6/1/26: US Bombs Iran, Jeff Sachs On WH Econ Lies, Artists Bail On Trump 250th Event

24:08Jeffrey Sachs:Well, we hope there is reason for optimism with the strait and beyond. So, Professor, he says, oh, not only are they spending more on gas, they're spending more on everything. Was that AI generated, by the way? That's real. I can't make it up. That's real. He's actually said it twice. That smile seemed completely phony. And, of course, every word he was saying was a lie because consumer confidence has plummeted. People are suffering. The American economy has two parts to it. There is a digital and war industry, which is booming. Let's say it's booming on Pentagon contracts. It's booming on war.

24:48So if you look at Silicon Valley and you look at the AI bubble and now AI bubble for autonomous weapons and Palantir information systems and the like. Yeah, this is good if you happen to be the few people that own our government. But for the rest of Americans, they can't believe what's going on. And that's why Trump's approval rating reached the grand number of 34 percent against, I think it's 58 percent disapproval rating in the most recent economist poll, but somewhere around there, 58 to 60 percent. People are disgusted. They can't pay their bills. The United States budget is totally a joke.

25:41Seven percent of GDP budget deficit. Trump's asking for a five hundred billion dollar increase of military spending. This is nuts. This is exactly what we're seeing in the domestic management that the rest of the world is watching in the American escapades in the Gulf. complete incompetence. And I hope they pay Hassett well because, you know, to be a grown person and stand up and say such nonsense, I hope he gets some compensation for that. Well, we have another one for you. Here he is talking about credit card debt. Let's take a listen.

26:21Jeffrey Sachs:Credit card debt, though, because that's another issue. Wall Street Journal says in the first quarter of this year, the percentage of credit card balances that were at least 90 days delinquent rose to 13.12 percent, according to data released in May by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That's the highest level in 15 years and the most since the period following the 2008 financial crisis. People say they're using those cards to get through necessities because they can't afford what's going on. So your message to them. Right. Well, we talk to the CEOs of the credit card companies all the time, and we do see some increased stress, like the numbers that the Wall Street Journal quotes.

26:58But for the most part, the delinquency is different from default. And there's not any kind of threat, the financial threat to the credit card companies that they don't feel like they're heading towards default scenarios. It's just that people are taking a little bit longer. He assures us that the credit card companies are going to be OK. As for the customers, he's not so sure. I love that smile. I just have to keep emphasizing that. This is quite a commentator. But yes, it's also absurd. They talked to the CEOs. I'm sure the CEOs are doing just fine, thank you. But the people whose credit card bills from necessities, as Fox News was kind enough to remind us, is soaring.

27:47So we have two Americas. one has most of the people in it. They're not feeling well. They hate this war by overwhelming majorities. They can't pay their bills. They are falling further and further behind. And then we have the CEO class, of course, and we have Anduril and we have Palantir. We have all of the big tech companies. They're having a glorious time. War is good business and things are revving up.

28:20Jeffrey Sachs:I wanted to ask you more about your analysis earlier of how this is a kind of bifurcated economy. And what I've been seeing is, you know, in previous eras, it's not like the stock market was perfectly predictive of the well-being of the average American. But you could imagine that was at least some sort of correlation. Now it seems to be a reverse indicator that the better the stock market does, because it is all consolidated, you know, concentrated into these AI tech companies. the better the stock market does, the more that the average American suffers because what they're being rewarded for with these AI companies is their ability to replace human workers.

29:00Jeffrey Sachs:And I wonder if you see it the same and how you're analyzing that impact at this point. There are two things going on. One is exactly what you said, and it's a deep trend which did not start with AI. It started with automation, robotics already more than 40 years ago. And we see it in one key, very interesting number. You can take the national income in the United States and ask what part goes to workers and what part goes to capital income. And when I was a student of economics in graduate school decades ago, in the late 70s, we used to say that the share that would go to workers was about two-thirds of the total national income.

29:52Now, just the most recent data puts it at about 50%. In other words, it's gone from about 0.65 to 0.5. That is a big deal. What's happening is more and more of the national income that's produced is going to profits, is going to corporate earnings, is going to rents, to ownership of patents and so forth. And what workers get is absolutely falling as a share. But for a great part of our society, what workers get is falling in absolute terms. And AI will speed that up. artificial intelligence substitutes these algorithms for human labor and whatever anyone says, this is a process that's been going on for decades and wages are stagnant or falling for those segments of the labor force where that substitution can occur.

31:0120 or let's say 30 years ago, it was people on the assembly line. Those jobs didn't go to China. Those jobs went to the robots. Now the jobs are going to Claude and to others. And this is happening actually with the new SWAT. We know it's with the college graduates this year. They're not finding jobs when they come out. And this is showing up as this shift of national income. The second thing that's happening, I think most likely, this is always a judgment that only can be made ex post, is that we really have a bubble. We really have the Elon Musk thrill that we got the gazillion dollar companies and the trillion dollar man and all the rest.

31:51I see no way personally that the valuations that are being put on big tech and on the IPOs can in any way be justified because one of the core features of these technologies is that they diffuse. There really is competition. There isn't somehow control by the first mover. China runs AI on an open source stack because it's trying to compete with the United States. So it's trying to get users all over the world. That means there's going to be a lot of open source ways to access this very powerful technology. and all these huge, huge revenues that are being anticipated by these companies that are now 50 times earnings or 100 times earnings or infinite because there are no earnings.

32:47I don't think this is going to materialize in the way that is expected. So on top of the fundamental shift towards profits, which I think is real and deep, there is also, I think, a financial bubble that is underway.

33:27We'll see you next time. or wherever you get your podcasts. Why is everyone obsessed with romance right now? Like everyone. Your coworker who quote unquote doesn't read is reading romance. Your mom, BookTok, the entire internet. I'm Sanjana Basker. I'm Tyler McCall. And this is Radio 831, a romance podcast. The books, the tropes, the adaptations, the drama, the discourse. and what all of it says about how we actually love, yearn, and obsess. We're going to Wuthering Heights, which, for the record, is not a romance novel. And yet it has haunted the romance genre for 200 years. We're getting into dark romance, age gaps, certain Russian hockey players, and sentient objects in love, which is a thing.

34:24That's the kind of conversation we're having every episode. Listen to the Radio 831 podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

34:36Jeffrey Sachs:This is Saigon, the story of my family and of the country that shaped us. The United States will not stand by and allow any power, however great, take over another country. From iHeart Podcasts, Saigon. Please allow me to introduce Joseph Sherman. You don't think I'm serious about a free Vietnam? I should stop talking so much. I like hearing you talk. One city, a divided country, and the war that tore America apart. This is for Vietnam. I've taken a hit from Japanese ground fire. Do you read me? They're pouring petrol all over him. He's holding matches. I'm on a landmine! For freedom! Let's get out!

35:17Freedom from Vietnam! Saigon, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Rob Benedict. Sting, here's madness. The world should hear about this. There's a fire coming to this country, and it's going to burn out everything. Listen to Saigon on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Professor, when we zoom out a bit, again, you know, looking to your own work and what you've looked at in the classroom, what are the parallels in history to these types of forces, to people coming out in the workforce in the midst of great technological change, of a great amount of wealth concentrated and potentially bubble assets?

35:54What does that look like and manifest in a society? Well, this has happened repeatedly. These technologies we call GPT, general purpose technologies, which means something like the steam engine, which was the great invention of 250 years ago, created the factory world. And not just in one sector, but across the economy. And it created the railroad and many other things. electrification was a general purpose technology. AI is a general purpose technology, an extraordinarily powerful one in my view. I don't believe it's hyped. I think it's amazing and real. But what you find with general purpose technologies is that generally they raise overall output in the economy, but dramatically redistribute the output as well.

36:53In the first industrial revolution with the steam engine, there were vast numbers of losers. The economy started to boom, especially in Britain, which was the first industrialized nation. But those masses in the satanic mills, These were women and children who used to have jobs in rural areas, for instance, spinning yarns. All of that went away with mechanization. They ended up as degraded workers, and it was exactly that, what we call a miserization, becoming more miserable, that led Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to issue the Communist Manifesto in the late 1840s. So that was real. Then over time, new institutions were developed to share the increase of output.

37:55Actually, Bismarck in the new German state in the 1870s and 1880s invented public pensions as a way to ensure that this booming economy would help more and more people. Well, this has been a repeated phenomenon. Big technological advance. The overall size of the economy increases. But the way that the pie is divided in the proverbial expression changes dramatically. And we're going to have that with AI as well. And the American political system for at least 50 years has been, don't help anyone. We're on our own. You know, good luck to you. And in an AI era, that would prove devastating. Now, Trump appealed to those who are suffering both in 2016 and 2024 on a clever political messaging that was fundamentally false.

39:06He said China took your jobs. He said the migrants took your jobs. He didn't say technology has changed how we live and redistributed the national income. That is the right answer. There are no jobs coming back from China. By the way, I go to Chinese factories all the time. They don't have workers in them anymore because they're all automated. There aren't jobs coming back from China. What we have is a technological revolution, basically positive, actually, in that we can do more. We can be more clever. We can have more sophisticated drug discovery or better health care diagnostics or many other things.

39:55But it's not going to fall equally. it's going to emiserize part of our society unless we actually decide for the first time in more than half a century to act like a society rather than to act like a group of individuals out in a brutal competition with each other. But we don't even have that kind of understanding in our political discourse right now. But the AI is moving forward relentlessly with or without it. And by the way, the number of meetings every day in every sector talking about loss of jobs, reshuffling of the workforce, this is happening everywhere right now. And we don't have any public policy framework and we won't under Trump.

40:44This is something way beyond him.

40:46Jeffrey Sachs:I think we do have a public policy framework under Trump rather than going in the direction of making sure that people will not be immiserated. What they've done is you mentioned earlier that he wants to dramatically increase. He's already increased the defense budget dramatically, but he wants to up it even further. And then we've also seen this tremendous increase in the domestic law enforcement budget and an emphasis on mass surveillance, et cetera. So it seems like the direction they want to go in is a sort of crackdown, authoritarian crackdown to make sure that people, if they're unhappy, are not going to have the ability or will be too afraid to get out of line.

41:22Jeffrey Sachs:But I wanted to ask you. That's exactly right. But I would just add one more point to that, which is that specifically the surveillance state and specifically the war economy are big business precisely for the AI industry. So it's not only incidental that they want to crack down. These are gold mines for them. More war, phenomenal. Look at the biggest booming stock market in the world right now is Israel because it's basically a war machine. It's basically a surveillance, intelligence and military machine. So war is good for the for not not for the stock market for the stock market. Mm-hmm. Well, do you see the introduction of AI?

42:07Jeffrey Sachs:As you mentioned before, we've had general purpose technologies introduced before. Over time, once you had a transition, they benefited, I think, the population overall, although there are some that may dispute that. But the difference may be twofold. Number one, how quickly AI has been developed and is being disseminated? And number two, you know, previous general purpose technologies were meant to replace like the horse, for example. This is explicitly meant to replace human beings. And the developers of it will tell you that and tell you things like we intend to make all of human labor irrelevant, human beings effectively irrelevant to, you know, productivity growth and economic output, etc.

42:50Jeffrey Sachs:So Do you see it as a more grave threat to the prosperity and happiness of mankind than previous general purpose technologies? Well, it's happening so much faster than anything else. And we have metrics, which we call adoption rates. How long does it take a certain number of users to use the technology? And we've never seen anything like what we have right now. So ChatGPT is announced, and within weeks, it's hundreds of millions of users worldwide. So we're seeing something that is happening completely at an unprecedented scale. And I think that that will continue. In terms of what it means for human well-being, there are two issues.

43:42One issue is the distributional issue that we say gainers economically could compensate those who lose because the overall pie grows. Elon Musk, you know, he doesn't really need a trillion dollars of personal net worth or whatever, 600 or 700 billion. I didn't check this morning. He doesn't need that. So if we actually distributed well-being in our country, we could have a broader gain. Then there's the meaning of life and the meaning of work question, which is that these technologies in a fair society would mean less work. The robots can do physical labor and the AI can do cognitive work of various kinds.

44:35Is that a good thing? In principle, again, if it's done thoughtfully, it could very well be a good thing because we would have more time for friends, for family, for leisure, for culture, for exploration, for other things if the drudge work is actually carried out mechanically. And so per se, earlier technologies, it's not true that they've always created new jobs to replace the old jobs. We actually work less hours per day on average than 100 years ago, by far, as a matter of fact. The numbers are quite astounding. The average work time of an adult American is about three hours, 20 minutes at this point, something like that.

45:31That's for an economy of a$30 trillion output. Now, that counts weekend time. That counts retirement time. That counts time in school. That counts vacation time, leisure time, and so on. But the point is, we don't work like our grandparents and great-grandparents did. They worked not only at physical labor, but they worked around the clock, maybe six days a week. And this is a big change. And on the whole, I believe it's a plus. But American society, as we've been discussing, is quite distinctive. It's barely a society. Our political system is so corrupted, it's not regarded as a society. It's regarded as a group of particular interests, of which Silicon Valley itself is interest group number one.

46:24It's more powerful than every other interest group, partly because the generals are desperate for this technology. The military, the government has put its hands into Palantir. Palantir is more important than the rest of our government. They're watching everything we do. They're building the surveillance state. So in this sense, we have a political and ethical problem that's quite fundamental in this country. And again, with this current gang, these are gangsters. They're not in any way, shape or form even remotely aware or interested in these questions. Wow. Very insightful as always, sir.

47:09Jeffrey Sachs:Yeah, it went in a different direction in this segment than I expected, but a really fascinating discussion, Professor. Thank you so much for your time and your analysis as always. Thank you, sir. Great. Good. See you soon. Hey, it's us, the Jonas Brothers, and guess what? We have some big news. What's the news, Nick? Huge news. We created our own podcast called Hey Jonas. We invented a podcast? Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it. We're the first people to do podcasts. Yeah, a pretty wide range of podcasts. We're starting a trend. But this one's extra special. So how did we actually come up with the name Hey Jonas, guys?

47:43I honestly don't remember. I think it was on a call about what we should call it. And we were thinking I'm originally calling it one of the early names of our band before Jonas Brothers. This is how you guys remember it going down? Yes. I have a very different memory of this. We were talking about a thing, a bit for the podcast where people could call in and say, hey, Jonas. And then I wrote down on my little notepad, hey, Jonas, and offered it up as a potential title for the podcast. But thanks for remembering that, guys. Listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

48:18Just listen. We don't care where you hear it. Why is everyone obsessed with romance right now? Like everyone. Your coworker who quote unquote doesn't read is reading romance. Your mom, book talk, the entire internet. I'm Sanjana Basker. I'm Tyler McCall. And this is Radio 831, a romance podcast. the books, the tropes, the adaptations, the drama, the discourse, and what all of it says about how we actually love, yearn, and obsess. We're going to Wuthering Heights, which, for the record, is not a romance novel. And yet it has haunted the romance genre for 200 years. We're getting into dark romance, age gaps, certain Russian hockey players, and sentient objects in love, which is a thing.

49:09That's the kind of conversation we're having every episode. Listen to the Radio 831 podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

49:21Jeffrey Sachs:This is Saigon, the story of my family and of the country that shaped us. The United States will not stand by and allow any power, however great, take over another country. From iHeart Podcasts, Saigon. Please allow me to introduce Joseph Sherman. You don't think I'm serious about a free Vietnam? I should stop talking so much. I like hearing you talk. One city, a divided country, and the war that tore America apart. This is for Vietnam. I've taken a hit from Japanese ground fire. Do you read me? They're pouring petrol all over him. He's holding matches. I'm on a landmine. For freedom. Let's get out.

50:02Freedom for Vietnam. Run. Saigon, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Rob Benedict. Sting here's madness. The world should hear about this. There's a fire coming to this country, and it's going to burn out everything. Listen to Saigon on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Turning now to America's 250th birthday. Let's go ahead and start with what a disaster it seems the celebration will be. Let's put C2 up there on the screen from Trump. I understand artists are getting the yips having to do their performance on Wednesday, so I am thinking about bringing the number one attraction anywhere in the world.

50:42The man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime does so without a guitar. The man who loves our country more than anyone else. The man who, some say, is the greatest president in history, the GOAT. Donald J. Trump, to take the place of these highly paid third-rate artists and give a major speech rallying the country forward like I have done ever since being president. And he goes on to basically talk about why he's so fantastic. This comes on the heels of C3. Let's put this up here on the screen. After many of the, some say, second-rate artists, actually, no, by Trump's own admission, third-rate artists, that were announced as the featured performers for Freedom 250, the Great American State Fair, have dropped out, including Martina McBride, Young MC, Millie Vanilli, The Commodores, Morris Day and the Time, and Bret Michaels.

51:34It seems that Vanilla Ice, Flo Rida, and C Plus C Music Factory will remain. I will confess, I did not know who any of these people were, except for Vanilla Ice and Flo Rida. That's it. That's all I've got.

51:49Jeffrey Sachs:I have to say the most shocking part of this whole story is that I had to explain to both Sagar and Mac who Milli Vanilli was. I don't have a clue. And the whole like controversy surrounding how, you know, there were these hit artists. And then it turns out they were just lip syncing. I couldn't tell you. It was a big thing. So it was humiliating when they announced that Milli Vanilli, who's literally like a fake artist, who is going to be performing. And then even more humiliating when Milli Vanilli was like, nah, I'm too good for this. We're good. Forget it. We're not doing this. I mean, yeah.

52:20Jeffrey Sachs:And I love I also love how Trump is like just out and out announcing like, yeah, I'm going to do the same old shit that I always do. As I've done, you know, give another speech as I've done since I began to leave the country or whatever it is that he said. Like, yeah, it's not going to be a special day. And Sagar, I feel like, you know, another president that hasn't made the office of the presidency all about them, you know, building monuments and putting their name on everything and, you know, instituting loyalty tests for literally every single position in the administration. Another president, you could imagine, you know, helping to put together a celebration like this that would feel nonpolitical, where you could have artists that have a different political ideology that still feel comfortable because they're like, it's not a celebration of this one man.

53:05Jeffrey Sachs:It's a celebration of the country and it's a celebration of 250 years. OK, we can do this. And I'm sure all the other celebrations that we've had for, you know, the centennial and the bicentennial, whatever, were like that. But because Trump is has this authoritarian tendency to personalize everything about the office and make it all about himself, it is impossible to participate in an event like this without low key endorsing Trump and what Trump is all about or getting used for his spectacle and self aggrandizement. And of course, this is all being hosted like around his own personal birthday.

53:40Jeffrey Sachs:So that doesn't help the matter either. Yeah, it's actually funny. To back up your point, I'll let Matt Walsh do the talking. Let's put C4 up there on the screen. As we like to do. As we like to do. I'm actually pretty pissed at how badly they bungled America 250. First, they tried to invite Milli Vanilli and a bunch of other absurdly washed up geriatric one hit wonders. Then when that didn't work, they decided to convert the event into a Trump rally. Well, Trump will talk about himself for 90 minutes. This should have been a massive, raucous celebration of the country in its 250 history. Now it will be a political rally identical to the 10 million other ones that we have already seen.

54:17I completely agree, Matt Walsh. But I was doing some ruminating this morning, and I was thinking a little bit about why in some ways it's fitting. So the last major celebration that we had was the bicentennial in 1976. And I actually think if you think back to that time, 1976 was a very bad year. We were coming off the heels of losing the war in Vietnam. This was the beginning of the Carter stagflation era. There was a deep amount of questioning in the United States. It's like, who are we? We're this great superpower that seems to have run amok. We have no idea what we're doing. Internally, there was the weather underground.

54:56There was all this insanity, bombings all across the United States, the new left kind of era. The Democratic Party doesn't know what it is. Even the Republican Party itself is like going through the Goldwater Revolution and the falling apart and the New Deal. And so look, I mean, you know, we can feel very pessimistic about where the country is, but things ended up being okay, at least in the 80s and the 90s. And so I don't know. I mean, it does seem as if the bicentennial and the, you know, what is it, the America 250 will share at least some of the DNA of all of that. But you're not wrong in terms of Trump himself making it, Trump making it about himself.

55:31I also think it's a reflection of the country. You know, I was looking, the one that actually will shock everybody is the centennial, the centennial of the United States and even America 150. If you go back and you look at the way that people talk and celebrate it in 1926, the amount of reverence that Americans, average everyday Americans had for the founding fathers, they could tell you not only, they could probably recite, significant portions of the Constitution of the Declaration of Independence. They can tell you a lot about America's founding fathers, about the Federalist Papers, and more.

56:04I'm talking about everyday school children being able to do so, even putting George Washington, he was celebrated during the America 150. We're very, very far apart from that. It's not just about being divided. It's just like we talk about screens, a lot of the social disconnection and other things that we have here in the nation. So it does actually seem quite fitting. Trump was elected here in 2024, which is a sign of a crazy country, I think we can all at least say. Some of us can admit now. And so this is, you know, in many ways we get what we deserve. And in particular, it's here is Trump now for his birthday celebration, ostensibly for Freedom 250.

56:41Let's go ahead and put this video, EC1, please, on the screen. Trump is now turning the White House into a UFC stadium to celebrate his 80th birthday. Again, it's UFC 250, so ostensibly it's for the 250 at birthday of America. You'll have some 5 ,000 spectators. I love that they threw some of this in too, the reflecting pool and the East Wing and the Rose Garden and all these other crazy things, the stadium being built here on the White House lawn.

57:10Jeffrey Sachs:By the way, the contract, I can't remember which outlet did some digging. The contract for painting the reflecting pool, this blue color or whatever, of course, went to some Trump aligned contractor. And the profit margins are in a no bid contract with the profit margins. Yes. We covered this. That's right. Escalated. So. So, yeah. You know, even in all of this, of course, it's got to be got to be peppered with some Trumpian corruption, too. It wouldn't be a celebration of Trump's birthday without some Trumpian corruption. I got no hate to the UFC. But let's all be honest. Like, we're going to have shirtless dudes and gladiator fights on the White House lawn.

57:45Like, what are we doing here? Like, it's ridiculous. And to use and to turn the White House, again, the South Lawn of the White House of the United States, this is a place for garden parties or for, you know, I can't even, the Easter egg roll, right? Like, these are the types of events that are supposed to be happening here. And to turn it into an explicitly, like, politically aligned, you could say it's not. Come on. Dana White is like the original Trump supporter. and then to turn it into some major spectacle, which will all be broadcast, I believe, on Paramount Plus, the Trump alliance, right?

58:15So, all right, yeah. In terms of what we're talking about here, we're talking about tens of millions of dollars that are being spent for this gigantic arena. Call me a buzzkill. Don't care because it's all put in the veneer of it's all about Trump himself and America 250. So I'm just, look, all I can say is I'm trying to take a step back and say, yeah, the bicentennial, it was a bad year too. So it's not, you know, like, Even though these are supposed to have some sort of reverence and all this, I think we'll be all right in the end of it. But yeah, it made me sad. It actually made me sad looking at the original 150th birthday and just looking at the way that they celebrated that at the time.

58:51And their genuine reverence for the founding and the intellectual backbone of the nation. I have a 1903 atlas in my house, which was printed by the Philadelphia Inquirer I found at a bookstore, antique bookstore. The level of time and effort that they spent on the founding history of the United States, of the myth, the origins, and all that, and yes, it has many problems, none of which were acknowledged in the atlas. I will definitely grant you that. But it was clear to me, and they're actually well-fingered. You can see some of the original owners, they spent a lot of time on this section. The amount of time that people spent and actually wanted to celebrate the founding and the birth of the nation at the 150th birthday, or even at that time, I'm talking about 1903, 1903.

59:33It would shock the average young person, I think, today. And so that's really what depresses me, is we're going to have gladiator fights like literal bread and circus. Without the bread. Without the bread, you're right, because everything is so ridiculously expensive. Anybody else driving July 4th? I'm excited to see how expensive gas is all the way up the I-95 corridor. That's what really sticks with me, is the cultural reflection. Because this is who we are. We are the UFC, right? We are the UFC on the South Lawn. We are in the social media era, no reverence for education, for our founding to even talk or to feel excited about where the nation is going.

1:00:13The only thing I can console myself with is that's kind of how the bicentennial was too. 1976, you know, you don't have to read a book to know it was a horrible year. And there were a lot of same questions, I think, swirling in the air. We got through it. I'm sure we'll get through it now, but I think it's a genuine reflection of who we are. I really do. From the artists to our culture to the UFC to Trump himself.

1:00:34Jeffrey Sachs:I mean, those images are too perfect. I saw somebody say that the White House now looks like a shuttered six flags that they're destroying because between the UFC cage or whatever that's being constructed that looks like a roller coaster, a defunct roller coaster, to one entire side just being complete and total rubble as Trump constructs his ballroom bunker slash military hospital. which he's obsessed with. I mean, he's truly obsessed with. Like, this is not just a liberal talking point. I think it was the Washington Post did an analysis of all the things that he's said recently. And the thing that he brings up the most is the freaking ballroom.

1:01:13Jeffrey Sachs:He talks about that certainly more than gas prices, inflation, the, I don't know, the war in Iran, the ballroom. And I think a big part of it is actually the military hospital seems to be a particular fixation now because he, like many, you know, absolute narcissistic people, is obsessed with his own longevity and, like, imagines that he's going to live forever and sort of reign over us for eternity from this impenetrable bunker that he is constructing. But, you know, he feels the need to build these monuments and celebrations to himself. I think it's embarrassing anytime an adult, like, demands other adults celebrate their birthday.

1:01:53Jeffrey Sachs:Like, that's just, to me, an embarrassing thing to do. and he's demanding the entire freaking world celebrate his own birthday. That is a real insight into his ego. But he feels the need to build these monuments and host these celebrations to himself because I think he's very fearful that at the end of his life, he won't be celebrated in the way that he has always craved. That in the end, the consensus opinion will be that he and his presidency was an absolute disaster for the United States. So he's trying to leave these impressions in stone, you know, with his monuments and his name on this and name on that and physically remaking the White House itself as a sort of cheat code to leave his mark on the world.

1:02:40Jeffrey Sachs:But yeah, you're right. It looks exactly like what America is today. I hope that we come through it, but I do think we have some existential risks that weren't present in 1976. I mean, AI being the prominent one, the advent of autonomous killer robots. Obviously, climate change has moved quite along. We have so much global instability in a nuclear armed world where nuclear proliferation is only going to accelerate. I think we all believe that's the logic that has been created. So we are facing some truly existential risks at a time when the population is, you know, dumbed down on algorithmic social media and reality TV.

1:03:21Correct. Last thing, C6, couldn't not mention this, Trump is currently pushing for a$250 bill with his face on it. act because it will be the highest, I think, denominated currency in terms of the bill. Also a reminder that it now takes 250 bucks to buy what used to cost$100. So there you go. Also a great reminder of what America 250 is all about. 250 bucks. Anybody else going to the grocery store recently and again, just being like, what? What? Forget about it. You're lucky to get away with$250. Yeah, it's crazy. For the last five years, every single time you go, it just ticks up and up and up.

1:04:01Now I'm researching how to learn how to make my own kids fruit leather. All right? This is where things are now. All right, we got Brandon Weikert standing by. Let's get to it.

1:04:28Hey guys, it's us, the Jonas Brothers. I'm Joe. I'm Kevin. And I'm Nick. And guess what? We created our own podcast called Hey Jonas. We invented a podcast? Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it. We're the first people to do podcasts. We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions. Well, sick and tired is a strong way to put it, but you know. Tired and sick. Tired and sick. Listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Just listen. We don't care where you hear it. This is an iHeart Podcast.

1:04:59Guaranteed human.