Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds.

We're on vacation, but that doesn't mean we don't have a great show for you today.

Michael Rohattan on his documentary Drop Dead City.

It's an amazing portrait of New York City in the seventies when it ran out of money.

But first we have the Groundwork Collective's own Lindsey Owens on the Groundwork Collectives blockbuster reporting on Instacart's dynamic pricing scam.

Welcome to Fast Politics.

Thanks for having me explain to us what the Groundwork Collective is and how you got involved.

So Groundwork Collaborative is a think tank based in Washington, d C.

We're focused on building an economy that works for all of us.

The last five years or so, that has meant we have been laser focused on high prices, cost of living, affordability.

This is the time issue that Americans care about, and every poll that we have fielded for five years now Americans are laser focused on the price of groceries, the price of housing, the price of healthcare, the fact that inflation was rising.

Now we have Trump's tariffs, and so we spend most of our time thinking about why our price is high, who is to blame, what we can do about it?

Okay, so this gets us to instacard discuss.

Yeah, so, look, Americans are really frustrated with grocery prices.

If you ask Americans which prices vex them the most, they say grocery prices.

It's not super surprising because you buy a lot of groceries, right, You don't buy one grocery, you don't buy one card of groceries.

You go to the grocery store a couple times a week.

You go to the grocery store all year long.

And grocery prices have been high, sometimes outpacing inflation for years now.

And there are a lot of reasons for this.

There are reasons related to not enough competition in agricultural market.

There are reasons related to the president's tariffs.

You know, we did a report at Groundwork looking at why Thanksgiving prices were high.

To put food on the table for Thanksgiving one of the culprits.

People buy a lot of cans at Thanksgiving.

They buy canned pumpkin candy, cranberry sauce, cand green beans.

Steel tariffs mean that even cheaper items like can goods are up.

But there's another reason why grocery prices are high, and that is because increasingly grocers and grocery delivery platforms like Instacart are running tests on American shoppers to determine exactly how much they can get away with charging them and to squeeze it out of them.

And we knew Instacart was doing this because this has been a part of Instacart's business development and business model for years now.

In twenty twenty two, then CEO of Instacart acquired an AI pricing tech company called Eversite.

Eversite Technology, the thing that they offer is the ab to build out these large scale experiments that shoppers don't realize they're in on to help companies fine tune and calibrate their pricing, to really figure out the maximum amount you'll pay for something before you pull it out of your cart or log off Instacart altogether walk into the store and buy your groceries another way.

And so we knew this was happening.

It wasn't exactly a secret, it was sort of hiding in plain sight from our perspective, and we wanted to understand exactly how much it could be costing shoppers and families, And so we turned instacarts experiment back around on the company.

And that's really how this project gets started.

You turn the experiment background in the company and what do you discover.

Yeah, so we partnered with Consumer Reports and a news outlet called more Perfect Union to recruit more than four hundred volunteer secret shoppers.

We have them log onto the instacart app.

We have them put the exact same twenty items, same twenty grocery items in their carts at the exact same time from the exact same pickup location.

So these were Safe Way stores and Target Stores and North Canton, Ohio, and Seattle, Washington, and Washington, d C.

And Saint Paul, Minnesota.

And then once all of.

The groceries are in their instacarts, we had them take screenshots of the prices and we collected all of those screenshots.

The team at the Groundwork Collaborative entered the data by hand.

Right, you have to sort of, you know, look at the screen shots, look at the prices, enter the data and we analyzed the data.

And what we found is seventy five percent of the items in the carts were offered at different prices to different customers, and that one hundred percent of the shoppers in our study ended up in some condition of the experiment at some point in the study, and that the price differences weren't small.

This wasn't sort of like teeny tiny ab testing where they're trying to figure out if you like the blue can or the yellow can, or if you're more likely to buy something with what we call charm pricing, right, something at three ninety nine versus something at four dollars in one cent.

The price differences in our study were as high as twenty three percent.

So you and I picking out the exact same box of wheat thens from Target and you being charged twenty three percent more than me.

Now again, because you don't buy only one box of wheat THENDS when you go grocery shopping, you buy a whole basket of groceries.

We look at the pricing variation across the entire basket, and then we use instacart's own analysis of how much a family of four a household of four spends on groceries in a given year, and we estimate that this experiment, I'm calling it the Instacart tax for simplicity could cost a family as much as twelve hundred dollars a year.

So this is really a significant amount coming from this Instacart experiment.

I shop sometimes on Instacart.

It seems really expansive.

Yeah, but is it really expensive or is it expensive for some people and not for other people.

Yeah, it's a great question.

So there are certainly aspects of shopping on instacart that are expensive for everyone.

Right, you pay a premium for the convenience of Instacart.

You're going to pay a service fee, a delivery fee, potentially a tip, right, all of those pieces.

We also know that instacart prices are sometimes just higher than in store prices, right.

So that's something that is true but can be consistent across all shoppers.

We also know that there are some additional levees that Instacart charges for certain items.

Heavy items, it's harder to get those delivered to you.

Fragile items like a bouquet of fresh flowers.

Can't stick that in your trunk if you're a delivery driver.

So there are a whole host of ways in which Instacart is expensive.

This is a new additional way in which instacart can be expensive, which is that on top of all of those fees which we call drip pricing, right, these little fees that get tacked on at different stages of the transaction, on top of all of that, you're also effectively a guinea pig in this experiment.

And if you're unlucky, if you're in the sort of gouge treatment condition and not the discount treatment condition, you could also be paying a premium as a result.

So this piece is variable.

Some people are lucky, some people are not.

But for those who aren't, and again, you know, we found that seventy five percent of items were offered at variable prices.

One hundred percent of people in our study were subject to some variable pricing.

You know, this can be a substantial additional amount of pricing that's getting layered in to your grocery bill.

So now explain to us why this is not okay?

Yeah, I think there are two answers to this question.

There's sort of morally why this isn't okay, and I think there are some good answers to that.

And then there's legally whether this is okay?

Does it pass legal muster?

And then the intersection of those two presents the question that policymakers are asking right now, which is like, to the extent that this is legal if we don't feel like it should be, because we don't feel like it's fair, we don't feel like it's right, should we be pursuing, you know, new legislation something like that to curtail this.

So from the moral perspective, it feels unfair because we're used to a public price.

We're used to a price tag.

If you and I are standing in line at the grocery store check out together and we're both holding the same box of cheerios, you and I expect to, say, pay the same price for that box of cheerios.

And it doesn't feel right that if we stepped out of line together and fired up our phones and got that same box of cheerios on Instacart, that you and I might pay different amounts because it's easier for them to run these experiments in this online setting where we're atomized.

You and I were sitting on our couches at home.

I don't know I don't know you, I don't know what you're buying.

I don't know that you're getting charged more than me, your time's very valuable.

They've figured that out right, and they're like, this woman doesn't have time to go to the grocery store, like we're going to go for gold with her, right, And that doesn't feel there.

I think the other thing that doesn't feel fair is how deceptive this is.

I think the backbone of a healthy economy is fair and honest markets, and the fact that we don't know that we're the guinea pigs in this grand Instacart eversight AI experiment doesn't feel right.

There's a sort of transparency problem here.

It's opaque, it's arguably deceptive.

The final thing that I would argue, in addition to the fact that it's just costing us more right, these companies are extracting all of our consumers surplus and we can decide that, yeah, maybe that's okay in a capitalist economy, but we don't have.

To like it.

The final thing for me that doesn't sit well is predictability.

It is really hard to budget for things that you know you need, like groceries, if you have no idea what it's going to cost from one week to the next.

Part of the reason that people find inflation so uncomfortable.

Is it adds that element of volatility to essential items and we start to wonder where we have enough money left when the music finally stops.

And I think this instacart experiment is adding volatility and uncertainty and unpredictability.

So I think those are all the reasons why I think it doesn't sit well with people, and arguably I think some of them, you know, do constitute a sort of violation of economic norms of fairness that lawmakers should take a look at.

Whether or not it's legal, I think depends upon a few things.

My sense, and we have been talking to legal scholars and attorneys general and people like that, is, you know, we already have laws protecting us against unfair and deceptive acts and practices.

These are called you'd.

App laws, and I think there's maybe a case to be made here that this particular experimental design violates those DApp laws.

And so I am actually interested to see if we may see some legal action coming down the pike here to sort of take this on and say, actually, we think this is already something that a company like in Stickhardt shouldn't be able to.

Do to us.

There have been further legal conversations and conversations with policy makers and lawmakers about better understanding whether or not our personal data is being used in the experiment.

So is the experiment random or is this that they've taken a look at our shopping history, They've taken a look at demographic information that they have about us because they've purchased it from third party data sellers, and that's actually being used to determine whether we're in the discount condition or the guage condition.

And I think if that is the case, it's something that looks more like personalized pricing, what we call surveillance pricing, where pricing is varying based on the individual characteristics of the consumer.

And there is actually a nice kind of movement afoot to curtail the practice of surveillance pricing, and New York State actually just took the first action, and just last month in November, in New York State, there is now a requirement that companies let you know through disclosure if they are using your data and their algorithm to set your prices.

And so in New York, now if you're shopping online, you'll get that disclosure or if that's indeed happening.

But in the US Congress, Senator Reuben Diego last week introduced legislation to ban the practice of surveillance pricing, and that follows action earlier this year in the House of Representatives, Representative Greg Kassar offered similar legislation.

So there are some thorny questions here about is this a deceptive issue?

Therefore maybe UDAP covers it.

Is this new terrain of surveillance pricing, therefore we need sort of new laws to curtail it.

Can you talk about what else you guys are working on, what other investigations you've done, what other investigations you're doing, or what sort of what other focuses you guys have.

Yeah, So one of the things that we've been interested in looking at is pricing around sports.

Which is also similar.

Yeah.

Yeah, we're in the New York Times this morning and the Athletic with some comments about our concerns about how FIFA has allocated World Cup tickets, and you know, as you know, they've sort of changed their tune a little bit and they're making some additional tickets available at some you know, firer and lower prices.

But you know, when you have scarce resources like seats in a stadium or plane tickets.

You often see dynamic pricing, right.

This is the idea that as the number of seats shrinks, the price goes up.

When there's two seats left, Like, the price really goes up, right when you need a last minute plane ticket, or you want the last seat at a concert or a World Cup game, World Cup playoff game.

And you know what we talk about in the piece and what we argue in the piece is there are a lot of different ways to allocate scarce resources.

You can allocate them based on ability to pay, which is what many people choose, many companies choose, and what FIFA chows initially.

But you can also allocate them based on lottery.

You can allocate based on queuing, first come, first serve.

I mean, I remember when I lived in Palo Alto for a while.

A long time ago.

We'd watch these people line up and camp out and sleep outside the Apple store, right, like the price of the iPhone didn't change, but they wanted to be first in line because they wanted to get the next batch.

Right.

So, there are a lot of different ways you can allocate scarce resources.

But what many companies do and what FIFA decided to do is prioritize ability to pay, and the result is you're going to have passionate fans watching from their couch and hedge fund managers watching, you know, from the sidelines.

We've also been really interested in stadium pricing concessions in stadiums.

This is something that came up with soon to be Mayor's or on Mandami's team recently and there was there was a sort of I don't know what you would call it.

There was a Twitter brew haha about to be except that that matters anymore.

But basically, you know, sort of our argument is that you know, it's okay to prioritize the fans and pricing decisions, and just because you have a captive audience doesn't mean you need to gouge people.

And also, our tax dollars go to creating these stadiums, our labor goes to making sure they're our ancillary businesses developed around the stadiums, and it would be okay if there were rules saying you got to charge the same amount for a pepsi inside the stadium as you charge down the street.

There are actually places in the country that do that.

The Portland Airport is one of the only airports in the country where you can get a bottle water and you know, some p tog at a normal price.

Right.

We have something called street pricing, right, which is this idea that prices outside and inside can be similar and just because they've got you over a barrel doesn't mean they get to shoot you.

So we've been really focused on understanding norms around pricing and thinking about different ways in which lawmakers could regulate pricing.

And by the way, companies can take this on voluntarily.

So you know, I do think as pricing gets more volatile and more opaque, there will be more kind of white hat companies who say, hey, you come to Owens's store, like we're not going to use electronic shelf label that where the price changes all day long, Like if you walk it.

In the morning, the price will be four dollars.

If you come back in the afternoon because you forgot something or you need another one, the price will still be four dollars.

And I think we will start seeing some of that backlash.

And you know we already have in sports, we have the Savannah bananas, which is a real sensation.

In the baseball sort of world.

And you know, Jesse Cole, who runs the Savanna Bananas, has said, look like I'm in the business of creating a positive experience, a memorable experience for fans and their families, not in the business of charging you whatever I can get away with charging you.

So they use lottery systems, they have all in pricing for concessions, all sorts of things that they do a little differently.

I think it'll be great to see more of that.

So interesting.

I hope you will come back with your next investigation.

Yeah, happy too, that would be great.

We have exciting news over on our YouTube channel.

The 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 Kahan, Elvero Bedoya, Elizabeth Wilkins, and Doha Mecki.

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Michael Rohantan is the director of the documentary Drop Dead City.

Welcome to Fast Politics.

Michael, thank you for having me talk.

To us about this movie.

You know, as someone who wrote a book about their mother, this is a sort of interesting way to process the familial connection, So talk to us about how you got here.

That's interesting that you frame it that way.

That I made the film with my friend Peter Yost, and I sort of pitched it to him as an idea after having spent time with my father and that cohort of old lions, where I saw how still, you know, vibrant they were with the whole energy of their experience.

But I didn't want to make a film about my father that was really like that would have bothered me.

There are so many puff piece.

Not what you did is about you and your mother.

I didn't want to do a movie about me explain to listeners who your father is.

So Felix Rohiton was my father, and he was one of the principal architects of the rescue and was sort of dropped into the crisis in nineteen seventy five at the invitation of the Governor q Carry to sort of see if he could sort out what was happening in New York City.

The financial crisis.

So New York City, just talk us through the financial crisis.

Where How did New York City get to this moment in nineteen seventy five where it went bankrupt.

In nineteen seventy five, New York had been spending past its ability to earn.

The combination of things drove New York City to a sort of sudden bankruptcy, a sudden brush with bankruptcy.

One was white flight rich New Yorkers leaving New York, which had been years happening.

One was the arrival of poor people to New York who needed services, also years happening.

One was terrible accounting at city Hall, also years happening.

One was interest rates that had gone up.

Sharply because of the oil crisis, not so long happening, And one day the governor of New York at the time, a Republican, Nelson Rockefeller, had been very generous in spending money on public programs at the state level and also in approving city budgets sent to him by John Lindsay, who was the mayor before our period, before our story.

And so when Lindsay wanted to spend money on housing, when he wanted to spend money on social services, the governor would approve it, and the legislature would design bond issuances that would kind of accommodate whatever the needs were.

And these were more and more far fetched bonds that required other bonds to pay them off, bonds that were in anticipation of taxes that hadn't been levied yet.

And literally, one day it's like the Emperor's clothes.

A young banker went to one of the issuingomists for the City of New York and said, you're issuing a bond in anticipation of attacks.

What tax are you anticipating collecting?

And he couldn't answer it.

He wrote something down on a piece of paper, and at that moment, this young lawyer working for the banks realized that there was nothing holding up these issuances.

As we've heard before, you know, in two.

Thousand and eight and whatever, the banks were selling bonds that had not been carefully vetted and where the risk was not accurately priced.

So and since that was a short term borrowing pattern.

That the city at that point was on such hard times that they were borrowing short term just to pay their payrolls.

The moment that the marketplace saw that there was some problems with the accounting and there was a young controller, Harrison Golden, who was at odds with the mayor publicly about the books.

Also something that had never happened, the banks just got cold feet.

The marketplace dried up, and there was no ability for the city to borrow short term.

Literally overnight, they made a bond sale and they had no bids.

So at that moment, now the city is on a three month you know horizon, or a one month horizon.

There are there are obligations coming due and they're chasing these obligations.

If you had a bond sale where no one bought the bond, even today, you would be on the precipice of disaster.

And maybe blundering.

And you have a very educated audience.

I would say this was worse.

I don't think this can happen much worse.

No, But because now this was for short term borrowing to just get through next month.

Right now, the next month is pretty well audited and managed.

If you had a bond for an airport reconstruction finance or a you know, and you had no bids, that's a crisis.

But this is existential in a different way.

That is literally, what are we going to do next month when we have to pay off those other bonds and we have payroll to meet.

So that's kind of.

Where they found themselves, and I think where there have been reforms since then, very important ones that now the city will never face those particular variables again.

For sure.

The city finds himself on the precipice of disaster.

Right and the mayor goes to Albany to get some funding, and he goes to Albanie to present his problem, which is that they have in their own audits at the Mayor's Budget Bureau, they have found that they are short billions of dollars.

They thought they had a deficit of two billion, but they had a deficit.

Of six billion.

And they go to Albany with this kind of half assed presentation to the governor and to the lawmakers there with just weeks to go before their next obligation is coming due.

So it's total Keystone cops at city Hall.

The sort of farce and tragedy of it is that the mayor had been controller.

Was this dignified, kindly guy, career.

Politician, had worked his way up through as precinct captain and was part of the machine.

You know, but our film is really agnostic on a lot of these things.

You know, he was part of a machine that in some ways worked, and you know there was a real connection between the politics and the community when you know when they were that connected, this guy, it all fell on his lap a beam.

He was sort of the goat because he should have known.

He was in charge of the books, not immediately prior but earlier, and was the mayor, and it sort of all fell on him.

But as our film really has tried to navigate carefully, the mayor's malfeasance was playing.

The auditing was terrible, The books were a joke.

But the banks failed their clients and failed the system by selling bonds that they should not have been selling.

A lot of other factors came into play.

One of the legacies is that the unions were overpaid, and I think that's kind of the lasting narrative here is that New York in nineteen seventy five is an example of what happens when unions are doing too well.

We really wanted to kind of go into that.

You know, they were paid well.

Your average worker union worker lived in the city, could raise his kids, could buy a house.

Were they the problem.

Absolutely not.

Yes, there was too much money was being spent proportionally to the other parts of the system.

But they were not the cause of this problem.

Had the other teams in this game, the banks, the city's budget process, the state's budget process, had they worked correctly as well as the unions did.

Frankly, the unions did what you're supposed to do.

They fought for the best contracts for their membership.

If the city had fought back with its best team to negotiate a contract that was equitable on both sides and that was you know, I don't think this crisis would have happened.

But the legacy narrative is, this is the folly of liberalism.

You're going to pay unions too much, you're going to go bankrupt.

So what happens next the governor, who both the governor and the mayor were rookies.

The governor had just started his term, he had been a longstanding member of Congress.

They were both from Brooklyn, and they were both dropped into this.

The governor arrives in Albany and he learns that there's this crisis in New York City and then New York City is looking at like the possibility of default within months, and he organizes a response.

He builds a team around, you know, my father and a few others who kind of created an administration that was an emergency finance administration without a doubt, the failure of democracy, there should not be an emergency group of elders or no.

Well, but it worked, So tell us how well it worked.

And it worked partly I think because my father.

Really revered government and revered FDR and was pro government.

So he was not there to sort of just you.

Know, he was not there to elon musk the government that was there to make it work.

So explain to us how they did it.

It was a disaster for the city.

I mean there were you know, thousands upon thousands of layoffs.

People were their lives were completely upended.

Arguably the city got worse.

Part of the challenge for our film was, like we framed around nineteen seventy five, well, nineteen seventy six was arguably worse than seventy five.

But you know, for the purpose of our study of what we wanted to talk about, which was this kind of process around this default, this near bankruptcy, it worked to end there.

But the consequence of all of the layoffs in fire and in police was rampant crime and arson.

And so you you go into the eighties and you go into crack, and you go into you know, the consequences for the city were far reaching across the board and not good.

In a way, you could say that this was one of the better moments in the story, was where people came together that the unions, the banks, the you know, antagonists.

The press was unbelievable.

They were incredible.

They were reporting the story, you know, several times a day, and everyone in the city knew what was going on.

It was quite an amazing feature of this story.

But you also had nighttime papers then too.

Absolutely, and they knew they knew what was going on.

You know, Victor Gotbam, these guys, Alice Schnanker, they were known to the city.

They were characters in the city.

Kind of a story.

I think it meant something to be a public person in nineteen seventy five.

That's different from what it is today.

Ooh, tell me more.

You know, these are the kind of things I think about a lot.

To explain, well, I just think that in those days, it was a matter of some p that you were going to participate in civic life.

And you know, my father loved it.

You know, he completely took to it.

He liked the attention, he liked the press, he liked the game of it.

But he did it because he wanted to help and loved New York.

And I think now public first of all, politics has been so degraded that nobody really goes into politics to play a role.

I mean, I would argue that that maybe.

Mondami absolutely, that's an example of a sort of a new chapter.

And I think what we had was Trump.

We had people.

You could become a public person through reality television.

You could become if you're wealthy, you're Mark Cuban, You're going to own a team, You're gonna be on TV, on.

Shark Tank or whatever.

There's so many other ways for a wealthy person now to become a sort of a public person.

And I love that, Momdami, that there's this idea of a celebrity who's going to be the mayor and who has talent, and that his talent is being put there.

So I wish him well and I hope he's going to be a rock.

So you have some interesting cameos.

I don't know how you do it.

It's a terrible job in your movie.

And I want to talk about them.

Dick Cheney and Ronny.

Rubby and Cheney.

Right, So, Okay, when you're making a movie, you want a villain.

And you need celebrities too, and you need celebrities and especially now.

And we really thought we were going to be working around the mayor as the villain.

Who ultimately is I think I've made clear It became a little bit of our sort of tragic hero, not hero in the sense of saving the day, but just the person you follow and you sympathize with.

But long Behold, we came across Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld's who were highly placed in Ford's white House, and Rumsfield was the chief of staff, and they hated New York.

They hated first of all, they were Midwesterners, and there's an antipathy from there.

That is a known fact.

We actually there is a story that's not in our film around the fact that they actually were plotting against New York in some real way in Congress to sort of precipitate New York's demise so that Chicago might rise.

But yeah, there they were young at the beginning of their careers, and this was the beginning of the demonizing of the coastal elites.

Maybe not the beginning, I know Nixon did it, and they went after New York as a as the profligate cautionary tale, and they hated Nelson Rockefeller, who was a high spending Republican.

In the nineteen seventy six campaign for they pushed Rockfeller off the ticket and.

They went for Bob Dole, who was from Kansas.

The convention was in Kansas, and that was sort of the beginning to my mind of the Republican you know, veering into the flyover states, into the middle and pushing out the coastal elites as the kind of the enemy they were chasing.

Ronald Reagan to the.

Right created no fault divorce.

Well there's that.

There's that these two guys were young activist and very very energized young conservatives in Ford's White House, and they set the policy on New York.

They and William Simon and a few others to really hang New York out to dry.

And there was a political side to that.

Which was as I said, they were they were worried about the right wing threat from Reagan, and there was also a sort of ideological moralist side.

And Ford was a Midwesterner and had you know, was a kind of a sober minded guy, and New York just defended him on some basic level.

And they kind of used New York as a you know, as a device and let it let New York hang out to dry.

And then it backfired.

And you know, David Gergan wrote a speech for Ford which was what the famous headline New York Ford to city drop dead is derived from.

Gergan wrote this speech and in our film we have him talking about that.

He wrote a speech that was that he got a call from Cheney asking for a very tough speech, and he wrote one, but he didn't think it would actually get you know, he thought it would get watered down, this is where we would start here and soften it.

And the President read it and it was a really tough speech.

I mean it was very, very blunt, and it totally backfired on Ford and arguably cost him the election.

Because New York had been a Republican and was not a it wasn't a given that New York would go Democrat in nineteen seventy six those forty one in those days, it was forty one electoral votes went to Jimmy Carter, and a lot of that came from his New York City policy.

Arguably one of the worst blunders of a presidential advisor that you could have you know, you could have.

Designed everything is so unbelievably stupid.

Though, this is fascinating.

The fact that these people keep coming back again and again is pretty incredible, right.

And you know the fact that like this antipathy, now we have Trump.

Arguably in those days, the war against New York was political, like it had there was some political gain.

With Trump, it's sort of vindictive.

It's you know, he's not running for reelection.

Well I think he thinks he is, but sure he might.

Right, Well, you're right, right.

I shouldn't say that, but on some level, the animus is just from his own gut.

You know, nothing he does seems all that.

It's much more intuitive and much more of a you know, off of the bad vibe of it.

Anyway, So and now amazing to watch him and Mamdami start their romance, start their romance.

Yeah, where do you think that's going to go?

I don't know.

Mayor is such a terrible job.

I don't know.

I can't begin to hope.

I hope that he can do it.

It always amazed me that Bloomberg, with all his money, that he wanted to be mayor of New York.

To mean, there's a certain sweetness in that is like, no, I want to drive a locomotive to Yeah, that's what it is.

But I always wanted to do because why else would you do that?

It's crazy, It doesn't make any sense.

Thank you, Michael, thank you so much.

Thanks for having us.

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