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TRANSCRIPT

Jane Coaston: It’s Thursday, February 5th, I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What A Day, the show that appreciates Vice President J.D. Vance for asking right-wing podcast host Megyn Kelly the important questions. Like why wasn’t CNN host Kaitlan Collins having more fun in the Oval Office Tuesday when she questioned the president about convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s victims? 

[clip of Vice President J.D. Vance] I mean like, there was a moment in the Oval Office, I wasn’t even in there, but you know I was in the West Wing, and somebody sent me where he was talking to Kaitlan Collins, who’s the CNN anchor. And I have like a decent relationship with Kaitlan Collins which is unusual given that she’s from CNN, but the president, she’s asking a question, the president says, why don’t you ever smile? 

[clip of Megyn Kelly] Yeah. 

[clip of Vice President J.D. Vance] And it’s actually like so perceptive, even if you’re asking a tough question, even if take your job very seriously, like why does it always have to be so antagonistic? 

[clip of Megyn Kelly] I laughed because I saw online everybody was calling him sexist for saying that and I literally said the same thing about Kaitlan Collins a year ago on my show, she never smiles. 

[clip of Vice President J.D. Vance] Yes. 

[clip of Megyn Kelly] Every once in a while you have to smile, Roger Ailes used to tell us that. 

[clip of Vice President J.D. Vance] Absolutely. 

[clip of Megyn Kelly] Every once and a while, you gotta remember to smile, show the viewers that you have a heart. 

[clip of Vice President J.D. Vance] Just have have some fun. 

[clip of Megyn Kelly] Yeah. 

[clip of Vice President J.D. Vance] Right? 

Jane Coaston: J.D. Vance, do you think the sexual assault of young women and girls is fun? [music break] On today’s show, can California cheat and gerrymander like Texas can? The Supreme Court makes its ruling. And President Donald Trump’s quest for immortality could leave us all with a mighty eyesore. But let’s start with the economy, which is in the same weird place it’s been for the past few months. Hiring is down, the cost of living is up, and no one really knows what’s coming next. And that uncertainty is partially thanks to AI, which everyone says will change work as we know it. But Trump doesn’t seem concerned. He mocked the idea in an interview with NBC Nightly News anchor, Tom Yamas, released on Wednesday. 

[clip of Tom Llamas] Mr. President, there’s widespread concern that AI is going to wipe out a lot of jobs, manufacturing jobs. I mean, there is.– 

[clip of President Donald Trump] Look, they said the internet was going to do everything it was going to do, robots are going to kill jobs. 

[clip of Tom Llamas] Yeah. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] Everything’s going to kill jobs. And you end up, if you’re smart doing great.

Jane Coaston: Comforting. Trump should probably be taking people’s concerns more seriously, because no matter what he says about the economy, voters have noticed it’s not great. In fact, new polling released earlier this week found that a majority of Americans think the economy under former president Joe Biden was better than the economy under Trump. And maybe the Trump administration hasn’t been exactly helpful on this front. Like the time last year, Trump told voters they shouldn’t buy so many toys for their kids a few weeks before Christmas. Or when Dr. Mehmet Oz, the raspberry ketones enthusiast who somehow runs the centers for Medicare and Medicaid services, argued that maybe Americans should actually be working more, at a Health and Human Services event Tuesday. 

[clip of Dr. Mehmet Oz] If we could get the average American, because they feel healthy, they’re vital, they’re strong, they have agency over their future, to start working a year earlier, right out of high school, or work a year later, not retire, or work better during their lifetime because they’re healthy, it would generate about three trillion dollars, three trillion to the U.S. economy. That would more than remove the debt. 

Jane Coaston: The U.S. National debt, as of Wednesday, is more than $38 trillion, so no. But like I said, AI is making everyone from stock traders to white-collar workers very, very nervous. So to find out what’s feeling and what’s fact in the U.S. economy, I talked to my friend Stacey Vanek Smith. She’s a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek and co-host of the Bloomberg podcast, Everybody’s Business. Stacey, welcome back to What A Day. 

Stacey Vanek Smith: Thanks, Jane. I’m very happy to be here. Good to see you. 

Jane Coaston: New Year, same economic problems. The last time we spoke with you, we talked about this phenomenon called a K-shaped economy. Can you remind me what that is? 

Stacey Vanek Smith: Yeah, the K-shaped economy is the idea that for the wealthiest people in the country, that’s I guess the top of the K, things are getting better and better, they’re getting more and more money, investments are paying off. And then for most of the country they’re seeing their fortunes get worse and worse. So the middle is basically disappearing out of the economy. 

Jane Coaston: And to be specific in the US right now, who’s the top-of-the-K and who is at the bottom of the K. 

Stacey Vanek Smith: I mean, the top of the K is very, very wealthy individuals. So this would be like millionaires and above, the 1%. Um. And they have been doing really, really well because the stock market has been doing really, really well and wealthier people tend to own a lot of stock. And a lot of the stock market has been moving up because of AI. So they’ve just seen their wealth increase and increase but wages haven’t really been going up. And so for people who rely on their wages for their wealth. They are not seeing their fortunes go up. They are having a harder time affording things because prices are going up faster than their pay. 

Jane Coaston: A lot of things make up our perception of the economy. You mentioned the stock market is doing great. The job market is mid. Inflation is still an issue. We’ve talked before about how the economy is sometimes powered by vibes, like there’s how the economy is doing and how people feel about the economy, what is the issue with the US economy right now that people are feeling and perceiving the most? 

Stacey Vanek Smith: I think there’s a lack of balance happening, and it doesn’t feel morally right, you know, that an economy is getting richer and richer and richer and most of the people in the economy aren’t feeling that or are really struggling. But it’s also a big problem for it’s not a healthy economy. If people aren’t feeling good about their ability to get jobs, to get paid, to afford things, that is going to start to have big implications. Because right now, just the wealthiest few people in the economy are supporting an enormous amount of buying. And they’re not gonna be able to do that forever. And once things start to catch up and people start buying less, that is gonna put the economy in a really tough position. So I just think this lack of balance, in addition to being kind of an ethical problem, it’s showing an economy that’s starting to separate in ways that aren’t really sustainable. That is what I see as the biggest problem. 

Jane Coaston: And what gets me is that now data is showing that upper middle class workers that may have been near the top of the K at one point, the ones in white collar jobs who have been keeping the economy afloat with their spending, they are starting to get nervous. Why? 

Stacey Vanek Smith: They’re starting to get nervous because of AI creep. So this week, there’s been something called the Claude crash. Claude is one of the artificial intelligence programs that’s gotten really popular. Its parent company, Anthropic, has released a bunch of sort of plug-ins that you can use in your computer, and they can do all kinds of things for you. And they just did a drop this week that had all kinds of legal tools. And then I guess quite easily you could see how you could use them for financial services. So all these stocks and all these companies, law firms, financial services firms, Salesforce, Thomson Reuters started to see their stocks go way down because all of a sudden people were like, wait a minute, a lot of what you do can just be replaced by AI. So–

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Stacey Vanek Smith: I think people are starting to get a sense of how AI is going to potentially take jobs. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah, and it’s interesting. So I’ve seen that also with like software developers. You don’t really need software if you have AI. And the thing is like we’ve been hearing that AI is going to transform work as we know it. The stock market is reflecting a fear that AI is going to take away jobs. But is it already actually taking away jobs? Is this kind of premeditated worrying? 

Stacey Vanek Smith: That is a really good question. And a little bit nobody knows. I mean, I think there’s a huge fear jobs are going away and maybe jobs are gonna be created. A lot of jobs are gonna change, but nobody kind of knows exactly how that’s gonna show up or how big of a deal that’s going to be. I will say that the company Challenger Gray and Christmas, which is an outplacement firm, they do a lot of research, said that AI was cited in more than 50,000 layoffs last year. You know, we just saw a whole bunch of layoffs from Amazon, about 30,000 people recently, they have mentioned AI too. So it’s not necessarily totally direct, but certainly I think we’re gonna start to see good, like high-paying jobs, jobs that, you know, tend to have people working them who live upper middle-class lives, really taking a hit, potentially losing their jobs, or at least having trouble finding new ones.  

Jane Coaston: The thing is, Stacey, the job market’s been kind of steadily mid for a while now. According to new data from ADP on Wednesday, private companies only added 22,000 jobs in January. So is the job market actually bad? Or does it just feel bad? What do we know? 

Stacey Vanek Smith: I think mid is actually the perfect word to describe the job market. So on the one hand, we’re not seeing huge levels of unemployment. Unemployment is still below 5%, which historically speaking is quite low. The thing that we are also seeing at the same time is no hiring. There’s kind of a frozen job market right now. Hiring levels are the lowest they’ve been in decades. They’re calling it a jobs recession because hiring rates are so low. So what that seems to mean is companies, and there’s a lot of speculation as to why this is, some people say it’s because of AI, are kind of in this holding pattern. Like they’re not laying a bunch of people off quite yet. I mean, in some fields, yes, but in many fields, no. But they’re also not hiring. There’s just kind of this weird frozen feeling in the job market. 

Jane Coaston: As you mentioned, we’ve seen a few companies make major layoffs, especially Jeff Bezos’ companies. Last week, Amazon cut 16,000 jobs, and then on Wednesday, the Washington Post laid off about a third of its staff. Bezos is a billionaire. What is the fact that even his companies are cutting back? What does that tell us about where the economy is heading? 

Stacey Vanek Smith: That’s a really interesting question and a really interesting point. I mean, Amazon obviously is doing really well. There are these, you know, seven companies, huge companies, they’re called the Magnificent Seven, and they have basically been leading the charge in the stock market. And Amazon is one of those companies. Amazon has been making money hand over fist. They are doing awesome. So why are they laying people off? They’re trying to keep maximizing their profits. They wanna keep making more and more and more money. So, they’re not laying people off because times are bad. But they’re laying people off I think because they can, which is very worrisome and does show you something about the job market that we’re in right now and why workers maybe don’t feel great about the economy and the power that they have in the economy because there’s a feeling of like, well, we can lay them off, so let’s do it. 

Jane Coaston: I feel like it’s the exact opposite of how things felt a couple of years ago, where it very much was like the job market was so tight that companies were trying to hang on to everybody and there definitely seemed like it was a real workers market in terms of jobs. So now that we’re in an economy where profits are everything and the worker comes last, what should Americans look out for? Because I feel like, historically, this hasn’t ended great for everybody. 

Stacey Vanek Smith: You know it’s interesting a lot of people are comparing this to like the industrial revolution. 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Stacey Vanek Smith: A moment where there’s this huge shift in technology and so things really start to shift. Some jobs go away new jobs are created but they’re not necessarily jobs that people have qualifications for it can be a really rough time especially for workers and you’re right I mean not that long ago the job market was so tight that you know people were asking for raises. There was all kinds of job jumping. We were getting benefits and meditation rooms and working from home benefits and actual raises and people who were very disadvantaged in the economy, you know people with like potentially criminal backgrounds or people who’d taken big breaks to do other things were actually able to reenter the workforce for the first time in a long time, real wages started to rise. That period seems to be over right now and it does seem like companies have a lot of the power again. And I think there’s a big worry that AI will mean companies have even more of the power going forward because they don’t necessarily need workers to do the things they can do. They can experiment with having AI do certain jobs. At the same time, obviously new jobs will be created as this technology involves and us as workers, people in the economy, you know, we can use AI as assistance and things like that too. So it’s a little bit mixed, but it’s little scary to be a worker right now. 

Jane Coaston: Stacey as always, thank you for joining me. 

Stacey Vanek Smith: Thank you, Jane. It’s good to see you. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Stacey Vanek Smith. We’ll link to her podcast in our show notes. [ticking sound and then a bell rings] Hear that? The rest of the show is fully baked and ready to go, but it’s piping hot. So in the meantime, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube where you can hear and see the show, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: Here is what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines. 

[clip of Lisa Rubin] The result of that, Katie, however, means that both Texas’s map and California’s map will stand. And politically, the projection is that they will even each other out or cancel each other out. 

Jane Coaston: MSNOW senior legal reporter Lisa Rubin reacted Wednesday to the Supreme Court signing off on California’s new congressional map. The decision swats down pleas from California Republicans and the Trump administration to throw it out. In December, the Supreme Court ruled that Texas could use a Republican-friendly racially gerrymandered map. That’s despite a lower court ruling that the map was, well, just that. A quick reminder how we got here. Last year, Texas’ maps were redrawn to flip up to five Democratic seats Republican. Shady as hell, right? So then, California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom responded with a tit-for-tat map designed to flip up to five Republican seats Democratic. And of course, Republicans threw a tantrum and made the exact same accusations of racist gerrymandering against the California map and voila, here we are in the middle of a redistricting arms race in the lead up to the midterms. What a fun journey we’re all on. The man convicted of trying to assassinate President Trump at a Florida golf course in 2024 was sentenced Wednesday. Florida Federal District Court Judge Aileen Cannon described Ryan Routh’s plot as, quote, “deliberate and evil.” The West Palm Beach incident happened roughly two months after Trump was injured in another assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Routh received life in prison without parole, plus seven years for a gun charge, which I’m sure he’s really torn up about. The sentencing had been scheduled for December, but the judge delayed it after Routh decided to hire a lawyer for that phase of the case. This after representing himself at trial, which obviously went great, as it always does. A group of teachers and school districts in Minnesota filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and related officials on Wednesday. According to the teachers’ union group, Education Minnesota, the lawsuit seeks to block both DHS and ICE from conducting immigration enforcement activity on or near public schools. In a press release, the group argues, quote, “Recent federal actions have disrupted education, endangered students, and driven families away from classrooms.” Education Minnesota president Monica Byron, who you heard on the show last week, spoke about the suit at a press conference. 

[clip of Monica Byron] The Code of Ethics for Minnesota Educators states, quote, “a teacher shall make reasonable effort to protect the student from conditions harmful to health and safety,” unquote. Although it pains me to say this, one of the greatest threats to the health and safety of Minnesota’s school-aged children right now are the ICE and Border Patrol agents in our state. 

Jane Coaston: Of course, the administration sent DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin to push back. She said in a statement to the Washington Post, quote, “ICE is not going to schools to arrest children. We are protecting children,” end quote. Protecting them by arresting them and their parents. Meanwhile, Trump border czar Tom Homan made his own separate announcement on Wednesday. He told reporters that more officials in Minnesota were cooperating with federal immigration enforcement, and: 

[clip of Tom Homan] Given this increase in unprecedented collaboration. And as a result of the need for less law enforcement officers to do this work in a safer environment I have announced effective immediately we will draw down seven hundred people effective today. Seven hundred law enforcement personnel.

Jane Coaston: Hey, 700 is not nothing. A win is a win. Homan says that leaves around 2,000 officers in the state. President Trump plans to install a statue of Christopher Columbus on White House grounds, according to sources who spoke with the Washington Post. The piece is a reconstruction of a Columbus statue pushed into Baltimore’s harbor by protesters in 2020. Trump’s reasoning for putting up a statue of a man who never actually reached America and was put into prison by the Spanish monarchy for being such a terrible person? The Italian vote. As Trump told reporters last month, quote, “Remember, when you go to the voting booths, I reinstated Columbus Day.” He didn’t. It’s the latest in Trump’s major kick to reimagine the White House and cement an American legacy preferable to him. And who better to immortalize than Trump himself? Trump’s latest vision? A 250-foot triumphal arch that towers over the Lincoln Memorial from across Washington’s Potomac River and stands almost as tall as the U.S. Capitol. The height is no coincidence. According to the Washington Post, it’s an homage to America’s 250th anniversary. This would also be the tallest arch in the world. Arc de Triomphe meet your gauche American cousin, L’Arc de Trump. And that’s the news. [music break]

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, celebrate the Spanish figure skater who will now be allowed to perform his Minions-inspired short program at the Olympics after dealing with copyright issues, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about the six-time Spanish national champion finally getting permission from Universal Music to do the routine, which features a dance sequence to Minions saying the word Papaya with an EDM beat, like me, What A Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston, and honestly, you never think you’ll discuss a Minions-themed Olympic figure skating routine, and then the moment comes. [music break] What A Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Emily Fohr and Chris Allport. Our producer is Caitlin Plummer. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Ethan Oberman, Greg Walters, and Matt Berg. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our senior vice president of news and politics is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Kyle Murdock and Jordan Cantor. We had help today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]