing that. We're pulling out that counterfeit. It's awesome. And the QE days are over.

We're not Q-in. And the QA days are over. We're not printing it. We're just handing it out. Well, this is fabulous. And by the way, thank you for giving, I think, the most cogent and clear explanation of what goes into the decisions and the meetings of how these interest rates are decided and what their particulars are and when it was. That was very, very illustrative for me, and thank you for that. Hey, John, I know this is technical, but the Fed matters, the economy matters. We're going to maximize employment and stabilize the prices. And if we do that, everything will be okay. Or we're just going to go back to the JP Morgan days. and just let Musk take care of it all.

Austin Gouldsby, you're the man. Great to see again, John. Always a pleasure. President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Austin Gouldsby, thanks for joining us. Take care. I love a nice cereal. Morning, lunch, dinner.

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cinnamon crunch. Look for MagicSpoon on Amazon or at your nearest grocery store. And there are plant-based versions of the cereal, too. Even vegans get to feel like they had a childhood. You'll find vegan options at Whole Foods or get $5 off your next order at MagicSpoon.com slash TWS. That's magic spoon.com slash TWS for $5 off. I love talking to that, dude. I could tell. I didn't know economists were allowed to be that fun. Right. Or that cafe. He's like talking to a normal human being about the economy and he's an economist. And when I don't understand something, he's not a huge dick about it. He's just like, look, technically your terms are not quite correct, but this is what it really. And then you can like

actually have the conversation. Yeah. And he actually seems like a really curious person too and like a really animated person by what he does. And I think that that's kind of like what you would want for somebody in that role. He loves it. It was the most excitement-filled episode that I think we've ever done. And it was on economics. About the Fed. Well, you know, part of that is so I've known them for years. And we did use to have in 2008, 2009, like, I had so many arguments with the economists that were in that administration about what we were doing. And so they were all just like, every time they would just be like, shut up. No. And then we were, and so reliving that and relitigating that is, is one of the true.

pleasures of that era because I was so mad. And I, I can't remember. There were like certain even terminology that I was trying to make happen during that time, like, like wealth incumbency. Like I kept, I kept trying to make wealth incumbency a tagline for what the economic crisis of 2008 was doing and that those banks had a wealth incumbency that gave them an advantage over the individual homeowners. And if what was the other, oh, I used to say to them all the time. I go, you're bailing them out at a geometric level when you could bail out the homeowners at an arithmetic level and save us fucking trillions of dollars.

And they'd be like, you don't understand. I feel like the term top down existed then. We were top down and we were trickled down in it. Yeah. But what was so odd about it was they were all Democrats. And so that my frustration was always, because it was all, this was all when my dislike of Larry Summers began to bubble. He was kind of the central, I think, Yoda-like figure of it all. He was the one that they spoke about as like, this is the unassailable guru and Nostradamus,

kind of like what we were talking about earlier, about how, you know, the economists would project, but with an air of mathematical certainty that doesn't exist in the world of probability. Larry only recently stopped making those types of predictions and nobody knows why. Yeah, I don't know. I think he just decided to take up a different hobby. Yeah, that's so weird. He just sort of dropped out of the public discourse and nobody knows why. Well, I think some people when they retire, they like to go down to a Caribbean island and just hang out.

or now. I wonder if he's going the opposite way now. He's just like, I will only ski. I will no longer go to warm climates. He's in Scandinavia as we speak. And what's so funny about that is if you remember, like, whenever there's like an economic crisis, they'll always go to him as the expert. And he's always in an island.

Yes. Oh, my God. I'm sure he's in the back. Yeah. How are regular people going to get through this crisis? And he's just down there with like a fucking Pina-Kalada and his cul-at's on. Sitting in a big chair from Margaritaville. I don't think we should bail them out at the demand level.

Massage me! It would be so reckless to bail them out. So reckless. Meanwhile, they're like handing in pinocaladas. Unbelievable. But fabulous. Gulesby is one of my favorites. And whenever the arguments were, they were never ill-spirited.

They were always like, you know, I really liked him. Yeah, I mean, I think part of that is him being such. a curious person. Like, you could tell he was really interested by the points that you were making because it's not the typical, like, economic framing necessarily. And I think he wasn't bound by we have to have certainty, that he was always willing to grant there might be a different way and a better way and all that, which is always helpful. Speaking of which, Brittany, what do the, what do the kids want from us this week? Okay. John, do you think news network should carry the president's remarks live on Thursday night or wait until they can fact check.

Oh, they're not going to fact check anyway. They're not going to. What difference does make? I think there should be a C-SPAN camera on the president at all times. Every remark he makes should be carried live, including whatever ketchup splattering tantrums he might be throwing behind the room when his gold-plated new phones came out late. Like, whatever it is. Listen, man, I don't think we should have. have to live with the shit that he spuse out there whenever he feels like doing it. I think you want to be ubiquitous, be ubiquitous. Yeah.

He's still deciding the terms, even though, yeah, we have like this like 24-hour news cycle. That's right. He can't get enough attention. Like, and yet we're still just like hanging on whatever words he selects that we pay attention to at any given moment. Do you feel like, and this maybe gets us into the relationship portion of our podcast, I feel like the country is in an abusive relationship with a narcissistic partner. Yeah.

And I don't, you know, I'm not fluent enough on the issues of the psychology of a relationship to think that to know how do we heal? How do people heal from that? First of all, how do we get rid of them? How do you break up with a narcissist? And how do you not let the specter of the narcissist cloud and begin to rule your life. That's the problem here is the narcissist isn't thinking about us. He's only thinking about himself. So we're left with the churn and bad feeling. Years of therapy, I think,

is the only solve. Yeah, we got to go on couples therapy on Showtime, baby. Would Orna, would Orna do it? Would Orna help us? Could Orna sit down with the country and Trump so that we can expose what a narcissistic because those are the best Orna episodes is when like the person thinks they're being clever and tricky and like Orna's just sitting back letting them expose the narcissistic asshole that they are. Crazy. I kind of love. Do you watch that show? Do you ever, you ever watch her show?

Yeah. Yeah, she's fantastic. I haven't, no. Oh, Brittany. I'm going to love it. You're in for a treat. You are, there's guys that are just like, you never listen to me. You don't do what I do.

You don't treat me like the kids. that I am, you know. Literally. It's like fucking crazy, though. And then they look at her like, right? And she's like, no. Right. Then she'll always turn and she'll look at the woman and go like, I'd like to hear where you're at right now. You know what?

How are you receiving his comments about how mistreated he is? You know, saying that, you know, you really began to mistreat him after he had fucked all those other people. Yeah. He's saying that he won the 2020 election. How are you receiving that? He won't get over it. Yeah.

Can't move on. Wild shit. All right. What else they want? John, what's the deal with Fetterman? Can't a man wear board shorts to work without everybody wondering? I think it's the deal with a lot of things, which is, you know, you tend to embrace the side that flatters you. And I think there's very little of his, you know, his whole socialist panic is bananas

for a guy who ran on working class bona fides. Like, like, what does he mean by socialism? Like, social security, health care? Like, what the fuck are you even talking about? I think the Israel thing also has affected him grandly. But I also think there's a lot of people that can't help be flattered by the other side coming to you and saying, you're the only one. You're the only one that makes any sense on that side. You're the guy. Come join us. One of us.

One of us. And it's so weird from where he started, too. Like, you wouldn't, maybe it was because he was getting the praise from the left or I don't know. It's like, I guess we were talking about narcissists. But the praise from the left, though, made sense. Yeah. That's what I mean is it's like, I just don't, I mean, I don't want to speculate about

anybody's health or anything, but it's been a real heel turn. I think it's also there is a power, and Cinema did this and Manchin did this to some extent, there is a power in being the controlling interest, you know, and I think that that tends to go to certain people's head of being, you know, I'm the contrarian that can change. The Republicans are pretty good about making a performance of that with the Freedom Caucus and those kinds of guys, but when push comes to shove, they still get their 215 to 214 vote or their 50 to 49. You know, they don't get that. But they keep saying, like, he's going to switch over to their side.

And you're like, on what ground? Right. Like, on what policy ground would he be over there? But also, like, how would it meaningfully be different? Well, get a nicer office. Yeah. Get a much nicer office. And if the Democrats actually had a majority, it would matter, somebody flipping.

if that you lost the majority for any reason. But like right now he's voting for all their nominees. He's, you know, doing everything he can to make their lives easier. So I just don't see how it's meaningfully different at this point. Except Blanche apparently. No, it seems to be that he seems to be embracing the caricature of Democrats as opposed to the reality of what, you know, a more populist economic platform would look like. But I have no fucking idea, to be honest with you. I mean, I think he just, he might just like iconoclastic status.

Yeah. I think he likes the attention. Right. And he's getting a lot of it. Yeah. They're flat. I mean, they're, you know, they're, they're courting him. From the media too, though.

Oh, sure. Everyone keeps going to him. If you remember cinema, what, like, that was her thing. Like, I'm the one. And it's all couched in pretend principle. I'm the one who stands on principle and integrity. And you're like, what principle exactly are we talking about? Yeah.

More guns, more religion, more like less social safety net? Like what exactly are you embracing on their side in terms of issues? Yeah. Other than I think the left is a little too angry at Israel right now. Like, well, if you're not fucking angry at Israel right now, I really don't think you're watching the dues. I don't think you're seeing what's happening. No. Yeah.

And there's also like there's this benefit to being a sort of swing vote because you can kind of get more for your state. Like look what Murkowski did with Alaska. But what is Vetterman doing for Pennsylvania right now? That's an excellent point, Jillian. The Murkowski example is a great one. She's leveraged it into, and she'll still support the bill generally on her side, but she leverages provisions. I don't know that he's done that, to be honest with it.

You can make the case that Murkowski has done well for her state in some regards. Like I would argue not well for the woman of any state, but she, you know, has managed to get these carve outs. Right, right. Yeah. And it's funny. Collins, in the same position, doesn't have the same efficacy.

And maybe that's, by the way that Alaska has a slightly, you know, less mainstream sort of need matrix. But I think you're dead on right there. Fine analysis. Last one. Oh, one more.

All right. Come on, Brittany. What have we got? Okay. Did John find that going vegetarian led to an increase in farting? I fear for my, marriage. What a pivot. This is the kind of pivot you only get on this show. As someone,

as someone who's, I don't wear, I don't have wearable tech. So I'm not, I'm not tracking it to the extent that I don't have a fart or a ring that is giving me a statistical analysis. I can tell you that it's very difficult to separate aging from diet when it comes. to your ability to digest anything. I mean, the idea that eating cheeseburgers would somehow calm the gaseous nature of your colon seems not quite. But I do understand if she's gone full cruciferous. Like there is, you know, there is an argument to be made that beans and broccoli,

like, do you have to spread it out a little bit with a variety of, you know, you got to throw a couple of slices of pizza in there to calm the waves. Beautifully put eloquent. The only thing I will say about that is the idea that that would hurt her marriage, it's the key to a happy marriage, is two people, remember, it's in health, but also in sickness, two people comfortable enough with their own standing with each other to let them know that their body is slowly dying from the inside and decomposing whatever has been put in it. And it's got to get out somehow.

I think Orna said that. I think that was on. Thank you for bringing that around. That's what we know as a callback. Brittany, how can they get hold of us to ask us more of these truly insightful questions? Twitter, we are weekly show pod, Instagram threads, TikTok, Blue Sky. we are weekly show podcast, and you can like, subscribe and comment on our YouTube channel, The Weekly Show with John Stewart. Fine and dandy. Thank you very much. As always, couldn't do it without producer Brittany Mametovic, producer Jillian Spear, video editor and engineer Rob Vitola, audio, audio, audio, and our executive producer, Chris McShane, and Katie Gray. We will see you all next week.

The weekly show with John Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Bus Boy Productions.