Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.

This is Everybody's business from Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

I'm Stacy Bannocksmith.

And I'm Max Chafkin and Stacy.

This week, secrets Secrets is the theme.

Yeah, the US economy.

Is it secretly good?

Is it secretly bad?

We'll try to find out.

Yeah, we got some big economic data, a really positive about economic growth which surprised a lot of people.

And we've got economist Ken Rogoff here to do a data deep dive with us.

Also, is your coworker secretly working for the North Koreans?

I don't know, is he Well, we'll find out.

Max.

Is there something that you need to just slow?

And one final secret, Stacy, is your energy drink secretly.

Filled with vodka?

I mean, if it is, it's a secret.

Ques.

I actually right now, I.

Have noticed, you know, my writing is really loosened up lately, feeling really good, loving this energy drink.

Is that a thing that's happening in the world.

You'll have to wait till the.

Energy drinks that seems dangerous.

So, Max, we've been talking about the numbers, a lot of data coming in about the economy.

Most of us looking pretty good this week.

And also people are apparently feeling good about the economy.

Yeah, consumer confidence numbers were out this week, and we found that people were feeling better about things the direction of the economy.

Just a note, Stacy, consumer confidence different from consumer sentiment, which we talked about a couple episodes earlier.

We are still waiting on those numbers, yes, so you know, we'll keep you updated though.

A lot of people trying to measure other people's feelings.

So I thought like I should get out in the field and do the same thing, right, because.

Of course, the economy it's not just numbers, it's not just data.

We live in it, right, we have we all of our own economic indicators that we watch in our lives.

So to that end, I thought I would go to as sort of an economically iconic spot here in.

New York, Okay, thirty fourth Street, Macy's.

Yeah, I mean, what could be more indicative of a personal economic indicator then?

And I love this, By the way, I can't wait to see what people say.

I think they're gonna come up with some ideas that maybe better than what the economists have.

I was very surprised.

Here's what they said.

So an hour ago.

We've been to a Papele ressroom which was super clean, So it seems.

Like a good economic indicator.

Yeah, so we can the still AFLD to have clean public ressrooms are fantastic.

How do you feel like the economy is doing right now?

Terrible?

Really?

The job market like, it's hard.

What field do you work in?

Mostly rita.

I was working at See matt In a couple months ago and I got laid off and I have been trying to find a job since.

But it's hard.

Like how many jobs have you applied to?

A lot?

Like?

I can't really like baby a lot?

Maybe like twenty five plus.

Generally on the security of my job?

Are you worried?

Twenty percent?

Worried eighty percent?

Note, yes, you feel pretty stable right now.

You know the subway is really.

It's not really.

We've been targeted.

Just two bags of groceries, nothing fancy, two hundred bucks, Like what did you buy?

The cost of living is going up, and mind you, the wage is barely going up.

You know, you gotta pay bills, but you gotta have money to eat.

It's hard out here being in New York.

You know what I'm saying?

All Right, So the restroom index.

I know, I mean I kind of loved that.

Now look at this.

You gotta send some restmen look at the.

Restrooms, and if they're too clean, I don't think he can cut.

Counterpoint the subway index not looking so good.

And you have a personal economic indicator, Stacey.

My personal economic indicator is a little bit at the grocery store, like when the checker rings everything up.

If the total makes me feel like there's been a mistake, that is my economic indicator.

I've been feeling that way for years now.

I'm like, there's some I got charged twice for something.

What I've started to do to feel better about that When I go to Costco and it's like four hundred and fifty dollars for like a week and a half's worth of groceries, and I feel bad.

I have three children, so a lot of groceries.

But and I feel bad.

I say, oh, maybe we'll set a record.

Oh that's good, just kind of silver lining.

Ex not that any of us can afford silver right now, but yes, I love that.

I love that.

So Max, there's a lot of big economic news this week.

One of the big ones is I think gross domestic product a GDP.

Yeah, yes, which is we should say, the sum total of all the goods and services the country produces.

There's some controversy around it.

But generally it's considered to be, you know, the measure of economic growth for an economy, and that measure came out this week looking really good.

Yeah, the between April and June, the economy grew at a rate of three percent.

That's pretty solid, right, Stacey.

This is after negative growth exactly, Cambu, months after not only amid all of the sort of crazy economic back and forth of tariffs, all these warnings from a lot of smart people that this is not going to be good for the economy, and like you said, the previous quarter, the US economy shrink, so so good news.

Yeah.

I mean the percent.

Growth on an economy, the size of the US economy is is really strong.

But you know, sometimes these numbers can be a little deceiving.

So I wanted to bring in someone who could do kind of a deep dive into the data with us, and we're very lucky to have Ken Rogu off with us.

Ken an economist at Harvard, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, author of the new book Our Dollar your problem.

Welcome Ken, Hey, thank you ca S and Max for having me.

So this three percent number.

When you saw the three percents, what went through your head?

Well, I was surprised that it was as high as it was.

But on the other hand, you know, these numbers get revised constantly.

This is a first reading and we don't really know what it'll looked like at the end.

The earlier number, which is actually negative in the first quarter, was mostly because everyone was importing like crazy ahead of the tariffs, and this time they imported less and imports get subtracted off from exports.

Yeah, I mean consumption I think was I'm remembering right.

One point four percent is probably you know, more capturing what's going on.

Business investment was soft.

The economy is slowing, and I think something to bear in mind is we started with a very strong economy.

Wait, the economy is slowing, but it looks like it's growing.

The number says growing, but.

It's You really need to average the first two quarters to sort of get a feel of what's going on.

Yeah, I mean, you have to remember, you know, we started with a very strong economy at the beginning of the year.

It was the Endviya of the world.

There's the old joke about you know, what's the easiest way to make a small fortune, and the answers to start with a large one.

And so, you know, our economy was really good, and I.

Thought it was to become a movie producer.

I thought it was crypto.

All right, I'm older than you, but yeah, no, I mean, I think in general the economy has not slowed as much as one would think, not given the terrorists, but the chaos it did hold back business investment, and business investment was soft, and in the long run that's what's driving growth.

But it doesn't seem to hold back the consumer that much.

Yeah, and the chaos continues stasy, And I was it two weeks ago we talked about copper tariffs, these fifty percent copper tariffs.

I believe it was yesterday recording this.

On Thursday, Trump came out and says actually exempting refined copper, which is the most widely traded version of this.

So like all of a sudden, you have this huge amount of copper that's now sitting in the US and is just you know, tanking the prices.

I mean, there's so much chaos, Ken, why do you think that has proven less of a drag than we would have expected.

Well, I mean, okay, just to be fair to Trump, he's a wild man, but he's also a kragmacusque, and so you know, one of his better qualities is when he sees something not working, he changes it, which has been an increasingly rare thing in Washington.

I mean, that's something he does well.

So things do seem to be settling down.

I have to tell you that if you pull academic economists on what tariffs would do, we were all talking about ten percent a while ago.

Now it's settled at fifteen is the norm I think everybody would have set.

Not the greatest idea, but not the end of the world.

We're a relatively closed economy.

If you have the ten percent on imports, you can cut taxes somewhere else.

It's a terrible idea.

Let's be clear.

It's not the end of the world.

We have a lot of bad taxes.

But closed economy.

You mean that like we can kind of produce a lot of what we need.

Oh yeah, I mean you compare us to New Zealand or you know, Canada, our fifty first state according to Trump, or Australia or Latin America, they have to import a lot of things.

We are unique, not only that we make stuff for ourselves.

We have a lot of natural resources.

We're still a bread basket to the world.

We have an amazing piece of land, we have water and everything.

So our economy is very diverse.

It's very resilient.

But I think I think the long run is yet to come here.

The verdict was Trump right about everything, meaning it's not such a big deal, or where the economists right that undermining institutions, closing ourselves off to trade are going to hurt us in the long run.

I think it's going to take as years for that to sort out.

Ken you said that economists had sort of and a lot of people write I think a lot of people on Wall Street as well, we're sort of expecting a tariff of around ten to fifteen percent, like something that would be maybe that would seem tough, not maybe not ideal from the point of economists, but like not disastrous.

That's what you were just saying.

Where is the number right?

Like this feels dumb to ask, but like how crazy is it right now?

Because like there's been so much back and forth and changes and revisions, and Trump is tacoing one minute and coppers are terrified, like, where is it right now?

Is it's higher than that?

I guess right.

So before I answer your question, I just want to say I consider myself as a I am a Harvard professor.

I do not have Trump derangement syndrome.

I think he's right about some things.

But what I'm about to say is an area where you know, I think he's a problem, which is he has a very mercurial personality.

So we have a tariff quote unquote deal now with Europe.

I mean, I'll take two years to work out with Japan, with Korea, do we I mean he's signed an agreement with Canada and Mexico in twenty eighteen, and then he decided he didn't like it Brazil.

He just said, fifty percent tariff on Brazil because I don't like your politics.

We actually run at surplus with Brazil, oddly enough, because his whole rationale for this was to reduce our deficits.

But that's not that's an aside.

He's mercurial.

Also, he's having the time of his life.

I mean, look at him, he's so happy, and all the world leaders are being sycophantic to him, and the tariffs is half of it.

If he just says, okay, everybody, fifteen percent, we're done, just don't think about it, He's not going to be happy with that.

He's going to wake up on the wrong side of the bed and you know, suddenly have a terrify on.

Sweden or whatever.

So no, I think I think we're still in the thick of this.

I have to say things have gotten better than most predictions.

The inflation's been significant, but the big one hasn't come through.

I think it will.

I think we'll get more inflation, but all in all, he's probably feeling pretty terrific about how his first six months have gone.

So one thing I did want to kind of dig into that you mentioned earlier in our conversation was businesses are not expanding.

I feel like that potentially is big economic implications.

Will you talk about like what that means and like on a like what the definition of that is, and then also like why that's such a big deal.

Well, they're not invest there waiting because they don't know what's going on.

And one of the my Ben Bernanke was my classmate at MIT and the says was about if there's a lot of uncertainty, investment will go down.

People are weight they're not going to build a new factory.

They're not going to hire more people.

They're not gonna.

Yeah, why build a new factory you don't know what the terrorist is going to be.

Should you build it in Canada?

Should you build in the United States?

So they've been holding back.

Now maybe there'll be a gusher of investment now, but there's been uncertainty.

I mean the stock market obviously really has been having a good time.

They are back to all time highs.

I just want to say, I think part of that is not growth.

It's the realization they can get rid of a lot of their workers and have a lot more profits thanks to AI.

So we I don't think we can look at the stock market and say that's an a plus for the economy.

No, it's I think something more malign.

But when businesses aren't growing, I mean that means the economy can't expand because when businesses grow, they hire, they expand that grows the economy.

So I feel like that number is particularly worrying because if businesses stop expanding, that means the economy is going to stop expanding.

Well, you've put that very well, Sacey.

I can't add to that except that we need years for this to take place.

Let's say you decide to build a new factory.

I mean that takes years just to get the permits, you know, to make it all happen.

The effect of these policies will take a long time to see in many cases.

Okay, So, Ken, in addition to being an economist and an author and a professor at Harvard.

You are also a chess player.

A grand master.

Yeah, of like a big deal chess player.

Yeah.

I represented the US and the World championships a long time ago, if you can believe that.

But that was I was a sort of more or less did nothing else during my high school years.

We'll mostly probably played three D chess, right Ken, not forty chess.

Yeah.

When we found this, we were like, we've got to ask Ken what he thinks of the thing that people are often seeing about President Trump, which is that he's playing for D chess.

As someone who may have actually played for D chess, what is the fourth D time?

Maybe you go backwards in time.

I don't know.

I actually have a view Trump as a chess player in some ways.

Really we have this phrase called coffeehouse chess players, which are they typically are better than you think, but not as good as they think.

And I sort of feel that describes a lot of Trump's analysis and philosophy.

And they also tend to be very good at beating week players, but have trouble when they get to playing strong players.

But he has a lot of common sense ideas, and even I know he says a lot of if you take every word he says, it's pretty easy to find a lot of crazy things.

But he has a lot of common sense things.

But some things like tariffs that he has just messy on it conviction about he It's almost as if his life was saved so he could bring carabs to the world.

He's just wrong.

I mean, it is not a great idea.

Excellent well.

Economists, author, professor and chess grandmaster Ken Rogoff, thank you for talking with us.

Thank you for having me.

Stacy.

Did you know that if you are running a tech company, or if you work at a tech company, there is a danger of a potential even a national security risk.

I'd say that one of your colleagues or one of your employees, or maybe even many of your colleagues or employees could be secret agents in North Korea posing as American IT workers.

I can honestly say that has never actually crossed my mind, but maybe that explains some things in my working history.

So I actually I'd followed this story a tiny bit because it's so weird.

And then amazingly, Bloomberg Business published this story by Evan Ratliffe, who's a freelance writer who's a contributor of BusinessWeek, created the podcast about AI that I love called shell Game, which everyone should check out.

He dug deep into this story for this for a piece in Business Week that just came out.

It's called Confessions of a Laptop Farmer, how an American helped North Korea's wild remote worker scheme and Stacy Evan is here with us now.

Hey, Evan, welcome.

Hey, thank you.

I'm very happy to be here.

So, Evan, before we get to the specifics of the story you wrote, give us a quick overview of this phenomena.

Well, most people will know that North Korea is under sanctions, global sanctions, particularly sanctions, very stringent sanctions from the United States many other countries because of its government's behavior in a variety of ways, but particularly around nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

So North Korea is really not allowed to transact with a lot of countries, especially the United States, and as a result of that, they have come up with all these creative ways to evade those sanctions over the years, stealing money.

For a while, they were making meth and distributing it internationally, right, a lot of hacking, hacking, cryptocurrencies, theft.

Recently last five years and a little bit more, they've come up with this plan which is basically to have their workers, it workers that they train, get jobs in the United States and collect the salaries.

Like that's the scheme.

It's so funny.

You go from like meth, ransomware, like doing all these like super nefarious things, and like what if we just had these people just get like work at Facebook or work at Google, or work at Amazon or something.

Right, it's just remote work.

They're just doing remote work.

And now it takes a lot, including a number of illegal steps for them to do this, but fundamentally they're doing something quite boring, which is just get the jobs, collect the salary.

And it probably like there are thousands of workers doing this outside North Korean there's a quote from your story which I really loved that said quote.

Sometimes the workers turn to extortion, threatening to reveal sensitive secrets if they aren't paid a ransom.

But security researchers have found that most of the workers raise money for the North Korean government simply by striving to do average work and collect their pay.

I mean, that's they're just doing jobs.

They're just doing remote jobs in the US and getting US paychecks to raise money for the North Korean government.

That's the plan, yes, and trying to keep their heads down, you know, so they don't get fired, do enough work to keep the job.

Sometimes they do a really good job.

But then the money and we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars each year, Like the UN estimates two hundred fifty million to six hundred million dollars each year from these jobs, that goes straight into the munition's program, which is ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons.

So basically they're doing these it jobs to fund nuclear weapons.

They're just getting a paycheck to fund North Korea's nuclear missile program.

That's right, Evan.

Can you just talk about what you did in this piece, because this was pretty new.

You you basically found one of the people in the US that the North Korean, these North Korean agents basically need American intermediaries to set this up to help them facilitate their jobs or whatever.

And you basically ended up spending time with this woman, Christina Maria Chapman, who's like one of these intermediaries, and the stories told through her.

I'm just kind of curious, first of all, how you came across her and kind of what she was like or what her experience was.

Well.

I came across her because she was being prosecuted by the Department of Justice.

And what happens in these cases is companies uncover these North Korean workers.

Sometimes they reported to the FBI, they don't always have to, and then the FBI starts investigating them.

But the problem is that people they really want are in North Korea or in China and they really can't get to them.

So that people they can get to are what they call facilitators, which include laptop farmers, people that keep laptops in their houses, in their apartment that will be on all the time such that North Korean workers can use those laptops remotely and work American jobs.

Yeah, explain how that works, Like, why do they need a laptop that is based in the US.

Why did Christina have like her I think it was like her RV was full of like dozens of laptops at one.

Point, dozens of laptops.

Yes, they need the laptops because let's say one of them gets a job at Google, and we can say Google because Google definitively hired one of these North Korean workers.

So they get a job at Google, a remote job, and then Google says, Okay, we're going to send you a work laptop, and they can't say, well, send it to me in this town on the border of North Korea and China.

Instead, they recruit someone in the United States to be their laptop farmer, and that the laptop gets sent to that person's address, so they claim, well, that's my address, or maybe it's my sister's address, or it's my roommate's address.

The laptop gets sent there, but then they have to use it to work, so they're basically using remote access software to log in remotely to that laptop and then work on that laptop for Google.

But then someone has to maintain that laptop, and that is the role of someone like Christina Chapman is keeping the laptops functional so that all of these workers can pretend to be in America, so of Google looks, they'll see an IP address from an American location rather than from a foreign location.

It's so crazy because a big part of her job, as I remember from the story, is basically just like restarting people's computers, and she gets like frantic messages from various workers that she's managed to turn the laptop on or whatever.

There's also the thing that happens if Evan you talk about this, like sometimes you're expected to show up on a video call, which creates kind of problems for these these secret North Korean workers.

If they did have a backdrop, it would just be like a room full of North Korean operative secretly working at Facebook or whatever, be like a barracks or something.

Yeah.

So, I mean nobody loves a video call really or a lot of video calls, but the North Koreans like them even less because it's a way to get found out.

They have very clever First of all, they can use software so that it looks like they're turning on the camera on the work laptop that's actually in let's say Christina Chapman's house, and then they will do the occasional video call, you know, with a blank wall behind them.

Sometimes they'll intentionally reduce the bandwidth so it gets fuzzy, so they could say, oh, well, I don't have a very good connection and therefore I'm gonna have to go camera off.

But they do get found out that way.

Christina Chapman even said that sometimes they accidentally would turn on their camera and she would see a room full of North Koreans, although she didn't know they were North Koreans.

She thought they were Chinese working out of an apartment.

You see in the article that if you are an American company that's hired contract it workers, you've probably hired a North Korean.

You found evidence that Google and Nvidia, Amazon, NBCUniversal all hired North Korean workers.

But there was something in your story that stuck out to me, which was this idea that a lot of the customers say, like, who cares.

I mean, if it is people from North Korea and they're just doing the job and trying to pick up a paycheck, it's not that different from other workers.

So what exactly is the problem here?

I mean, other than the existential like nuclear proliferation.

Is this really an issue?

I mean some of the companies, like you say, one of the security research in particular, said he ran into this a lot where companies would say, hey, this guy's good, like do I have to let this guy go?

I mean there are a few issues there.

One is, of course, as you say, the ballistic missile and nuclear weapons issue.

That's where the money is going.

And is a horrible regime.

I don't think it should be supported.

But you know, just from the company's point.

Of view, it is by US law, it's illegal for these companies to even transact with North Korean agents, so they are technically in violation of the law if they knowingly hire a North Korean And then there's all sorts of other laws that get broken, like they have to fake their I nine forms and things like that.

But that's not the company's problem if they don't know.

The company's biggest problem is embarrassment, which this is something I encountered when I said that I was going to out many of these companies who had never been outed before as having hired North Koreans, like they're worried about their stock.

Price and who were these companies.

Amazon, Google, Boeing, Hyatt, Mass Mutual Insurance, NBCUniversal, Nike, Nvidia.

How do these.

Companies not know?

I mean, these are like tech companies that deal with tech security all the time.

It's a little worrisome that they did this.

There is a lack of due diligence.

I think you could say it'd be safe to say what happens a lot of times is these companies they hire so many IT workers and remote workers that they hired them through these third party staffing companies, and they assume that the staffing companies have done the due diligence, so they don't actually do any They just the staffing company sends them someone and they say, oh, okay, they're good.

But the staffing company they may have not done any due diligence, and so just down the line, like no one's actually doing a very good job of checking these people out.

There's also, we should say, there's an additional problem which the story mentions, which is and that list of companies you just read off hints at it, like there's the risk of North Korea like xfiltrating information from one of these companies, right, like one of the weird mysteries of this, and Evan mentions this as in the story is that so far these workers seem to be just doing their jobs, but of course there is a risk they could try to steal data.

But I want to just get to kind of maybe a bigger question, Evan, which is like, are these jobs just like bs, Like like the fact that you mentioned this in the story, like some of these North Korean operatives are holding multiple jobs at the same time, doesn't it kind of just make you think like maybe these tech firms are overpaying for this work or something, or like like what is it about this work that makes it so vulnerable to this kind of thing.

I mean, I would never cast aspurseons on the companies and they're hiring policies, but I will say, like they're pretty well trained to many of these IT workers.

They're not just sluves who have never done it IT work, Like the North Green government has trained them up quite well.

And then the other issue is like it's hard to find good IT workers, Like there's a lot more jobs maybe than there are people trained for many of these roles, and so you go on the open market and you find who you can find, and especially I mean the tech companies should know better.

But some of these other companies you take, like Hyatt Hotels or these other companies, they may be not experts in hiring tech workers in the first place, and so that's why it's a little bit easier for them to get in.

But I mean it's hard.

It is a phenomenon that actually American tech workers do a thing called job stacking sometimes where they have more than one job and they collect the salaries from both.

Yeah, you all probably saw this, but earlier this month, this tech worker I think his name was so ham Peric.

He it went viral because like basically every tech company in Silicon Valley discovered they'd hired this guy and he was doing some kind of extreme form of jobs stacking, and it was this kind of like viral moment.

Hey, even before we let go, I mean, has this changed the way you think about work in general, especially this kind of like white collar remote work a little bit?

I mean, even with all the problems we've described, like there are real consequences to this scheme, it still can sort of make you think, like what is work?

Like We've got people in North Korea who were not supposed to be doing these jobs.

But all they did was say, like, I don't know, these jobs are available, like we can do them as well as anyone else, so like let's do them.

And it's sort of like a product of globalization more than anything else, and so it doesn't make me think less of the jobs in any way.

It just makes me think, well, this is one of these sort of unforeseen, underground consequences of globalization, and we've kind of seen larger ones, and this is kind of like a weird, quirky one that you don't really think about until it shows up.

Evan Ratliffe, thank you for being here.

My pleasure, Thanks for having me.

Okay, Max, it is time where we talk about our underrated story of the week, and this one's all you.

I don't actually know that much about your story, So what did you find?

All?

Right?

So this is in in in retail news or consumable goods news.

I don't know consume anyways news.

Yeah, we got news on Wednesday of a recall high noon, which makes a very popular I think it's the most popular hard Seltzer brand ion.

Like it's shootout at the Okay Corral is the name.

It's like you never had this, I have never had High News, so this is very popular.

I'm too white strung already.

Energy drink.

I don't even know what it is.

Not an energy drink, it's it's a well and that Stacey is the problem.

It's a it's an alcoholic beverage.

It's a spirit in a with a fresh juice.

It sounds very refreshing, kind of type thing you might want to have at the end of the day at the beach or whatever.

Unfortunately, a bunch of High Noons were sold in a bunch of states marketed as Celsius, which is an energy drink that people normally drink in the morning when they're trying to get stuff done.

Let's see Florida, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Assumedly, some people cracked open a nice can of Celsius, hoping to maybe focus get ready for the.

Day, and instead look at economic data.

We're transported to you know, the relaxation tap.

So they had to Anyway, this happened because of a bottling mishap or a canning mishap.

It comes in a canon and Celsia is actually totally different companies.

High noon.

Fun fact is owned by E and J.

Gallo, which actually makes the yellow one.

Yeah.

Yeah, like the delicious boxed wines that you and I know love and.

Enjoy the words delicious wines and.

Seltzer.

And I guess the company that was doing canning got them mixed up.

Maybe they got into the product a little bit.

Maybe I don't know.

Sample and the thing it was like Celsius, which you know, naturally you'd kind of want to blame Celsius for this, like they had nothing to do with it.

They didn't make these cans.

They just, like the cannon company, just took their design and put it on some hard seltzer.

Wow.

I think this is fun though, because if you just do how is this fun?

Like if I accidentally drank a hard seltzer instead of an energy drink, I think like nine times out of ten, unless I didn't have to drive or operate.

Huge site, it'd be like finding like a bonus toy in.

Your cereal box exactly.

Yeah, this is the thing.

If I dre accidentally drank alcohol in the morning, like my week would be done all right.

Well, The funny thing is, like I don't think I've ever had like you I don't think I've ever had a high Noon or a Celsius.

I don't know if you've ever had a Celsius.

But those are like the two most popular products in their categories.

Those are hot categories.

So like I, I guess I could conceivably like not know until secret collaboration.

All right, before we go we got Sacey, I wanted to read an email we got from Tim t about the ex CFPB episode.

So, okay, so this came up during the episode.

Remember I think Nick mentioned the sixth hand.

Yeah, I mentioned, like one of these investigations with Capital One.

This was like where Capital One had been promising very high savings account rates and not giving those rates.

And the explanation was a customers had not opted in.

There had been a CFPB investigation, and I believe a settlement in that is now done.

I think it's no.

Yeah, So anyway, Tim appreciate the episode.

He said that he opened one of these three sixty savings accounts when rates are rising their own pandemic, but he missed out on the advertised higher interest rates because he didn't understand that you had to like go in and change your accoun he wrote.

Anyhow, Hopefully the Capital Want execs and the Trump administration are enjoying some wine and cheese on a yacht somewhere and laughing it up, maybe drinking some of these high news.

Yes.

Anyway, thanks Tim, We really appreciate the note.

Listeners.

Let us know how you're sort of experiencing in the economy if you've got a personal economic indicator, because frankly, talking about GDP is no fun, but talking about the personal the restroom cleanliness indicator, I think.

There's something there.

Although I did have a lot of fun talking with Ken Rogoff about GDP.

What's more fun than that?

All right, that's fair.

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