BRITTANY LUSE, HOST:
Hey, hey. You're listening to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR. I'm Brittany Luse. And today on the show, we're talking about the C-word, by which I mean capitalism. It's an especially potent word this year as hot-strike summer looks like it might turn into hot-strike fall. Unions across several industries are pointing out how hard workers' lives are under this system, even for the most seemingly glamorous of industries. Actors Guild president Fran Drescher has tweeted several times about capitalist greed being the root of the world's problems.
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FRAN DRESCHER: We are labor, and we stand tall. You share the wealth because you cannot exist without us. Thank you.
LUSE: On the other end of the spectrum, people like Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy are also questioning what they see as an abuse of capitalism.
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VIVEK RAMASWAMY: This is the game of the woke capitalist. It is an abuse of market power to settle political questions through the use of economic force.
LUSE: Although there have always been critiques of capitalism, it hasn't always been so mainstream. Here's my guest, "Today, Explained" co-host Noel King.
NOEL KING: I started covering economics in 2013. And I could very confidently talk to you about IPOs and what markets were doing and what oil prices were doing and what CEOs were doing. But there was one thing that I never talked about as an economics reporter, and that was capitalism, our economic system. It was just not something that ever came up in any newsroom discussion.
LUSE: Now it's too big of a discussion to ignore. I mean, I feel like everywhere I turn, someone's blaming stuff on, quote-unquote, "late-stage capitalism." Noel's seen it, too.
KING: We are seeing capitalism kind of openly discussed, and I just find that fascinating. I really do. Because I remember when you just didn't, outside of a classroom, hear this word.
LUSE: Noel and her team at "Today, Explained" dove deep into a four-part series, explaining how living under American capitalism has changed and why talking about it has made us more divided than ever. We sat down to chat about her findings and to discuss what America even is without capitalism.
Noel King, welcome to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE.
KING: Thank you so much for having me.
LUSE: Apparently, I have been unknowingly a part of the genesis (laughter) of this podcast series we're going to discuss today.
KING: You are the genesis of this series.
LUSE: When did you get the idea? Because I'm, like, sitting here. I'm like, I don't know that much about econ. I'm like, what did she get from me about this?
KING: So summer of 2017, I'm starting to get a vibe. I'm like, are people talking about capitalism? But then I'd go into the office and I'm like, no, no, we're definitely not. It must just be me. And then that June or July, you held a live podcast taping. You were talking to your guests, including Vinson Cunningham of The New Yorker...
LUSE: Lovely. Yeah.
KING: ...About Jay-Z's new album, "4:44."
LUSE: Oh, my God. Yeah.
KING: Lipstick Alley on wax, you called it.
LUSE: (Laughter).
KING: And it was such a good line.
LUSE: That's a good one. I got to give myself credit.
KING: It was a great line. And you were playing the game that you often played, which is, is this album good for the Blacks?
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "GOOD FOR THE BLACKS")
LUSE: How many of y'all think it's bad for the Blacks? Give me a boo.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Boo.
KING: And Vinson said, there is an economic - a deeply economic message embedded in this album, which is that capitalism is good. That's what Jay-Z is saying here, you know? I could have bought a building in Dumbo for 2 million.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE STORY OF O.J.")
JAY-Z: (Rapping) That same building today is worth 25 million. Guess how I'm feeling. Dumbo.
KING: But he said - Vinson said...
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "GOOD FOR THE BLACKS")
VINSON CUNNINGHAM: I don't think that capitalism is the answer for Black people, so bad for the Blacks.
KING: And at that moment, I had one of those realizations where I was like, OK, hold on a second. My dad worked on Wall Street. He left Wall Street in his early 40s because he hated it. And I had this memory - this deep, dark memory - of my dad saying things like, I don't think capitalism is the answer for Black people. But that was always behind closed doors. That was not something in the '80s and the '90s that you said openly.
LUSE: Right.
KING: And so I hear Vinson say this and I'm like, oh, my God. The culture - the young culture people are coming for capitalism. And so the suspicion that I had that people are talking about it was real. It was just that economics reporters weren't talking about it; culture reporters were. And I was like, OK, this is real. I went running into my office the next day. I told my colleagues. I was - listen, you guys. The young people are talking about the whole system. They're talking about capitalism. Guess what these middle-aged men say.
LUSE: No, they're not.
KING: No, they're not. No, they're not. That's just college kids. That's just college kids.
LUSE: What?
KING: I know, I know. And I felt so shot down because I think of myself as a very observant person. And, like I said, hearing you and Vinson, I really had had a moment. And so my excitement went away for, like, a brief second. But you know me, I'm a lot. And I was like, no, no, no, something is up here. And then I came to sort of my first thesis about capitalism and what's going on, which is the Berlin Wall.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: They are here in the thousands. They are here in the tens of thousands. Occasionally, they shout (non-English language spoken) - the wall must go.
KING: How old were you in 1989? May I ask?
LUSE: I was 1 1/2 for most of the year, 2 for the last month and a half.
KING: There you go.
LUSE: Yeah.
KING: So the young people were not conscious or sentient or even there when the Berlin Wall came down and capitalism defeated communism, right? Communism was this boogeyman. And if you're like me and you were 8 years old when that wall came down, you do have a faint recollection of, like, this is the system we have. It is the best system. It's got to win. But if you're like you and you're a year and a half or 2 years old...
LUSE: Yeah.
KING: ...Your mind doesn't go from capitalism directly to communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the existential fight.
LUSE: No. No, no, no, no, no. I was mostly thinking about bottle feeding...
(LAUGHTER)
LUSE: ...Transitioning to solids. Like, I don't think that's what was on my mind.
KING: Right. There you go. That new diaper.
LUSE: Exactly. That's really, really, really interesting. Wait. So your whole series is about how people - it's become commonplace. It's become just a part of our culture now for people to question capitalism, question the idea of capitalism. Where do you see this questioning of the idea of capitalism in broader culture?
KING: I mean, I see it all over, like, the pages of New York Magazine, the pages of Vulture. I hear it. There's a show I love - "You're Wrong About." And one of their taglines is, it was capitalism all along. And I just - I love that so much because I think it's a distillation of the way a lot of people feel. I don't know if you remember the summer when "Indiana Jones" came out and there was this line in the trailer. They were all talking about, you stole it. You stole it.
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PHOEBE WALLER-BRIDGE: And then I stole it. It's called capitalism.
KING: I remember when you did not hear this word.
LUSE: Coming up, Noel on why even if we might be critical of capitalism, most of us are complicit in it. Stay with us.
My husband and I do a lot of, I'm sure like many people do, tortured Zillow scrolling...
KING: Oh, yes.
LUSE: ...Where we're just looking all the time...
KING: Yep.
LUSE: ...At houses - we don't own our house. We rent. And we live in New York City, so, like, I mean, I could be renting into, like, 2075, who knows? And we kind of are shaking our fists like, ah, capitalism.
KING: Right.
LUSE: I want to say, I mean, there have been really stark changes, really noticeable changes to how it feels to live under capitalism currently. The way capitalism works, there's always somebody under the boot. But it seems to me like capitalism is increasingly not working for more and more people, and more and more people are talking about it. I mean, now we've got open Democratic socialists in Congress.
KING: Yes. Yes.
LUSE: I mean, that's a shift. One of the things that we've been talking about on the team as we've been preparing to talk to you is - and also, that you and I have been talking about today - is that at this point, for normal people, owning anything - a house, a business, any kind of asset - I mean, it's very, very, very, very, very hard. It's much harder to do now than it has been in the past, comparatively. And you kind of can't be a capitalist if you can't get a return on anything, and you got to own something to get...
KING: Yep.
LUSE: ...A return on it. So, like...
KING: Yep.
LUSE: ...Where does that leave the average person?
KING: It leaves the average person really complicit. I mean, I bought a house - a small house - and you know what I look on Zillow for? In addition to looking at houses that are much bigger and nicer than mine, I look to see if my house has appreciated in value.
LUSE: Oh.
KING: Because what you want is the cost - the price of your house to go up with the intention that someday you, like, sell it and move into a nicer house. And you're right that there is this kind of I need more to get more. I need to have an asset to make money. I need to have money to make money. I need to own something so that I'm not giving all of my money to a landlord, right?
LUSE: Right.
KING: This is very real. These dynamics are very, very real in people's lives. And so if you are blocked out of home ownership - if we were blocked out of home ownership, what it means is we don't have those assets. Nothing is accruing in value...
LUSE: Right.
KING: ...Except for if you're lucky enough to have that 401(k) and that 403(b), which means you want to see that stock price go up. Do you have a 401(k) or 403(b)?
LUSE: Yes.
KING: You do. You are a shareholder. I am a shareholder. Everybody who works at NPR is a shareholder. We all want to retire. So we are shareholders now because companies have done away with pensions. But what making money for shareholders means - and you will see this today. I would urge you and your listeners to check out something that fascinates me. Whenever one of these big tech companies goes through a round of layoffs, their stock goes up...
LUSE: Yes, it does.
KING: ...Often the next day. Yep.
LUSE: Yes, it does. Often...
KING: Right?
LUSE: ...The next day. Exactly.
KING: Yep.
LUSE: Yes.
KING: So it's like the company has done a thing that is very bad for the people who work there. It has...
LUSE: Right.
KING: ...Laid them off. But it's eliminating redundancies and it's getting rid of, like, people who don't - we're not wasting money. And so the stock price responds by saying, OK, thank you for laying those people off. It's this really difficult circle. And for people who defend capitalism, they would say Noel, capitalism has allowed you to buy a house and have, like, a not super healthy but existent 401(k), right? You're doing well by capitalism's standards. And that's true. I absolutely am. But what I see around me is a lot of people who are not, and I will tell you something, Brittany, you don't know this, but once you get over 40, you start thinking about the kids all the time. Capital T capital K, The Kids. And what I see with the kids, the kids are not buying it. The kids don't believe they're going to get anywhere. The kids are worried about everything, and they have good reason because the millennials are in their late 30s and 40s now. We're just buying houses.
LUSE: Really. Really and truly. Yeah.
KING: Yeah. Yeah.
LUSE: Yeah. You know, for a lot of us, our current understanding of America's financial precarity goes back to the 2008 recession, which, in your view, spawned twin movements - Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. You say these movements brought about talking about capital C Capitalism to the mainstream. How did these movements start making people across the political spectrum who aren't economists - like, everyday people - to start using this language?
KING: That was my big obsession when I started this series. Why suddenly am I hearing the word capitalism? Literally just hearing the word when before it was like capitalism is the water we swim in if we're fish, right? We just - it's there. It's water, but we're not going to comment upon it. It's the way things work. So the financial crisis happens. President Obama is bailing out everybody. Obama gives this speech in February of 2009 in Phoenix, where there's a lot of people who are underwater on their mortgages.
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BARACK OBAMA: Well, it is good to be back in Arizona.
KING: And he makes this promise that he is going to bail them out. He doesn't use those words. It's much more formal. But essentially at the end of it, what you get is the federal government is going to bail some of these people out on their underwater mortgages.
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OBAMA: And through this plan, we will help between 7 and 9 million families restructure or refinance their mortgages so they can avoid foreclosure.
KING: A day later, a CNBC personality named Rick Santelli is on TV, and he issues this call. Rick Santelli says, all you capitalists out there should be really mad that the president is bailing out these losers, these guys who got too big a mortgage and now they can't afford it. All the capitalists should meet up, and they should start a Tea Party, a new Tea Party.
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RICK SANTELLI: We're thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I'm going to start organizing.
KING: And...
LUSE: Right.
KING: This is where the Tea Party begins. It begins with him invoking the capitalists need to make sure that the government isn't bailing out the losers. And I wondered for a while, why would Rick Santelli and other people like him care about middle-class homeowners being bailed out? Like, why call them losers?
LUSE: Right.
KING: It's mean. A lot of people got hurt. Why would you not be mad at the banks? But then if you look at what happened with the Tea Party and who was behind the Tea Party, much of the Tea Party was in fact grassroots, especially at the beginning. But within a very short period of time, the Koch brothers, these very, very, very rich billionaires...
LUSE: Very rich.
KING: They were funding Tea Party rallies. They were putting their money into this movement that was very, very, very anti-government, anti-Obama. And I talked to an activist who was with that movement. And this is a guy who, like, did not recognize that the Koch brothers were part of it. And also, he said to me - he said...
LUSE: Really?
KING: ...You know, when we used to talk about capitalism, we didn't even really know what we were saying. It was just, like, a word that we all used. So, like, you see how it becomes - these billionaires are mad at Obama. They're really frustrated at the big government bailing everybody out. And so they fund this movement and support this movement that sort of begins to talk about capitalism as if this is the system we've gotten. It's great. And the last thing we want to be is socialist. I talked to academics about this, and they're like, this is where we start hearing the dog whistles. This is where we start hearing the racist commentary. This is where it starts to become us versus them. And all of this begins with a man on CNBC saying, it's time for the capitalists to get together and do what we got to do, which is be mad at the little guy, I guess. In all honesty, that's what it seems like to me. Be mad at the guy or gal who got underwater on their mortgage.
So while the Tea Party is going on and actually really fundamentally changing our politics, two years later, Occupy Wall Street - right? Wall Street got us into all the trouble. Let's get mad at them. And what's really interesting about that movement - it doesn't start out - again, it doesn't really start out using the word capitalist at the beginning. But very quickly, people get down to Occupy Wall Street and start saying, it's the system that screwed us up. It's not just the banks. It's not just the bosses. It's not the president.
LUSE: It's the system itself. Yeah.
KING: It's the system itself. And from there, the word capitalism goes mainstream. It is now everywhere. People have signs. My mom is talking about capitalism. Like, you suddenly hear this term that, for generations, was not spoken outside of classrooms. You suddenly hear it everywhere you look. And a lot of it is critiques, and a lot of it is late-stage, and a lot of it is, capitalism doesn't work for me. And so yeah. These two movements, I would argue - they are what brought this word and this concept into the mainstream.
LUSE: So the thing is that after the 2008 crash, capitalism - I mean, it failed everybody. Everyone was a loser. You know what I mean?
KING: Yeah.
LUSE: Everyone was a loser.
KING: Yeah.
LUSE: Some people maybe to varying degrees, but everyone was a loser. We all faced the same problem. But these two camps, Occupy and the Tea Party - they wanted wildly different solutions. How does that divide over capitalism inform our current wider national divisions?
KING: I mean, I think the Tea Party started a lot of the divisiveness. I remember a time when, if a politician gave a speech, people in the crowd were quiet. And one of the things you saw as the Tea Party movement gets started is your senator, your congressman or congresswoman would get up, give a speech, and Tea Party people are there, shouting them down. It gets really ugly. Remember; Obama's giving his speech, his State of the Union. And somebody yells at him, you lie.
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OBAMA: The reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: You lie.
KING: That made news.
LUSE: Yeah.
KING: Today, that would not. I mean, Joe Biden gave his State of the Union speech. People were yelling him every two seconds, and he was, like, batting it. He was hitting it, hitting it, hitting it out of the park. Like, I got it. I got it.
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PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I'm not saying it's a majority.
(CROSSTALK)
BIDEN: Let me give you - anybody who doubts it, contact my office. I'll give you a copy. I'll give you a copy.
KING: Like, I remember a time - we all remember a time when this was unheard of. So I think the Tea Party movement introduces the divisiveness. And this is what academics tell me as well. It introduces the divisiveness. It introduces the rhetoric about immigrants. It introduces the dog whistles. It introduces the, we don't trust this president because he's not like us. He's a socialist. And what else is different about Obama, I wonder? And so you can say it without really saying it. And then when you look at Occupy, there's real rage there, too. You get Bernie Sanders.
LUSE: Yeah.
KING: Occupy is the movement. And I exaggerate slightly, but this is the Bernie Sanders movement. This man's - Bernie Sanders' furious anti-capitalism is brought to a wider audience. I don't think I had any idea who Senator Bernie Sanders was before Occupy Wall Street. He was a random man from Vermont, as far as I was concerned. And I'm an avid news consumer. So, like, what you see, though...
LUSE: Right.
KING: ...On the left as well is there's real rage there, too. And we start talking about each other in a different kind of way. We start really getting toxic. And what fuels the toxicity is rage. It is rage about the system failing all of us. And as often the case in America, some people choose to blame the system itself, capitalism. And other people choose to blame the government.
LUSE: Coming up, where debates about capitalism are today and what America could look like without it. Stick around.
You know, let's talk about right now. This has been called hot strike summer. Summer 2023, hot strike summer, a bunch of very visible industries - Hollywood, shipping and delivery, airlines. Oh, my gosh. And a lot of very - and a lot of the workers in these very visible industries are on picket lines. And it's showing just how unequal things have become. And on the other side, as you brought up earlier, we have a Republican candidate in Vivek Ramaswamy railing against what he calls woke capitalism. Like, what is going on? What is happening?
KING: Everybody's mad. That's the thing, everybody is mad at the system. Everybody is mad because everybody feels failed. When Vivek Ramaswamy talks about woke capitalism, he is talking about companies. He is talking about investment products that take into account environmental, social and governance of companies. So you have that and then you have people striking in large part because capitalism is not working for them. That is when you go and you picket.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Pay your writers.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: Pay your writers.
KING: It is, things are not working for you. Things are working very well, often, for your bosses, but they are not working for you. And the numbers on striking people are still low compared to what they used to be in, like, the height of the times of strikes. But people have to know that they're mad. People have to understand that they're being screwed before anything is going to change. What was going on in the '80s and '90s, I think, was just we hadn't yet caught up to what was actually going on around us. Our manufacturing jobs are going overseas. Everybody's moving away from pensions. You're going to be on your own. You're going to be a freelance or gig worker.
I don't know. I think we've hit the point where we have looked around - and by this, I mean people broadly have looked around, surveyed the landscape, and we are furious. And we are going to come for capitalism from a million different angles, whether you're a conservative like Vivek or whether you are an actor in Hollywood on a picket line. And the person standing outside is Mike Pence and the other old people being like, but remember communism?
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RAMASWAMY: I wanted to briefly address Pence. Vice President Pence, I have a news flash. The USSR does not exist anymore. It fell back in 1990.
MIKE PENCE: Did I say USSR?
RAMASWAMY: The real threat - you talked about the communists. And the real communists...
KING: It's amazing. This is a sea change moment that we're in. This is a shift, and I love being here.
LUSE: There are a lot of ideologies, a lot of solutions people are putting forth as alternatives to capitalism in this moment. But one of the ideas that you talk about in your series is degrowth - in short, the idea that endless growth shouldn't be the primary principle around which we organize our economy. What would degrowth mean?
KING: Degrowth would mean some real interesting stuff, girl. It really, really, really would because the thing that you and I know about our lives is we want our salaries to grow so that we can afford that house.
LUSE: Yes.
KING: We want our 401(k)s to grow. Growth is a really good thing. I worked for a long time on the African continent. And I saw countries where their GDP was really, really, really galloping all of a sudden. And I saw roads and bridges and highways and office towers.
LUSE: Infrastructure.
KING: Infrastructure. And people - I knew people who had dropped out of school at the age of, like, 8 or 9 sending their kids to college...
LUSE: Wow.
KING: ...Because they had entered into the middle class and they could do that. Growth is amazing. The problem with growth is this, we trashed the planet on our way to this endless growth. We have done these incredibly, incredibly planet-changing things in our quest for growth.
One of the propositions that degrowthers make is that we should end planned obsolescence. So like, in three years, my iPhone will not be any good anymore, but it could be if Apple would just put a little bit more into it. And so they say we should legislate that Apple has to make phones that last for 10 or 15 years, full stop, so we're not all throwing away our computers and our phones after a couple of years. They would like to legislate an end to advertising. They would like to legislate the beef industry, which is responsible for a lot of emissions into the environment.
LUSE: Right.
KING: They would like to legislate that we stop eating meat. And all of these things - I mean, I started this series very skeptical of the idea of degrowth. And I will tell you something, I have come around. I am convinced. I've stopped eating meat. I did, I stopped eating meat.
LUSE: My jaw is on the floor.
KING: Yeah.
LUSE: I've literally - if you could just see me, like, I'm, like, sitting here looking like a marionette. You've come around on all this?
KING: I have.
LUSE: Now you're, like, pro degrowth?
KING: I am - so here's the tricky part. I lived and worked in Sudan for three years. I am not pro degrowth for Sudan. Sudan needs to grow. And that's the issue, it's a country of millions of people that needs to grow. And Noel King stopped eating meat and has committed to not buying new clothes. I am an individual making a choice for myself but still saying I understand that there are countries that badly need to grow, and I think they should. I think we're going to have a new generation of politicians in the United States who will openly talk about degrowth, which at the moment is like a cuss word.
LUSE: (Laughter).
KING: If anything, our politicians are like, we are going to grow GDP. It's how they get elected. But I think we're going to see a shift here, too. I think people, myself included, are willing to make changes to their individual lives if they mean the planet survives, which degrowthers for the most part believe if we keep doing what we're doing, the planet will not survive. And if you view it in those existential terms - we will destroy this planet - then you are willing to make individual changes. And maybe you're even willing to vote for a candidate that says the United States economy can stay where it is, it can stay where it is. But it's a really hard sell, as you know, because there are parts of the United States that really need to develop, too.
LUSE: You know, all of this makes me think about one of our founding principles of this country, according to the Declaration of Independence, the pursuit of happiness, which here often means the pursuit of money and dollar bills. It's at the heart of America for better and also, definitely for worse, I think, as we've discussed. I'm trying to hold all of this in my brain. Like, the current anger that so many Americans have now about their economic situation, regardless of where they stand politically, and also, trying to hold the concept that you just shared with me about degrowth. I don't know, what is even America without capitalism?
KING: I think America without capitalism is probably nonexistent. But I would say once upon a time, America had a much bigger middle class. It just did.
LUSE: Yeah.
KING: There were millions of people who did have enough, and that middle class has been eviscerated over the last 40 years. And I think that's why so many of us are so unhappy. The America I can imagine is one where more people get into the middle class, stay in the middle class, are not displaced from the middle class by losing their jobs or by having a health emergency. And I think lots of smart people have ideas about what it's going to take to get there. But I do think there was a time in this country, the golden age of capitalism in the '50s and '60s. Not everyone could participate, for sure. Not everyone got to participate.
LUSE: Bingo. Yeah.
KING: There were real problems with that. I don't know. I don't know that there's a lot of hope because the reason these big corporations have a ton of power is because, again, we are all complicit in wanting our stock to go up and wanting our 403(b)s, our 401(k)s to go up. We have a lot of complicity. But, again, you just never really know when somebody's going to come along with some great idea or there's going to be some next revolution. Hopefully not a violent one. But, yeah, in the end, I would like rich people to pay their taxes, full stop.
LUSE: (Laughter).
KING: Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, sir, pay your taxes. There you go.
LUSE: Noel, this has been such a fantastic conversation. I am so excited for this series. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
KING: Thank you so much for having me. This was really, really fun, Brittany.
LUSE: Thanks again to Noel King. You can find her series on capitalism over at "Today, Explained" wherever you get your podcasts.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: Hey, Brittany.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: Hey, Brittany.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: Hey, Brittany.
CALVIN: Hey, Brittany. This is Calvin (ph) from San Francisco. I was watching the VMAs this past week, and I really loved Olivia Rodrigo's performance. That girl is truly a star. Do you think the VMAs are back?
LUSE: Calvin from San Francisco, thank you so much for calling in. First of all, yes, Olivia is a star. That is my girl. I have been bumping her new album "GUTS" nonstop. Now, you're asking about the VMAs. Are they back overall? I would say that they have been on a - sometimes I think at first slow and then steep decline for the past decade. They have had really low ratings. There was, like, a serious drop in ratings about 10 years ago, and the ratings have remained pretty low since then. I think that for the past decade or so, MTV, because it's no longer, like, the center of pop culture that it used to be for someone my age who's, like, a millennial who was, like, calling "TRL" every day after school and wanting to see the new Britney Spears video and, like, actively seeing NSYNC in concert, I think that, like, for people younger than I am, MTV is just, like, a place where "Ridiculousness" with Rob Dyrdek plays all day long.
Like, I don't think they think of it as, like, an actual cultural touchstone. And I think that, like, MTV kept trying to chase this younger generation that just didn't recognize them, didn't see them as an authority. Where I think they did a really good job this year is they were like, we're just going to go for the middle to elder millennials. They had, like, a good combination of younger artists that I think people in their 30s and early 40s would recognize, like Olivia Rodrigo and, like, Ice Spice. But then they also had more established acts. Of course, Nicki Minaj was hosting, and then they also featured these, like, reunions and tribute performances for and by all of these artists that popped in the '90s and the aughts.
So, like, if you were in college in 2005, like me, I loved my roommate freshman year. I love her forever. She's one of my favorite people, my best friends. She played the heck out of some Keyshia Cole. So when I saw Keyshia Cole get on stage and do a tribute to Diddy, I was loving it. I don't know if your average 23-year-old was, but, again, I don't think MTV was speaking to them this year. I think they decided to dance with the one who brung them, and that's elder millennials. They had an NSYNC reunion. That wasn't for anybody below the age of 34. It just wasn't. But, I mean, I don't know if they're back. I don't think I can confidently say that they're back. But I do think that they have put a little gas in their tank for, like, another five years of good VMAs productions. That's just my 2 cents. We'll see what happens next year. But until then, I'm just holding out hope for an NSYNC reunion tour. JC, if you're listening, we want to see you. Anyway, thanks again, Calvin.
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LUSE: And to all of you listening, I want to know what you want to talk about, too. Anything from the biggest pop culture story of the week to the newest bangers to the TV show everyone is talking about. If there's something everyone in your world is going on about, record a quick voice memo with your first name, location and the topic, and send it to ibam@npr.org. That's ibam@npr.org. I cannot wait to hear what you want to talk about. This episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE was produced by...
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LUSE: All right. That's our show for today. I'm Brittany Luse. See you next week for another episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR.
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