Mixed Signals: Can Kamala hold on? With ‘Veep’ EP Frank Rich

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Other Platforms

Nayeema Raza: What’s your favorite Kamala meme? Mine is the Venn diagrams.

Max Tani: Venn diagrams.

Nayeema: It’s just so authentic.

Max: I really enjoy the... I think I love all the context to which became before you unburdened.

Nayeema: It’s all about that hand movements.

Max: I love that

[MUSIC].

Ben Smith: I am Ben Smith.

Nayeema: I’m Nayeema Raza.

Ben: And this is Mixed Signals from Semafor Media.

Nayeema: Today we’re going to talk about Kamala Harris and how she became cool again. We’re going to discuss whether it will last, whether the press is coming for her and when fact is better than fiction. For that last part, we’re going to have the former Executive Producer of Veep and Succession, Frank Rich, on to join us and it’s fitting this week is basically like a fusion, a mashup of Veep and Succession.

Ben: Yeah. I can’t believe we’re here honestly, because it’s been the craziest week, month of our professional lives, I think.

Nayeema: Of course. I think it has been, and that actually reminds me we have to roll back the tape a little bit to, I think it’s like three and a half weeks ago, right after the debate we taped, do you remember it was like Thursday at 11:00 PM ET?

Ben: It was like 10,000 years ago. I have no memory.

Nayeema: It was 10,000 years ago. A different presidential candidate ago, but we made some predictions about whether there would be another debate and whether that debate would be between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. You predicted there would be a second debate, do you remember?

Ben: Yeah, and I think I predicted it would be Biden.

Nayeema: Yeah, and Max thought it would be Biden and Trump, but not a second debate.

Ben: And you got it right.

Nayeema: Well, let’s hear.

I’m going to have to take the craziest bet here, which is that there will be a second debate, but it will be between Donald Trump and somebody else.

Ben: I love it. I love that kind of New York room Nayeema.

Nayeema: I’ll take odds on this.

Ben: Go breathe some fresh air.

Nayeema: “Go breathe some fresh air, touch some grass,” you said to me.

Ben: So dismissive and you were so right.

Nayeema: I know.

Ben: I feel like real failure of imagination by my fellow self-satisfied members of the pundit class.

Nayeema: Why do you think that is that you couldn’t see it coming?

Ben: Because there’s always wild nonsense speculation over presidential campaigns and stuff like this never happens, hasn’t happened for 50 years.

Nayeema: Part of it is there’s this big theory right now that the internet is becoming real life and I think we might just be at the cusp of that where this felt like internet to you, but it felt like real life to me.

Ben: Well, it felt like scripted television actually to me. We’ll talk about that some more, but it felt like people’s fantasies sort of manifesting in a way.

Nayeema: I think it just felt like people’s heads had to be dragged out of the sand and if they weren’t that Thursday night, then you were, I don’t know, sleeping on a different, you were basically Joe.

Ben: I think very few had been excited before.

Nayeema: Exactly.

Ben: But there was just this sense of absolute doom kind of death march set in.

Nayeema: Anyways, Ben, you got to breathe some fresh air sometimes. Maybe you’ve got to breathe some fresh air.

Ben: Well deserved. I’ve got to expand my imagination for politics. I mean that’s a great lesson.

Nayeema: All right. Let’s take a quick break. We’ll be right back.

And this is the next plot twist of this election. It’s July and there’s already foreign interference. Have you seen this?

Ben: What did I miss?

Nayeema: The British singer Charli XCX has transformed the American elections landscape by declaring that Kamala is brat. I mean this is obviously days ago, old news at this point, but Kamala has gone from cringe to cool.

Ben: Yeah, kind of an incredible moment. All of the clips of Kamala that have kind of haunted her of really since, in a way since she got to Washington from California of being a little wrong-footed, answering in word salad, saying sort of awkward, incomprehensible stuff. All this stuff that, at best it was kind of dorky and at works was kind of incomprehensible, but got reprocessed first by just editors on people making edits on TikTok with Charlie XCX, who then embraced it and has been sort of reprocessed as cool and actually kind of an amazing, and I think in the way of things that work on the internet, genuinely organic transformation of Kamala that her paid team had been working so hard to make happen for a long time and had not happened.

Nayeema: Did you know before this what brat was?

Ben: I’m not going to attempt to explain it because I feel like this thing of old people trying to explain brat on broadcast is very bad. Do you want to explain brat? Do you relate? Is it like your sort of-

Nayeema: I mean, by the way-

Ben: Are you brat?

Nayeema: Do you see, do you know the color of brat?

Ben: It’s chartreuse and here you are.

Nayeema: Yes. And your phone case is chartreuse, Ben.

Ben: Yes. That’s why I got it. No, I actually thought it was going to be Semafor yellow and ordered from Amazon and the color was wrong.

Nayeema: You bleed Semafor yellow. Okay, so brat, basically, it is their reaction to the clean girl aesthetic and fashion always does this, right?

Ben: Yeah.

Nayeema: You went from quiet luxury to mob wife style, and so all of a sudden that clean girl feminine icon is being repurposed by Charli’s hit summer album. The song is 365, the album is Brat, the color is chartreuse, and it’s basically like a chick who says what she wants, does what she wants, that some dumb stuff sometimes, doesn’t really care what people think, is honest, is blunt, is whatever, and I am embodying it today. This is not endorsed-

Ben: That’s genuinely your vibe, isn’t it?

Nayeema: That’s generally, yeah.

Ben: To some degree, yeah.

Nayeema: Say some dumb stuff sometimes.

Ben: You’re a little more, yeah, so you’re a little bit more self-control.

Nayeema: A little bit more polished, but I’m a little brat. I don’t know if Kamala is actually a brat.

Ben: Yeah, this is the problem, right? Is that the internet reprocessed all these moments of Kamala attempting to be incredibly careful and controlled and inauthentic that went so off the rails that they were in some way authentic.

Nayeema: Except when she talked about Venn diagrams.

Vice President Kamala Harris: I love Venn diagrams. I really do. I love Venn diagrams. It’s just something about those three circles.

Ben: The Venn diagram thing seemed real. Some of the cooking stuff.

Nayeema: Yeah, it seems very real.

Ben: Seems very, very real. But her political performance, I mean her problem has been that it’s so cautious, so inauthentic, and I guess the question is can she, in the next days, catch up with this image of herself?

Nayeema: I think that is the question. I want to talk about whether it will last in a second, but first I just want to say while she has become cool, the media has become really uncool. I hope we did an okay job of describing that, but the number of CNN round tables or others, I mean we should just play a clip of one. This is Jake Tapper, Jamie Gangel and poor Caitlin Collins, the youngest of the tribe sitting there talking about Charlie XCX and what it means.

Jake Tapper: Kamala has branded her Kamala HQ Twitter page with the same aesthetic of the album. That’s another Gen Z word, aesthetic. It’s even becoming a trend on TikTok. Special Gen Z correspondent, Jamie Gangel, what can you tell us about it?

Jamie Gangel: So first of all, just for my producer, Elizabeth Stewart, who will spit out her coffee as I say this, I am supposed to say that’s brat.

Ben: I mean it’s brutal and there’s a lot of like I called up my Gen Z producer. I mean it’s terrible.

Nayeema: I know. You know what it reminds me of actually, do you remember back in the day when the 2018 Facebook hearings when Mark Zuckerberg showed up at Congress like Montana Senator Roy Blunt was asking him questions about his son loves Instagram and do you remember that?

Sen. Roy Blunt: When I sent my business cards down to be printed, they came back from the Senate print shop with the message that was the first business card they’d ever printed a Facebook address on. There are days when I wonder if the Facebook friends is a little misstated. That doesn’t seem-

Ben: Yeah, it sort of call the series, the internet is a series of tubes or just old people explaining youth culture to each other. Actually does kind of make great television, come to think of it, but it is very cringe.

Nayeema: That could be the next changing of the guard, Ben. We drove an old man out of politics. Maybe the next they’re going to come for all that aged...

Ben: Well, it’s just going to be a pop quiz on whether you know what brat is and if not, you’re out.

Nayeema: Well, the question is again, is the internet real life? Because if the internet is real life, we need to get up, get into it.

Ben: It’s real youth culture.

Nayeema: It is, yeah.

Ben: I mean, it may not be real electoral politics, but it is also real image-making is happening really right now.

Nayeema: This feels like there was a moment in the nineties before I could vote.

Ben: We’re talking about Rock the Vote.

Nayeema: Rock the Vote on MTV, but I remember being a kid and when I’d come to the states in the summer and seeing Rock the Vote and all these people in Palm Beach looking hot in bikinis talking about Bill Clinton, it kind of feels like we’re in that moment again. And then Obama again had that on Facebook.

Ben: Did you remember Obama Girl?

Nayeema: No.

Ben: There was a song called Crush on Obama. It was a very widely viewed, I believe it was a YouTube video.

Nayeema: Maybe I can reprise that role. Can you reprise a role if you’ve never had it?

Ben: I think that’s, I don’t know. It’s-

Nayeema: It’s between me and Michelle.

Ben:That’s really between you. Yes, exactly.

Nayeema:Okay, but how long do we think this will last? I mean we were talking about this the other day with Max Tani and he was like, now the reporters are starting to kick into this story and it’ll just be a matter of times since the toilet press cycle moves in. What do you think?

Ben: Yeah, I mean certainly there’s been a wave of really positive press of her too partly sort of been hidden away and it’s like who is this person? We’re reintroducing her. But right now she has this incredibly hot cultural thing that is challenging, I think, for her to become, but she’s trying to keep it in the air. And the question with these presidential campaigns, I mean there’s a hundred some days, how many of those days can be good days? And if yesterday was, she’ll try to make tomorrow and tomorrow, and I think it’s to some degree in her hands, but also an incredibly difficult feat to keep this momentum.

Nayeema: Yeah, it’s an editorial conversation where this content is being made and it’s about picking up on it moving fast enough and leaning into it. Do you think she will or will not last for a hundred days? You got to take it, Ben.

Ben: Well, the question is-

Nayeema: Don’t be wrong again.

Ben: No, no more predictions, Jesus.

Nayeema: Come on, Ben.

Ben: But the question is how do you take that cultural energy of brat and in a interview with Lester Holt about what you stand for in these Israel-Palestine conflict? Take that and-

Nayeema: Not make word salad of it.

Ben: What’s the brat answer to that one?

Nayeema: That I think will be the question. She has been in hiding, but she popped her head out on abortion and she’s done, that’s probably a sick way to say that, but sorry.

Ben: Some partial birth metaphor, Jesus.

Nayeema: Not making partial but.

Ben: Damn.

Nayeema: No, but she’s come out ahead of abortion. People haven’t forgotten her on the border, but they have come to know her in a different way on this issue where that moment where she was at the rally, she says-

Vice President Kamala Harris: And when Congress passes a law to restore reproductive freedoms as President of the United States, I will sign it into law.

Nayeema: That’s a very remarkable visual moment. She’s giving you a future to believe in and I think that this is the physics principle, the act of observing something changes a thing that’s being observed as it Schrodinger’s Cat. I think she’s getting more confident, this is going to make her better. And I think a hundred days is not long.

Ben: It’s not that long. And I think there’s some chance that she keeps the meta, I agree, right? And also she navigated, I mean talk about dexterity and talk about a messy situation.

Nayeema: Yeah.

Ben: The last three weeks of “is Joe Biden going to quit?” She obviously wants it, but she has to stand by him, but not too close. And she really navigated that. I think part of the reason that there was this huge bandwagon effect, which Democrats may live to regret of getting behind her was because she’d really navigated just a genuinely messy, complicated political situation.

Nayeema: She was delicate.

Ben: Yeah. And she’s just good on stage. She really does. She is much younger than these guys.

Nayeema: How old is she?

Ben: 59.

Nayeema: 59 is young. I mean that’s great. 59 is young. I got decades. I got decades, Ben.

Ben: We all do. Thank you. We’ve reset the whole clock here.

Nayeema: It’s great.

Ben: But how do you translate that into spontaneous situations, which she has not been in. The places she fell down and the reason that she withdrew from the public eye was she just botched an interview about the border so badly that she stopped giving interviews. And the other thing that I think people’ll forget, she’s been in the White House for four years, all the things that she didn’t know about national politics because she, by the way, she did sort of fall out of a coconut tree, which was California not long ago. She now knows she’s been in the White House. So I mean she’s a different figure than she was four years ago.

Nayeema: But I think that can be a superpower actually.

Ben: You really think this is going to last?

Nayeema: I think so. And I think it comes down to one, Kamala gives good meme. She just gives good meme. And we live in a meme world where we have meme stocks, meme coins, including one like a meme stock from Donald Trump, which is truth social, a meme coin from Donald Trump, the DJT coin. And we basically have a meme presidency in Donald Trump and I think she gives better meme. So there’s that.

And then the second part of it is every time, and this cuts to the Teflon of it all, when she has served attacks, her machinery around her, like the same machinery that so quickly rebranded Harris, Biden HQ to Brat HQ is going to seize on that and just push it to the culture. And so are all of these women who are so online. You see this right now with the 2021 childless cat lady comments from JD Vance.

Sen. JD Vance: We’re effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. And it’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats-

Ben: It’s part of the broader theory of the world where people with more kids should get more votes.

Nayeema: Yes, it’s this whole prenatal, as we’ve talked about, gender roles and it is alarming to women, and I think people are going to dig out these kinds of attacks from three years ago. I also should say completely ridiculous to call Kamala Harris, who is a stepmother of two people, a childless woman or Pete Buttigieg, a childless cat lady when in fact, I don’t think he has a cat. I don’t think he’s a lady.

Ben: Seems unwise.

Nayeema: Not a cat, not a lady, and not childless, adopted.

Ben: Seems unwise to go around calling people names when they’re trying to get their votes.

Nayeema: We have seen Kamala Harris on the offensive in media. As a prosecutor, I mean those are the strongest clips of her interrogating people in Senate, but we haven’t seen her, on the defensive women sometimes look weak, they look defensive, and it’s just ammunition for her. Her being on the defensive all of a sudden looks good, looks cool. She has an army of women. Literally the Women’s March, right?

Ben: I mean, I guess I think that you have a idea of her that is very appealing and it’s been with very little input from her because the meme is composed of terrible gaffs she made that almost ruined her career that have been repackaged. And I think it’s now can she actually be the person that you’re describing or when she’s asked complicated questions, will she answer in Selina Meyer-style word salad?

Nayeema: I think a hundred days. And you’re really talking about 60 until people start voting, right?

Ben: Yeah. So maybe you actually don’t have to be who you are, you can just sort of surf on the memes for a hundred days. We’ll see.

Nayeema: One thing’s for sure, JD Vance and Kamala Harris are both selling streamers again, because Veep is taken off. We’re going to talk to Frank Rich about that in a minute when we come back. And Hillbilly Elegy didn’t pop in 2020, very bad reviews, but now top 10 on Netflix.

Ben: Yep. Thank you, JD Vance.

Nayeema: Thank you, JD Vance. Let’s take a quick break and we’ll be right back.

Vice President Kamala Harris: I know you love Veep.

Steven Colbert: I do. I love Veep. Is it accurate?

Vice President Kamala Harris: There are bits of it that are actually quite accurate, and-

Nayeema: That is a clip of Kamala Harris just saying how much she loved the show Veep and talking to Steven Colbert. Do you love Veep, Ben?

Ben: I do love Veep. I mean, it’s impossible not to love.

Nayeema: Very good.

Ben: But you’re like a legitimate junkie, right?

Nayeema: I am a junkie. The show is so good, but I am a junkie in spite of my more idealistic self.

Ben: Do you identify with one of the characters? Are you the sort of like-

Nayeema: I feel like I’m Sue the receptionist.

Ben: Oh, I thought, I mean, what’s her name? The Chief of Staff?

Nayeema: Anna Chlumsky’s character.

Ben: Yeah. I feel like the sort earnest, hardworking, basically idealistic.

Nayeema: Yeah. Sleeping with that guy who’s like the comms director.

Ben: Just makes poor choices.

Nayeema: I mean, yeah, but I do think, it’s in spite of my better senses because I really like idealist television, particularly around government, and I feel like we need more of it in this country. I really liked West Wing.

Ben: Yeah, you’re a West Wing.

Nayeema: I’m a West Wing kid.

Ben: Basically.

Nayeema: Yeah. I mean, I really liked it when I started watching Veep, I’m like, I love Julia Louis-Dreyfus, but I don’t like the dislike of government in the United States. And then I ended up just joyously watching Veep probably more than once.

Ben: It’s just more a guilty pleasure for you.

Nayeema: It’s a guilty pleasure. It’s just a fantastic show of if, anyone has not seen it, is basically a bunch of kind of mindless muppets running around trying to bear hug the second in command who has no virtual power to get closer to her lack of virtual power and somehow succeeding in spite of themselves. And I think that it was just great television.

Ben: Yeah, it’s a fabulous show. And real Washington in a way too.

Nayeema: And kind of genius.

Ben: The sort of everyone moths to the flame of power, even when it’s kind of fake power.

Nayeema: Yes, you will cling onto it, and that is what happens in this show, but also just genius writing, genius creativity, the fact that you never see the President when Selina is Veep. You as the audience are relegated to this world of inconsequence.

Ben: Yes. This is your second-tier bubble across the street in EEOB.

Nayeema: Exactly. And you have no idea of what’s going on there, and yet it is a circus, but today we’re going to have on one of the Executive Producers of that show, Frank Rich, someone who you know.

Ben: Yeah, I mean Frank’s really has one of the legendary media careers. He was wrote up politics, wrote about all sorts of stuff as a young journalist, but when I came to know him was the theater critic for the New York Times, which is this incredibly powerful New York job. He was the guy who could open or basically close a show if he didn’t like it, or it would run for years if Frank Rich liked it and gave up that to become a columnist, writing about politics in New York Magazine and culture.

And then left that role to vanish into Hollywood and kind of emerge with a couple of the really great, the absolute great pieces of the golden age of television being Veep and Succession, which he executive produced for HBO and just, yeah, very unusual, genuinely astute, knowledgeable observer, both of real politics and of the arts and just incredible character.

Nayeema: Perfect credentials to get to where he is, which is like-

Ben: Yeah, totally.

Nayeema:Op-ed columnist writer, theater critic observer for so long. You told me he was what? The Butcher of Broadway?

Ben: Yeah, when I literally first met him was when his son, his 7-year-old son came over for a play date with my little sister and this very nice Upper West Side dad dropped her off and I was home and sort of collected her.

Nayeema: How old were you?

Ben: I must have been 14. And then I told my parents that Frank Rich had come by and they were like, “Oh my God, he’s legendary, he’s feared. He’s the Butcher of Broadway.” I’m not sure that’s a sobriquet he really loves, and it was a long time ago.

Nayeema: Yeah. Should we be afraid of Frank Rich?

Ben: No. I mean, when I’m hard up for ideas about what to write about and just need a column, I often call Frank and say, “Hey, what’s on your mind?” He’s just a very incredible range, actually, of an observer.

Nayeema: And still writes for New York Magazine. Well, I’m very excited to meet him. I’m a big fan of his work. Let’s have on Frank Rich.

[MUSIC]

Nayeema: Welcome, Frank.

Frank Rich: Thank you. Nice to be here.

Ben: Yeah, thanks for joining us. It’s good to see you.

Frank: Good to see you.

Ben: In another life you were a theater critic, and I wonder what would be your quick review of the last month of this presidential race as a piece of drama?

Frank: It’s insane, isn’t it? First of all, it almost would have to be cinematic because I don’t know how this would even work on the stage. There’s so many events, so many locations, things happening with so little warning you couldn’t develop a scene.

Nayeema: Has it been a good show, Frank, you think? What’s your 10 word review of the show of this presidential campaign?

Frank: Completely unbelievable, cardboard characters, unmotivated story events, pretty bad direction. Get that Trump speech down for heaven sakes.

Nayeema: These are good notes.

Frank: 90 minutes of gibberish is a bridge too far. So yeah, I think it would’ve, script notes of this would be extreme.

Nayeema: But it’s a must watch, right? Must watch.

Frank: Oh, yeah. It’s watching, at various times a train wreck, a tornado, sometimes literally a tornado has played a sub role in Houston or whatever the hurricanes of the past month.

Nayeema: And sometimes a rocket ship. I mean, Kamala feels like a rocket ship right now.

Frank: Yes, and that’s one of the really unexpected, to be blunt, events. But one thing I never predicted, I mean I didn’t predict any of it really, but the one thing that really was a surprise is the Democrats could get their act together in two minutes that she would take off like a rocket. It’s so unlike the Democratic Party, was almost like, is there some other thing going on here we don’t know about?

Ben: Maybe they’ll live to regret it.

Frank: I’m not sure but anyway.

Nayeema: We were just discussing, Ben and I before this, how Kamala has shifted from cringe to cool very quickly in the culture. And one of the things is in 2022, the Daily Show did a mashup of Selina Meyer versus Kamala Harris, and it had a very different valence then. Let’s play a clip.

Vice President Kamala Harris: Talking about the significance of the passage of time, right? The significance of the passage of time. So when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time.

Selina Meyer: Whatever we have in store cannot be known. The past was once the future, the future is, I should say unknown.

Vice President Kamala Harris: We got to take this stuff seriously, as seriously as you are because you have been forced to have to take it seriously.

Selina Meyer: Obesity is a serious disease and it needs to be taken seriously.

Vice President Kamala Harris: You need to get to go and need to be able to get where you need to go to do the work and get home.

Selina Meyer: I hope that clarifies the issue, and this can be the last word on those words.

Vice President Kamala Harris: Certain issues are just settled.

Robert Costa: Clearly we’re not.

Vice President Kamala Harris: No, that’s right. And that’s why I do believe that we are living, sadly, in real unsettled times.

Frank: I have to say on Veep, there were a couple of writers who specialized in writing political speeches, particularly for Selina, that literally have absolutely no content, the word salad of all time. And if people can’t get enough Veep, we’ve actually had a legitimate book publisher publish a fake campaign memoir by Selina Meyer.

Nayeema: Oh, my gosh.

Frank: And it was written by Billy Kimball, a writer on the show, a very funny writer who also worked with Al Franken, and it’s like 150 pages of slop like that, anecdotes of her childhood that have no payoff or no point or designed to prove that she loved her pet horse. Anyway.

Nayeema: By the way, as a writer, I don’t think there are many books that could be written by AI, but I think that the Selina Meyers autobiography could have been a fantastic Chat GPT project.

Frank: Completely. And although basically the AI stuff I’ve read, it’s a little for now, it’ll change soon within a year, but for now it’s a little clever than the AI version. But yes, that’s a great point. And by the way, Kamala Harris, when we were writing Veep didn’t exist as a national political personality, so this was all based on everyone else.

And then there’s a little bit, often when Veep has been sort of weaponized through the years, it’s been often aimed at female politicians. It was true of Hillary too, and as Dave Mandel, who was the last show writer of Veep would say, Selina is much closer to Trump, or also at various times, Mike Pence who also spoke in complete platitudes that led nowhere and then Trump in terms of her ethos. So it was a little unfair to Harris. But anyway, it’s interesting how it’s now flipped and it’s all cool.

Nayeema: Yes, and we want to get to those themes in a minute, the gender of it all, the inspiration for the characters. So we’re going to ask you about all that, but the flip right now, back then in 2022, this was a critique of Kamala. Now, Veep has weirdly become an endorsement of her, and this new kind of Kamala is brat culture. So what do you attribute that to? Is it escapism? Is it the devolution of our politics? Is it some kind of evolution or reclaiming of our culture? What is the flip?

Frank: I have to say I’m more of a student of it at this point than an expert. I didn’t see it coming and the whole brat thing, I didn’t see coming for her. I also was impressed by her campaign’s ability to seize on it in a nanosecond and use it as branding and all the rest. But I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. And I think frankly, part of it’s a younger generation than I am, and I’m probably not the right person to ask, but there is something about her, from afar and not knowing her, that she sort of has a way of going with it. Maybe it’s unintentional, but she does have a kind of humor about her.

It’s not like she’s cracking jokes, but she has a slightly humorous persona that maybe is now perceived as more charming than it originally was, as people have gotten to see her more in public life, but it also may be a factor of two old candidates, one now gone, just the fact that she’s now the young person in the room, I think counts for something. So geriatric are our politics that a 60 or 59-year-old can be claimed as hit by a younger culture.

Ben: Do you think when it comes to Selina that the vice presidency is sort of inherently funny?

Frank: Vice presidency has always been funny, and it’s had a history even in satirical comedy dating back almost a century. I mean, there was a musical by Kaufman and I guess I think Gershwins on Broadway in the early thirties, the one that pulled surprise called Of Thee I Sing, and the Vice President was a complete buffoon in it, made fun of in musical numbers. So it’s a staple of American culture. It’s always been there, Veep, which was conceived by way by an Englishman, Armando Innucci just went for the mother load on it.

Nayeema: A lot of people, there’s this Mandela effect happening now, some false memories being formed that Selina Meyers is inspired by Kamala Harris, which as you said is not the case. Kamala was not on the national stage at that time, but is she part of the inspiration for Kemi Talbot? Because there is this, I’m going to give a spoiler alert for anyone who’s not watch Veep. There’s this very competent Black DA turned senator who runs against Selina in season two, and then you’ve learned later at the end of the show, big spoiler alert at Selina’s funeral that she became President.

Frank: No, I mean, as someone who was present first of all in season two was still Armando, most of the writers were British, all the writers were British then. And I don’t think any of them had heard of Kamala Harris. And keep in mind, this was so early, we made the pilot in 2011, so we’re talking about a dozen years ago when we started the show. It’s been off the air for what, five years or something like that. And so no, it was all just too early. And when Dave Mandel took over the show for the last three seasons, and it was mainly American writers, she still wasn’t much of a presence.

I was thinking about it because I remembered when she started to get some national attention, but this is like when she was running for Senate, maybe if that, she was attorney general, I remember being in the room and the writers would been paramount and asking a lot of the writers, “What about Kamala Harris?” I was just curious because they were all mainly active Democrat, California Democrats, and there was not much talk about it all. In fact, it was general sentiment that Eric Garcetti was most residential timber to place it in time. So really there have been a couple of politicians that have over time without being specific because some of them are still in office, but there are people who’ve been around a lot longer that we thought of. But no, she just wasn’t a factor. So it’s coincidence.

Ben: You invented her. I mean, did you talk to, or any of the folks who had been in or around these roles to Cheney or Palin or I guess, in a sense Hillary Clinton feels like she lived in that world a bit, Al Gore, I mean, were you calling them up?

Frank: I know that Julia at the very beginning reached out to Al Gore, who of course is the person you want, the go to person for any kind of comedy and I’m being facetious. And we definitely reached out to certain kinds of people in Washington and even at one point spent a week in Washington meeting people, but it was not politicians, it was staffers. We were really interested in staffers, political strategists. We reached out to at one point, Ben Ginsburg, the now back in the news, the Republican election lawyer when we had a tied election, but not really politicians because I think we got the sense that any politician would put in a performance for us. It would be useless. We’d just get the image.

The one politician who did come, and I unfortunately missed it because I was working, it was a week when I was on Succession, was Mitt Romney came and spent a day or a long lunch in the writer’s room and brought his wife and charmed the hell out of everyone. Everyone just loved him, which was, it’s not the politics of the room, but he was apparently quite funny and charming. But I can’t say that you really see any, it was late in the day on Veep, but I don’t think you’ve seen anything resembling Mitt Romney in Veep at all.

Nayeema: It’s funny because you often hear the female comparisons, and you talked about this before. When Veep is weaponized, it’s often weaponized against female politicians. And of course, women in politics, they have to walk such a fine line. They have to be approachable, but not ridiculous, they have to be powerful, but somehow warm, friendly, but not flirtatious, not too feminine, but not at all masculine. And you play with this in Veep, there’s actually a great clip of Selina Meyer talking about being a woman.

Mike McLintock: He actually wants to know if you’ve changed your stance on abortion RE: POTUS. So you could say, as a woman, I believe that-

Selina Meyer: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I can’t identify myself as a woman. People can’t know that. Men hate that, and women who hate women hate that, which I believe is most women. Don’t you agree with that, Amy?

Amy Brookheimer: Yes and ma’am, we should really bag this up and take it-

Nayeema: Pretty genius. Is there something about the performance of politics from women that is so easily satirized?

Frank: Yes, because, and it fits in very well with the Veep concept too, by the way, the memoir that Selina “wrote” was called A Woman First: First Woman. Anyway, look, Armando’s original concept of Veep was someone who’s the second most powerful person in the world who has literally no power. And that kind of secondary status of a vice president has fit the secondary status of women, sadly in American politics. That they always have to, as you just said, they can’t be too feminine, they can’t be too funny, they can’t be this, they can’t be that. I think that’s beginning to change, and this election cycle may well change it further, but that secondary status, it fits in with being a veep, sadly. And so it’s very much something on our mind, on writer’s minds in the show. And also on the Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ mind, she loved this kind of material because she’d also dealt with in real life in Hollywood, even as a successful actor.

Ben: Could Veep have been a man?

Frank: Yes, it could have been, but that’s an interesting question. But it was never discussed. It was always a woman, and probably in part for the reason I said, it accentuates the comedy even more when it’s a woman who has to fight like hell to get anywhere, anyway, in Washington, and again, keep in mind the show was conceived five years, little more than five years before Hillary Clinton ran for president.

Ben: Does JD Vance have comic potential?

Frank: Oh, yes. Yeah. I actually worked on a show that didn’t happen, wasn’t a comedy, but a couple of years ago where he was already, after Hillbilly Elegy, a version of him was a much mocked character. No one would’ve recognized, the character wasn’t in politics, but he was sort of a little Peter Seale like with JP Vance stirred in, yeah, he’s already showing that potential. I think the guy’s comes across as such a loser.

Everyone’s saying, “He’s this great politician. He’s so great in the stump.” The speech of the convention was completely tepid. He seems to have no, I’m not even talking about his views, which are also in my view lamentable to put it mildly, he was terrible on the stump so far. He’s subservient to Trump. He keeps stepping into it. And one of the things I love too is he’s presented as this military guy. He went into the Marines. Do you know what he did in the Marines?

Nayeema: No. What did he do?

Frank: He was a journalist. He was a PR guy.

Ben: Hey, that’s honorable work, Frank. Come on.

Frank: How low can you get? How low can you get?

Nayeema: But like Selina Meyer, he contains multitudes.

Frank: Exactly, and seems to have absolutely no convictions of his own, which is very Selina Meyer like. We saw throughout the shows, she’d just turn on a dime depending on where her next meal is coming from. And yeah, he’s that. And I’m just struck, I find he has no charisma as a political figure at all. I’m not sure he is built for the national stage. We’ll see. We may not get a chance to see, because Trump may just stick him in a closet.

Ben: Yeah, I mean there is this sort of degrading humiliating quality to being vice president should they win. That sometimes it elevates people, but sometimes it really compresses them. It feels like Kamala barely escaped in some sense, right?

Nayeema: Yeah. Well, I mean the way she played the last few weeks has just been impeccable in the sense of just so elegant because there’s a way for all that ambition to get in your way as it kind of gets in Selina’s way when she’s told she can be president and in spite of herself, she makes it through.

Frank: I couldn’t agree with you more, and that’s one of the things that surprised me. I felt she’d been pitch perfect from the moment of the debate. The way she picked up the ball for Biden when he should have been out there and wasn’t, was quite impressive and struck, as you said, struck this tone that hard to do. And then as we now know from sort of morning after stories, there was also a lot going on behind the scenes that said that she could hit the ground running should Biden step down.

Nayeema: Yeah. There is, Frank, something so darkly comic about Veep, and I think of it in the sense that growing up being a kid, I watched West Wing, which was at that time the great liberal fantasy during the Bush era, right? And I think Veep is just the opposite of that. Selina, spoiler alert, sells her soul as you’ve said. Even her most loyal henchman, Gary, the bat carrier, even he falls out of love with her by the end. It’s a total contrast to the kind of moral rectitude of the West Wing or Madam Secretary. Do you think that’s a bygone, because those are very much network shows and Veep is very much a cable streamer show. Do you think that’s just a bygone of the culture or we couldn’t have any positive interpretation of our government anymore?

Frank: That’s a good question. Certainly is for now. I mean, I have to say we very much, Madam Secretary was after, I mean started after us, but we were very much the unWest Wing. We had no intention, no one in the show, no one in Veep has a good motive for anything. I think culture does shift and there’ve been periods, there was Mr. Smith goes to Washington in between the wars and around the New Deal and there was some idealism, and then you think of what happened in say in the sixties, it was completely different cycle. And also it was before that the Manchurian Candidate, which was still during the Cold War, and then it shifted to warm and cuddly again, it shifted back. Veep may have well been a leader in that, it wasn’t alone, I don’t think. But it could shift again, but probably not fast. I mean, it’s going to take a while. I wouldn’t want to go out and pitch the Ted Lasso of politics now.

Ben: If not Ted Lasso, have you ever thought about or put your hand to writing something inspiring, idealistic about politics or is that outside your range at the moment?

Frank: You know something, I’ll tell you very honestly, I grew up in Washington. I was not in a political family, but I grew up in the city of Washington. My stepfather was what you’d now call a case B lawyer. He was a fixer for corporations. And so very, very cynical about politics. And the other thing about growing up in Washington when I did was you’d see all these school groups come, buses and they’d visit the Capitol and the White House and all that, and yet it was a city that was at that time, particularly a lot of poverty, people living in alleys. It was such a contrast between the official sets of Washington and what was actually like to live in that city. So I guess it is out of my range. I always saw what was going on behind the scenes in some way long before I thought of being a journalist. So it was inculcated me at a very young age.

Nayeema: Well, we’ll ask you to color outside the lines a little bit maybe then for this last question. But what is the most earnest West Wingy interpretation of Biden’s actions in stepping down? And then I’ll ask you for the more pragmatic VP take.

Frank: The earnest interpretation is, of course, he did it for the good of the country. He saw he couldn’t win. He believes in the values that he was preaching as president and as a candidate and wanted to further them and felt his Vice President was the person who could carry it forward. I mean, that’s what I think a lot of people, certainly people around him were saying that is the earnest version, I think. Do you agree?

Nayeema: Yeah.

Frank: Yeah, sure.

Nayeema: Yeah, I think that’s the earnest version. I think the question is if you buy it, and that’s certainly by the way, the version that you’re seeing out there with the Washington Post and New York Times, you’re seeing a lot of op-eds and ads running the brave act of the President.

Frank: And of course one of the fascinating turns is to see the press turn on a dime.

Nayeema: Yes.

Frank: My feeling is he obviously didn’t want to go. I felt that even came through last night in his address, that people got through to him and convinced him that there’s no way he could win. That finally, people penetrated that inner circle and showed him hard data, and he was smart enough and I think sentient enough to realize better to go out with dignity and do the right thing for my party and the right thing to try to bring down Trump.

I think the Kamala part of it, I’m not sure what the real version is. I don’t know. I’m willing to believe they had a good relationship. I honestly don’t know. It wasn’t conspicuously bad like some relationships between presidents and vice presidents had been like Kennedy and Johnson or even Trump and Pence, but he convinced himself what the right thing was. And it turns out politically, it seems to have been the right call for now.

Ben: We were talking before about whether can she keep this ball in the air? Can she keep this going in this cultural moment that she somehow happened into? What do you think?

Frank: I don’t know. I think one thing that’s going to help her is that Trump really isn’t campaigning and she now seems fresh.

Nayeema: I think that’s the thing people forget. Campaigns are about that, getting to know the candidate as well, and there’s a curiosity. I mean, forget the age thing and everything else, there’s just a curiosity about Kamala that will sustain. It’s like you keep watching because you don’t yet know the answer. Versus with Trump, you kind of know the answer. And so I think that works in her favor.

Frank: I agree, and I think I’ve heard the story of her childhood and her parents, and I’ve covered politics and I follow those, but I’m a little sketchy on it. I’m happy to hear it again, it’s a new story. And the Trump story, partially because of Trump himself, we just know it by heart and it never changes.

Nayeema: Yeah. Maybe people will watch it the way they’re watching Veep, just stay glued to their screens. They’ll be in the hero position for time to come.

Frank: Maybe so, and maybe she can be intentionally funny. We’ll see.

Ben: That is the test.

Nayeema: That’s the test.

Frank: There’s so many things we don’t know. What is the convention going to be? The show business component of too really interests me because we went through the George Clooney moment and all of that. Now everyone’s on board, including George Clooney, and how’s that going to play out? What’s Taylor Swift going to do? There’s so many interest for who’s going to interact with. And all of it’s going to drive Trump nuts. That’s the thing. The other thing that she has going for is a woman, a woman of color. He can’t help himself. He cannot help himself. Also, and JD Vance has really helped me by saying that women who don’t have children are worthless and gay men who don’t have children. So he’s, it’s going to be interesting. Aren’t you riveted by it all?

Ben: Totally.

Nayeema: Riveted. Yeah. We’ll wrap there. But I do think, by the way, the VP interpretation of the Kamala of it all, if in success minting the first Black female President of the United States helps you make history too, bonafide is your legacy, I guess.

Frank: And leaving Veep out of it, it would be a good thing in general, I think. And look, and if that happens, that might answer your previous question. Turn the culture around again. Now maybe you can believe in the West Wing again.

Nayeema: Yeah.

Ben: Oh, God. We’re going to have to watch a bunch of sappy heroic president movies again.

Frank: Oh, God. Well, at least we won’t have to watch the episode that Aaron Sorkin wrote last week.

Nayeema: The Mitt Romney.

Frank: Democrats nominating Mitt Romney. That was bizarre.

Ben: One plot twist too outlandish and short-lived.

Nayeema: He did have to quickly retract via Malina’s Twitter account, but idiotic.

Frank: It was ridiculous. Totally out of touch, right?

Ben: Yep.

Nayeema: All right, thank you so much, Frank, for being with us.

Ben: Thanks, Frank. Nice to see you.

Nayeema: This is great.

Frank: Great to talk to you. Great to see you both, and thank you. Do it again, I hope.

[MUSIC]

Nayeema:He’s fantastic.

Ben: He’s great. Just totally unique kind of range.

Nayeema: Totally unique. I hope for a West Wing rendition. See, I watch Madame Secretary in those kinds of shows because I’m like-

Ben: I loved Scandal. Is that what it was called? That’s my favorite one.

Nayeema: I think that’s also not good.

Ben: I thought that was the most realistic one.

Nayeema: Ben, really?

Ben: Yeah, because it was like-

Nayeema: Wasn’t there murder? President pays for abortion?

Ben: Some of the details were out of it, but I think one of the things about these shows that Veep sort of captures too, I mean, I do think that some of the idealism is real, and I kind came up in House of Cards World where everyone is a total cynic and what I liked about Scandal-

Nayeema: But then you came up, were you like twenty or are you...

Ben: That was the big show of my, I guess when I was a young political reporter, got a cameo at some point, it was very exciting.

Nayeema: You really had a cameo?

Ben: Well, they showed a video at the correspondents dinner where I was talking to Kevin Spacey on the phone. It was a big, big moment for me. But the thing about that there everyone is so cynical and stands for nothing, and my actual experience of Washington is more true believers.

Nayeema: Yes.

Ben: And that was what Scandal was about. And in some way, Veep too, and incompetent, true believers is also a big theme.

Nayeema: I think the incompetent, true believer thing is real. But I don’t know. I feel like so much of government has been gutted and there was this complete distrust in this country of government, and we’ve just grown up millennials, Gen Zers in particular, growing up with this kind of government as joke culture.

Ben: Joke or conspiracy.

Nayeema: Joke or conspiracy, but either way, not good. And I think that kind of you get in what you put out. So if that’s what you want to draw to the roles, it’s what you want. People will become memes and caricatures of themselves in those roles and also you kind of have adverse selection. You don’t get the earnest West Wingers into the White House or into the administration or into office. And I think that’s sad. I’m so idealistic.

Ben: Yeah, I mean, and Trump was elected too, people who voted for because they hated everyone and they wanted someone who’s going to come in and clean house. So you’re suggesting that Hollywood poisoned all of our belief in government and now and got us Trump.

Nayeema: I know having had that one cameo in House of Cards, you don’t want to sell out your Hollywood class, Ben, but yeah, no, but I do think that the culture, the mockery of government paired with the kind of historical distrust of government that brought a lot of people to this country, like the story of America is a number of people who are persecuted by their governments or don’t trust their governments come here and “make it on their own.” There isn’t a lot of space for luck or nationality or compassion.

And I do think that one of the beautiful things about West Wing is while the government was actively lying to you to pursue an international war, you had kids, I was growing up, middle school, high school. You’re watching this show about government being great and being able to maybe change that and I think that helped with Obama.

Ben: Yeah. And people making decisions for the right and weighing decisions heavily for the right reason, which really is a lot of what people of both parties and government do, is make hard decisions mostly for the right reasons with a lot of VP incompetence and political calculation mixed in.

Nayeema: At minimum, you’re giving people something to lean into. Like the Obama campaign leaned into the West Wing, and I’m going to say the Trump campaign seemed like Veep on steroids with the kind of characters. But let’s take a quick break and we’re going to be back with Max Tani to talk blind spots.

[MUSIC]

Ben: This week on our branded segment from Think With Google, we’re talking with Google VP of Marketing, Josh Spanier, about the lessons marketers learned from political campaigns and why campaigns can take bigger risks than brands. This has been called the year of elections with 2 billion people voting. Of course, we have the US election in November. How do big elections impact marketeers?

Josh Spanier: So elections impact us in marketing, but probably not in the way you think. Now here in the US, if you are a local brand selling products or trying to get people to come to your store and you happen to live in a swing state, you may be impacted more. There may be less media ads for you to buy, or maybe because of all the money flooding in, you actually are going to have to pay more for your commercials. But I think the most interesting part of the impact of elections is what happens after the election. Over the years, when you have an election, there is a winner and a loser. The winners are heroes. The losers are abject failures. The binary natures of elections happen there and coming out of the DC Beltway, there have been a succession of election winners, think James Carville, think Carl Rove, think Mark Penn, even Nate Silver.

They have actually spun up and become very attractive to marketers to learn how did they do their microtargeting or their persuasion or their polling. Those companies coming out of the DC beltway, taking their political skills honed on elections and bringing them to major marketing organizations in the years that follow off the success of whether they won or if they lost.

Ben: Do you find that commercial marketing follows political marketers or does it go both ways? Are the political campaigns also stealing the best of private sector?

Josh: I think what you’re touching on, Ben, is the digital transformation of our society. The incredible technologies that Google and others have invented have enabled things that never were possible before. And that’s actually created all sorts of opportunities with creators on YouTube or short form video advertising on YouTube shorts or podcasts and a number of other ways of connecting and engaging with people. And what I see is we’re all sort of navigating through these digital transformations of what’s working? What’s not working? What are these new platforms? What are these new surfaces? Sometimes we will learn from a political company, other times they’ll see something that we’ve done. But as you and I saw when we went to the Cannes Advertising Festival, every industry is leaning into digital transformation. So we’re actually finding learnings from across the board, not just those two directions of marketing and politics.

Ben: Yeah, that’s interesting. I do wonder if the politicians, because they have a higher appetite for risk because it’s just so binary, either you win or you’re out of business. And so they’re sort of more willing to experiment with riskier stuff.

Josh: Ben, I think you are totally right. I’ve worked with brands my whole career and no one wants to cause a crisis or a scandal. There is no good outcome when you have that happen to a brand. So that inherently makes you conservative as your go-to market. Politicians, I think are much more flexible, much more adaptable, and they’re much more short term. They can turn a crisis into a win and they can turn wins into crises, actually, unsurprisingly. But in regulated industries like marketing, it’s actually much better to be planned for the long term to be sustaining and to be organized such you avoid the worst possible swings of every situation.

[MUSIC]

Nayeema: Back in the studio. Max Tani here with us.

Max: I’m here.

Nayeema: The only person not in chartreuse.

Max: Yeah, that’s true.

Nayeema: You didn’t get the chartreuse memo.

Max: I don’t really, it’s not, I’m colorblind, so I’m not really about whatever color. People are like brat, it’s green. Okay.

Ben: You’re saying you’re colorblind is sort of a sensitivity thing or are you colorblind, you’re colorblind in a political sense?

Nayeema: Are you interrogating him?

Max: No, no, no. But I do think that it’s interesting, Ben, you are technically my boss and you’re making a joke about my disability.

Ben: Oh, about your disability.

Nayeema: Yeah, I was going to say, it sounds like.

Max: Yeah, I mean, I’m just pointing it out.

Ben: We should not only strike this but erase it from the recording.

Nayeema: But the technical term for what you’re describing is post color.

Ben: Right, right.

Nayeema: Post color.

Ben: Right. That’s what I was going for.

Nayeema: I don’t see color, I’m post color.

Ben: This is the disability joke I was trying to make.

Nayeema: Yeah.

Ben: Sorry, Max.

Max: It’s interesting.

Nayeema: All right, well let’s move on before we have HR issues.

Max: So one of the blind spots this week for conservatives or whoever really is the RFK voter. I can’t really tell exactly where that person exists on the political spectrum.

Nayeema: The middle of the road anti-vaxxer, I think.

Max: Yeah. Which I think that’s right wing at this point, right? So if he’s elected president, RFK Jr, plans to create “wellness farms” where people will spend three or four years harvesting organic vegetables to cure their addiction to antidepressants and ADHD meds. This is according to Mother Jones who reported this week that during an event that was billed as a Latino town Hall, RFK unveiled his plan to overhaul addiction treatment programs. And here’s what he said. He said, “I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also other psychiatric drugs if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off benzos, to get off Adderall and to spend time, as much time as they need three or four years if they need it to learn, to get reparented, to reconnect with communities.”

And he said that on these farms, residents would grow their own organic food, which would help them recover from addiction because “a lot of the behavioral issues are food related.” And another crucial rule on the farm, and it’s important to understand is that because if you’ll be there for three or four years, cell phones and other screens he said would be prohibited.

Ben: For years.

Nayeema: Digital detox.

Max: So to get off of your SSRIs or ADHD medication, you’re going to go to a farm for three to four years to make organic vegetables and there’s no screens. What do you guys think?

Ben: That sounds great.

Max: Good deal.

Nayeema: Wait, I have a couple of reactions. First of all, when you said he was going to make people go to a farm for three to four years, because we’ve just been discussing JD Vance and you said to harvest, I thought you were going to say they’re eggs for procreation.

Ben: See, I thought you said organs. We were each auto completing that sentence.

Nayeema: You thought organs, I thought eggs.

Max: No, for.

Nayeema: This is breeding.

Max: This is a classic traditional farm. You’re going to grow some vegetables and some fruits and you’ll be there for...

Nayeema: He’s really tapping into the beauty and wellness culture that has just taken over our society and the antiscreen moment of Jonathan Haidt we just had.

Ben: Is he tapping into anything?

Nayeema: He’s tapping into something, guys.

Max: Guys, this is classic old school granola stuff. This is like guys are putting modern frames on. This is the most classic old school hippie granola.

Nayeema: This is the crunchy to granola access that we-

Max: Yeah, we talked about this.

Nayeema: Raw milk, we’ve talked about before.

Max: Raw milk is another one.

Nayeema: But there is a kind of cultural obsession with wellness that’s happened. I think one could argue the amount of wellness and self-help books have made us an even more naval gazing, less kind of communal society. But this is making a community of that culture.

Ben: And there’s backlash to therapy, a backlash to SSRIs, a backlash to a lot of psychological treatment. It’s also a big part of Scientology.

Max: I really think that mostly this is just a new frame for something that’s existed for a long time. I mean, I’m sure you guys were kind of around when there was the wwoofing thing. Do people still do that? That was a big thing when I was in college, which was, it was basically like an early version of Airbnb. This is how I was described to me in college is people would go and stay on a farm and do some work in exchange for being able to stay in some place. A few of my friends did it during college.

Nayeema: Cult, is that the word for that, cult? But how is this going to be funded? Who’s going to pay for this?

Max: So actually, you know what? He did say that the way that it was going to be funded was based off of taxes on legalized marijuana. That was the way that he was going to pay for this.

Ben: I mean, this is a real plan.

Nayeema: This is a policy position.

Max: So to me, I kind of think that this sounds pretty great besides the timeline. To me it’s really more of I could do this for three weeks, maybe even three months. That sounds great. It sounds like a vacation, but three or four years, no screens to get off of SSRIs. I think at some point, if I’m there for three years and I haven’t done it, I’m good to go.

Nayeema: I’m not going to keep you there against your will. I’m just like, instead of going to the Mandarin Oriental Spa, I’m going here for the taxpayer funded one week digital detox with organic comfort.

Max: I mean, it’s real. I mean, the Soviets had great sanatoriums. I mean, that was a real thing that workers could get shipped off to a big hotel on the seaside and recover. I mean, it’s strange that it has this right wing coating because as you say, it comes out of a real left wing tradition.

Nayeema: Yeah, progressive.

Max: And that’s big government.

Nayeema: But I think weirdly, this is kind of an incentive to do SSRI so you can go on holiday and eat organic kombucha.

Max: Yeah. What do I have to do? Do I have to prove? That’s true. Do I have to prove that I’ve taken something like that?

Ben: I don’t think he’s going to be President, but something’s going to happen with that strand of politics that he embodies.

Max: The whole thing doesn’t sound particularly that bad, and it’s honestly not that far away from these volunteer programs. Didn’t Obama have a volunteer program?

Nayeema: Yeah. Maybe he is campaigning for HUD, Secretary under Trump administration.

Max: Well, that was actually what he wanted, right? Is he was basically like, I want to trade.

Ben: He wanted health and human services.

Max: He wanted health and human services.

Nayeema: Health and human services, plus Airbnb HUD.

Max: Trump to his credit was kind of like, “No.”

Nayeema: Well, what is the other blind spot, Max?

Max: The other blind spot, this is a bit of a stretch, I have to kind of admit that. Which is for all the non-conservative readers of the Wall Street Journal, who may have missed the story, the journal this week reported that stealth shopping is on the rise. The journal basically said that according to a survey last year, nearly two thirds of people who live with a spouse or significant other hid a purchase from their partner over the last year. A quarter of them hid a clothing purchase and 1 in 10 manipulated financial records to conceal their spending.

Nayeema: Manipulated financial records.

Max: Yes.

Nayeema: To their spouse or partner?

Max: So basically the journal interviewed a clinical psychologist who said that she had seen a jump in stealth shopping in recent years, which was fueled by, what she attributed, to the rise of influencers. “When you see someone online pushing something, you feel more pressure to buy it even if you can’t afford it.” Have you guys done any stealth shopping recently? Do you have this kind of guilt around shopping or shame or any sort of accountability?

Nayeema: No. All my shopping is in shameless display, including to whoever my partner might be in the moment. But I guess if you share finances, maybe there’s some kind of different reality.

Ben: Yeah.

Nayeema: Did you stealth buy that phone cover?

Ben: No. I’ve never had the sort of energy to hide a purchase. But definitely impulse purchase, books in particular, and then feel like Leona is going to see it and be like, “What are you doing? You’re never going to read that it,” small things. But I think if I had the sort of wherewithal/if I could buy it in cash and not be judged in that way, I would prefer to stealth shop.

Nayeema: Your stealth shopping books that Leona is worried you are not going to read.

Ben: Those are my impulse books.

Nayeema: You are so wholesome.

Max: They don’t talk about anybody having a problem stealth shopping books in this article.

Nayeema: I think that 1 out of 10 who are hiding their expenses, I want to know what percentage of that is OnlyFans, and Ashley Madison, are those considered purchases? Those are stealth purchases.

Ben: That’s a traditional, pretty traditional stealth form of cover.

Max: No, but I do think that this is a real thing. I mean, I know that in my life, I think my girlfriend is appalled by the amount of online shopping I do.

Nayeema: I actually have the opposite reaction to Instagram and social media where there’s so much pushing of stuff, constantly seeing ads for these flat shoes that become heels that become flat, it’s kind of interesting. Ingestible beauty, dah, dah, dah. I just, I’m not interested in consuming any of it. It makes me actually want to be more of a naturalist.

Max: Yeah, no, I definitely feel that way about, in particular Instagram. I actually think that this is one of the things that cheapens their ads is if something is being served to me relentlessly, I’m like, this is obviously not something that I want to seek out because it’s constantly finding me.

But at the same time, I really do understand this idea that people have guilt over the amount of time that they spend shopping now because I actually think that the ads and the targeting have gotten so good. They’ve gotten so good at following you around forever. So I understand people feeling like they have a little bit of shame about the amount of shopping they’re doing.

Nayeema: Do you know you got to do? You got to do some SSRIs. Get to that farm where you cannot shop anymore.

Max: It would definitely qualify me.

Nayeema: I put the subsidized-

Max: I think that shopping addiction qualifies me to go live on the farm.

Ben: I think it should.

Nayeema: I think it should blind spot A could kind of cure blind spot 2, which could feed you into blind spot A. This is actually good.

Max: But I’ll to buy some new clothes for the farm first. So I look good on there and I’ve got the appropriate-

Nayeema: Oh, God.

Ben: What are you thinking?

Max: I’ve actually got some good gardening shoes. Some good gardening clogs.

Ben: Oh my God.

Max: That I got a few years ago.

Nayeema: I have a whole camping outfit I bought for one camping trip in Montana.

Max: Great. Yeah, exactly. So I’ll need to do that first.

Nayeema: Before we go, should we do a predictions round? Because it turned out so well for Ben last time.

Max: Sure, yeah.

Ben: Absolutely.

Nayeema: Why don’t we do predictions for Veep, who’s going to be Kamala Harris’s Vice Presidential pick?

Ben: I mean, she historically plays it safe, and I think the safest pick is probably Mark Kelly, the former astronaut, Senator from Arizona, kind of makes checks a lot of boxes.

Nayeema: Gabby Gifford’s husband.

Ben: Gabby Gifford’s husband. Yeah. Although I think we’re going to come out of this moment in which Democrats are totally high on their own supply and feel like they’re winning. And she’s going to look at polling that will either say she could win, play it safe, or will say she’s totally screwed, she’s got to do a Sarah Pale in like Hail Mary pick. And I think that’ll be clear in a couple of weeks. It’s just not clear now.

Nayeema: Got it. Max, what do you think?

Max: I really think that there’s no indication in what way she’s leaning. So I’m going to kind of make a prediction that I think she’s going to go with a Governor. She spent a lot of time with Roy Cooper, swing state guy, North Carolina, place where they got kind of close last time, but not as close as they would’ve liked. And he’s won there. They have a good relationship. He checks a lot of boxes. He’s just a down home American guy, not going to overshadow her. And I feel like that’s an obvious easy one. What do you think?

Nayeema: What do I think my prediction is? I think it’s going to be, I mean, I was going to say Kelly, but I’ll say Shapiro, just to be different from you, Governor Shapiro of Pennsylvania. But I actually have a wild idea that maybe the smartest thing for her to do is actually pick one of Gretchen Whitmer or Pete Buttigieg, because I do kind of feel like there’s a sense of, oh, there couldn’t possibly be two women or a Black woman and a gay man on the ticket, but this is the wave that is carrying you forward. Maybe lean into it. There will definitely be a long-term backlash, but that would be-

Max: I mean, in a way, this is, is she thinking about swing voters or is she thinking about the base? It’s a choice she’s going to make a million different ways and this is one.

Nayeema: Well stay tuned for veep the pick, not the television show, which you can now watch and contribute to the millions of minutes being watched. In the meantime, thanks for listening to Mixed Signals from Semafor Media. Our show is produced by Max Tani, Allison Rodgers, Sheena Ozaki, Alan Haburchak, and Andrea López-Cruzado with special thanks to Dan Nathan and the team at Risk Reversal Media who let us use this very, aren’t these nice digs?

Max: Very nice, yeah, it’s really nice.

Nayeema: Very nice.

Max: It’s cozy.

Nayeema: If you haven’t checked out Dan’s podcast Okay, Computer, please do, it’s fantastic. And of course, special thanks to Brita Gallanis, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pizzino, Garett Wiley, and Jules Zirn. Our engineer is Rick Kwan. Our theme music is by Billy Libby and our public editor is the Childless Cat Ladies of America.

Ben: I hope they’ll send us notes.

Nayeema: They will definitely be sending us notes. If you like Mixed Signals, please follow us wherever you get your podcast and feel free to review us whether you like us or not.

Max: And if you’re watching on YouTube, please subscribe and remember to subscribe to Semafor’s Media Newsletter and send us your tips, published this Sunday night.