Make Me Smart November 16, 2023 Transcript

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Kai Ryssdal 

Those days are over. You don’t have to, sell your body to the night. Roxanne. All right everybody, I’m Kai Ryssdal. Welcome back to Make Me Smart making today make sense is what we do on this podcast as best we can.

Kimberly Adams 

As best we can. And I’m Kimberly Adams. Thank you, everyone for joining us this Thursday, November the 16th.

Kai Ryssdal 

We are going to do what we do on Thursday is listen back to some of the big stories of the week and and talk about them a little bit. Here we go, Drew.

Markwayne Mullin

So this is a time, this is a place. You want to run your mouth. We can be two consenting adults, we can finish it here.

Sean O’Brien

Okay, that’s fine. Perfect. You want to do it now?

Kai Ryssdal 

Oh, my God. Do you wanna do this one?

Kimberly Adams 

Oh, sure. So many of you will probably have heard this clip already. That was Republican senator Markwayne Mullin from Oklahoma, challenging the president of the Teamsters, to a physical fight in the middle of a Senate hearing on Tuesday. Senator Mullin is a former mixed martial arts fighter and you know, the Teamsters president was there. And I actually, you know, I was looking at the article about this. And it didn’t even say what the hearing was about, because this, this air, quote, fight got so much of the attention that there was very little attention paid to actually what the work of the Senate was supposed to be. The hearing was about standing up against corporate greed, how unions are improving the lives of working families was the title of that hearing. And that was what it was supposed to be about. So in addition to the unconscionable breach of decorum, you know, then you had Bernie Sanders, who is the chair of that committee stepping in. So here’s what he had to say.

Bernie Sanders

This is a hearing to discuss economic issues. All right, if you have questions for Mr. O’Brien or anybody else on what he has said, go for it. I’m not we’re not here to talk about fights or anything else.

Kimberly Adams 

And watching that exchange, just really encapsulated to me, what we’re really dealing with on the Hill right now, which is some people who are literally trying to do the work of governing, and managing this economy, and other people who are, as you’ve said, many times, Kai, just there to fight, just there to fight. And then, you know, Sanders came back later with, you know, this this other bit.

Sean O’Brien

Can I respond?

Bernie Sanders

No, you can’t. This is a hearing. And God knows the American people have enough contempt for Congress.

Kimberly Adams 

And it just got worse. Just got worse.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, yeah. So, so number one, this is completely embarrassing. For for, well, we have to say it for Republicans in Congress, because this was a Republican in Congress that you also saw the shoving news from from Kevin McCarthy to Tennessee Republican whose name I think is Burchett. Right? Burchett. McCarthy elbowed him in the back as witnessed by NPR’s Claudia Grisales. There was also a really, an interesting interview this morning on Morning Edition. A Martinez was talking to a woman who wrote about physical violence on the rise in the capitol before the Civil War. And she said, this is what happens when people can’t beat you on ideas, they get physical with you. And she went to the Charles Sumner beating in 1858, age 60 ish, whatever it was. It was really, really, really, really interesting. And it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s bad. It’s bad when physicality comes to what’s supposed to be a legislative body.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, and just again, the effort to do the work of governing is so suppressed at this moment. Right? And there’s no, you know, who was it? Who was the Republican was a Chip Roy, who was literally yelling at members of his own party, before the house left for the holiday recess. He was like, give me something, give me something to take back to my district that we actually did give me anything, saying the quiet thing out loud.

Kai Ryssdal 

And yeah, there was a there was a thing that went by my social feed this morning, and I will look it up as we as we go on. Something about this Congress being the least productive Congress in like half a century or something. They’ve passed 21 laws, 21.

Kimberly Adams 

How many of them are post offices?

Kai Ryssdal 

Oh so here we go. “With only 21 bills making into law halfway through November the 118th Congress controlled by Republicans in the House and Democrats in the Senate is on the most sluggish pace to make law since the Congress that met during 1931 and 1932. That was during the Great Depression?

Kimberly Adams 

Okay. It was like the Great Depression right?

Kai Ryssdal

Yes it was. Yes it was.

Kimberly Adams 

There wasn’t much to be done because there was no revenue. Yeah, let’s move on. What’s the next one?

Joe Biden

We’re not trying to decouple from China. What we’re what we’re trying to do is change the relationship for the better.

Kai Ryssdal 

So that was Joe Biden, President Biden speaking yesterday about his meeting with Xi Jinping, the leader of the People’s Republic of China, they met in California, as everybody who’s been near a television set or radio or any internet connected device will know. Just ahead of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco. There were some agreements, as you know, on fentanyl and restarting military to military talks. I think what’s really interesting, though, is that what he was trying to do is to stabilize the relationship between the two biggest economies in the world and maybe it worked. Maybe it didn’t, we’ll see because there have been agreements on fentanyl before we have had military to military communication before. So we’ll see where this one goes. But, but I think it’s a big deal. I think it’s a big deal.

Kimberly Adams 

There are also some hints that we may be getting the pandas back.

Kai Ryssdal 

Oh, I saw that I saw that I know. Right? You know, but honestly, you have to say to yourself, come on, if he was going to come to if she was going to come to this country, could’ve brought the pandas with them, or better yet, leave them here.

Kimberly Adams 

You know, but can you imagine like, what a photo op if you’d like brought the pandas with him and like. Although that would have been a little too, like on the nose, stereotypical stuff. So, all right, let’s go to the next clip.

Chuck Schumer

This year, I am happy to announce there will be no government shutdown. As of Friday night, the government is staying open.

Kimberly Adams 

So that, thanks, Chuck. That was a Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer basically announcing that the continuing resolution has made it through and we will not have a government shutdown. Notice he said this year, because it’s a continuing resolution. It is not the actual appropriations bills, it is, you know, pushing the actual big decision making on the funding of the GOP federal government until after the new year. Now, what’s funny about this not funny, but interesting to me, is on Monday, I did a story because all through the weekend, I started hearing about this laddered CR, this idea of doing a continuing resolution with two different deadlines. I had never heard this term before. And I’ve been covering Washington for a while. And I called around a bunch of people. And they had never heard of it either including people who’d been on like the Budget Committee for 20 years, are like they made this up. And they’re like, there’s no way that they’re going to do this what a gimmick, this is just the Republicans trying to you know, get around the fact they can’t govern. And yet here we are a few days later, with a laddered CR. And I shudder to think what this means for the backsliding of the process. Because it used to be that you were supposed to pass all 12 appropriations bills by the funding deadline and be ready to fund the government October 1, that stopped happening. And we started having these omnibus bills. And then we had many bus bills where you sort of broke it into chunks, right. And then we couldn’t even get those done. And we started having all these continuing resolutions, and then the omnibus bills. And now we can’t even get to the omnibus bills, because we keep doing continuing resolutions. And I mean, usually, we get a continuing resolution around the time of the funding deadline, it kicks it to around the holidays, and the holidays are the impetus for them to actually fund the government. Right. And but this looks like it’s gonna go well into the new year, we’re going to be up for the next funding cycle before we get funding done for the fiscal year that we’re in. And now that they’re willing, they have demonstrated that they are willing to break apart the actual funding deadlines that I don’t think bodes well for the process at all.

Kai Ryssdal 

So that’s a really important point. That’s that last little bit, they’re breaking apart the deadlines. And that’s just bad for process. That’s a really important point.

Kimberly Adams 

And process matters. I know it sounds super wonky. But the process matters because this is affecting the government services that you rely on. If your government, the government service that you rely on happens to get packaged into the wrong bucket, you might have a completely different outcome than if it gets put into the bucket with the one on a different timeline and different priorities.

Kai Ryssdal 

Totally. And that’s the fallacy of the Republican plan, right? The fallacy of this plan is that, oh, it doesn’t really matter. We’ll just get to it and it’ll get done and don’t worry about it. And that’s actually not the way the federal government works, right. There are deadlines for money to be spent. There are deadlines for checks to go out there deadlines for reimbursement and all of those things. And it all goes kerflooey if Congress doesn’t do its job, that That’s, you know, that’s the truth.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah. And what’s funny about this is that they ended up basically with level funding, as in on the budget that Pelosi did. So what else? All right. I’m done for one last piece.

Kai Ryssdal 

Let’s go.

YouTube AI

We’re experimenting with new ways to let artists songwriters and producers instantly hear their ideas, new ways to use technology to help them create music, like singing a melody to create a horn section.

Kai Ryssdal 

Wow, AI is going to take over our lives. So that was a promo video from YouTube. And this new AI music experiment, they released an early look at the project as we just played for you. They’re developing it with Google Deep Mind. So you know, Google, Google’s big brains are working hard on this one. It’s just testing out there with artists and musicians. But, but look, AI is coming for every slice of this economy, every slice of this society, and you just need to be aware of it. That’s why I think, why we picked that one.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, I was digging into it this afternoon. And one of the other things they’re doing in an blatant attempt to lure people over from Tik Tok is for YouTube shorts. They’ve partnered with some artists like Charlie Puth, and Demi Lovato, and John Legend and a couple of other people and you can like type in, Oh, give me like, an up beats, you know, clip for a morning in Florida. And it uses that artist’s voice to like, generate a little soundtrack to whatever little video you want to post on YouTube shorts. That is pretty, I can imagine that being pretty compelling for people who are very into posting to have your own custom soundtrack by an artist, you have to be the background for your video. And it was just like, you type in a phrase and then you pick which artists you want to make it. And it makes a little snippet in that style. And, you know, the person from YouTube who was talking was talking about how it’s important to be responsible with all of this and to respect the rights of the art artists and that it’s supposed to build on human creativity and not replace it. Good luck. Good luck.

Kai Ryssdal 

Good luck with that. Yeah, it’s true. Yeah,

Kimberly Adams 

that’s, that’s probably we should end it before we go deep into the dark place. That is it for today. We’re gonna be back tomorrow with economics on tap. That’s our YouTube live stream show and we have a great time if you can join the YouTube live stream. We have a poll we talk about drinks we gossip and chit chat and talk trash. Also in the fan run Discord, but you can also just watch or listen to the podcast later. But we’re going to be on YouTube at 6:30 Eastern, 3:30 Pacific so you can join us for more news drinks of course and a game.

Kai Ryssdal 

This episode of this podcast which is called Make Me Smart was produced by Courtney Bergsieker with assistance from H Conley. Today audio engineering by Drew Jostad. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. Our intern is Niloufar Shahbandi.

Kimberly Adams 

Marissa Cabrera is our senior producer. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts, and Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital.