Hello, everyone. This is JVL here with my bulwark colleague, Catherine Rampel, author of The Receipts Newsletter.

And we're going to be talking about politics and the law today.

We're going right to Virginia, where the state Supreme Court is, I'm kidding.

I'm kidding. We're not going to do that.

Sorry.

You're going to have to tune into other bulwark hashtag content for that sort of talk.

Catherine and I are here because we have jobs numbers.

You political sickos can go do your redistricting fight.

We're here to nerd out about the economy.

Catherine, job numbers are out.

They are.

Yeah. They are, eh, up 115,000, which is better than being negative,

which is a thing that often happens during the Trump era, down from last month, but better than the expectation, which was like 50, $55,000. So talk to me about

this. What is it? Is this just me? I mean, it's better than expected, as you pointed out.

I'm a little confused, candidly, about what's going on in this economy.

I think a lot of people are at this point, just because there are a lot of weights weighing on the economy, largely policy-related weights dragging on the economy.

And so I guess the question is, like, how much better could things have been without that boot on our necks?

But the economy is still chugging along.

Like, as much as criticize Donald Trump's policies when it comes to tariffs or the war or mass deportations or trying to politicize

the Fed or firing the commissioner of the BLS for that matter, the agency that releases these numbers.

All of those things are bad. But our economy still keeps chugging along.

So despite what seems to be lots of efforts to make things go south, we still seem to be surviving. And to what extent that's about the AI boom slash bubble, I don't know. I think it's a little bit hard to tell within this

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