Progress is a Long Game

(Originally aired 5/06/25) What sparks progress? The right political conditions? Social pressure? Economic upheaval? In response to two listeners’ questions, we say… both none of those and all of the above. As an example, we talk through just one bit of the New Deal in the 1930s, which was the law to limit child labor. That movement started decades earlier, and continued decades afterward. For those keeping score at home, this a sneaky third installment of Kathryn’s 68-part series on the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Chapters: 00:01:08 Announcements 00:01:43 Retcon 00:03:58 Terms & Conditions 00:07:03 Centerpiece 00:42:56 Executive Orders 00:46:25 Spiritual Sponsors Donate to Optimist Economy: https://optimisteconomy.com Follow us on Instagram at ⁠⁠@optimist_economy https://www.instagram.com/optimist_economy or TikTok at ⁠⁠@optimist_economy https://www.tiktok.com/@optimist_economy. Or on the Optimist Economy YouTube channel⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@optimist_economy. Chat with other Optimists on Substack. https://substack.com/chat/4604257?utm_source=pub-nav-bar Shirts, caps and totes, oh my!: https://merch.ambientinks.com/collections/optimisteconomy Reach us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to Optimist Economy. I'm economist Catherine Ann Edwards.

• 0:33Robin Rauzi?

  I'm editor Robin Rousey.

• 0:35Speaker 02

  On this show, we believe the US economy can be better, and we talk about how to get there, one problem and solution at a time.

• 0:40Robin Rauzi?

  This week on Optimist Economy, we're going to rerun an episode that we first aired a year ago, called "Progress is a Long Game."

• 0:48Speaker 02

  It is about the defeat of child labor. And we asked our audio engineer Sophie and our video producer Andy, what were some of their favorite episodes. And Sophie picked this one, in her words, not because she likes child labor, but because it gets at so much of what we're trying to do on the show, which is to help optimists understand that the struggle is long and the progress is possible.

• 1:10Robin Rauzi?

  Progress is a long game.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  Progress is a long game.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to Optimist Economy. I'm Catherine.

• 1:22Robin Rauzi?

  I'm Robin.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  On this show, we believe the US economy can be better, and we talk about how to get there, one problem and a solution at a time.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  Well, we are going to start with a quick announcement. Our show now has an official website, optimist economy dot com, in which you can subscribe to the show, in which you can donate to the show, you can donate through our Substack, you can donate through Buy Me a Coffee. And we've decided that we'd love money. We'd love to have it to support the production of the show. And in fact, it would be pretty useful in maintaining the show to have money for it.

• 2:08Robin Rauzi?

  All true.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  Thank you. Give your time there. Now we can go straight to retcon.

• 2:13Robin Rauzi?

  For our new listeners, because I'm sure we're getting them every day, retcon stands for retroactive continuity. And this is where we talk about things that we actually talked about in our last episode and offer any updates or things that we thought about since then. Catherine, what's on your retcon list this week?

• 2:32Speaker 02

  So mine's actually from a few episodes back, but in the social security episode, I said that I was commissioned to write an explainer about social security when I was 22. I was 24.

• 2:43Robin Rauzi?

  I'm glad that we're on the record about that.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  I thought about it and I, you know, the four years between college and grad school, I just kind of collapsed everything to age 22. Not just for like, when did I write this thing about social security? Like everything that happens, happens at age 22. And then I go to grad school and I'm like 30 for like another 15 years.

• 3:02Robin Rauzi?

  We call that, at our house, we call that the collapsing 90s. Like they just telescope down.

• 3:10Robin Rauzi?

  For you, apparently it's later, but you know, I get it.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  I'm just, everything was 22 and then it was like a whole bunch of [BLEEP] happened when I was 30, probably about 10, 15 years worth of stuff. And I'm about to turn another age soon, so that'll be a really big deal for me. But yeah, that was my, that was my retcon.

• 3:25Robin Rauzi?

  Great, great. I was thinking about paid leave, paid sick leave, which is

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Oh, is yours a real ret, is yours, yours is a real retcon?

• 3:31Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, it is a real retcon. Because I was curious, I knew that in California where I live, we have paid sick leave. And in fact, California updated its law and it's pretty remarkable. We, the update started this year, I believe. And basically temp workers, seasonal workers, if you work more than 30 days for any employer, you get paid sick leave in California. California wasn't the first state to implement this, Connecticut, I believe was. But California came on shortly thereafter. But anyway, 21 states and the District of Columbia actually already have paid sick leave for employees in the United States. And it's so surprising that that many people could be covered by this already and that there'd be resistance at the federal level.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  It's through their state and city actions that we have so much good evidence about why paid sick leaves are so beneficial to the economy and to workers.

• 4:22Robin Rauzi?

  Right. And I put that study up on the show notes, the one in, about Seattle.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Okay, terms and conditions. Do you have any, do you have any fun ones this week?

• 4:31Robin Rauzi?

  I don't know if this is fun or not, but we can cut it in post if it's not. I looked up. Animal spirits, which, you know, is a term that apparently comes from John Maynard Keynes.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  Keynes.

• 4:44Robin Rauzi?

  Keynes.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  We say Keynes.

• 4:45Robin Rauzi?

  Keynes.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  Oh, be a first year grad student, say Keynes. I'm not coming from like a place of judgment, I'm coming from a place of experience. This old hick from Texas doesn't say things right the first time, so if I've learned, you can now learn.

• 4:59Robin Rauzi?

  Thank you.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  They say Keynes.

• 5:01Robin Rauzi?

  Keynes.

• 5:03Robin Rauzi?

  It's from one of his books about that overarching macroeconomics, but he basically says that markets aren't perfectly mathematical, that there's this human element to decisions about how markets move, particularly in moments of stress and panic. And he calls this the animal spirits, which I thought was a pretty great term.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  There's a book called Animal Spirits, which I would actually really recommend called, How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and it's fascinating, but it's all about essentially making bad decisions. Like if you were just to lay out like the economic path of like making a strict numbers decision, and this is how economists build our understanding of the economy. And people would be like, well, I picked the wrong thing every time. And I think it's also taken on a broader meaning of animal spirits of a two-way street of not just how people act in the economy, but also how people react to the economy. And so I've been using animal spirits interchangeably with vibes lately.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  You have this notion, updated for the nomenclature of the day, that there's more to the economy than just the data and the numbers and the cold calculating decisions. I think he brought it up a lot more for things like panics.

• 6:16Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  And how situations get worse for no economic reason, but for psychological reasons.

• 6:22Robin Rauzi?

  Right, right. The fundamentals may still be there, but people freak out.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:27Robin Rauzi?

  But, Anne, the book you're talking about is not by Keynes.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  It's not by Mr. Keynes. It is by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller. Akerlof has won the Nobel Prize. I don't think...

• 6:38Robin Rauzi?

  Is Shiller, is in the Case-Shiller Housing Index, that's Shiller?

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Yes, that's Shiller, I'm pretty sure it's that's Shiller. Akerlof has won the Nobel Prize, and he's probably one of few Nobel Prize-winning economists who has a more famous economist wife in Janet Yellen.

• 6:55Robin Rauzi?

  Oh.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  So he like I've I've heard him give speeches where he's like this Nobel Prize winner and he's like, oh, yeah, I'm nobody knows which one I am because his wife is Janet Yellen. And so he's like, I'm I'm kind of the lagger in the couple, which is amazing.

• 7:15Robin Rauzi?

  Excellent. Did you have anything to add on the terms and conditions front?

• 7:20Speaker 02

  I mean, vibes.

• 7:23Robin Rauzi?

  The sorus version of Catherine vibes. Yeah, okay.

• 7:31Robin Rauzi?

  All right. So today, speaking of our tens of listeners, and there are more than tens of you, we know now, because I answered a lot of your email. When I answered email, I told people I've added your questions, your worries, your things you'd like us to talk about on this list. And this list is, I think it's nine pages long of copied text from emails. But one that kind of stood out to me right now came in two different letters. Should I read these letters?

• 7:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:58Robin Rauzi?

  Okay. So one is from Ben, who lives in Richmond, Virginia. And I wanted to say again, I contacted these people. They said I could read these. He said, what political conditions beside Brody's gesture at the Great Depression existed to pass so much of the social welfare programs that we have today? Why was it easy then, but so hard now? Or was it hard and politically dangerous? And the history books just don't cover it that way. And then Sharon, who lives in Washington DC, also sent in a question that was similarly about the New Deal. She says, related to this, can you talk about the social pressures that contributed to the very wealthy being willing to relinquish control with FDR's New Deal? I don't see any reason why the wealthy would accept a higher tax rate today.

• 8:44Robin Rauzi?

  It doesn't benefit them. And since they seem to hold the keys of power, it seems unlikely to happen. However, historically, it has happened, and I would love to hear why.

• 8:53Robin Rauzi?

  So we thought that this would be a good jumping off point for our conversation today and see where it takes us.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  These are great questions. Thank you so much for writing them in, Ben and Sharon.

• 9:01Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, I thought they were too. And I guess where I'm going to start is I think that we're always living through history, but there are moments that it feels very acute to us. And this is probably one of those moments. And at least for me, and I think like Ben and Sharon, makes you think, is there a parallel moment in history? And if so, what is it and what do we have to learn from it? So I put these to Catherine and she said, you know, it's the long game. Like, this stuff did not happen quickly.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Robin's got that shirt, "Not an economist." I have another shirt that says, "Not a historian."

• 9:36Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  This is coming from the lens of someone who looks at policy in order to understand how to design it and implement it, but I am not a historian.

• 9:45Robin Rauzi?

  That's fair.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  So acknowledging that we don't know what we're talking about, should we dive right in? So when Robin showed me these questions and we were thinking about what we wanted to talk about, my first thought was, social policy is a long game. And we kind of cluster that part of history into the New Deal. And I think the shortest answer to both of these questions would be that the New Deal, for being as formative as we think about it in our economy and society, it was not like the high watermark of liberalism. If anything, it was a compromise and it was not the most radical proposal by far.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  And it was, in some ways, watered down, especially at passage. And then really, its legacy comes from what was added after the fact. It's less of a crucible moment on the front end because there were decades of social fighting in progress and lawsuits and Supreme Court cases that were cruel that preceded the New Deal. And then afterwards, I mean, it was corrected and improved upon for decades after it had passed. And so we think about this moment, which is important, but it was not, it didn't all happen in three years. It didn't even all happen in the Great Depression. I mean, we're talking about, you could probably squeeze 100 years of social and economic policy history, in which the New Deal was a big turning point, but it wasn't, I wouldn't even say it was a high watermark.

• 11:14Robin Rauzi?

  And I do think we're taught the Great Depression, again, talk about the telescoping 90s. It's like the telescoping 30s, they just... You know, and then there was the depression and then there was the war. And that's sort of how we, how we learn it. I mean, you said, what did you tell me the other day? Like, we think that like FDR came into office with all this policy in his back pocket and that they just rolled them out in response to the depression. But it took, I mean, years, right?

• 11:39Speaker 02

  Even after he was elected, it took years to get his agenda passed. And the Social Security Act passed in 35 after he had had, I mean, just crushed some midterms. But he didn't get the Fair Labor Standards Act till 38, until he had been reelected. He had a historic hundred days of a bunch of stuff that was eventually all ended by the Supreme Court. I wanted to think of an example to explain what I mean about the front end and the back end to the New Deal and how it was more of a conservative compromise. And so I think, noting, of course, the theme of the show is optimism.

• 12:15Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  I want to talk about child labor. And dwell on just how hard it was to ban child labor in the US, which we actually still have, kind of, and whether or not we even did it to protect children.

• 12:34Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 12:35Speaker 02

  All right, so the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 sets out some pretty strict rules of the labor of children. You know, they can't work under 14 unless they're a paper boy or a babysitter. This is like a thing that even if I talk about child labor resurging today and, you know, the horrific cases of child labor where we found in the US, I will get someone responding like, but what about my-

• 13:00Robin Rauzi?

  But I had a paper boy.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  But I had a paper route. And I have to be like, your paper route is protected. And also, we don't have those anymore, but I understand.

• 13:08Robin Rauzi?

  It's because your paper is coming by fax machine.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  We have a fax machine route, but it comes into law in 1938. This is the foundation for prohibiting child labor. You can't work under a certain age. Your hours are limited when you're in the school year. You can't work too late. And there are certain jobs that you simply cannot do. Anything too high, anything too sharp, you're not supposed to have kids there.

• 13:31Robin Rauzi?

  That's fair.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. So even like a deli, you're not supposed to have someone under 18 in a deli.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  So that law was really a weak compromise, even though we see it now of like, oh, in the New Deal, they banned child labor. I think it was a victory for sure and one that we look back on and built a very liberal foundation for prohibiting child labor in the United States. But it was not the victory they wanted and it didn't come quickly. So, I mean, the earliest movements for child labor in the US go back to the 1830s in Massachusetts.

• 14:06Robin Rauzi?

  The earliest to ban child labor or restrict it.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, because what has to happen in the United States for child labor to be banned is that we have to go from the paper boy, it's good for them. It prevents idleness.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  You know, we need to send these kids to work so that they'll be industrious and learn things and be responsible. And that's what they need as children. And like, that is the accepted norm to child labor is the result of the exploitation of capitalism. It's destructive to children and families and we need to send them to school and protect them from working. And in between is this kind of background argument of like, they're unskilled and cheap and competing with adults. And there's lots of, I mean, there's instances of child labor, like in the 1870s that are horrifying. And like, it's going to be another 60 years before it's banned.

• 14:58Robin Rauzi?

  I mean, it's like, like, well-known at the time, cases of child labor in the 1870s.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  There's actually an article from like 1871, 72 in the New York Times where they're bringing up an editorial of an Italian indentured service that brings children from Italy to quote unquote, "go to music school," but then forces them into busking on the street as street performers and musicians. It's run by a group of Italian men called the Pedrone's. And the New York Times says, "Why would we need to get slaves from Africa? We get children from Italy." And that's like a direct quote from the article. In the 1870s. So it's not as if we didn't, like, we decided in 18, in 1937, child labor was wrong, and then in 1938, like, we did it. There were rumblings for a really long

• 15:44Speaker 02

  time. What pushed child labor to the forefront is so many more children started working. And by the early 1900s, like, one in five kids under 15 are working.

• 15:54Robin Rauzi?

  And is that due to the kind of urbanization and moving off of farms, or immigration, or what's the?

• 16:00Speaker 02

  It's urbanization, immigration, and industrialization. And you just, you had a lot of jobs that children would do in coal mines. Their biggest employers were cotton mills.

• 16:08Robin Rauzi?

  Great.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Fantastic stuff. Coal mines and industrial occupations. And then they were on the street. They were delivering things. They were like newsies, selling things on the street. They were forced buskers, as in this case of the Italians. Even as early as like 1880, the American Federation of Labor is saying, "We need to ban child labor," because it's going to undercut the wages and opportunities for adult workers.

• 16:36Robin Rauzi?

  Hmm. Because they'll just, they'll continue to get undercut?

• 16:40Speaker 02

  They'll continue to get undercut. I say all this, I mean, I think the fast-forwarded version would be, think of how early that is relative to the first federal child labor law that is upheld by the Supreme Court. I mean, you're talking about like 70 years between rumblings of child labor being a problem, between workers saying it might not be good to have child labor, to a multi-decade child labor campaign being successful on the federal level. So there's some real, like, it's not like they weren't organized and they didn't fight. So I think the movement itself, despite rumblings, the movement against child labor, and the idea that child labor needs to be prohibited, really takes off around 1900.

• 17:19Robin Rauzi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  And you have labor organizers, you have members of the clergy, you have people who are social workers and work in settlement houses, and they kind of band together to say, "We need to stop child labor." And they had a multi-fronted campaign to do this. They had- A PR campaign, so they hired a photographer named Louis Hine, and he spent a decade going around the United States taking photographs of children working. And that was his one mandate, just photograph them on the job. He had to sneak into places, he had to be very surreptitious in his photo-taking. And every picture you see that's like a grainy, black and white photo of a kid in a factory, it was probably taken by this guy, who they had hired and told him,

• 18:04Speaker 02

  you know, go out and take photos of of children working.

• 18:06Robin Rauzi?

  Wow.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  They started consumer leagues, the National Consumer League, and they started this campaign called the White Label Campaign, which would products that weren't made with child labor were given a special white label so that you would know you were supporting producers that weren't relying on child labor.

• 18:25Robin Rauzi?

  I'm like, this is the social media campaign and, and, you know, environmental cotton campaign of its day.

• 18:33Speaker 02

  And a lot of it starts around child labor of you, these are, we do not want to support businesses that use this labor or factories that use this labor. And they, they organize the whole idea of you need to be a responsible consumer comes from child labor.

• 18:50Robin Rauzi?

  Really?

• 18:51Speaker 02

  And then the other thing they do is they set up kind of permanent fact-finding campaigns because they want data and they want evidence. So the first time they do it, they commission the Bureau of Labor Statistics in conjunction with Roosevelt, or Teddy Roosevelt as president, to do like a fact-finding mission of what is the actual state of children working? And almost taking it from a perspective of like, is it even that bad? Do they really need the money? Are their conditions so terrible? I mean, they do a two-year study. I could talk about, I just want you to know, first, I am grateful that I get to go back to the 1830s and the 1870s in this one, but, but the drama caused by the Bureau of Labor Statistics trying to find out if working children had good labor conditions.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  Is so high stakes and incredible. The commissioner does this report. When he goes up to be reconfirmed and is reappointed, the Southern Democrats are still so upset that he said that child labor is worse in the South and there aren't good conditions there, that they try to block his nomination. They come up with a pressure campaign where they come up with all these lies and have people come forward to say like, "The commissioner is not a good administrator and he steals money and he goes on really long vacations and like, he's biased against the South and he hates Democrats and if a Democrat works for him, he gets fired." This guy was like, "Oh, that's really interesting. I think you should hire an outside law firm to independently investigate my performance on the job for the past six years." They hire the law firm. The law firm holds all these hearings.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  The law firm comes back and says, "We think he's clear. He's really good at his job. This was just a smear campaign." Then, he gets reappointed and two weeks later, he resigns. And he's like, "Yeah, I wasn't ever going to do another term. It's just that I didn't want to not have a term and have you think that that campaign was going to be successful. So, once I cleared my name and showed you that you wanted me for the job." He quit two weeks later. It was like a four-month battle. And he was like, "Yeah, okay, I'm out." And it all, it all came down to the fact that Democrats in the South, where cotton mills were, did not like that he had, you know, essentially found out so much about child labor. And cotton mills in the South, they had the highest share of children working.

• 21:05Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, they had the little, good, good little fingers, right?

• 21:08Speaker 02

  The good little fingers and the spinners. But like, yeah, you use your tiny little fingers and you're spinning and you're making cotton. And they were not necessarily the largest employer of child labor, but they had the highest share of children of their total workforce. And so, they were deeply opposed to any child labor legislation.

• 21:27Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  And anyone who was trying to convince them otherwise. So, like, the next big story in the child labor fight is in 1906, the first child labor law is introduced into Congress for a federal legislation. Again, this is 32 years before the Fair Labor Standards Act. The law is defeated by Southern Democrats, but 10 years later, they are successful in Congress in passing a child labor law. And it's struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional.

• 22:01Robin Rauzi?

  Really?

• 22:02Speaker 02

  Yes. So it's called the Keating Owen Act. It passed in 1916. It prohibited, I mean, really, it's even less prohibited so much as deeply regulating child labor. And the Supreme Court overturns it and says it's not constitutional. So then they pass-

• 22:17Robin Rauzi?

  I'm sorry, on what basis?

• 22:20Speaker 02

  So, okay-

• 22:21Robin Rauzi?

  Like your parents get to decide if you're going to work or not?

• 22:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 22:24Robin Rauzi?

  Is it parental rights?

• 22:25Speaker 02

  Yes, it's under parental rights. I was like, I mean, if I'm wearing not a historian on the front, I have to have an all caps on the back, not a lawyer. But-

• 22:33Robin Rauzi?

  Me either, but, you know-

• 22:35Speaker 02

  It was a parental rights case. Like, you are telling a parent whether or not their kid is allowed to work, and that violates parental rights, and so they overturn the first federal child labor law.

• 22:44Robin Rauzi?

  Because parents own their children.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  Because parents own their children. Then Congress is like, okay, well, you know what? We're going to pass a tax that if you employ children as a business, you have to pay more in taxes. And the Supreme Court overthrows that, too.

• 22:59Robin Rauzi?

  Were they trying to level it out? Like, you can use children, but you're going to have to spend as much as you're going to spend on adults.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  Yes. Basically, what if you make up for in wages because you're employing children? We're going to hit you with taxes. And even though, I'm pretty sure Article 1 says taxes in spending lies with Congress, the Supreme Court's like, actually, that's unconstitutional, too. So I feel like there should be some parallels now to feeling like the Supreme Court is standing in the way of progress that people want.

• 23:25Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  And that people want to have certain things, and the Supreme Court is just like Gladiator-style saying thumbs down, and they're standing in the way of where people want to go, where law has already gone. And it feels almost, you know, like dictatorial that they get to come in and do this. That child labor activists, I mean, this was such a blow. So then, they decided that they, because they couldn't get past the constitutionality, according to the Supreme Court, they passed a constitutional amendment. This was going to be the 20th amendment to the Constitution. It passed in 1924, I think it was called the Child Amendment or the Child Labor Amendment. And they, they-

• 24:06Robin Rauzi?

  This is, I'm sorry, you're saying Congress passed this and-

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Congress passed a constitutional amendment and they even got 28 states to ratify it. They weren't that far away. I think they were 10 states off. And this was their answer of like, okay, well, if we change the Constitution, the Supreme Court can't rule unconstitutional. And the campaign against this amendment and where ratification failed, I mean, y'all, there's just so many echoes. Right? Like it's parental rights.

• 24:33Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  They basically turned it into a cultural war that they're not trying to regulate businesses. They're trying to regulate families. You know, when that this is what you can do with your children and businesses should have the freedom to make decisions and not have the government get in the way, in the way and squash enterprise.

• 24:52Robin Rauzi?

  Yikes.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  Yikes, yikes. And they, they were successful. So-

• 24:56Robin Rauzi?

  We should note that there are people who think that children should work now.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 25:01Robin Rauzi?

  They just pass, try to pass some liberalization of child labor in, was it Florida?

• 25:06Speaker 02

  Florida, Arkansas, a couple of other states. I think Florida and Arkansas were the worst. So then that is the like part-

• 25:14Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. What worked to when? Like 1920, would you say?

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. Now we're getting into the 1930s.

• 25:18Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Then the Great Depression hits and this cultural argument doesn't have as much sway for the number of adults out of work. The labor argument, the economic argument, it becomes much more-

• 25:30Robin Rauzi?

  We need the adults to be able to make a living.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  We need the adults to be able to make a living and it's not good for children anyway. And I mean, of course, going on the whole time is the move to increase compulsory education, which also gets a lot more support during the depression of like, we should not have these kids competing for jobs. And we prohibit child labor in the Fair Labor Standards Act, which I mean, really people were not convinced that the Supreme Court was going to uphold it. They did. But the FLSA, when it was passed in relation to child labor, I mean, it was estimated that it was, you know, 10% of actual children working were going to be immediately affected by it. I mean, the vast majority of occupations in which there were children were not under

• 26:14Speaker 02

  the legislation. It was focused on a specific set of occupations. So they passed this federal law, but it's not like the law is really simple, like no children can work.

• 26:23Robin Rauzi?

  Right. It was very specific about certain industries.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  And like ages of the kid and times of day and, and things like that. And it didn't, and because of the way it was written, it didn't cover actually that many child workers.

• 26:37Robin Rauzi?

  Really? So, so when you were saying it's 10%, it was like only about 10% of children who were in the wor- one assumes worse conditions would be covered by this law?

• 26:46Speaker 02

  You took all kids who were working in 38. No, it was really just a fraction of them that were protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act. So it's, it's a conservative compromise watered down from what they had wanted, but it ends up being the basis for the continued child labor movement. Like we, we got this marker, federal law prohibiting and regulating child labor.

• 27:11Robin Rauzi?

  But that wasn't the end of the fight.

• 27:13Speaker 02

  That wasn't the end of the fight, especially because we relaxed it in World War II, but then we got up strong again. No, we did relax it. We did relax it in World War II. I mean, it only just passed. I mean, come on!

• 27:25Robin Rauzi?

  We got some ships to build.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  We gotta build stuff, sewing these little...

• 27:30Robin Rauzi?

  Those little fingers were really good.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Little fingers at it. I mean, we were already putting women to work, can you believe it? I mean, so it's, it's a, the fight continues and you see that same cultural argument somewhere else. And so I, I take a lot of comfort in kind of the history of the child advocate movement and the trying to ban child labor movement because it just cements like, these things don't happen overnight. You become aware and upset about a problem and it can feel like overnight.

• 28:02Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  But that's, these fights are much longer and if anything, what is going on in the current administration is proof of that just having a limited mandate to follow through with radical action is jarring on so many levels. And then the, kind of this need to relish the people who were wrong. You know, like, oh, they voted for him and his, their tariffs are gonna crush him of like, well, you know, it doesn't, this is why social movements tend to be long because you get people on board with the solution so that it's accepted and it's permanent and we don't have whipsaw policy changes in our economy. There's a trade off to going slow, which I recognize, but there are some benefits for being deliberate.

• 28:47Robin Rauzi?

  Right, right.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  And child labor laws did get stronger.

• 28:51Robin Rauzi?

  And when did they get stronger?

• 28:53Speaker 02

  Uh, they got stronger, you know, basically all the way up until like three years ago.

• 28:58Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  They were mainly just one, a story of one direction of getting stronger and the federal government sets the floor and most state governments go above the floor. There's lots of provisions that could be stronger, but, I mean, you know, there was a resurgence of child labor recently. There's really only three types of child labor violations. Either the kids too young, they're working too long, or they're in a place they're not supposed to be. The vast majority of child labor violations in the US are kids working too long. The too young one doesn't happen too often. You can work when you're 14 in certain jobs for a limited number of hours. Then when you turn 16, you can work for more hours and then when you work, turn 18, you can work in more occupations.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  Most of the time, it's kids in retail sectors who are working too long. Where like, it's a school night, or like, it's, it's during the week, you can't work kids more than three hours, but like, they'll be at McDonald's and stay for seven. Those are the typical violations and I think would characterize the vast majority of child labor in the United States. What came up in the Biden administration, this, this like flourishing of child labor was a bunch of kids who were in places they weren't supposed to be. Which we had not seen, especially to that degree for a really long time, but it was like staffing agencies would, you know, you hire a cleaner to clean your

• 30:23Robin Rauzi?

  poultry factory.

• 30:24Speaker 02

  Your poultry factory, your slaughterhouse. And the cleaner is like, okay, we have a staff that's gonna come do it and the staff has children on it. And then they all claimed that none of them knew that they were children. And one of the violations, the reason why they were found is that there was another labor regulatory agency there, I think it was OSHA. The inspector looked over and like, someone walked in with a pink sparkly backpack.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  And they were like, well, I think you have children working here.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  It was a function of the fact that most of those kids were kids who came across the border as asylum seekers and they were unaccompanied and they were taken advantage of in the United States in an absolutely disgusting way. It was not like the law in Arkansas of like, we need to give parents more rights over kids' work schedules was not, it was a development that was not in response to what was the crisis. The crisis was you had a lot of kids who didn't speak English, who didn't have family in this country, who were being employed in places the law says they weren't supposed to be. And then they're kind of going back and under business pressure saying like, actually, kids can work six hours on a weekday. Or like, actually, you don't need your parents' permission to work when you're 15 because that's a parent's right. You know, it's just, it's like stuff

• 31:37Speaker 02

  like that. So, you know, the fight continues.

• 31:40Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, yeah. Can you talk at all about what was going on though during the actual New Deal about, you know, I mean, I think both of these questions that we got really have to do with conditions of the moment. And what you're, I mean, what you're talking about is that things that we might see happen now are things that maybe started long ago, right? But did you, when you were doing your reading, you're not, not a historian reading on this, like, was it the economic conditions, though, that led laborers to say, hey, maybe we need to get, we need to stop having competition from 12-year-olds who will get paid pennies on the dollar?

• 32:19Speaker 02

  Right. Also, when we passed some of our strictest immigration law and most racist immigration law, it was around the same time.

• 32:25Robin Rauzi?

  So.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  You know, the other thing, and I think this gets more to the, to Sharon's question about like, why were the wealthy even willing to give up taxes, like what was in it for them? I would hazard a guess that

• 32:43Speaker 02

  You know, for example, like the Social Security Act was by far the least crazy radical proposal that was around at the time. I mean, with this economic distress came a blossoming of policy proposals, some of them who came from like a guy who had a radio show who was kind of crazy. So like, "Look at us, Robin." "Look at us." You know, or like, like a guy who was, had like a lot of failed professions, but who was a doctor, who wrote like an editorial and like, I want to say it was like the Long Beach City newspaper, or some Southern California newspaper, wrote an editorial that was like, "All people over 60 should get $500 a month."

• 33:26Speaker 02

  And it's like, tens of millions of people joined clubs to promote this plan. That was the Townsend Plan. You had Huey P. Long, "Every Man a King."

• 33:36Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  You know, his proposal was, "Share our wealth." So I mean, like, you can already tell that rich people aren't going to like that one. But, you know, he was incredibly popular, and "Share our wealth" was like, "Every family gets money." You had people who were trying to nationalize banks, who thought that the best way to get out of the Depression was to deliberately inflate the currency. Upton Sinclair ran for governor of California under the epic plan, "End Poverty in California." And his 12-point plan included all kinds of, like, very radical proposals. I mean, most of them, they weren't all radical, but they felt radical at the time. And so I think the New Deal, we see it as like the evolution.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  We don't see what it beat out on the policy side. Like, we see what it moved past.

• 34:25Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  Right? Like, we now have Social Security. We now have an unemployment program. You know, and the Fair Labor Standards Act was quick on its heels, and the National Labor Relations Act was quick on its heels. And so we see all of these things. As like, the bad guy was, yeah, it's a big jump. Like, the bad guy that we defeated was lack of movement in the before, and then what we won was the New Deal. And I think, at the time, it was like, man, there's a lot of crazy [BLEEP] up there. And this rich cat from New York, it's kind of got some reasonable stuff to say. You know, like, we, we don't see the fight as they experienced it, which was so much outpouring for so many things that were more radical. I mean, the Townsend Plan, the Townsend Plan stayed popular, like, through the 50s.

• 35:09Robin Rauzi?

  People love a simple, a simple plan.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  People love a simple plan.

• 35:12Robin Rauzi?

  I mean, it's, you know, flat tax and all that.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  Flat tax and we all get money. People loved it.

• 35:18Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  People still love flat tax and we all get money.

• 35:20Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  So, maybe just the moment is less special? I mean, no, it's still special. I don't think that that's fair. It's, the New Deal is special.

• 35:28Robin Rauzi?

  But our view of it isn't complete. Our view of it is, is very low resolution.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  I don't know if it was necessarily this moment of like, you know, oh, well, let's get ready for terms and conditions next week. Is it like, light, okay, lightning in a bottle, flash in a pan? Um, I'm thinking of like, that, like, special moment, maybe flash in the pan. No, maybe that's not it.

• 35:51Robin Rauzi?

  Well, lightning in a bottle is something, yeah, that just, yeah, I think that's what you're getting toward. I'm not sure yet.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  I'm not sure.

• 35:56Robin Rauzi?

  Finish your sentence.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  Um, wow, Robin, sometimes you're such an editor about this.

• 36:01Robin Rauzi?

  Sorry.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  I can't actually tell what you're saying if you don't ever finish what you're trying to say.

• 36:07Robin Rauzi?

  More words, need more context.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  And just, we think of this as this, like, historically special moment, the Depression was bad, the politician was amazing, and we get all these things, and then we, we confine it, we compress it to age 22. But really, you know, there was a lifetime there.

• 36:27Robin Rauzi?

  More than a lifetime.

• 36:28Speaker 02

  And it was, yeah, a lot of lifetimes. And I take that as a very inspiring lesson for the current moment, frankly, because this is the process. This is the process for American social policy. We take a really long time, we're very deliberate, we do a lot of stuff in states first. We have state campaigns, we have federal campaigns, it comes down to how good your PR guy is, you know, and how good of a story you can tell. And then sometimes the economy tips in your favor, and you take advantage of the moment, and there's big change. But I, I- I think people might be more doomeristic about where we are now when I'm of the mind like we're closer than we've ever been and I could, for a lot of the stuff, I'm like, it's in reach.

• 37:10Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  We just have to keep fighting because we've never been closer.

• 37:13Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:16Robin Rauzi?

  That sounds optimistic to me.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 37:19Robin Rauzi?

  So let's stop talking.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  We should stop. Or, hold on, counterpoint. Can I keep going?

• 37:28Speaker 02

  I know we're laughing, but I do actually want to keep going.

• 37:30Robin Rauzi?

  All right.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  The undercurrent to a lot of things that happened in the New Deal was an economy turned on its head. And I think that that teaches us in some ways the wrong lesson, that we're like, oh, when the economy's bad, we should be able to accomplish things.

• 37:48Robin Rauzi?

  Right, yeah, that we're never let a crisis go.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  Never let a crisis go to waste. Yeah, and that we've like, oh, because good stuff happened right after the depression, every time there's a recession, something good should happen for us. Y'all, there have been 13 recessions since World War II, and you do not associate them with this advance in policy.

• 38:07Robin Rauzi?

  Good things.

• 38:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're not like, oh, yeah, and then after the 73 recession.

• 38:12Robin Rauzi?

  Then we got.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  Then we got crickets.

• 38:16Robin Rauzi?

  Long silence.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  What about the double recession at the start of the 80s? And then we got, not gonna say anything else.

• 38:24Robin Rauzi?

  And then, and we, just cut to dead air.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  Just cut to dead air. I think of the Simpsons cutaway of like, technical difficulties.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  But I, but the, this like, Great Depression, ergo, social policy is also, for me, it's not the right lesson. I mean, the Great Depression was a pressure point that kind of in some ways, for, in like, lots of things happened at the same time, but I don't think that it has to come from the economy. I think where it's going to come from now is demographics.

• 38:57Robin Rauzi?

  Hmm.

• 38:58Speaker 02

  So, the baby boomers, it's officially defined as individuals born between 1946 and 1964. That is the census definition of the baby boom in the United States, based on birth rates. In other countries, it's different. The youngest baby boomer is 61.

• 39:16Robin Rauzi?

  Mm hmm.

• 39:16Speaker 02

  And they are mostly retired.

• 39:18Robin Rauzi?

  Mm hmm.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  No, we're not getting smaller. There was just a lot of them. As long as the baby boomers were in their prime working years, we had a ton of people willing to work in the United States. And it was a numbers game. And the numbers game was, I don't have to do anything to increase labor force participation. I don't need to make sure they're that well paid. Like, I've got this, I'm, I'm got this massive tailwind, which is huge population that wants to be working. As they get smaller, they are leaving in their wake all of the decisions that we didn't have to make before.

• 39:50Robin Rauzi?

  And you're not saying the generation is getting smaller. You're saying as, as they make up a smaller part of the workforce, right?

• 39:56Speaker 02

  So the fact that they're leaving exposes the labor market's weaknesses, especially when it comes to policy. And so I don't think the undercurrent or the ticking clock is a Great Depression or an economic upheaval. We've gotten better at managing them. We've had more of them. We, we understand how they work and how to get past them. And we have experience getting past even horrible recessions.

• 40:19Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  What we do not have experience getting past is a demographic shift of this nature, especially for the pressures it puts on the labor market and workers. And at some point, I don't care if Congress doesn't like children or childcare. They need more warm bodies. And childcare is a really effective way to get more people to work.

• 40:37Robin Rauzi?

  You could just put the seven year olds back in the factories.

• 40:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, but for me, for me, I'm kind of like, this is death throw. Like, I mean, the idea that they're like, hey, we can't have childcare, but we can get more 14 year olds in the labor force is like, y'all are desperate and you're clinging and grasping at straws?

• 40:54Robin Rauzi?

  Grasping at straws, yes.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  Grasping at straws. Wow, I learned so much. Um, grasping at straws. And so I'm like, I'm like incredibly optimistic. Like 10 years, the childcare industry will probably collapse before then. Um, and we, we're going to have to get more people.

• 41:10Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  Even if we weren't taking a radical term on immigration, immigration would not be enough. But we need to, we need to have policies that make it easier to work. And so I think this will, this will affect huge change. And like, that will be our Great Depression. The cataclysmic, not before seen, not really sure how to understand, but exposes so much that's wrong with our economy. It is coming from these demographic shifts.

• 41:32Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. We should do a, we'll do a whole show on, on the demographic shifts. I think that's really fascinating. Topic, I say that as if I, as if I decide what we're gonna talk about it.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  Well.

• 41:43Robin Rauzi?

  Well, Catherine, I'll let you talk about that.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Honestly, this works really great for me. You just, you just, I'm the top on the table. You spin me and I'm like, okay, child labor. I mean, there's, there's so much more to say on these topics and these problems that are still ongoing. But I think you can't be depressed that the problems are still ongoing. You just have to see like where the progress we've made and the, the fight being in front of us. Should not be depressing when you see how much fight we've already had. Maybe that is depressing to people. Actually, it doesn't, it doesn't, I really said it out loud and I'm like, isn't it good to know we've been doing this for a long time? And I'm like, maybe that actually doesn't make people feel better. You know what? I'm the optimist. Y'all just get, you can just do thumbs up. Every episode, we ought to do a little poll. Are you more optimistic?

• 42:29Robin Rauzi?

  At the end of this or not? Yeah.

• 42:34Speaker 02

  Well, I'm thriving. Oh, my God. Um, it's, it's, it's. I empathize so much with these questions too, because it's so, it's so tough. It's so frustrating. We have these just such massive problems in our economy. And you're like, oh, okay, let's do tariffs.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  Cool. Cause that's gonna help me afford childcare. Or a house.

• 42:59Robin Rauzi?

  Or a house or, or hell, a car.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  Hell, you know what? Mess with mortgage rates. That's really, that's really helping.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  The problems of the present moment can seem overwhelming, but I think they aren't a problem of a day and they aren't fixed in a day and we're so much closer than our current state reveals.

• 43:24Speaker 02

  Okay, let's, let's do executive orders.

• 43:27Robin Rauzi?

  Let's do executive orders. Yours looks really serious. Mine looks really silly. Okay.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  Oh, no, mine's, mine's pretty silly.

• 43:33Robin Rauzi?

  Okay. Can I go first?

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:35Robin Rauzi?

  So this is really on behalf of my spouse. We believe that there should be, if you're gonna put cinnamon in anything, you need to label it. You need, it needs to be called cinnamon granola. Because you know what? Cinnamon is not a neutral flavor. You can't just slide it into things and people aren't gonna notice. Just be honest with us about where the cinnamon is.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  I think cinnamon is such a neutral flavor.

• 43:58Robin Rauzi?

  It's awful. It's an awful flavor.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  You don't like cinnamon?

• 44:01Robin Rauzi?

  I like cinnamon in certain things, but I don't like it to surprise me in things that were not, like ice cream, that were supposed to be like fudge swirl.

• 44:11Speaker 02

  Okay, you're not approve of the cinnamon hegemony that's taking over the sweets business?

• 44:17Robin Rauzi?

  It's like corn syrup business, just putting it in everything.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  I just think that whenever I have a recipe that calls for cinnamon, like especially in a baked good, I'll be like, and use a teaspoon of cinnamon. And I'm like, or three tablespoons.

• 44:29Robin Rauzi?

  God.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Throw it in there. Because I feel like when you bake it, it loses a lot of its punch.

• 44:34Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, okay. Well, that's fine.

• 44:36Speaker 02

  Which apparently is.

• 44:39Speaker 02

  Okay, mine, mine is more petty. I don't know.

• 44:44Robin Rauzi?

  I'm sorry, more petty than?

• 44:46Speaker 02

  Sorry, I don't mean that you're petty. I mean, mine is like of the petty variety. I feel like yours is of the like exacting of like, come on, it's too much cinnamon in things.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  This is a standard and this standard needs to be met. I appreciate that. Mine is like, you know, what would be kind of fun? If you let C-SPAN have creative control over its programming. So I don't know if any of you remember this, but the Republicans have a very hard time electing a leader. And they couldn't take majority control of Congress until they had elected a leader. Well, that is when a lot of us learned that the majority in Congress dictates to C-SPAN how it can cover things like proceedings on the House floor. And when they didn't have anyone telling them what they could do, it was like high stakes drama and they would like zoom in on

• 45:41Speaker 02

  people talking and they would like, you know, the camera would like move across the floor and you would see people talking and they're like, no, no, no, don't show me talking to him. And then they would like move away. I loved it. And I mean, like, I want C-SPAN to have a little bit more creative control over how they depict Congress because the reason why C-SPAN, especially when it's covering congressional events, they're, they're regulated by the majority of how they are allowed to do that. Like it's a fixed point of view. You never move off the speaker or you can use these three angles, but apparently when you let them have fun with it, it's kind of wild.

• 46:15Robin Rauzi?

  I like this idea.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  So.

• 46:16Robin Rauzi?

  Boost the ratings for sure.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  Boost the ratings for sure. And then I think within 10 years, this will devolve into some kind of like reality show type situation where C-SPAN has like no fewer than 50 cameras going at any time. And like any hearing room has got like the over the shoulder camera where you're like, Jesus, C-SPAN, give me some privacy. Like, sure. I mean, I don't think it's gonna stay good.

• 46:39Speaker 02

  I think it'll start fun and then it might just devolve like so many other things related to media. However, I mean, let's have some fun with it. So that is my executive order. C-SPAN should have more fun.

• 46:53Robin Rauzi?

  Here we are again at the end of an episode where we thank our spiritual sponsors who are what we have in the meantime before we have our financial sponsors.

• 47:03Speaker 02

  But we should clarify, we did get actually a lot of questions about this. We will always have spiritual sponsors, even if we get actual non-spiritual money. I had several comments on social media that was like, please don't get rid of.

• 47:15Robin Rauzi?

  Don't ever get rid of that.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  Don't ever get rid of spiritual sponsors. Like, no, I'm gonna need them for forever. So the show will always have them. Robin, who is your spiritual sponsor this week?

• 47:25Robin Rauzi?

  My spiritual sponsor is Griffith Park, which is one of the largest parks in the country, 4,000 plus acres. Griffith Park, first of all, is everything. Like, it has the observatory. It has the Hollywood sign. It has a zoo. It has tennis courts. It has, I would, future executive order, get rid of them, golf courses. But what it has more than anything else is it has 53 miles of hiking trails. And I have walked every mile of them. I got poison ivy on one last week. And I forgive you, Griffith Park, because you are the best.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  I love it. I've only been once, but it was stunning.

• 47:58Robin Rauzi?

  Love it.

• 47:59Speaker 02

  It helps that LA always has like pretty good.

• 48:02Robin Rauzi?

  Pretty good weather.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  Pretty good weather. All right. My spiritual sponsor for the week is Abby Wambach's header goal against Brazil in the 2011 World Cup quarterfinals. It was after 30 minutes of overtime. In the 122nd minute, it was the equalizer that sent them into penalty shootouts that they won.

• 48:24Robin Rauzi?

  Which they won.

• 48:25Speaker 02

  Riding high on the moment. I think, I think I've watched it. I mean, it has to be more than 100 times.

• 48:32Robin Rauzi?

  It's great. And Megan Rapinoe's kick into the box is also fantastic.

• 48:38Speaker 02

  I mean, and she's like, what, like, three miles away? Like, it's such this amazing cross. If you haven't watched it, it aired live, and it was when the World Cup was in Germany. So it actually aired, like, on Sunday afternoon in the US. And so a lot of people ended up watching, and it was a completely thrilling ending to level it right at that minute. But when I was taking my qualifying exams during my PhD, in the, like, minutes before the test, when you have to put everything away, you know, it's just pencil, you have some sheets of paper, I just sat there watching the goal. And I went back to the beginning, and I watched again, and I went back to the winning, and I watched again. And at like, at one point, I was, when I was going to testify in front of Congress, I

• 49:20Speaker 02

  was on the metro on the way there, and I was trying to listen to pump-up music as I was, like, frantically reading about obscure tax law. And then I was like, no, we know what we need to do here. And I just, like, I pulled it up, and I could, I mean, I could hear it of, like, chants of "USA" is ringing around the arena in Dresden, and I, you know, the US has to get numbers forward, there's no point defending anymore.

• 49:40Robin Rauzi?

  We should build an app. We should build, where you just, like, keep it on your home screen, just play it whenever you need it.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. I, it's those moments, those, like, exhilarating sports moments.

• 49:51Robin Rauzi?

  Great.

• 49:51Speaker 02

  So thank you, Abby Wambach, for that amazing goal. And obviously, Megan Rapinoe for the assist back when her hair was still blonde.

• 50:01Robin Rauzi?

  Well, that's it for us.

• 50:03Speaker 02

  As we close out our episode, we, of course, want to thank the two people who make this show possible, our producer and audio engineer, Sophie, thank you very much, and our video editor and producer, Andy, thank you very much.