Mark Blyth, political economist at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, and Carrie Nordlund, political scientist and Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Programs at Brown University, share their take on the news.

On this episode:

• 2024 election update: Biden struggles to get his message to Americans, while Trump’s hush-money trial might be playing into his strengths
• What to think of US presidential polling 6 months out from November’s election
• SCOTUS term wraps up
• The muddled political impact of campus protests over Israel’s invasion of Gaza
• Can the dollar be too strong? 
• Tariffs, foreign competition, reviving national industry – is it the 1930s or 1800s? 
• The TikTok "ban” in Congress - national security priority, or tech extortion play?
• Mark and Carrie are very nice to dogs

Learn more about the Watson Institute's other podcasts

[THEME MUSIC]

CARRIE NORDLUND: From the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, this is Mark and Carrie, our May edition. Hello there, Blyth. How are you?

MARK BLYTH: That was nearly well executed. I would have went a little bit more dramatic. From the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs It's the Mark and Carrie Show.

CARRIE NORDLUND: You do so much better because I think it's the depth of your voice. And I'm also, because I'm trying to cram up, keep all this stuff in my head, like the normal stuff just can't, like, come out of my so smoothly.

MARK BLYTH: I think you've just defined life. Hello, Carrie.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Thank you. [LAUGHS] Hello.

MARK BLYTH: So where do you want to start?

CARRIE NORDLUND: Well, OK. Well, let's just start at the top, I guess, with American politics news. And, I mean, I don't even know where to really start with this. And, you know, I don't even have a whole lot to say.

MARK BLYTH: How about Trump-- how about Trump on trial? Let's just go there. What do you think? You must have been watching it.

CARRIE NORDLUND: No, that's what I was thinking, too. But I don't know that I have that much to say because of the following. I don't know that it moves anybody that it's supposed to move. I think everyone has their mind made up. Trump is a liar and kind of scummy. And if you didn't already think that, I don't know that this trial is going to persuade you either way.

The testimony of Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen, I mean, again, I don't think that's really changing anybody's mind. The things that have been most noticeable to me have been the human side of this. And this is that nobody at the beginning of the trial, Trump's family, none of his family members were there. And then one of his sons started showing up.

And now it's this parade of people that are just like, kissing up to him that are there. And also now his theatrics of this kind of fake sleeping that he's been doing through some of the more controversial testimony with Michael Cohen, the muttering under his breath.

I mean, just this kind of stuff I think has been sort of fascinating because it gives you just a tiny bit of a window into his psyche, which is what I would have thought it was. I mean, he's all about himself and he's a theatrical performer.

MARK BLYTH: Yeah, but there's more than that going on, because-- so first of all, let's just break it down. As I've been saying for weeks, months, if not years, we've been out to get this guy since Twenty Sixteen. And this is just the latest iteration check.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Sure.

MARK BLYTH: And what the latest iteration is really rich guy basically behaves badly behind his wife's back with somebody who is in the sex industry. And then when he becomes more of a public figure, he wants that information to be squashed. Why is anyone in the least surprised that that happened, right?

Now, thirdly, let's go on the other one. This is the trial that's going ahead. I'm surprised you haven't mentioned the other ones that aren't going ahead. It seems that Georgia has sort of imploded in a sort of I'm going to put it, a galactic implosion of incompetence and ineptitude.

And then there was the one where the Trump appointed judge on the documents trial said, no, it's just a bit too complex. They got all this stuff in line. And all the liberals went, this is outrageous and it has to be tried. And then people start to actually look at it and went, actually, it really is kind of super complex and it's really not even clear what's chargeable and what's not.

So once again, sort of, the Democratic State seems to have decided in one shape or form that you're going to get them through the courts. You're trying every means necessary. And ultimately, it's all blowing up in their face. I mean, are the Democrats basically the PR campaign for Trump? Because I can't imagine a more successful PR campaign than actually doing this.

CARRIE NORDLUND: I mean, it's kind of classic big Democratic Party like shooting itself. I think you're right in terms of thinking about the cases. I mean, they've had an assist. The Trump side has had an assist from the Supreme Court in terms of delaying things further.

MARK BLYTH: Right. I forgot that one as well. Exactly.

CARRIE NORDLUND: I mean, there's just so many things that have gone by Trump's playbook, which is delay, delay, delay, and just hope that you run the clock out. And you either win the presidency and all of this goes away or you just wear people down to the point of, like, they succumb to these tactics like they did in Georgia.

I mean, the number of cases and this-- I mean, pay attention to politics. The number of cases, maybe there's 100 more out there and I just haven't been paying attention because it feels like there's so much more than there actually is in this ongoing buzz.

It's hard to keep track of it. Let alone if you're just living your life trying to get through the day, I think you're paying very little attention to this.

MARK BLYTH: I don't know. I think that people who are both Trump supporters and sort of Trump adjacent, and think there's more of those out there than we let on, are paying attention to this, because they maybe don't believe the whole narrative of the deep state and they're out to get him and all the rest of it. But that's what it looks like.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah, yeah. I know that narrative is really stuck. And he says that after every-- he--

MARK BLYTH: Absolutely

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah. And his support.

MARK BLYTH: I was in Naples, Florida about two weeks ago.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Oh.

MARK BLYTH: And I went to this lovely place. It's a sort of lovely big organic grocer with everything you could possibly want and a nice sort of feel of community.

And it's got a restaurant in it and all this. And you go to the bathroom and it's got an "F Joe Biden" sticker in the urinals along with a picture of his face that says Looney Tunes.

And it's not just one. They all have it. And you just get the feeling that, like, you know, 15-20 years ago, the folks in this place would have been Democrats.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: They're not. They're 100% not. And they are paying attention to this trial, and they are not paying attention to it in terms of a prosecution. They're seeing it as a persecution.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah. This is what I think is really interesting, too, in terms of thinking about-- well, I mean, so there are now two presidential debates as of the last couple of days, which I just am like, can we please not put ourselves through this?

Because the first one's coming up in June. And I mean, what does that even going to be like? I just get so anxious watching Joe Biden walk two steps, let alone across an entire stage.

But there is this sense of Biden just having no real for a person who's like, right, I'm in touch with the real guy or the real America, he's just seemingly lost his touch and is just seen as this not only senile, but then also part--

I mean, these two things of being senile and also running the deep state. And yet they've stuck with people.

MARK BLYTH: Absolutely. I mean, one of the ones that we pointed out along like a long time ago we spoke about was Biden's cadence that he always bangs on about good union jobs, good union jobs. Less than 10% of the private sector is in the union. So to 90% of americans, that literally doesn't mean anything.

And it's not as if they're all sitting there going, God, if only I was in a union.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Exactly, exactly. And he just keeps banging on that like, this is the best economy since like Nineteen Seventy-Nine and the last 12 seconds. And you're just like, there's no-- like, you have to do that.

MARK BLYTH: Meanwhile, people are looking at the two things that they pay attention to, which is basically the price of mayo in the supermarket and the shrinkage of the boxes, and the fact that you can tell them that the real wages have gone up to where they were in Twenty Nineteen and they will turn around and say, yes, that's when Trump was around.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yep. Yeah. No, I totally agree with that. It's the like, let me tell you about how the economy is so good versus the cost has gone up on everything.

MARK BLYTH: Absolutely. So let's move on a little bit, right?

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: Related. You mentioned SCOTUS. So have they been up to anything? You are my SCOTUS mole. You tell me everything that they're up to.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yes. Well, there is a case actually just decided, and I think we had talked about this in the past about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and that decision was 7-2 in terms of keeping the funding stream the way it is for the CFPB. The constitutional question was whether it had been funded in an unconstitutional way.

There's tons of nuance to that, but it was a 7-2 decision. The majority said that the funding is legit, essentially. And so this doesn't negate the policy that's come out of the CFPB. That was probably one of the bigger decisions that was kind of on the horizon regarding the administrative state.

So this just holds all the stuff that's come out of there, all those protections, mortgages, blah, blah, blah, holds the line on that there. I mean, on the horizon, just to keep us all awake is that there are, I think, a number of cases, I just did a quick-- so two cases having to do with abortion.

There are still pending, three gun cases, two big tech cases, and then a couple Trump related cases that are still out there. So we'll wait to see those in June. But we're starting to get some decisions.

MARK BLYTH: Wow. Somebody is keeping Clarence busy, and isn't a billionaire friend with a boat.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Well, it's not summertime yet, right? We got to wait for the summer vacation for that--

MARK BLYTH: Fair enough.

CARRIE NORDLUND: --for that to happen. Just to round this out, I wanted to talk a little bit about the protests on college campuses around the country and all of the images that we've seen on the news. And I wanted to think about this, as you can guess, from a political point of view. And that is so next week, the subcommittee-- the House Committee on education that's been calling those University presidents before them, that's caused so much, so much reaction on campuses.

The next round is set to be Rutgers, UCLA and Northwestern. And so one of the things that I've been thinking about, because I think this does connect with the protests on campus, is who has been called before that committee, why they've been called, what the political gains have been called for calling the presidents that they did.

The first round were fairly new college University presidents in Penn and Harvard and MIT, all women. And just thinking, especially close to home for us, Blyth, it was-- is Chris Faxon going to be called? And just thinking that maybe there's not a lot of political gain for Marjorie Taylor Greene or Virginia Fox, who's running the subcommittee to call those University presidents that maybe have a longer tenure, have more of a presence, have made more of a presence on campus.

I mean, total hypotheticals. But just thinking about how that, then related to the what has happened on campuses and how this has shut down graduations across the country. And, you know, the topsy-turviness of this. And I don't think I have a really great conclusion on, of all of this except for that this House Committee is the stir of this pot. Sort of what the gains are that they're getting from this.

And, you know, they've been, they and their supporters, have gotten a lot of credit for the resignations of the college presidents.

MARK BLYTH: I mean, they managed to basically single handedly blow up Columbia by basically calling the Columbia president. The Columbia president looks at what happened last time and said, OK, this is basically a Stalinist show trial. You want me to say that I'll do everything possible to end anti-Semitism and the universe? Absolutely I'll do it.

And then that was picked up back home as you just through your faculty and students under the bus because you don't believe they actually have a right to protest. You then call in the cops when the cops don't even want to be called in, and the whole thing becomes a gigantic mess. So, yes, stirring the pot, but there's also grotesque incompetence.

CARRIE NORDLUND: That's what was so surprising.

MARK BLYTH: --level in some areas as well, right? I mean, yeah. It's one of the things that we forget about this. Is that student protests it's not as if it's something new. I mean, this is a perennial, right? And sometimes it's historically important, as it was, for example, in Vietnam.

Now, the stakes here and the issues and the actors involved are actually very different, but the intensity of feeling is exactly the same thing. And what's remarkable about this committee is these are the free speech stalwarts. You can say anything. You can't create puppy zones and safe spaces, and you've infantilized all of American youth, and you've destroyed higher education with your wokeness, et cetera, et cetera.

So they got all that going on. So basically they want absolute free speech. But you can have absolute free speech as long as our absolute free speech doesn't actually infringe anything at all on your preferences on the state of Israel's policies.

CARRIE NORDLUND: That's right.

MARK BLYTH: Because if it does, then you're going to get killed.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: So there's a wonderful you're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't quality to the entire thing.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah. But you're-- your point about faculty and students from the Columbia president that to name specific faculty, I just thought, man, you've now crossed that bridge and what's going to happen, what's going to happen next.

MARK BLYTH: This goes back to something we've spoken about before that like to a large extent, you know, the upper management of many of these universities have become so apart from the faculty and are not from the faculty. That simply they become a separate organization.

And my shorthand way of doing it is you're basically a hedge fund that runs a university for tax purposes.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: And that comes with donors that think they have more rights than faculty or students. And this is the world that some of these places have built.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yep, Yep. And I think that's been-- I think that point has been illustrated so frequently in terms of the protests and how they're protesting, divestment, et cetera. The last thing I wanted--

MARK BLYTH: Where to next?

CARRIE NORDLUND: Well, the last thing I wanted to say about American politics, please don't fall asleep on me, is the New York Times had this big poll that has sent all of the big Democrats into sobbing in the corner. And that is that Trump is up in the five battleground states pretty handedly and Biden as well.

So there's a difference between likely voters and registered voters. The big headline was on registered voters. Biden goes up, if we talk about likely voters. But the one thing that I took away from these polls, because I was just looking at the cross tabs, is that there's about a quarter of the country that is paying some or little attention to the election. And I laugh only because I thought it would actually be more than that.

But it just shows that it's still early. And essentially what these polls did to me after I got done, like being mad at New York times was it's a dead heat. And it's really, I think it's too close to call at this in May of Twenty Twenty-Four. So 15 years before the election will take place.

MARK BLYTH: Yeah, but you're such a Democrat on this one. You're always looking at the glass half full or half empty. But at the same time, by your own admission, you have very little faith in your candidate.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Oh, yeah.

MARK BLYTH: You fully admit that like, millions of Americans see this guy as like, physically or mentally impaired and therefore unfit to do it. And no matter what you say about Trump, he has his own barriers and his handicaps and his hang ups and his problems. But it's not those ones.

CARRIE NORDLUND: This is a good point. Though this shows that I am human and can hold two opposing thoughts in my head at the same time and come to this-- come to the same conclusion.

MARK BLYTH: My favorite definition of hypocrisy is not the price that virtue pays or whatever it is. It's the ability to live two simultaneously contradictory things at the one time because reconciling one for the other is too expensive.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yes, yes. That's right. That's right. So I've been saving this question for you because I was paying attention to it in the news and then was saving this for you, and I hope this isn't too lame of a question to ask, but the dollar is very strong right now. Can the dollar ever be too strong?

MARK BLYTH: Well, it's always a relative question, right? Too strong in relation to what? And too strong for whom? So why does the currency strengthen? Because people are buying tons of your stuff. And if they want your stuff, they have to use your currency to buy it, very crudely, right?

But the other one is interest rates. If I'm sitting in a place where I know that I can just buy a bit of treasury debt and get paid five 6% as the risk free rate, why wouldn't I do that? And if I want to do that, I'm probably going to have to get some dollars. So either way, you're juicing demand for dollars and dollars go up, and that shows the strength of the dollar.

The traditional downside on this is if you're an exporter, that's a problem, and that's probably true, but we're not much of an exporter. We are a giant importer more than we're an exporter. We're actually still a massive agricultural exporter. We're a massive carbon exporter.

We're literally the Saudi Arabia of the Western hemisphere. We don't like think about it that way. But in general we're more of a consumption led, import driven economy where everybody else does the exports. And what that means is essentially when the dollar is strong, we get to buy even more of other people's stuff and pay it with our stuff, which is relatively less compared to theirs because our dollar is strong.

So it depends on who you are and what you're doing, whether it's too strong or not. Where it really hurts is if you're a foreign country with a weak economy and you've got a ton of dollar loans, thinking somewhere like Argentina, and the dollar strengthens because that means you need more of your stuff to buy the same amount of dollars you need to pay back to someone else.

So it's all about basically who has the sort of the dollar as an asset, who has the dollar as a liability. And that will tell you how the pain goes. Is that what you wanted?

CARRIE NORDLUND: No, it is. And I was thinking then, of course, mapping it onto American politics, the strength of the dollar means it doesn't necessarily mean that much to me when I'm at the grocery store, though.

MARK BLYTH: It doesn't. Well, it does and doesn't because it depends whether you actually get the benefit of it or not, right? So if I'm a massive wine importer and you live in a state that has middlemen, which is pretty much every state apart from, I think, Rhode Island and one other, maybe Nevada, then you need to basically go through a distributor.

If the distributor is able to buy French wine at a 10% discount because the dollar strengthened to the euro relative by 10%, it doesn't mean you're going to get 10% cheaper. You might get 2%, you might get nothing depending on the monopoly supply that distributors got.

So it's not as if there's a pass through that immediately goes from out there in the global economy to you and your pocket book. But in principle, what it means is, you know, if you want to buy a BMW in relative terms, it's a bit cheaper than it was last year.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah: OK, it's something. But again, it feels again, like, let me tell you about how the dollar is so strong and therefore you shouldn't be worried about the cost of your jar of mayonnaise.

MARK BLYTH: Well, I mean, here's how to think about it, not how to think about it, right? Biden just put massive tariffs. He just took all the Trump tariffs and went, oh, you think that's good? Let's do this. Happy to talk about this. If you want one conclusion we can take from Twenty Twenty-Four is no matter who's getting in, tariffs are coming back. And this is pretty much the end of America as pretending to do any type of free trade, hegemonic role in the global economy.

But yeah, so he puts all these tariffs on. He goes to Pennsylvania basically, and he's like, we're gonna put tariffs on steel because that's a swing state. I'm going to do this. Now, is this because of the strength of the dollar making American steel relatively expensive? Maybe.

It could also just be pure electioneering. It could also be part of the strategic calculus to do with the IRA, that you want to protect critical sectors against Chinese competition, et cetera. The point is there's so many things that could go on as a plausible explanation, that blaming the strength of the dollar as the thing it probably overdone.

CARRIE NORDLUND: But to the tariffs point it is interesting that Biden has taken or-- yeah, has continued Trump era policy, right?

MARK BLYTH: Yeah. There's a really 19th century feeling to the moment. The people are sort of, like, is it the Nineteen Thirties? And we're all going to devolve into trade blocs, right? But there's another reading of this, which is mine. Which is that this is like the 19th century.

There's a guy called Henry Carey. Nobody's ever heard of him. He was kind of the big chief economic theorist for, if you will, the Republican Party of the 19th century. And he was, along with a few other the people that said, you want to develop, you need to protect your industries.

You need to have really high tariffs. United States had the highest tariffs in the world throughout the 19th century. You need to not give a shit about foreign copyright. You need to steal whatever technologies you want and never actually pay for it. Everything that we accused China of, the United States did in the 19th century, and became basically a superpower on the back of it.

So now we're at the point where basically the Republicans qua Trump come in and they want the tariff at like 60% or 100% on China, and 10% and everyone else for shits and giggles. So what are they doing there? This is the typical Republican policy for protecting the working class. We will keep foreign competition out.

We will keep foreign workers out. We will tariff in immigration. And what we'll do domestically you're on your own. It's free competition. Get to it. You're on your own.

And then the other side of it is kind of the Democratic side of it, which is a kind of developmental state infant industry argument, which is like, oh, when we gave away all of our productive capacity over the past 30 years through globalization so corporations could make more money and we screwed the American working class, yeah, not so great.

We need to win them back electorally. So we're going to do this stuff and on the way we'll decarbonize. But to do that, we're going to have to basically build up all these industries we don't have, and that means tariffs. So both of them, and one of them is a sort of like Germany in the 19th century becoming the first developmental state, Biden.

And the other one is Republican politics from the 19th century, Trump.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Well, this is so interesting. I think this connects. I was talking to one of my friends who's in corporate America, and he was saying, we were talking about immigration, and he was saying, I can't hire engineers. I can't hire both high and low wage workers because there's just nobody to hire on either side of this.

And so I thought that was interesting just in what you were saying, in terms of it's a free for all within the United States, and do with it what you can. But if you don't actually have the workforce to be able to do what you can for all the myriad of reasons why that is, then it just seems that you're not really the competition, is therefore been pretty flat and China can eat your lunch.

MARK BLYTH: They tend to do because, you know, they had these things that we never understood called state owned enterprises and we were like, boo, these are public things that are inefficient. They're just filled with workers. They're part of the welfare state. They don't do anything.

Or you just destroyed the global solar industry with one of these.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Right.

MARK BLYTH: You just did the same thing with EVS, right? So admittedly, the EVS aren't really a purely story, it's also private companies. But the fact is, rather than sort of taking a company like Ford that says, can you not make the Mustang and the F-150? Can you take all those drivetrains out and reengineer it and put in a bed and put in fireproofing and putting a big battery, and get some electric motors?

We have to relearn all to-- There's a figure that gets quoted now in the auto industry because they don't want to do this. American automakers are really shit. They just basically-- they withdraw from markets all around the world. They just sell their stuff at home at the highest price possible.

So they're all in on electrics, right? And it's like, yeah, but you're kind of crap. And they're not very good, and nobody's building charging stations. So why would you expect people to back that up? And the Chinese, they just started from-- they start making the batteries. All right.

We already make electric motors. How difficult can it be to do this from the ground up?

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: So they are, in a sense, the native play.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: Right? So just trying to compete with the native play by converting what is a 20th century technology into a 21st one. That's the route that we're going. It's so much harder, and it encounters resistance on it.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah. I mean, isn't there some huge number of malta that China produces x number of hundreds of thousands of EVs per day and the US produces like three? I mean, it's just like the imbalance.

MARK BLYTH: Yeah. But the number you get-- I was going to mention this and I kind of went off tangent. I mean you get this number report in America. Like, it costs America 100,000-- every car EV that makes $100,000 loss. And somebody pointed out in a blog post on Twitter the other day, I will not call it X, it's Twitter.

This is essentially taking the one off cost of removing the drivetrain and putting in something else as a recurring cost every year for every car you make, which is obviously nonsense, right? So there's a great deal of like, let's say, protection of existing business models rather than adapting to the future going on.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah. It just feels like we're Americans. We're just so inefficient about so many, many, many things.

MARK BLYTH: In terms of where we could go next, you know, we touched upon the campus protests. That brings us to the Gaza conflict. There's also the continuing festering sore that is Ukraine.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yes.

MARK BLYTH: And it seems that, while the Americans basically retained enough capacity in their defense industry to still be the world's biggest military power, they didn't give all that away. It seems that the Europeans either gave it away or just never built it or gave up on it. And now that they're fully committed to Ukraine, it turns out they can't actually give them anything that they need.

The Ukrainians got an acute manpower shortage. Even if they were to actually do a full draft now, it would take so much time and resources to train everyone that it might actually not be effective. The $61 billion that's in there is a stopgap at best. And Blinken shows up in a bar and starts playing guitar.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yes. That pretty much sums it up.

MARK BLYTH: Wow. I was like, ooh! I don't know, when your Secretary of State is like rocking in a downtown bar, like, in the underground, in the bunker with you, I'm not sure that's a really hopeful sign.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Well, that's soft power, right? That's a soft power. I always have questions, like, how is that money transferred? Is it like a wire transfer? I'm always curious about that sort of stuff.

MARK BLYTH: I love the idea of Western Union.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Exactly. $61 billion.

MARK BLYTH: Could you imagine-- could you imagine the fees? That'd be like their best day ever.

MARK BLYTH: Yeah, yeah.

MARK BLYTH: No, you're not transferring money. You're basically transferring supplies.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Right.

MARK BLYTH: And the supplies have dollar cost. And essentially it's moved from like treasury account X to DOD account to private sector account, that sort of stuff. So these numbers are largely, largely fictional anyway.

There's great stuff on YouTube about this where basically you'll get guys that work in the Air Force going, this is a bag of rivets. These rivets are basically 3 millimeter rivets made of steel. This is whatever. You go to Home Depot and you get this $3-- 100 for like $3.

Here's exactly the same rivets which are made to aircraft standards, which is exactly the same as the ones that these are made, but they have to go through these tests and made by these firms. This bugger costs $3,000.

CARRIE NORDLUND: You're not helping me on my, like, on my survival-- whatever, the-- not the survivalist, the people that stock sorts of stuff for when the end of days comes.

MARK BLYTH: Yeah, preppers.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Preppers. Because I am starting to think I should keep my money in my mattress because it-- does money even exist? If it's just numbers on a page or rivets. Like this does not help me.

MARK BLYTH: Isn't that great? After the financial crisis, when Ben Bernanke showed up to Congress and he kind of admitted like what everybody knows, which is when we do all these swaps and all this sort of stuff, it's not as if we're literally giving the Bank of England $200 billion.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Right.

MARK BLYTH: We're just putting a digital entry in a column that says that they now have it and that's it. And that's pretty much it.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah. I mean, there's so many questions about this, but another time. The one thing I was noticing-- I noticed talk about money transfer is that the EU has given a loan of $1 billion-- billion euros, sorry, to Lebanon. And then last month, I think the IMF upped the loan to Egypt to $8 billion.

So just seeing that as part of the original stability, trying to stabilize those economies and those particular countries to keep the region sort of somewhat stable, so people's economy or country economies don't crash. I thought that was kind of interesting from a regional point of view.

MARK BLYTH: So it's funny Argentina gets all the opprobrium for, like, you know, your serial defaulters and you always crash your economy and all this. So there's actually one case which is worse than that. It's just that it's never allowed to actually crash, which is Egypt.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah. They always get money, right?

MARK BLYTH: They just get money because they're too strategically important. And also, if they fail, this is the problem with the narrative of well, we'll just-- all the people from Gaza will be absorbed by Egypt as if like, you know, they've got no choice in it or just they'll just go, right?

This would be so destabilizing. The Egyptian regime, it would never survive. And again, this goes back to Gaza, right? I mean, the question is now begun very big in Israel itself, is like, OK, baby, what's the end game, apart from you continuing this war forever because it keeps you in power?

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: Right. It doesn't seem to be there's actually an end game on this one. In which case, then how are we meant to interpret the massive destruction that's going on? What's it for? It's to get Hamas? Well, you could get every Hamas member, and given the damage that's been done, there'll be twice as many of something else called something else in no short order, unless there's a plan B.

There doesn't seem to be a plan B.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Right. Because there's no plan to where Gazans will actually live or anything like that.

MARK BLYTH: They would want it to be Gaza. And, you know, it's up in the air as to whether that's physically possible given the damage is done.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yes, yes. That's just interesting. I've been thinking about too big to fail. I mean, Egypt is quite literally too big to fail. And so--

MARK BLYTH: Yeah, totally.

MARK BLYTH: Do They put into policy stuff that they know is just, because they're going to be safe no matter what? But I hadn't thought about it in that particular way. Man, tough segue way here. I don't know if you've been paying attention to the TikTok ban or not.

Are you on TikTok?

MARK BLYTH: No, as I'm neither a creator nor a consumer. Although there's someone in this house that every now and again looks at it. Yeah, it's an interesting one in the sense that-- the way I look at this is the United States has all of the big internet technologies except this one. Hand it over.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah. Yes, right?

MARK BLYTH: This is an extortion play.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: Right? Now, it's not the United States is doing this on its own. India banned TikTok, done it. India bans loads of Chinese apps. Yeah, absolutely. So there's a way-- there's a tech reference for this. And they've been talking about it for years, actually. It just hasn't really hit public consciousness.

They call it the splinternet.

CARRIE NORDLUND: OK.

MARK BLYTH: The best examples, payment apps, right? So when you pay with your phone, what do you pay it with?

CARRIE NORDLUND: My credit card.

MARK BLYTH: Or alternatively Apple Pay.

CARRIE NORDLUND: OK, Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: Or PayPal.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeap.

MARK BLYTH: Or Venmo.

CARRIE NORDLUND: OK.

MARK BLYTH: You never use Alipay, do you?

CARRIE NORDLUND: No, I don't.

MARK BLYTH: No, you don't. I'm not even sure you can, right? In India they have their own suite of payment ones as well. And what you're beginning to see is the sort of no interoperability, different sort of areas having different technologies for strategic important things like payment systems.

And then you can begin to imagine how this becomes sort of problematic if you have technologies which can hop over those barriers, if you're erecting them, and TikTok is one of them.

CARRIE NORDLUND: And that goes back to the other point that you just made, which is regions having particular walls erected around them. And this sort of isolationist stuff. So that's an interesting point about technology, isolationism.

MARK BLYTH: Anything fun happened?

CARRIE NORDLUND: I know you have a dog.

MARK BLYTH: Ah, yes, I know where you're going with this one.

CARRIE NORDLUND: I do. I'm assuming you like your dog.

MARK BLYTH: Have I ever thought about shooting my dog because it was just a bad dog?

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yes.

MARK BLYTH: No, I have the best dog ever. That has never occurred to me.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Let's imagine it was a bad, badly behaved dog. Would you think, I'm going to shoot it and then write about it in my memoir?

MARK BLYTH: Well, it depends. I mean, you know-- I know what you're talking about. You're talking about Kristi Noem, right?

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yes.

- Or Kristi Noem, right? But I mean, there's a whole sort of, you know, really bad girl screen of very video conscious Republican politics. Like you just scan Twitter or whatever. There's a woman, I forget her name. She's got a sort of a Latina name, I think.

Maybe getting this wrong. She's in Missouri and she's running for some senior post in Missouri or already has it. And just check out her video. It is amazing. Like, she just walks down the stairs going, I'm getting a lot of shit on the internet from people. Well, F you. This sort of stuff.

And it's way past. And it's people with a very strong physical presence and this sort of stuff. And very glam but also very powerful. That sort of thing. It's kind of weird. So it's sort of-- the Nineteen Eighties had big shoulders and power suits and now it's like, now we're just going to go for like big makeup and guns, and just being mindlessly aggressive.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: And that seems to actually find a real resonance. I mean, would I personally like to hang out with someone who shot their dog because they couldn't be bothered training it? No, but I'm not going to vote for people like that anyway.

CARRIE NORDLUND: I think the commentary that I've really enjoyed the most is that, you know, of course, there's nothing in this country that will unite any of us, except for somebody who shoots-- like the one thing that Americans love are their pets, and so someone that writes about it in such a way and her political future is potentially done. No longer on the VP list for Trump either.

The dog was just one bridge too far. I mean, she can say all sorts of things, but the dog that was the final--

MARK BLYTH: I don't know-- I don't know if that's the case. I think that would actually pass any notion of, you know, you've gone too far. I think you just wait until a couple of other dozen scandalous things happen before next Tuesday. And then you come back and everyone's forgotten about it.

CARRIE NORDLUND: OK. Well, I guess that's kind of glass half full. I think the thing that will end with--

MARK BLYTH: Glass half full of what? That's a different question.

CARRIE NORDLUND: RFK Jr. disclosed that he had a worm in his brain. And I thought, you know, maybe you guys meaning voters out there for RFK Jr, maybe this will show you that he's not totally the candidate that you think he is.

I don't know if this is-- any of his voters off or not.

MARK BLYTH: I have no idea. I have no idea where you're going with that thought, because my immediate thought is, if you said that to someone who was RFK inclined, they would say, well, unlike Biden, at least the worm is a brain to get into.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Ba dum pam!

- Thank You. You know, my only thing with him is the polls are so tight, everybody knows it's five states with a population of about 100 and blank 1,000 that really matter in determining this whole thing, et cetera, et cetera.

And if we assume that that's true, somebody like this guy who can basically get 2% of the vote can literally swing the election.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Oh, yeah.

MARK BLYTH: And we saw this before. We saw this with Nader. We saw in Two Thousand. This has happened before. So this could actually happen again. And I think we're massively underpricing it.

CARRIE NORDLUND: No, I'm with you. I mean, this is Michigan in Twenty Sixteen.

MARK BLYTH: So the question is this, right? Which party has more people who are more into wacko conspiracy theories and anti-vaxxer?

CARRIE NORDLUND: I think that's the good-- Yeah, yeah. Because both parties, it appeals to both parties, yeah.

MARK BLYTH: Exactly.

CARRIE NORDLUND: As we close this things out, do you have any good summer plans that you want to publicly discuss?

MARK BLYTH: You want to publicly admit to. Yes, I'm going to the Bilderberg annual meeting, and me and my fellow elites will discuss and describe and destroy the world. [LAUGHS] No. Let's see. What am I doing?

The European championships are on.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Oh, OK.

MARK BLYTH: That's very important.

CARRIE NORDLUND: All right.

MARK BLYTH: This is a soccer tournament that happens every four years in Europe and teams qualify for it. And those teams that qualify include Scotland. So what's going to happen is Scotland is playing the first game against Germany. We'll probably draw or win it.

Then it'll be the second game and we'll probably draw that one and-- no, we'll lose that one. And then we have to win the last game of the three. The last game of the three happens when I arrive in Germany because I'm doing something at Brown the week before and I can't get away.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: My own fault. I scheduled it. So I'll basically land in Germany when Scotland get eliminated.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Oh, man.

MARK BLYTH: I know. It's brutal.

CARRIE NORDLUND: But I hope you're not. Attention is like cosmic, you know, karmic positive for them. And maybe they squeak it out.

MARK BLYTH: Something like that.

CARRIE NORDLUND: You're like, no, it's not going to happen.

MARK BLYTH: No, it's not going to happen. What about you?

CARRIE NORDLUND: You know, I'm teaching a class in Oxford in July. So I'll be in, hopefully sunny balmy because due to climate change Oxford, England. Or it'll be gray and I'll be in rain.

MARK BLYTH: What are you teaching about?

CARRIE NORDLUND: A little public policy, actually, at Saint Edmund's College.

MARK BLYTH: Oh, very nice.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah. So I'm kind of excited for that. Hope to see the sun once or twice.

MARK BLYTH: Excellent. You will see-- You'll see-- actually sunny, Oxford is actually nice in terms of latitude and weather. You will have a nice time.

CARRIE NORDLUND: OK. All right. I was just hoping for a little, you know, summer like weather.

MARK BLYTH: No, no. You'll be good. You'll like it. It's cool. I mean, it's a good thing about Oxford is, like Cambridge, these towns were built for much smaller populations who didn't own SUVs.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: And now, impossible and impassable. And there's too many people and too many cars, and it's really, really annoying. So you kind of have to get yourself to a part of the town where these things are inaccessible.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah.

MARK BLYTH: And then you can have much more of that kind of experience.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Well, this makes sense because trying to find housing in Oxford in the summer, it's impossible. And it was $80 billion as well. So.

MARK BLYTH: Yeah. And don't worry, it will be crap as well. It's like crap starts at $20 billion and then goes all the way to 80.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah. Well, I look forward to that.

MARK BLYTH: Exactly. Well, maybe we'll do a summer. Maybe we'll do a summer thing. We'll see how it goes. We could do Midsummer madness.

CARRIE NORDLUND: OK. Yeah, that sounds good.

MARK BLYTH: All right.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Lovely to see you.

MARK BLYTH: Lovely to see you. Bye, y'all.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Thanks for listening.

[THEME MUSIC]