Redefining Masculinity and Personal Agency

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She's written thousands of songs about men who've broken up with her and zero about blowjobs. Connect the dot s . Go, go, go! Welcome to the 389th episode of the ProvG Pod. What's happening? Just a reminder that we are live on Substack. It is so interesting. Substack is we've been talking about doing a subscription strategy for a while. I'm gonna talk about the business end of it. Subscription revenue is worth three to five X and ad revenue is worth one to two X because ad revenue in a recession goes away. People are lazy in recession and don't cancel their subscriptions. So I think a lot about enterprise value, and I thought, okay, the two things we need to do to establish greater enterprise value, you always want to be thinking when you're in business, how do I increase revenues by 30%, but increase the enterprise value by 50%? And for us, a subscription program, and we finally have enough assets across the portfolio, I think, to offer compelling a compelling subscription offering. 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Anyways, we're just getting started. Uh but our plan is to surround you with great content so that you not only access the free unpaid version, but you sign up for subscription and also get access to our events or first or premier access to our events. Anyways, to resist is futile, subscribe now at propgymedia.com and become a member of our community. Also, if you love our stuff and uh find you can't afford it for whatever reason, just send an email to infopropymedia.com and we'll figure out a scholarship for you . Anyways, moving on. In today's episode, we speak with Senator Corey Booker, a U.S. Senator from New Jersey, former mayor of Newark, and Democrat recognized for criminal justice reform. I'm a huge fan of the senators. He's a moderate. He's a great leader, um, super compelling. And he's just proposed I don't know if you call it a tax holiday or a tax cut for the middle class or the first seventy five thousand dollars are tax free and we want to dig into that. I am absolutely fascinated with tax policy. I think it's the boring stuff that moves the needle in a society and in our society, simply put, whether it's declining birth rates or resentment or income inequality, a lot of it comes down to tax policy. And uh at the end of the day, one of the things that I think really, really ails our society is the following stat, and that is today a 70-year-old is 72% wealthier than they were 40 years ago, and a person under the age of 40 is 24% less wealthy. And so what do you know? They're not having kids. But anyways, uh excited to have uh someone who uh I think of as a raging moderate. Here's our conversation with Senator Corey Book er. Uh Senator, so uh just a little bit of context for our listeners. The Senator has literally been running to and from the floor to to vote. I occasionally I guess they ask you to do that. So very much appreciate. And if if if the senator is out of breath, it's because he's been running back and forth. Uh appreciate your time today, Senator. I'm grateful. I'm a fan of your work and grateful being conversation with you tod ay. So obviously a lot of stuff going on, but I wanted to spend some time talking specifically about some of the things you've been working on. So let's start with the Keep Your Pay Act. And first off, I think it's smart that Democrats have finally figured out that America loves loves the idea of income redistribution as long as it's in the form of a tax cut. So I salute you on that. I think it's politically astute. And uh my understanding is it it says uh the Keep Your Pay Act would make the first $75,000 of household income tax-free. Um Here's the downside. The Yale Budget Lab puts the cost at five and a half trillion dollars over ten years. What is the funding side of that? It is uh really unrigging the tax system. So if if you're wealthy in this country, extraordinarily wealthy, you have a lot of ways to avoid paying taxes. And so the way this pays for it is simply by taking away of all those ways of avoiding taxes at the very, very top, some of which we've talked about in the past. It raises the top uh income tax from like 37, 39, um, and making sure, frankly, that um we have a corporate tax rate. Remember they were asking for twenty-five, Donald Trump gave them twenty. So it it it turns that dial of of up a little bit above twenty-five to about twenty-eight, twenty-nine. And all of that actually produces enough to give that to raise that standard deduction to 75K. And this is really what I feel is I don't like a Democratic Party that criticizes success. I I want I want somebody to invent something that transforms my life and the life of my neighbors. I want somebody to be an artist and create some the next beautiful work that inspires a nation. I can go on. I want those people to be successful. I want them to enjoy the wealth that comes with that success. I just want you to pay a fair tax rate that doesn't make you pay less of an effective tax rate than the guy in Iran right now uh serving their nation on this unconstitutional war or the cop or firefighter or nurse in your neighborhood. We should have a tax rate that's fair across the board with a little progressivity in it to make our society more just and frank frankly socially mob ile. So I I think when people hear that, they nod their heads. The quick math I've done is that it would be hard to find to tax people, you know, who make over a certain amount of You have done budget scoring on this that if you raised taxes on the wealthy and closed certain loopholes, that you could actually raise this five and a half trillion dollar shortfall? Aaron Powell Yeah, we have. And there's some pretty big windfalls when you get rid of things like the stepped-up basis, which is just a ridiculous way to avoid paying taxes. For estate taxes. For estate taxes, yes. So there's some pretty big windfalls when you get rid of carried interest. Um and we could re put we can put that back into this to pay for it because the staggering deficit we have right now is something Democrats should talk about more, where not only are we spending our great-grandchildren's money, uh, but we're actually also putting our very currency in crisis. So I I just think we should be coming up with big, bold ideas that make the average American feel that there's justice. Because if you're making $150,000 a year under this plan, you have two kids, you're struggling to make it in New Jersey, but now you get to keep about $10,000 more of your earnings. If you're a single mom with a young child making $60,000, you get almost $6,000 more of your own hard-earned dollars. So that's going to help people to start believing that this capitalist system, this free market system, which was very different in my dad's era than it is now, that the system actually can work for them as well. So uh let me just say Senator, I love this. I think it's smart for Democrats to go on offensive and be the party of ideas, not indignate I love tax policy and I know enough about it to be dangerous. The idea of the first $75,000 being tax free, um it I I a hundred percent get it notionally, but would I believe it ends up doing is up until about $50,000, people don't actually pay a lot of federal income tax. So doesn't this end up actually benefiting the most? And stay with me here, upper middle class taxpayers, because what it does is it shifts their tax burden higher such that the people who start to pay real tax rates are actually the biggest beneficiaries. Isn't this really more of a tax break for the upper middle class versus the middle, the middle, middle, and the lower middle? Yeah, no. There's there's two things that check that. One is I think we need to start reimagining what it is to be middle class in this country. At the example I gave you with the $150,000, a lot of people uh would think that that's a middle class income. But if you're living in uh New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, it's just not. But the second thing that protects against that and makes this very progressive is we do a very big expansion of the child tax credit and we do a very big expansion of the earned income tax credit. Remember, these are fully refundable tax credits. When we did that for one year under the Biden administration, we were one vote shy of making it permanent. We virtually cut child poverty in half in this country. And when you tinker with the earned income tax credit and expand it, ' rightcause now if you're over sixty five you don't qualify and we both know many seniors who pick up extra work. And if you're a young person in college working, you don't qualify either. We expand the qualifications. So it actually does help more the lower income tax brackets as well. But I am telling you right now, when I have sat at kitchen tables now and just went around the table cold, I said, how much are you making? We have a tax calculator on my website in a in a working class New Jersey neighborhood, when I when we told people how much they would be uh getting back, it it it made instant sense to them and was a relief to them because all this nibbling around the edges that we've been able to deliver people. And I'll support Biden's wins, the Infrastructure Act, the CHIPS Act. These were great bills, but the people in neighborhoods like the one I live in is one of the only senators, if not the only, that lives in a working class low-income neighborhood. My census track, I think, is below the poverty line. For people in those communities, when you actually translate that for them into how many dollars their families savinging us say finally somebody is doing something or proposing something that could make a real substantive difference for my family. And in an era where we're spending seven trillion on five trillion in receipts isn't at the end of the day kind of to try and be the grown-up in the room just to not cut anyone's taxes, but raise taxes at the high end and cut entitlements, isn't this I mean the fear is that this is quite frankly, we just don't have the money to do this. What's your argument for justifying I I I don't think anyone's against a tax cut for the for the middle class. I think that it's hard right now, and I don't think anyone or anyone on our party is going to argue with the notion that the upper income wealthy aren't paying their fair share of taxes. But is it reasonable when we're at seven trillion, we're at a two trillion annual deficit. Is it re- is it a reasonable argument back that look, we'd love to do this, but we until we get our house in order on the spending side, we really can't cut taxes for anybody right now. Aaron Powell So let me take two two points to you, and you know this because I've actually heard you talk about it. The first point is we are profligate spenders. Not that we don't have good priorities as as a government. I'm I'm for the the investments, the Department of Education was making, health and human services making hell, if you were an investor, which you are, and I could tell you you can invest a dollar in science research at the NHS uh National Health Services and you can get uh uh fully three dollars back on every dollar you invest, we'd be like, hey, sign me up to continue and invest in that. If I told you Pell Grants actually return investment to the overall taxpayer, where we are profligate spenders is areas where we do not get a return on our investment. And there's two areas we could be cutting billions on. One is our military spending. I'm actually one of these Democrats that believe, uh, as a guy who spent uh too much of my life in the weight room. Uh I wanna be big and strong and I wanna be able to intimidate any of our potential adversaries that we could kick the crap out of them should they do something uh uh uh offensive against us. But John McCain and I used to talk about this all the time. We spend tens of billions of dollars because of corruption within the military-industrial complex. And we haven't even passed an audit in the last eight years. I'm the only person that was an executive in the in the sen in the Senate. There's there's mayors, there's former governors, there's county executives. But I cut my government twenty five percent when I was mayor, quarter of my government. Difficult as hell, but it was a recession, and I had to live within my own means. We found so much waste once we cleared transparencies, deep audits. We found so many more efficiencies. And the military is one area we can do that. I'm going to continue though, because another thing that you and I both know is that the only way out of this problem is not just cutting, but it's also in growing our economy. And there are some obvious things that this country is not doing that could create increased economic growth and therefore increased revenues. One of them is the one thing that we're effing up royally right now, which is called immigration. You literally can move your economy almost up another uh a whole click, if you open legal robust immigration from agricultural workers to what my Stanford uh president once said to me, uh, he came to Washington demanding to see me, and I thought, oh my God, did I not finish a paper way back in the 90s. But he said to me, We we graduate people from Stanford with degrees and things that half of Congress can't spell. And then we kick them out of our country because their student visa is up. So what we need is the same thing we did when I was a mayor, and what did I do? One is I brought my government and made it more efficient. With less people, we took potholes from being fixed in a month to being fixed in a matter of hours. We brought in technology and innovation, streamlined services. We actually made it a better customer satisfaction because there's way too much friction. In fact, the way it's the reason why it's so hard to pay taxes in this country, again, is that corruption that allows companies that benefit off of complicated taxes and then charge you for helping you file them. We have a system that is built-in inefficient because people are making profits off of it. So the first thing that we did in Newark was cut the size of our government and make it more efficient. But the other thing we did in Newark, after 60 years of losing population, after 60 years of disinvestment, we brought about Newark's biggest economic development boom in 60 years and increased the size of our population for the first time in 60 years, and we grew ourselves out of the deficit as well. So the problem that we have, and the last point I really want to make, if the first one is we need to start auditing the military, making it more efficient. As John McCain said, we could be doing more in terms of the growth and strength of our military with less money if we were efficient. Number two, we need to grow our economy, and there's some common sense ways we could do it now, like we did it between 1940 and 1980 when we had massive growth. But the last thing that we have to do as a country is begin to attack what I think is the biggest thing that's that's driving up costs, which is just the corruption writ large uh in America, is the fact that we have allowed this concentrations of the wealth. Remember, I want to celebrate wealth, but they're finding ways to make us less efficient. Let me give you one last example of a windfall we can do that would bring tens of billions of dollars into our government. We tried to do it under Biden and then Donald Trump fired them all, which was to hire IRS people to do a special task, to go after big earners with complicated tax returns who are finding ways to to to build the American people. The Congressional Budget Office said it simply: there are lots of tax cheating going on at the higher echelons, and if we just enforced our tax laws, we would be collecting tens of billions of dollars more. So their money is out there, but our democracy right now is in peril. And you and I know this because half of our country doesn't believe in free market democracy. They don't believe the system is working for them, and they're beginning to turn to the extremes on both sides of the aisle that should make us all worried. What we need to do is restore people's faith that the deal works, like FDR did, at a similar period when there was stratification of wealth in cre extremely great extremes, when the fundamentals of our economy were crumbling, he said it's time for a new deal. Well, I think the Democratic Party needs to stop thinking so small, nibbling around the edges. They need to start telling the truth about our problems, but they need a big vision that can help to redeem the dream for Americans. And a tax plan like this, immediately, President elected, the party, Congress is controlled by the same party, they could pass a radical shift in our tax plan that benefits the middle class and working class, and they can restore people's faith that, hey, somebody's fighting for the little guy and making this, and that would give the the whoever the president is and the party in power the momentum to start taking on some of the other stubborn problems that actually bring about more big solutions to these complicated problems . We'll be right back. Although he had big ambitions, his socials lacked creative vision. That bad. Maybe vampid epitaph? I have an idea. Bob launched Canva and got into gear. Create the video in the vampire team and make it the funniest M It went viral. Bob's business are revival. Now imagine what your dreams can become when you put imagination to work at canva.com. Support for the show comes from VCX, the public ticker for private tech. 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And listeners to the show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help you get your job to the premium status it deserves at indeed.com slash podcast. Just go to indeed.com slash podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast. That's indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring, do it the right way with indeed . One of the reasons, Senator, I was so excited to speak to to you, and I don't know if you appreciate this label or not, but I think of you as a raging moderate. And one of the call signs of a moderate is fiscal responsibility. And I think of you as someone who does, you know, try at least make a good faith attempt to speak about how you're going to pay for some of your ideas. You mentioned some things that I think a lot of moderates agree with. Tons of waste in military spending, a tax gap, maybe up to $750 billion a year, closing loopholes, uh thinking about a sane immigration policy that continues to attract the best players such that we grow our economy. You know, the only way we're going to deal with the deficit is both cutting spending and growth. What I don't see in your explanation there is where I think is the third leg of the stool, if you will, of being a fiscal or fiscally responsible, and that is entitlements, specifically Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, that in 1970 were 2 percent of GDP, are now 9 percent and are projected to be fourteen to sixteen percent of GDP. I don't see a way out of our fiscal a responsibility unless a Democrat, a moderate such as yourself is willing to touch this third rail and talk about Apologies for the tattoo. No, no. Give me your raging moderate label and you'll make me very happy because uh I'm finding myself angry and raging more and more, but I I keep turning to what I want America to know is that like 75% of us all agree generally in the same stuff and we're not getting things done because of of people way out there on the wings who who seem to benefit from sclerotic uh political war. Um, I call it the political industrial complex. So let me let me give you two things and get you back just to when I had to balance budgets and manage people. So I told you how much we cut our budgets, but there's two things I could not control, two costs that I had no control over. One was that my healthcare spending was going up eight, nine, ten percent a year, and the other was my pensions. And I had no control of that, no power to change those things. And I was going out to m talk to some other CEOs uh to really bitch to them about uh brag and bitch at the same time, like brag that, hey, look at all these savings I found, look at the creative things I've done. Um, but bitch, that like I'm screwed because healthcare costs are going up so much. And this guy who was the head of one of the biggest uh Jim Murren, I hope he's out there listening. Uh one of the head of the biggest casino companies out in Vegas, global company, said to me, Corey, I had the same problem, but I fixed it. And I'm like, well, what did you do to control your out-of-control healthcare costs? He goes, Well, one day I went down in my in my cafeteria where we feed thousands of employees, and I see deep fryers and cinnabon like products and all the junk and the crap we were feeding people. And I was appalled, and I ripped it all out. And he said he was almost getting union complaints until he brought in the best chefs and and and and the best food. And people loved it. In fact, he said I would have all these single parents who would then leave their double shifts and go home and stop at a McDonald's. They were asking me, can we get this food to go to feed my kids? He said within a matter of months, his cost curve on health care started to bend. The biggest so-called entitlement that is worrying what is our problem right now in America is sickness, illness, Medicaid, Medicaid. We are spending more on healthcare by a long shot than any other country, and we have the worst results. And the argument we're stuck in is how to clean up the water and not how to turn off the spigot. So let me tell you something you may not know that should outrage every American. 93% of our ag subsidies, 93% of the billions of dollars that you and other taxpayers pay for go to the foods that make us sick. Only 7% go to the healthy food. So let me show you pilot pro. First of all, that's why my kids in my neighborhood, predominantly black and brown neighborhood, walk into a corner grocery store and get a Twinkie cheaper than an apple. Not because of the free market, because we've chosen to subsidize everything in the Twinkie and not the that's why fast food restaurants proliferate. They do not that's not the true cost of the food, the dollar meal. It's our government subsidizing everything there. And then if they try to go get a bucket of salad, it costs twenty bucks. We have a such a effed up system controlled by the monopolistic companies that right now are controlling our food system. But let me let me tell you right now, there's been some battles. I'm on the ad committee, and perhaps after this election, I'll be the ranking Democrat, and maybe even the chair if we take back the Senate of the AD Committee. And I always see the fear in the in the big food uh oligopoly because Because what we've done is some small pilot programs to prove it right. Like, hey, instead of using SNAP food stamps, where Coke and Pepsi make billions a year, I'm not exaggerating, off of our tax dollars that go to their sugar water that has no nutritional value, even though the program is called supplemental nutritional assistance program, that drives diabetes. Now half our country is diabetic or pre-diabetic, we've done some in innovative programs like something called uh GusNIP, which is a terrible Washington name for simply giving people double the value of their food stamps or their SNAP to to for fresh, healthy foods. Well, I went out to one of these places in Newark at an urban farm I started when I was mayor, and I had a camera crew out there with me for a documentary called Food Inc., and we had African-American woman after African American woman coming up and telling us. One woman's like, I had my doctor told me permanent uh digestive uh problems. I had to take medicine. It cost $700 a month. I asked her, What's your copay? A hundred dollars. So we're picking up taxpayers, six hundred dollars for that. And she said I started sourcing all my food from this farm instead of the corner place where I can only find, you know, all the the horrible foods. She said, my doctor called it a miracle that now I don't need the medicine at all. I had a 80-year-old diabetic come up to me and say the same thing. I'm sourcing all my food from the farm now. It reversed my diabetes. We have a system that the all the incentives are for sickness and death and suffering. We need a radical reimagining of where we put our subsidies. I want, if you want a hamburger, french fries, and a milkshake, I want you to have that. It's a freaking free country. But I want to have you pay the real cost for that. So I know that we want to argue about entitlements, but why aren't we making the question, why do we need so much healthcare in America? Why is the demand so high? So a lot of the problems that we have financially, and by the way, obese people, sick people, people with Alzheimer's, all of this is connected to our food system. You're less productive. You have less well-being. But yet we've created a system that incentivizes wealthy corporations, record record profits off of our sickness and suffering. And I want to stop that uh uh i in the years to come. Just on social security, a more point of question. I like you benefited from a Pac Ten education. Very lucky, I'm a wealthy man. Next year I'm eligible for Social Security. Should I get Social Security? Listen, let me tell you. I I I I don't think you should, to be honest with you. I really don't. Mm-hmm. So what does that mean? Means testing? I would do a few things. First of all, like give people the option to opt out . You know, everyone has the option to opt out. But again, I'll go back to my question. Do you believe we should raise the age of eligibility and means test social security? I will tell you this. I I came in thinking that we should raise the age, and and I've I I now do not believe we should raise the age. I really don't. In a time of AI and automation and all of these things, I I I do not think we need to raise the age to make this solve. And I've sat down, as you probably have, with a lot of people doing the the math on this. If we simply and I would like to skip a lot of middle income earners and get back to simply raising the the social security tax on upper income earners. I think we can make enough to make the system solvent. Yeah, I 100% agree. It makes no sense that it stops at $160,000 in terms of the tax. So I wanna I want to go to some of the bigger news, bigger news in the news . So Iran, do you think do you think there was any legitimacy for that warranted military action and had the president come to Congress got consultation or perhaps even congressional approval that there was any legitimacy to the notion that there was a reason to engage in some sort of authorized or military operation in Iran right now? None whatsoever. And if you just listen to the president, he he will show you his lies. So at one point he says he's a completely obliterated their nuclear program. Then he comes back and tells us they're imminent in a nuclear breakout in a matter of days. That's a clear lie, and no evidence is in the public that suggests that. Number two, he says uh it's because they're slaughtering and murdering their uh their own constituents. He he he that was one of the original threats, and why you said he was moving military assets in that area. Well, he's definitely obliterated that lot But they did slaughter thirty thousand of their own citizens in what, forty eight, and and you heard nothing. And and unjustified. But if every place from the Chinese with the Uyghurs, uh, to what's going on right now in Sudan, which is the largest mass slaughters going on on our planet. If that was the justification for U.S. military involvement, we'd be involved in a lot of other countries. The reality is Donald Trump had no justification for bringing us unilaterally, making a unilateral decision bringing us to war. No justification. And if he thought there was a larger reason for it, he should have come to Congress, made his case, and had a vote because that power lies with us. But now we're in even a worse situation. He's he has not learned from history. He has repeated the mistake of mistakes of the past. He's gotten us into a yet another Middle East war with no off-ramp. Because again, if it's to say I'm going to take away the nuclear threat, that would take boots on the ground to go after fissile material. Regime change would take boots on the ground to go after uh uh these people. Th there is an there is no end game in this. And meanwhile, we've changed warfare as we know it. Yes, our extraordinary military has deeply disgraded degraded their near-term combat abilities. But the one thing that's going to be very hard in wars of the future is how cheap it's gotten to design, develop, and deploy drones. And so here we have this president who's gotten us into a war where the Iranians are still able to launch attacks at us, and because of the choke point of the Strait of Hormos, he's been they've been able to uh against the strongest military on the planet Earth, completely choke up that area, which is going to send oil shocks that even if the vote- even if the war star stopped today would still cause uh serious harm to our American economy and the global economy as well . I think one of the frustrations is I I just can't imagine the majority of the Democ of Democrats and a lot of Republicans are nodding their head as they agree with you around we kind of uh uh that at a minimum the execution of this war, and it is a war now, has been, you know, borderline if not fully incompetent. There's a certain frustration though that there's a lack of leadership from the Democratic Party in terms of our ability to stop things or to get things done, as opposed to just, you know, moving from against indignance to ideas. And I would imagine some Republicans even feel that way. We see a lot of Republicans in Congress resigning because of their frustration. What do you think the strategy is for Democrats to, if you will, stop the President's actions around this and other things that the American public or that at least Democrats don't agree with. Aaron Ross Powell So I I'm going to share one of the share with those people who feel anger and frustration the Democratic Party that I do too. I think that we need to be a lot more imaginative in how we're fighting this. This is why even right now we're me and a small group of Democrats are forcing every week, sometimes twice a week, I hope, just more and more votes uh because we have a privileged lever that we're using to force the Senate to to have confront this uh awful war and try to leverage what the Senate should be doing is having hearings, debate checks and balances, oversight, which they're not doing at all. But I I think that we need to understand a couple things. One is elections have consequences. And this election that we allowed Donald Trump to win, um, and I will say again, this is an indictment of the Democrats. Donald Trump didn't win. It really was our failure to mount a successful fight, has consequences. That said, I'm seeing things start to shift, not as fast as I want. And I think that I can think of some ways it could shift faster. But you're seeing the popularity of this president really successfully decline month after month going lower and lower and lower, setting up for in November, what could be not just a wave election, but a tsunami election, which then will send a signal to Republicans, do you want to chain yourself to Donald Trump going into a 28 cycle or do you want to start doing your job? Because right now, Senate Republicans are in a pickle. They're more afraid of Donald Trump than they are of their constituents, which speaks to what Thomas Jefferson said. When people are afraid of their government, there's tyranny. When the government is afraid of their people, there's liberty. Well, my Senate colleagues on the Republican side are more afraid of Donald Trump than they are of their people. And that's why we have this authoritarian outrage of a president now. So voters have power. People have power. I'm hoping that in the coming days we see yet another mass demonstration in this nation that's even bigger than the last, that definitely sends signals to Republicans in the legislature that, you are on sinking ground. Get off and start voting your conscience. But one more thing, and this is something I know you agree with me on. I don't want Donald Trump to be the center, the main character of this story of of our democracy in crisis, of our country in crisis. It's a mistake. The problems you and I have already mentioned, from the outrageous uh uh expansion of entitlement costs to the deficit to um uh the military uh corruption, all of those things were going on before Donald Trump. If we don't start telling the truth to what American voters already know, is that so many of the challenges we have right now are because the decisions made in Washington are being corrupted by a never-before imagined amount of money flowing into our politics. So, what gives Donald Trump the power to threaten b,ully, intimidate into submission so many of my colleagues, it's not just his popularity and his MAGA base, it's that, and this has happened since this last year, where he can simply threaten, or Elon Musk can threaten, if you don't do what I tell you to do, I will put twenty million dollars in a primary against you. Nobody ever conceived of that much money being so easily spent by people who have record wealth. Let me tell you right now, I'm negotiating a a crypto bill as we speak. I was just with my Republican uh colleague who I'm negotiating with. I'm one of these Democrats that thinks Democrats are too much of the nanny state sometimes, and that uh blockchain technology and and a lot of the things that are coming at us that we need to create safe sound regulation uh but not try to stop people uh from having access to a lot of these new tools. Well, that said, in the middle of the negotiation, the crypto industry puts a nearly $200 million pack together and is spending at levels that are unconscionable in races, because they can. And that's how things get done around here. So as much as you want change and don't like Donald Trump, the the deeper problem that's bigger than him right now is we have a system that doesn't respond to the democrat to the democracy that we created. The system is responding to the power and the wealth that comes with large concentrations of capital and enormous wealth amongst certain a small group of individuals that's bigger than ever before in human history. We've got to stop this corruption. We've got to get the money out of politics in a big, bold way to restore trust in our government. I think everyone's nodding their head, but again, does that involve overturning the Supreme Court decision on Citizens United. How do you do that? Absolutely does. I mean last look, we're we're trying to roll out as I get ready for my reelection in November big ideas that are easy to understand. So the first one is the tax code is rigged. We are going to make sure we give a standard deduction of $75,000 by unrigging the top and transferring those tax breaks to middle class. That's number one. Number two, for us, is going to be a big comprehensive bill on corruption, on how do we get all the corruption that makes me sick because ten years ago I was one of the first people in Congress saying I'm not taking corporate PAC money. Um I'm now saying this on all ideological or issue PAC money, period. But but you know senators can trade stocks. All my stocks, all my I have mutual funds, but there's corrupt things that our president can create a crypto coin and have people uh foreign adversaries invest in that uh crypto coin and make him a lot of money. So we're gonna put forward a very big omnibus bill that is just common sense stuff that's been supported by people on both sides of the aisle to to undermine the the horrible Supreme Court decision and create uh fairness and ground rules for our politics. That has got to be part of what I think is the renewal of the American uh democracy that we need right now. We'll be right back after a quick bre ak. Support for the show comes from Forra. Planning a trip takes time, effort, and a bit of skill. Some people scroll through travel inspo and throw things together like they do in a shopping cart. But for others, they take a travel itinerary and bring it to life. With Fora, your eye for detail and discovery becomes your calling card. You're not just going on great trips, you're creating them and sharing them as a travel advisor for others. Fora is a modern travel agency built for people who love to plan, travel, and help others travel as well. 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A bit of financial know-how and planning might be the only thing standing between you and that item you Maybe it's a new car, a dream vacation, or a purchase for that niche hobby you've got that seems absurdly expensive to the people around you, but means everything to you. Point is if you value these things enough, you have to make Rocket Money can be the first step to help you make it happen. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings. You can use the app to consolidate your checkings, savings, loans, and investments all into a single dashboard to give you a clear view of your financial picture. Set budgets and goals, get personalized insights and regular reports and receive real-time alerts for large transactions, upcoming bills, refunds, and low balances. You can use automated savings to help you grow toward goals with adjustable amounts and frequency, set it and forget it approach. Let Rocket Money help you reach your financial goals faster. Join at rocketmoney.com slash prop G. That's rocketmoney.com slash prop G. RocketMoney.com slash prop G We're back with more with Senator Corey Book er. Senator, coming up to literally the present moment, and it might be the reason you're running in and out of your office right now is we're several weeks into a partial government shutdown affecting the Department of Homeland Security. Tens of thousands of TSA workers are working without pay, hundreds of quid, and airports are seeing major disruptions. Shutdown has caused an estimated two and a half billion in losses with travel and business disruption, adding over a billion in losses per week. Give us what your view is the state of play here and if and when and how this gets solved? Well it it's a weird uh washing a way of dealing with problems. We have a problem with the with ice and customs and border patrol. And so instead of dealing with that problem, negotiating over that problem and and and solving a reckless and out-of-control agency that's doing so much damage in our neighborhoods, which was actually having an economic effect as well as obviously violating people's civil rights, injuring people, and murdering too. Instead of dealing with that crisis, what the president has chosen to do is take the whole DHS, uh, Department of Homeland Security and hold them hostage. And so here you have TSA, which is vital for our safety secur,ity, and the smooth running of our flight, uh flight operations, him saying that I am not gonna fund TSA unless you deal with this problem. I'm gonna put so much pressure on you that I hope Democrats are going to squeal and then come and do what I want them to do on ICE, which is fund ICE and with this little inhibiting um restraints on ICE operations. And that's to me absurd. So Democrats have come to the floor time and time again and said, fund TSA, just fund TSA. And instead, uh, the president has said, I'm not only not going to fund TSA, but I'm going to bring this ICE problem into the airports and I'm gonna post them there. So yesterday I was in Newark Airport, which I know quite well, uh having been the mayor of the city, and my port authority police officers, airlines are telling me, uh TSA people are telling me, this is outrageous. You're taking a already chaotic environment with long lines and you're adding this massive stressor stressor to people as well. And the airlines, as you said, are saying you're driving my customers away who want less and less a part of this. And I have people in my life who said, I'm not gonna take my kids on spring break. Well, I do not want to enter an airport right now. So this is Donald Trump's MO, which is chaos and confusion, um corruption add that into that, and then rising costs and a and a in a and a declining economy. I do think, as I sit here running back and forth and was just in conversation on the floor, I do think that uh that this might break soon, that Republican Congress people who have to fly through the same airport airports we do are getting a lot more pressure than they bargained for. And when we looked at polling this week, we saw that people are most people are putting the blame squarely where it belongs, which is the president and Republicans who are enabling him. So I actually think that this is going to end soon. But again, it's just another example of a president who promised to make people's lives easier, promised to drive down costs, promised to improve our economy, and continuing to do things from the war in Iran to reckless, chaotic tariff policy to cutting people's health care, it continues to do things to make life more difficult for working families. Before you go, I want to touch on your book, Stand, A Story of Generations Power in the Future of the Economy. You're a senator. I I I think you're you know, you you ranked kind of pretty high in terms of the up uh likelihood you might in fact be the Democratic nominee for for president. Talk a little bit about the balance between structural problems in the U.S., of which they are there are huge, but also I'd like you to talk about, in a message to young men, about agency and what you've learned about agency. I know that's a lot, but let's talk about what you think of the structural problems in the United States. I love the term you use it, inequality compounds. But also I want you to talk about agency as someone who has obviously been very successful. Aaron Powell Yeah. I I think that this country has 250 years founded on these radical ideals at the time. It was not an inalienable, an unalienable right uh uh uh i idea that all are created equal. We we actually broke with theocracies and monarchies and formed this what is now the oldest constitutional republic uh in the world, on principles, on virtues. Now these were imperfect geniuses, but the great thing about this nation has it's been its ability to evolve and adapt and get better . Who are we in this generation, who've inherited wealth and abundance and promise and freedoms from people who struggled for them, fought for them, died for them, who we to stop believing that we too in our generation can shape our democracy, can direct the course of our country. And the reason why I'm the best flattery I got for my book was that Doris Kearns Goodwin, J John Meacham, Henry Lewis Glates, all these historians read it and then added uh praiseful blurbs to it because they really saw how I tried to show time and time again in American history, not the presidents and the uh people of great wealth and power, but how ordinary Americans, through grit, guts, and gumption in difficult times, changed the course of this nation by being the best of who we were, by evidencing virtues. So here we are today on this idea of agency. It's the first chapter of my book is around that virtue of agency, and rejects this idea uh that y you do not have power, that we can't make a difference, and puts squarely on us that we are the heroes we're looking for. But dear God, right now, we need more heroes stepping up and standing up and coming forward. And it and at a time, uh I quote you in the book about the crisis amongst men, the loneliness that we feel, the disconnection, the isolation, the counterfeit communities that appear online to pull people into dark corners or gutters, frankly, that this is actually the time where I hope there's a resurgence in masculinity, a resurgence in standing up for the best of what it means to be a man, what it means to be an American and using that toughness, that strength, uh not that perfection, one of my chapters is all about vulnerability, but that toughness and that grit to take this country uh by the scruff and help to pull it, push it, move it forward through what I think are really despairing