Justin Wolfers & Jacob Soboroff

And look, not all victims of police violence are beautiful, red haired Christian women who have six year old children who they've just dropped off at school and a glove compartment filled with stuffed animals. Most victims of police violence don't necessarily look like that. But Magilworld has stumbled into a hornet's nest, and they are just keep they just keep kicking at the hornets. Here is a woman who is every woman in Minnesota, right. She looks like everyone

in Minnesota. She acts like much of Minnesota. You know, a lot of times Trump World will somehow imply that a victim of police violence is a criminal or deserves this because they were maybe a drug addict, or maybe you know, we're involved, or maybe held a weapon. This is a woman who had just dropped off her six

year old at school. So with that, there have been videos that we have seen of her trying to make a three point turn while the ice agents jumped in front of her and shot her three times point blank. Now there is a new video which has audio. So Renee Nicole Good says that's fine, dude, I'm not mad at you, and the ICE agent shoots her three times in the face and says, fucking bitch, we all rage.

There is a doctor who comes and tries to treat her, and ICE says no. So not only is this like murder, but it's some kind of terrifying where they keep her hostage, and instead of acting the way normal government might, which is to say we have to investigate this, we can't comment until it's investigated, they without any investigations, say, you know, this is not how any of this looks. She was an activist, she was this, and.

they come in and do insanity to us. Right, Minnesota was just minding their business and Ice and Border Patrol came in, killed one woman, shot two other people yesterday and now won't let the local authorities investigate because they want what do they want? They want to have their own people do the kind of investigation you see in a Banana Republic. I cannot express to you just the level of corruption. And by the way, two other things.

The reason you know that Trump world knows this is a loser and knows that this is going to fuck them and by the way, good.

and many Democrats seem to be calling for this. Though I wish someone in the leadership were a little more stern with it, but that's a different story for a different time.

won't hear from it again. Probably not great for Venezuelans. And then the other thing that they did, which I think is good, is that we had Leader Jeffries get this Obamacare tax credit. This expansion for three more years, and that has been seventeen Republicans voted for that. So look, that now goes to the Senate, and there's a world like just like with the Epstein files, which by the way, this DJ has not released to release one percent of the Epstein files. It is still pretty good to see

some of these Republicans breaking with Trump. Obviously not what we need, but still good.

absolutely insane. I am just super horrified by that. I think, as far as I can tell, that there is a real appetite for releasing of the Epstein files, and I think that Donald Trump is doing everything he can to obfuscate and try to not let people see them, not have the DOJ release them, and so having a special master would be really great. So I think that this

is a really smart way to do it. Again, these guys have had to just do everything they every which way they can to get people to pay attention to this.

this is yet another one. This federal prosecutor has oversted his legal one hundred and twenty day appointment, and we saw this. This was the thing we saw with everyone's favorite pageant queen in the Southern District of Virginia. You know what they're doing is they're doing emergency power stuff because they can't get congressional approval for stuff. And that is the secret to Trump is you can't get the courts.

And that's why, like when we talk about fixing the system, one of the things that we're going to really need is we're going to need all of those emergency powers. I mean, there are emergency Powers Acts that have not been repealed since nine to eleven. There are things that are working not the way they're supposed to. They're working on these sort of emergency war power stuff and that

has to stop. We have to sort of reset back to a system of like the most checks and balances you've ever seen, where you have real democratic norms and you really don't have any of these sort of special emergency powers. Because that's how we got That was sort of the first step towards this presidency of a kind of unchecked power. We have exciting news over at our YouTube channel. This second episode from our Project twenty twenty

nine series is out now. It's a reimagining where we examined what went wrong with democrats approach to politics and how we can correct it and deliver changes to help people's lives. The first episode dove into the very sexy topic of campaign finance reform, and our second episode deals with an even sexier topic, antitrust and regulation. We look at how antitrust and regulation can protect American citizens and make America thrive in an era of rampant corruption and

predatory crony capitalism. We talk to the smartest names in the field like Lena Khan, el Vero Bedoya, Elizabeth Wilkins, and Doha Mechi. Republicans were prepared for when they got the levers of power. We need democrats to be too. So please head over to YouTube and search Molli John Fast Project twenty twenty nine or go to the Fast Politics YouTube channel and find it there and help us

spread the word. Justin Wolfers, as a host of The Thing Like an Economists podcast and a professor at the University of Michigan, Welcome back, too Vast Politics.

which is when these latest numbers come out. Measures the unemployment right, which is one of the best indicators for how the economy is doing for you and I, But the one the markets really watches employment growth. They watch that because it's got very good statistical properties. There's more signal than noise normally in a normal hero then end the lesson there and move to talking about the world.

But we're not in the normal moment, or in a moment where as you say, Molly, the president fires statisticians who give him facts he doesn't like, has tried to put in place Charlattan's and clowns and undermined the very notion of truth. So how much should you believe these numbers? And the answer is so far these are as honest as can be, so I believe them. Now, let me be clear about what I do and don't believe. What I believe is that these are a serious estimate of

what's going on, using serious, high quality statistical methods. Now, remember it's always difficult, so that doesn't mean they're exactly right. Second thing is right. Now things are even more complicated because we just had a government shutdown where some numbers weren't collected, and even more, the Bureau of Labour's satistics is under resource.

believe the following instant. So these are true numbers. Now here's the other way I know they're true. They don't serve the administration's purpose. What happened this month as we learned that job growth last month was fifty thousand, which is very very low. That's so low that you could say you'd call it nearly zero. We had almost no job growth. And then the other thing that happens is every month we learn more about what happened earlier in

our history. Sometimes mentioned businesses don't send in their reports of how many people are on payroll on time, and they send them in a little bit later. As a result, we revised the numbers to make them more accurate. And one of the really big things that happened was that we learned in the fact that October is one of the worst recent months we've had that jobs fell enormously in

October and they rose by lesson we previously thought November. Again, for the audience, I don't want you to take month to month up and downs very seriously.

in work is declining. It's been declining for the past three months. It's also the case that for wildly oninteresting technical reasons, these numbers may be overstated. FED Chair Powell said of this last press conference, he thinks they're overstated by sixty thousand per month. Based on these numbers, ever since Liberation Day, remember the beginning of Trump's trade war

that happened in April, We've created almost no jobs. It may be that we subsequently learned we've actually been shrinking the number of jobs we have in the economy since Liberation Day.

ask them how many workers they have. Now, if I sent out a form to one in every hundred firms that are out there, then all I do is I take the total number of workers and I multiply by one hundred, and that would tell me how many jobs they were. The problem is, we don't know if we're sending them out to one and one hundred or one on one hundred and one, because we don't know how

many firms there are. The reason for that is every day businesses are dying and every day new businesses are being born, and the government doesn't necessarily see them until the next tax season. So we literally don't know how

many businesses there are. And so if there are fewer small businesses being born, or if there are more old businesses dying than we'd previously thought, and there's good reasons to think that's the case based on other statistics than our existing methods, which are honest, are honest, but inaccurate. So it looked no one expects that the current pessimistic numbers that show no job growth. Let me get rid of the negatives, double negatives. The current numbers show no

job growth, effectively no job growth since Liberation Day. Everyone expects that to be an overstatement, too rosy, too optimistic. Wow, If anything, reality is worse.

he'd forgotten to think about what they should be. So he gave himself another twenty four day extension, then announced a set of tariffs actually were remarkably similar to what they'd been way back in April. And then his tariff nerds said, well, we can't get that entered in the computers quick enough. That'll take another seven days. And so once we start to faff around, it takes to like August or September until we get tariffs, by which point

he also starts offering exceptions. So went back, renegotiated with Canada, and basically most trade with Canada became tariff free. He backed down on a range of things. Remember the term taco. And it turns out, if you're willing to bring just the right bauble to the White House, you can whisper and say, hey, we'd like a special exemption or exception here there or somewhere else. And so it turns out there's the tariff regime as announced, and there's the tariff

regime has actually implemented. So first of all, the announcements were months ahead of the implementation. The second thing is the announcements were big and public, and the walkbacks were fairly private, and so it turns out the amount of tariff revenue we've taken in is much less than you would have expected given the bold pronouncements, which is to say, there are now so many exceptions, loopholes riddled through the whole darn thing that and I think there's as good news.

Trump has actually implemented fewer tariffs than you said he would. That's the reporting from the New York Times. So we do have tariffs, but they're not quite as bad as Trump.

huge crash in confidence. You look at consumer confidence, it's never been this low. You look at the share of Americans who judge the quality of American macroeconomic policies being poor. It's literally never been this high right away, that's going to cause problems. The second thing is you've got this tremendous rise in uncertainty. Right The uncertainty is partly tariffs.

Will we get into trade war with China next weekend probably depends on what's happening with Epstein more than anything else. The uncertainty of those far greater than that, right. Remember the CEO of Intel walked into the White House and walked out having accidentally left behind ten percent of his company that somehow got nationalized. The White House is taking big positions in private sector companies. The White House is

calling CEOs and telling them what to do. The White House is picking up foreign leaders and just bringing them home. The White House is deciding their wives and their wives, and the White House is deciding if and which states American states that wants to invade next. All of this it's tremendous cause of uncertainty. We're two weeks away from a healthcare overhaul. Of course, we've been two weeks away from a new healthcare plan now for ten years. All of this means if you were my staff and you

came to me with a big vestment project. He said, justin we should invest millions in this new factory. I would say to you, hey, Molly, how much does it cost to wait a few months and see if some of these regulations actually pan out in ways that would undermine my investment. I've always got the possibility of delaying, and that's become an absolutely compelling choice now for a lot of companies. And that's part of what's going on with the economy too.

by the public sector. One way of figuring out what they is going on with the private sector is to look in other countries, because things like AI are genuinely global, right, things like a shift in global demand genuinely global. And so once you do that, it turns out that the US stock market performance has actually been genuinely weak. Almost any other industrialized country you visit has had stronger stock market growth since Inauguration Day than the United States. We're

at the very very bottom. So that says there is something that's driving global markets up. Whatever it is, the US is doing worse relative to every other country. So normally, if I were to look for, you know, what could an administration claim credit for, I'd say, compare the US to the rest of the world. Well, the US is

doing worse than the rest of the world. That says markets have become relatively less optimistic about the US economy relative to every other economy since the administration came to power. So the claim that the stock market is says markets believe that what the administration is doing is good. I think is upside down and wrong. It shows the infatuation. It shows that American business reporters know how to look up the Dow Jones, but don't know how to look

up what's happening in the rest of the world. I know it's weird to say that Americans can be a little inward looking, but.

I choose to speak about that in optimistic terms, which is, if it takes away the boring parts of yours and my job, my you and I get to spend more time doing fun things. And that's been what past technological revolutions have done.

So then you can think about the US as been two economic stories. There's what's going on with your AI buildout, which is going to be short term, and there's what's going on with the rest of the economy. Well, the AI build out has been very strong. That has kept stocks up around the world. It's kept the American economy growing.

The rest of the economy, though it has been very weak, in particular the parts of the economy Trump claims to care about, and that his policy agenda is meant to benefit manufacturing, the goods producing sector, which is helped by which if anyone is helped by tariffs, it would be goods because tariffs are on goods, they're actually doing incredibly poorly. Much of the rest of the economy is looking pretty weak. Is that responsive, Molly.

you know, almost it was a time machine. I was going back in time, and I could see my childhood literally disappear as I was reporting on Primetime MSNBC on the night of January seventh, twenty twenty five. And really, I think now that I've spent so much time diving deep on this is to look into the future. It was the fire of the future, and firestorm means a

lot of things. It means the actual literal event that I experienced, but it's all so the politics around the moment and how that contributed to what I went through, and so there's so.

And he went from AJHS and tried to help the children during that to leaving that job because of his opposition to the policy, and went to every mass casualty fire event over the last five years. And this guy, Captain Jonathan White, said to me, he's the one who said what you experienced was not some aberration. This is the fire of the future and it's here now. And the reason why is and he said, give me your notebook.

I was taking notes sort of a Mexican restaurant in Washington, and he said he drew an X on the page and he said, it is the confluence of four things. One obviously climate change. Two our infrastructures falling apart. Three changes in the way we live with electric car batteries exploding. You know, these toxic substances of the past now coming out.

But for misinformation and disinformation, the amount of misinfo and dis info that permeated literally as toxic as the fire and the things that we're all breathing in ourself was, if not unprecedented, I think a sign of what's to come, particularly during this administration, which is why the book is called Firestorm, the Great Los Angeles Fires in America's New

Age of disaster. Donald Trump was a president elect, but it didn't stop him from interjecting, injecting himself into the not only the recovery process, and lying about what was going on, and picking fights with Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass, but really in real time as the fire was unfolding. I don't think it is an overstatement to say it

changed the way that people experience the fire itself. No politician, Democrat or Republican has absolved for and there'll be lots of investigative reporting how did this happen?

the National Weather Service. Two guys in particular, doctor Riel Cohen and Dave Gomberg from the National Weather Services office in Oxnard, just west of LA predicted that these were we're called mountain wave winds. If there was a spark coming over the Santa Monica Mountains or the San Gabriels, would result in catastrophic fire like we have never seen before. And guess what, that's exactly what happened, and all it took literally in the Palisades was you know, there are

two different approximate causes. I guess you could say of the fire the Palisades was a holdover fire from an arson fire seven days earlier and an Alta Dana. The Eaton fire was faulty electrical equipment. The prevailing theory.

and Altadina, but literally thousands of homes destroyed. I always think that these events become x ray vision, and for me they were, especially in the aftermath of reporting this book x ray vision about the things that are underneath the surface of our society. And in the homeless capital of America, more unhoused people sleeping on the street than

anywhere else. Instantly, tens of thousands of more people were homeless forced from their homes, and we're only a year in, but so many of them have not returned, and so there's just so much, so much to talk about, so much I learned at the end of the day, it's a story about people as much as it is about politics. And while this is a tough story, it's also a hopeful one because I met so many people with whom I shared, you know, the experience of I lost my

own childhood home in this fire. My brother lost the house that he was living in, friends of mine on both sides of town. My son had his ninth birthday party in Altadena at a pizza place called Sidepi that burned down in the fire. And so there's so much

that we share too. And that's why as depressing of a year as it was, as hard as it was for me to cover this and to spend the better part of the last year researching how something like this could happen, I left feeling really hopeful because of the people that I got to meet and learn about, whether it was JPL engineers two hundred of them lost their homes in the fire living in Alta Dina to Caltech, or the firefighters that did everything they could just to stop the fire from each and every home.

and it said Katie Waldman was calling me. Katie Waldman is now Katie Miller, which was in my phone as Katie Waldman because I knew her during family separation as the junior most Press deputy at the Department of Homeland Security. She married Stephen Miller during that policy. This is Stephen Miller's wife. And while I told her I had to call her back because I was about to go up on this special report, she texted me, just like so many other people did when I was in the Palisades,

can you go check this address. You're the only person I know who is there. And I said, what could this possibly be about? It was Stephen Miller's parents' house. She asked me to go by and check and see if it was still standing. And just like I did for the kids that i'd oaken carpool or my brother, more other people that called, I did. I went by and it had burned down. And I had hoped that it was going be this moment of like Olive Branch,

that we would find common cost. And to your point about the recovery in the aftermath, not only was she working for Elon Musk, who was spreading misinformation about why the water sources had run dry during the fire and amplifying Donald Trump's conspiracy theories about the fire during the fire, but this is an administration that has decimated so many of the key agencies that are going to be critical in the recovery. National Weather Service meteorologists have been fired.

Scientists and NASA's Earth Science program that study wildfires are on the chopping block. At NIOSH National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. I had stood there on the corner in Morgantown, West Virginia, talking to some of these employees that look out for the health and well being of firefighters and firefighters safety at a time when there were a risk of cancer more than ever before. I had firefighters during this fire say because of the environmental catastrophe.

I thought during the fire and certainly after that, I'm probably going to get cancer from battling this. And that office was decimated by this administration during the DOGE cuts, and the list goes on and on.

But on McNally Avenue where I met Kate Henigan, who's a senior JPL engineer who lost her home and her story is detailed in the fire or Herbin Lloyda Wilson, a married couple who met at UPS and are incredible too, incredible working class pe people, like so many people in Altadena, that block was it looked like it was firebombd you know, And I was just there, I think last week, checking up on the block again. I'm going to see them actually tomorrow, and there's one home or two homes that

are starting to be rebuilt. It's a long way from coming back from this, and that's the case also on the other side of the town in the Palisades, because in addition to becoming victims of this horrible, horrible tragedy, we live in a city that is unaffordable.

be safe to rebuild. And so the onus is on so many home owners and people to decide whether or not they even want to come back now knowing that this stuff, whether it's lead or asbestos, which is in the lungs of the firefighters who battled it, but also in the ground. According to this reporting of so many the people who want to come back to their homes.

because the wind stuff? I don't know the say it to Anna, I don't know that that I mean, it may we may see changes in the jet stream that will create that, but we don't have that.

lot of time with Newsomb for this book. He told me a story of how when he was governor elect and Jerry Brown was governor, Trump came out to Paradise.

The difference between the LA fires and those were this was a urban conflagration, This was a city in multiple locations because of the winds that you describe ember cast that went for miles and miles things for catching on fire, miles away from the front lines of the blaze, and that in terms of climate, in terms of the mountain wave winds that were predicted by the National Weather Service workers colleagues of the guys that had been fired by

this administration since then, that was the thing to me on the ground, and as you'll read about, that was the most the most unbelievable thing to experience physically, you know, I could. I remember one night it was almost Stephanie Rule. It was the first night of the fire. I could barely stand.

the tracks, there was no turning back. And that's where the politics of the moment really took this to a place that didn't need to go.

warrant and follow their owners home or to their employers. Okay, so first of all, we really have ICE operating in like an extra legal you know, they're operating like Donald Trump. They just don't think the law applies to them. So and here's this will have sort of you will have your city, neighborhood or block will be monitored by ICE. They can track the movement of the devices and their owners over time, follows them from places of work to

other locations. According to the material that describes how the system works from four four Media, it's really scary. It is stalking. It should not be illegal. It's a huge violation of our civil liberties. You know, maybe it's for deportation, maybe it's for intimidation, maybe it's for any number of things. I mean, for example, Renee Good was not a danger. Even if she had been a danger, she should not

have been murdered. But she wasn't a danger, and she wasn't here illegally, and she wasn't the worst of the worst. In fact, she was an American citizen who had just dropped out for a six year old at school. So we know these people. They are not focused on the worst, the worst. They're just focused on hurting people and doing Trumpism and blaming people for getting her. And so here we are, ladies and gentlemen, mass deportation now right, it wasn't a vibe. It was what they were thinking. And

by the way, none of that was about deportation. Right. It was about violence, it was about hurting people, It was about crackdown retribution. Yeah, that's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.