Podbit · Planet Money
The Trump administration's loan cap strategy is a game of chicken with colleges: lower your prices or watch your enrollment shrink. The problem is that students — not administrators — are the ones forced to make the hard choices while the standoff plays out.
NYC Mayor Mamdani asked residents not to set AC below 74°F during a heat wave — Taylor Swift apparently ignored this entirely for her MSG wedding. Matt McCusker sees it as a potential 'totalitarian tiptoe': a small compliance test to gauge how much control the government can actually wield.
California's CPUC requires large utilities to direct up to $633 million in contracts to state-certified LGBT-owned businesses. Qualifying requires letters from personal contacts on company letterhead attesting to your homosexuality — and falsely claiming the certification carries up to a year in jail.
Taiwan has less than three weeks of energy reserves. A Chinese blockade — no military engagement, just cutting off oil and LNG — would brown out the island. Fabs take 90 days to restart once shut down. The global economic impact would exceed the Great Depression. This isn't hypothetical: China has blockaded the Taiwan Straits 7 times in the last 4 years.
In the LA mayoral primary, Karen Bass led, Spencer Pratt was second, and Nithya Raman was a distant third — until the mail-in ballots came in and Raman leaped to second. Vance calls it 'super sus' and asks: what theory of the electorate explains why mail-in ballots were so disproportionately pro-Raman? There was also direct evidence of homeless people being given cigarettes and cash to use addresses for ballots.
JD Vance formally offered, as sitting Vice President, a deal to Democrats live on Joe Rogan's podcast: accept federal voter ID and Republicans will significantly dial back election-integrity rhetoric. The Save America Act already has majority Senate support but the filibuster's 60-vote threshold is blocking it.
The US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding has three parts: Iran opens the Strait of Hormuz, violence stops, and then both sides negotiate long-term nuclear issues. In return, Iran wants sanctions relief. Within the first week, 20 million barrels per day were flowing again. The hardliners then panicked and shot at ships — triggering US retaliation and a temporary breakdown.
Critics claimed the Iran MOU would give Iran $300 billion. That's completely false. The deal allows UAE and Saudi Arabia to invest in Iran if Iran meets its obligations — no US taxpayer dollars involved. Vance says this was a deliberate, well-funded disinformation campaign to tank the deal.
A Time magazine story published the day before this podcast revealed that a former Trump campaign operative, paid by elements of the Israeli government, funded influencers to attack the Iran deal and personally attack Vance. Vance says beyond a shadow of a doubt, some elements in the Israeli government are actively trying to derail the negotiation — and his response is 'go to hell.'
The New Mexico Department of Justice sent formal letters, made calls, and held meetings from February to July 2026 — and got almost nothing in return. After five months, the federal government delivered 31 pages of mostly-redacted, already-released documents out of 6 million on file.
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