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- [00:00]
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Matthew Schmitz
Welcome to the Compact podcast. Inflation hits 3.8%. The hantavirus is spreading. And New York State is preparing to ban New York pizza and bagels as we know them. I'm joined by Ashley Frawley and Jeff Schillenberger. And I'm Matthew Schmitz. So Donald Trump came into office, his fundamental pitch to voters was a better economy. And now we see inflation hitting 3.8%, pushed up by increases in gas prices as well as Trump tariffs, other economic factors. And this is a real moment of truth for the administration. I think they came in with a very ambitious agenda, including on, not least on trade. And I think you, even if you're very high on Trump's trade vision, you have to concede that it's going to raise prices in various ways, even if it's, you know, paired with offsetting tax cuts or, or what have you, as, as Trump has promised so to pursue tariffs and to pursue a war that drives up gas prices, it's going to make it very hard to continue to deliver on what I think Trump's most basic promise to voters has always been he's a businessman and he will run the business of America. Well, I think that's always been the most basic promise. And inflation inching up I think really presages a disastrous midterms for the GOP and genuine threat to Trump's popularity and appeal. I mean, a lot of people hate him, but those who love him, I think really rely on him to deliver the good times economically.
- [03:00]
Jeff Schillenberger
Yeah, I had not been on the road driving for about a month, and then I did have to do some driving this weekend and I did see the gas had almost reached $5 in New York. I think some, some of the gas stations I passed by, I think I found one that was maybe 480 or something. But some of the gas stations I passed by were 4, 4 95. So really before the summer peak travel season, Memorial Day weekend starts, we're already near $5. So that's always been pretty significant sort of marker that, you know, costs are really going up and people are going to see that and be, be cognizant of it. I believe when I was in California earlier this year, it was already around $5, so I'm guessing there it might be six or I'm not sure, but it, it's definitely a significant thing. And I remember, you know, going back to the sort of first, our second, first and second Gulf wars and a lot of discourse about gas prices being this sort of key political indicator, just always being, always being significant. And then, I mean, I think the other things that are interesting here are obviously there is a difference over the past 20 years, which is that the US has massively increased its, its production. Drill, baby, drill happened, although ironically, it happened mostly under the Obama administration, was really the explosion of, of domestic oil and gas production. And so that has at least changed the geopolitics of it. And so you'll hear Trump and people in the administration sort of say, well, you know, we don't really need this stuff anymore, but, you know, we don't, we don't have to worry about it as much anymore as we used to. And I mean, that's mainly true only insofar as oil and gas producers in the United States benefit now when prices go up, as opposed to, say, in the 70s when the explosion of oil prices was something that beggared American consumers while at the same time enriching countries with large oil deposits and the OPEC cartel in the Middle east and elsewhere. So now obviously, there are sort of two sides to it. American oil and gas producers benefit when the high prices are high, but nevertheless, consumers are still facing, you know, gas prices that I imagine over the summer are going to go above $5 pretty, pretty quickly, given what I saw this weekend in many places anyway. And that just seems like an interesting place for, for us to be in that. As, as Matthew said, obviously the, the real selling point of this administration and the reason it came into office was that we experienced high levels of inflation in the early 2000 and 20s under the Biden administration. And that really soured a lot of people on, on that administration, and it just wasn't a handicap that they could overcome. And I guess the other thing that's kind of interesting here is that he, you know, the policy choices being made here seem quite willful. They don't, they don't seem like there was an element of in the early 2000s, inflation. Clearly the policy choices of the Biden administration played A role in terms of the way that a large stimulus package was implemented and, you know, the particular way that that was structured. But there was also just global inflation due to supply chain stuff, which of course, was not, you know, this was not a natural disaster. It was based on policy choices around the pandemic. But the thing that's interesting here is that, you know, those were, those were kind of global policy choices that were made by, by governments around the world, notably China, you know, which, which sort of started the whole global lockdown process, set it in motion. Whereas here we have a set of policies that, that really can be traced directly back to the decision making of this White House that are not. It's. It's not a, a sort of localized version of a global phenomenon which is having global effects. It really, it really is a choice that was made by this administration that seems to be directly leading to this. And, and, you know, to a degree that in, in the Biden administration, obviously you can fault various of their policy approaches, but inflation was happening globally at the time. So, yeah, I do think it's, it's a kind of remarkable place to have arrived. And I, you know, I think the other question which sort of looms over this in terms of what's going on this week is that you have Trump going to China to meet with Xi Jinping. And so you have a question hovering over it, which is, you know, what is the future of global, of the global economy, of globalized trade flows? Where is all that going? Are we moving into an era in which that will be less. In which kind of, you know, some attempt at autarky will be, you know, more of the policy standard in, in the, in the coming era. Now, interestingly, I was reading this new book, Muskism, which I, I will write about in compact at some point soon. And one thing that's interesting about that is that if you re, you know, if you, if you situate Elon Musk's rise, and particularly the rise of, of Tesla within the American economy, it comes out of this period in the years after the Gulf War, sorry, after the Iraq War, when you also had a huge spike in energy prices. And that had several effects. One was it created a greater impetus to do this local energy extraction within the United States to massively ramp up our oil and gas industries. And so it provided the impetus that gave us the big oil and gas boom that has kind of changed the global energy landscape. But the other thing it did was provide an impetus for electrification projects, and Tesla's initiatives were part of that and the various subsidies that they received, which it should be noted, you know, partly came from the federal government, including laws that were put into place by the Bush administration. So, you know, it really was a bipartisan push to reduce dependency on foreign oil. Obviously part of the problem of the electrification approach was, I mean, for various reasons, people can read Emmett Penney's articles for us about the grid and the kind of, the sort of self sabotage involved in the expansion of renewables, which don't provide a reliable enough energy source for expanded electricity demand. But the other thing that happened here is that the oil and gas boom, which was also propelled by the higher energy prices of the post Iraq war era, kind of eventually reduced the impetus for this electrification push that Tesla was part of. And so it became a much more limited kind of luxury commodity kind of area of the economy rather than a, you know, what was envisioned in the late aughts, which was kind of this expansion of the electrical grid to create a kind of again, sort of autarkic transportation system which, which was sort of how it was conceived at the time, that would, it would make us less reliant on foreign oil and gas through renewables and electrification and somehow this would, you know, make us less, less vulnerable to these kind of shocks in the future. So obviously for various reasons that, that the conditions changed, but nonetheless, you do wonder if we're going to see, you know, further pushes in that direction. Of course, ironically, you know, generally Trump and the Republican Party are sort of anti, you know, despite being allied with Elon Musk on some level, there are also sort of anti electric cars. So that sort of bipartisan agenda behind it seems to be gone. But nonetheless, I do, you know, I wonder how this is going to change. Obviously there's sort of been a shift away from the centrality of climate politics even on the left in recent years. But nonetheless, I do wonder to what extent or how this is going to change those sort of policy areas in terms of how we think about energy, energy independence, energy autarky, and how that fits into this question about the kind of future of global, of globalized trade that again will be kind of put to the test in Trump's summit with, with XI this, this week as well.
- [13:06]
Ashley Frawley
I'm, I, I'm, I'm kind of wondering how, how much importance should be placed on what's going on with oil in terms of the trouble with inflation. Because this is, I don't know, I feel like it's a kind of a similar thing that's going on in the uk by analogy, that there we've had a steady kind of revolving door of different prime ministers. I think it's like six in the past seven years or something like that. And today Starmer was experiencing this enormous pressure to step down. And it's kind of like, while there are all these big problems, this, this, this person here, they must be the cause of it. Let's just get rid of that person, and then we'll be able to solve the problems. And it's a similar thing with what's going on with inflation in the US at the moment, and also the ability to blame Trump's tariffs and energy policy and dealings in the Middle east for it. But there's a. We kind of have to ask the question, why is it the case that something like problems like this are able to create such enormous destabilization? And I think the answer is because the United States has been stuck between a rock and a hard place, not just the United States. So kind of a larger problem in that you have an economy that is based on bubbles and debt, and you simply cannot raise interest rates without risking triggering an enormous recession. But at the same time, you cannot deal with inflation without attempting to raise interest rates, and you also can't get out of a recession without cutting them. But if, if interest rates are already trending towards zero, you are absolutely screwed. These, these typical kind of policy maneuvers don't work anymore. And all of this is kind of breaking down. And this is the deeper issue that I think is easily missed when we focus on what did Trump do? Did picking this fight causes, oh, my God, there's this trouble at the gas pump, and this is the reason for this rising inflation. The fact of the matter is that the tools, the. One of the few tools available to deal with a problem like this, you can't call on because it will cause an enormous ripple effect within the economy. And that's a. That's a deeper question about the structure of our economy than one man's bad policies or a poorly chosen fight in the Middle East. And it has much, much deeper implications for getting out of a situation like this than, you know, cheaper oil in the short term or something like that. So the trouble is that at the moment, all the options on the table are bad. And, yeah, it's a kind of a volatile situation. I'm not sure. I'm not sure what the end point is here, what. What can actually be done. But, yeah, policymakers are basically trapped between inflation on one side and financial ruin on the other, and a crisis on the other, and I'm not sure how much longer they can teeter on the edge like this before, you know, we topple over.
- [16:42]
Matthew Schmitz
Hantavirus has broken out on a cruise ship. Our producer, Stephen Adebotov, used this as a just expression of divine disfavor for anyone who goes on cruises. I don't take that view because I have an open and generous heart, unlike Stephen and Ashley. What's your take on the hantavirus outbreak and are we heading toward another lockdown?
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Ashley Frawley
Well, interesting, given what I've just said, because the previous virus came at a very similar moment economically. But I'm not going to, you know, go into conspiracy theories. Yeah. So this is really interesting to me because we've obviously been through all these years of COVID blah, blah, blah, and then the response to this has been so strange because you'd think that we would be primed to avoid the next crisis. I mean, the next Covid, the next epidemic, the next pandemic. Because the narrative was like, oh, we were not prepared and we're going to learn from this. Da, da, da. And then you hear that you had people who were on this cruise ship sent back to their, like, you think, like, airlifted back to their home countries. You think, well, like on a medical jet or something like that. Sure. That, you know, in a very controlled way. No, no, no. On a commercial airliner with 300 other passengers, like you would. It's, it's really bizarre. And like, the first kind of reports out were like, oh, no, there's nothing to worry about, because hantavirus is very, it's very rare to pass from, from human to human. It's, it's probably just from rodent urine or probably the ship had this problem. I mean, there is one strain of it that does pass from human to human, but we don't need to worry about that. And then a few days later, well, it turns out that it was that strain that passes from human to human, and it has indeed passed from humans to humans. And yeah. Whoops. It's like the most extraordinary suddenly, after so many years, like, decades of risk management in which everybody learned that it is much better to affirm risks than, like, I mean, politically anyway, to affirm race. And then, you know, it's better to be seen to have overreacted than underreacted. The incredible optimism suddenly, with this one was just really stunning. That it made me kind of wonder, you know, made my conspiracy senses start to tingle, like, why did nobody care? But I, I, I mean, I, I've now looked through some of the World Health Organization stuff and I, I suppose there are good reasons not to care. It's not the not to care or like not to ratchet up the panicker or encourage people to panic because there have been previous outbreaks tending to be localized and they've done contact tracing, told people once they have, you know, the standard kind of protocol once people have symptoms to stay at home and don't bother people. And it tends to be incapacitating enough that by the time you are shedding a certain amount of virus you're too sick to go out and give it to people. So there's reasons to believe that it, it can be quite self contained and they are doing contact tracing in that sort of typical protocol for this as well. It doesn't pass easily from human to human although it does, but it's typically through quite close relationships like caring for somebody or something like that that that it would be passed. They doesn't seem to be any kind of new strain or unknown strain more easily. But as I said before, the incredible optimism is worrying and has been proven wrong thus far. And so yeah, so on the one hand, yes, there are reasons to believe there's, you know, this isn't the next pandemic. On the other hand I am a little concerned because as I said, my conspiracy senses were tingling that just when you need a whole bunch of capital destruction, wipe out your competitors. Tada. Here comes another pandemic. Possibly, but more realistically, during COVID one interesting phenomenon was the fact that bed availability continued to be rolled back in a lot of countries and in the UK as well. And after the pandemic, pandemic preparedness has also been rolled back. It hasn't. They haven't been pouring tons and tons of money into preparing for the next pandemic. And so, and also it's very difficult too. You have to, to be fair. I mean you can't just pour money into research not knowing what the next virus is going to be. Right? You, you, you know hantavirus has very little funding associated with it but it's not like you could like could know in advance that this would be something that people might be passing around from a cruise ship. You just simply cannot know that. You simply cannot know that in advance. But I do think there's an interesting story here around the fact that regardless of the certainty that another pandemic will happen because it is simply the price that we pay for civilization and also the great benefit that we get from civilization, the price we pay is that we will have more pandemics. And the benefit we get is that civilization and the ability to communicate with each other and trace contacts and share knowledge and all these sorts of things allow us to effectively deal with them if we do not panic. So, you know, it's. It's inevitable that we are going to go in this direction. It's inevitable that it's going to happen again. And yet there isn't any. There doesn't seem to be a huge amount of incentive to put money into prevention and, and preparedness. And even with this, even secure in the knowledge that certainly this will happen again. And I think, you know, aside from all the conspiratorial stuff, I think that's the most realistic line of worry is that even given everything that we've been through, we are still not prepared for the next pandemic.
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Jeff Schillenberger
Well, it's also worth asking what it means to be prepared in the sense that, you know, one thing that's, you know, that I always bring up about COVID is that if you look at the preparedness literature and documents that were composed in the years leading up to the COVID crisis, the basic takeaway you, you must have is that almost all of it was completely tossed out the window. And the reason for this was simply that China locked down Wuhan and that generated some statistics supposedly showing efficacy of the lockdown approach. And then suddenly everybody went along with that. And I don't know, you know, there are all kinds of. You can spend, you could probably spend an entire career just studying what happened in those few months and how that came about. I don't. I find that most people's answers, whether they're justifying it or whether they're, you know, trying to offer some conspiratorial account of what was really going on behind the scenes, are pretty unsatisfying. The, the people who tell us that. I mean, so, so anyway, I guess my point is in terms of preparedness, you know, that then the question becomes, what's the value of preparedness if all of the preparation that did take place, regardless of how adequate or inadequate that was, ended up being completely discarded and the only thing that mattered was this kind of mediatic shock and awe that came out of the. The initial Chinese response, which was itself not something that the Chinese state had prepared or planned for. It was. It was a kind of ad hoc approach. And, you know, that I think is. Is just a. It's a question. I mean, I honestly try not to think about it that much anymore. So the fact that this is in the news is kind of annoying to me because I prefer to just kind of. Even though I spent a lot of time writing and thinking about this stuff back then, I honestly prefer to just not think about these sorts of situations just because I feel like you open up this Pandora's box of. Of nightmare as. As soon as you start thinking about what happened. It's, it's. Honestly, I just find it ultimately mysterious and terrifying. The, The. The trajectory that the world took during those months. And I still, even having spent a lot of time reading it, reading very, you know, extremely varied analyses of it, I don't have a very satisfying answer. And I think you can. You can sort of see that the fact that nobody has come up with a very good or serious explanation. I, you know, I, I recommend a few books on the subject. One is In Covid's Wake by Stephen Macedo and Francis Lee. The other is the COVID Consensus by Compaq contributors Thomas Fazi and Toby Green, which I think do the best they can at sort of accounting for what happened and how we got where we did. But it now just seems like, because of the weird polarization of. Of responses, it seems that we've now just become all kind of COVID zombies, like, locked into whatever we thought. The. Well, I mean, I think the majority of people maybe just prefer not to think about it or prefer to ignore it, prefer to be told, you know, this time it won't. It won't be a crisis. But the people who are responding to it, as far as I can tell, are just completely zombified by the experience of COVID And so they either, I guess, you know, there are these kind of wacko, lunatic, sort of supposed pseudo public health influencers who built up reputations back then, who are, of course, already arguing for universal masking and locks, like all the same stuff. And then there are the other people who are like, well, you know, clearly the, you know, the Democrats think they're going to lose this fall, so they, you know, somehow the sort of dnc, like, produced this hantavirus outbreak in order to somehow game the. The midterm elections is a take I've seen. You know, in some cases. You know, clearly there's a kind of jokey ness to that, but I think there are people who actually believe that because that's the lesson they took away from. And I've spoken to people who I respect who actually think that, you know, Covid was essentially a kind of a political hoax, the point of which was to get Trump out of office or something like that. I mean, this is a pretty common view in some, in some circles. And so the result is that people just are. Are. I think in cape, the people who do think about this or who do comment on it seem to me just incapable of, like, having any coherent thoughts about it at all. They're just locked into this kind of, you know, this state of this kind of strange fugue state that Covid generated in people who spent a lot of time thinking about it. And then the majority of people, I think are, are, are just in the. Maybe in the situation I'm in now, despite having, like, edited an entire book partly about this topic, like, where I just don't want to think about it anymore. I'm just done. And, you know, I think I'm with the normies on that. But that does also mean that they're, they're susceptible to being carried away by whatever narrative manages to take hold. I guess the, the other question is, okay, I mean, I think the theory of the Trump administration coming to office was that, you know, that the CDC and various other health agencies were just a kind of partisan operation targeting conservatives and, and that, you know, they're just this kind of liberal, tyrannical apparatus. And so their theory was, well, if we just kind of demolish this stuff, then, you know, none of that will happen again. And it seems to me, you know, there, there certainly was a need for serious auditing of, of those agencies and, and what they, what they did. And they're. Again, just the basic question of why they discarded all their own prior plans, why so many of them reversed course so, so rapidly in March 2020, so that there's, there's certainly plenty of room for a serious set of reflections on that, but I don't think this administration did that. Instead, they just kind of came in with a wrecking ball again theorizing that this is just a kind of partisan operation that needed to be. That just kind of needed to be destroyed. And so I honestly don't really know. You know, I mean, we're, we're publishing something soon about rfk, you know, which argues, among other things, that he seems not to believe in the germ theory of disease. So he seems to be basically somebody who thinks, I don't know, if you get people to not eat seed oils, then they won't get viruses or something like that. So, you know, it's, it's hard to overstate. Not, not that everyone in, in the, in the public health realm, in the administration is similarly unserious, but it is actually hard to overstate, like how, how unserious the, the ostensible reckoning that this administration has done is, I think, conceived of its predecessor as a purely partisan operation and therefore has taken it upon itself to also act as a purely partisan organization. And I just don't know how that leaves it in terms of responding to any actual public health problems which, which do exist and do cause all kinds of problems and also create panic, which, and, and this is, I think one of the flaws of the kind of COVID conspiratorial like coat, you know, lockdowns were an elite liberal globalist plot. I mean there, there are various holes you can poke in that narrative, but one of them is that, I mean, it's true that, it's true that there was kind of a media hysteria, but I think it's hard to separate that from the fact that there was a genuine public panic enabled by social media. And so to some extent the elite response was prompted by the fact that people freaked out on social media and you know, kind of generated the demand for some kind of response. And so that's, that is actually part of the story that I think the kind of purely like elite driven top down narrative doesn't fully account for that. There was a sort of, there was a social media driven kind of global hysteria around this. And clearly, you know, the media itself played some part in that. But it wasn't a simple top down causation. There was a kind of feedback loop that involved the fact that people genuinely panic about these sorts of things. And then people in power are put in the position of having to respond in some way and having, having to give the sense that they need to do something. And that's true, that's going to be true of pandemics, it's going to be true of terrorism. It's going to be true of any, any kind of event that is going to cause a public panic. And so, you know, the, you can sort of put your head in the sand and say, well, Covid was just like invented by partisan liberal elites who wanted to get rid of Trump or something like that. But you know, if, if there is an outbreak that caught, if there is an outbreak of disease that causes a public panic, you're going to be put in the position of, of having to respond to that in some way. And I think the way that the governing class responded to it last time was, was quite bad and damaging. But I don't see any kind of serious attempt to figure out how, what a better way to respond to. It would be
- [33:49]
Ashley Frawley
in my defense. When I was talking about conspiracy, I meant the opportunistic use of viruses.
- [33:56]
Jeff Schillenberger
Oh, yeah, yeah. Sorry. And I wasn't. No. And. And to. And to be clear, I mean, I'm not. I'm not entirely averse to conspiratorial readings. I just think some of them have kind of set into dogma to the, to the extent that people just think things that are pretty easily disprovable about, you know, how this all came about. And the, the reality is actually much more disturbing in some sense, because it was multi, you know, because it, It. It was not a simple sort of causal mechanism. There were. There were, you know, a very complex interaction of many different factors. And, and it's. It's very hard to trace what all those were. So clearly there were people who opportunistically or there were, you know, people in power who opportunistically saw certain advantages in it. But, you know, that's. That's sort of one part of the story. And there are also others which. Which I don't think we have a very firm grasp on.
- [34:57]
Ashley Frawley
Yeah, I mean, basic things like regulatory capture, you know, just being like, oh, yeah, we're on the side of the people, and, and then knowing your smaller competitors can't keep up with the regulations that you're pushing. But anyways, I mean, yeah, I mean, the, the answer is a lot more banal, and we're still living in that world, which is quite terrifying in terms of what I said before, in terms of the likelihood of another pandemic and that the lesson from COVID was not let's build a whole bunch of extra capacity, somehow figure out how we could do that, be able to mobilize it, because that was the big question. No one was able to do that because we have this like, just in time model for everything, including hospitals. And the United States is the worst for that as well. And you would think that it's so wasteful, but apparently not because it's the way people are doing things. And so the lesson wasn't like, to have to figure out a way to have spare capacity that you can call on. It was improved surveillance messaging. Like, how are we going to, you know, rhetorically, how are we going to deal with this again? So, you know, there's. We're going to wind up with the same situation because we haven't learned anything, and perhaps we can't because our, the models that are. The model that our hospital systems is running on is this like, lean hospital model of Just in time. Care. Which is horrible for a surge like a pandemic or even like a flu season.
- [36:17]
Matthew Schmitz
France is currently on its fifth republic. But through all the revolutions, changes in government, foreign conquest, Paris has not yielded its secret to making a good baguette in America. This prosperous, unconquered land with a single system of government for 250 years. We are now facing a situation that seems dire and inexplicable. The New York State legislature is considering legislation that would ban bromated flour as a carcinogen. Bromated flour is used by almost every bakery, every bagel shop, every pizza parlor in New York City. It gives bagels and pizza crust a kind of stretchy, fluffy character. And if this is taken away from us by people who are swept away in some kind of ideological mania, some insanity, that concludes it's better to live without bagels, without pizza, and be more healthy than to live with them and allegedly be a little less unhealthy. I don't know. I don't know if New York should go on existing, Jeff. I mean, come on, you live in the city. What are we doing here? Is the New York State legislature saying that eating pizza and bagels might be unhealthy? I mean, is that the idea here? I mean, what. This is not, we're not talking about kind of quinoa granola. I mean, like, it's a, it's a bagel. It's just a huge kind of ring of flour pizza. I mean, what are we doing here? You're trying to make it healthier.
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Jeff Schillenberger
See, this is the, the sinister effect of the Make America Healthy Again movement, which has extended its tentacles even into democratic run states.
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Matthew Schmitz
Yeah, I mean, you, you mentioned rfk. I mean, so he's abandoning germ theory, but this kind of idea that, you know, we all have to be healthier, so we, we don't have vaccines and now we also don't get bagels.
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Jeff Schillenberger
Yeah, it's. I, I mean, I find it very confusing the. Well, I, I suppose the theory here is, right, that, you know, the real problem isn't us catching hantavirus. It's that, you know, our, our bagel, our excessive bagel consumption is weakening our immune system such that we can't fight it off ourselves or something. But yeah, I'm, I'm curious. I'm actually curious to know what Maha luminaries think about this proposed legislation. I mean, it does kind of go back to a point I've made a lot, which is that there's something very bizarre about you know, rfk, you can sort of imagine him being in Fate, you know, back when he was in New York. Democratic environmental activist, maybe he would have been in favor of this ban. Don't know where he stands on it now. But clearly Democratic states have done all kinds of things, you know, banning ingredients regarded as carcinogenic. If you go to California, there are signs up everywhere telling you that like, you know, the wall of the building that you are like in the waiting room of the DMV for has carcinogens that may cause cancer. Very helpful to, to know that as you, as you wait for your DMV appointment.
- [40:12]
Matthew Schmitz
I mean, the sun, the sun causes cancer, right?
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Jeff Schillenberger
But, but it's a major cause of
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Matthew Schmitz
cancer and it's also a source of life.
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Ashley Frawley
That's it blotted out.
- [40:23]
Jeff Schillenberger
But, but, but the point is, I do find it interesting. I still haven't quite. I've written a few things about this, but I still don't quite have a grip on the MAHA sort of gop. You know, clearly there's a kind of older MAHA agenda, I suppose, which is manifested in these kinds of standard blue state legislation which this, this particular thing is part of. It reminds me maybe a little bit of the proposed ban on Big Gulps by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, which set off a lot of controversy and of course at the time was roundly ridiculed by Fox News hosts and Republican legislators, you know, as sort of nanny state overreach. But now it would seem, I don't know, now RFK is busy sort of banning food dyes and things like this. So now it seemed the, the GOP has picked up a version of this agenda. Two, they want to take away your Fruit Loops and, and you know, they want to, they want to take Froot Loops out of the, the bowls of, of crying children. But apparently there's no outcry about this violation of, of individual rights from, from Republicans anymore who are now on board with RFK stuff. So similarly, here we have. It reminds me a little bit of the. Do you remember the whole panic about trans fats? That was another weird one where suddenly it became this substance that we were supposed to be really worried about. So I do find this sort of policy making through you know, somewhat obscure sort of scientific studies that reveal like slightly increased incidences of, of certain risks based on this obscure ingredient that no one's ever heard of. And suddenly it becomes this kind of crusade that you have to rid the world of of trans fats are now bromated flour in order to, you know, Ensure health. And so yeah, I think, I think overall the agenda of, I, well, I want to be careful here, but I think most sort of health agendas of this sort are, are quite dubious and deserve skepticism. But in this case, if they're going to, you know, they, they will take my, you know, my bromated flour, nice chewy bagel with perfect elasticity out of my cold dead hands, I will definitely revolt against this tyrannical government overreach. And I, I will. It is, it is probably the thing
- [43:07]
Matthew Schmitz
most likely not gonna do anything. Just, you're not gonna be out there barricades, you're going to be contentedly eating your supermarket bagels that come in a bag of six and are shelf stable for up to, you know, 15 weeks. You're, you're just going to accept lowered living standards without, without doing anything. And so will I live in the
- [43:33]
Jeff Schillenberger
pod, eat the dinner roll style bagels.
- [43:41]
Matthew Schmitz
Oh man, it reminds me of. Well, I grew up in rural Nebraska, which is not a noted center for bagels. And once my grandmother, this was, you know, decades ago when they were both still living, but my grandmother was in the hospital and my grandfather was there with my parents and everything worked out in health terms. But as they were sitting in the, in this kind of waiting room, my grandfather picked this, you know, kind of item off of a tray and ate it. And then when he was done, he turned to my dad and said, that is the driest donut I have ever had. And it was this kind of whatever supermarket bagel he had seen and not knowing it was a bagel, had just kind of picked it up and consumed it and chewed on and said, that's the driest donut I've ever had. Anyway, that's, that's the fate of all of us.
- [44:50]
Ashley Frawley
Look, I'm trying to, I'm trying very hard not to give you a lengthy lecture on health promotion and risk by extrapolation because this is an excellent example of it. And there's just so much of this junk all over the place. Look, anything in a high enough quantity is bad and anything in a low enough quantity is inconsequential. And so much of health promotion policy is based on like, well, theoretically in high enough quantities, let's ban it. Oh, better safe than sorry. And they're like, oh, why is everybody so anxious? Why have we moralized our food? Why are we like blaming people when they get cancer? Well, because that's what you did. You basically, everything is risky. And it's like, well, what's in your Sandwich. You know, we're all meant to be like hyper vigilant all the time, but what the heck's going on? It's like, it's so funny how Maha is just so much of Trump and Maha and this sort of stuff is like, oh, we're going to have like this big change. And it's just a continuation of like decades of public health promotion and the trajectory. Anyway, so I did give you the lecture, but I will be very sad if excellent, excellent New York pizza goes down the drain. But you know what? You might deserve it because the last time I was in New York, I went to go get a slice of pizza. I went on like a, in the depths of like, cold, minus God knows what. I was like, I'm gonna get myself a New York slice. Lineups around the block. Could not get one anywhere. And I didn't. You know what I wound up eating? I think I wound up eating at like Taco Bell or something like that. And I'm, I'm, I'm mad at you and you deserve the repercussions.
- [46:19]
Matthew Schmitz
We still have McDonald's, even though, you know, McDonald's like breakfast sandwich now costs about, you know, I mean, $5 or, I mean more than that. So, yeah, I mean, I guess, I guess they can ban all this stuff. We can hardly afford it anyway. After months of Mamdani, he still has not brought back the 99 cent slice. One of his promises. I guess he can blame it on Trump, but neither, neither of these men is delivering right now in economic terms or pizza terms.
- [46:54]
Ashley Frawley
Sorry
- [46:58]
Matthew Schmitz
with that. Thank you, Jeff. Thanks, Ashley. Thanks to Steven for silently receiving my slanders. For more go to compactmag.com subscribe.
- [47:29]
Ashley Frawley
Foreign.
- [47:34]
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