Mark: — and I hit refresh. Twice. Because I genuinely thought the page hadn't loaded.
Lauren: [amused] It had loaded.
Mark: It had loaded. [laughing] Good morning, this is Ashley River Radio, I'm Mark, that's Lauren, it is Wednesday, August twenty-sixth. Here's your forecast, and I want you to really sit with it. Overnight: chance of showers and thunderstorms, seventy-five. Today: chance of showers and thunderstorms, eighty-nine.
Mark: Tonight: chance of showers and thunderstorms, seventy-five.
Lauren: [flat] Mm.
Mark: That's not a forecast, man. That's a screensaver.
Lauren: [dry] The wind's different.
Mark: Oh, the wind's different?
Lauren: One to eight today. One mile an hour overnight.
Mark: [beat] One.
Lauren: One. Which is not weather, that's a... that's a rounding error. That's the sensor apologizing.
Mark: [snorts] Okay, that's fair.
Lauren: The storms matter to me though, because — [sighs] the router took another lap last night.
Mark: [delighted] Ohhh.
Lauren: It's fine.
Mark: You said you weren't looking into it.
Lauren: I'm not.
Mark: You said, and I want to get this right, you said you had "decided not to look into it."
Lauren: [flat] And I have not looked into it.
Mark: You read the logs.
Lauren: I read... I glanced. I glanced at the logs and I closed the tab, which is a different thing, and I am at peace.
Mark: [amused] You are not at peace, man. You are so far from peace.
Lauren: I'm at a peace-adjacent location. [beat] Okay, so — before we do anything else, I owe everybody something.
Mark: [curious] Do you.
Lauren: I made a call on the record yesterday about the runoff.
Mark: Ohhh, you did.
Lauren: I did.
Lauren: So let's just — let's do the part where I was wrong first, get it out of the way.
Mark: >> [laughing] Please. Take your time.
Lauren: Live 5 has the numbers. AP called it for Darline Graham. She got a hundred ninety-three thousand, three ninety-six — fifty-two and a half percent. Norman got a hundred seventy-five thousand, three twenty-seven. Forty-seven five.
Mark: And yesterday you said —
Lauren: I said her thirty-three percent in the ten-way primary meant nothing going into a runoff.
Mark: No, that's a real thing, I've seen that happen.
Lauren: Right, and I want that on the record. Evette led on primary night and Alan Wilson took her apart in the runoff. That happens constantly. First place in a ten-way is... it's not support, it's name recognition divided by a crowd.
Mark: Okay but you left out the one variable.
Lauren: [conceding] I did, yeah. Go on.
Mark: Trump reportedly suggested her for the appointment in the first place. So the endorsement isn't a thing that happened to the campaign. The endorsement IS the campaign.
Mark: That's the whole race.
Lauren: [exhales] Yeah, no, you're right. I was reasoning off the shape of the thing instead of the content of it. Which is — I do that.
Mark: You do do that.
Lauren: It's still fifteen thousand votes though. Eighteen, whatever. Norman had the late momentum, everybody was saying it — that wasn't a walkover.
Mark: >> No, and can I do the Rock Hill thing? Because the Rock Hill thing is the part I can't stop thinking about.
Lauren: [flat] Go on.
Mark: He comes out on stage with no concession speech written. None. And then he starts to drift toward, you know, mild criticism of the president — and his own people boo him. In his own room.
Mark: In Rock Hill.
Lauren: [flat] Mm.
Mark: And I know, I know. But there's something almost —
Lauren: Don't.
Mark: — a little sad about it?
Lauren: [incredulous] Mark. He was on a statewide ballot three times in one calendar year. He self-funded a governor's run with millions of his own dollars.
Mark: Which is my point! Three swings, millions of his own money, and he still can't say one true sentence out loud in a room he paid for.
Lauren: That's not sad, he built the room. [beat] I've got nothing.
Lauren: He helped make the rule that beat him.
Mark: [conceding] ...yeah, okay.
Mark: I don't know, it's grim to watch. I'm allowed to think that.
Lauren: >> So the thing I actually care about is what she ran on.
Mark: Which was affordability.
Lauren: Affordability crisis, lowering health care costs, says she understands it firsthand, says she's not running as a career politician. And — look, she was a public administrator before this. Sworn in three days after her brother died. First woman to represent South Carolina in the Senate, which is a real thing and it took until twenty twenty-six.
Mark: [thoughtful] I do think it matters that affordability is the thing she ran on, though.
Mark: Like, that's a shift.
Lauren: [flat] Everybody runs on affordability.
Mark: Okay, but —
Lauren: Everybody runs on affordability. Nobody runs on who's charging it — that's the trick, right? You can say "costs are too high" for eighteen months and never name a company, a rate case, a hospital system. I'll believe it when there's a vote attached.
Mark: Yeah. Yeah, okay, that's fair.
Lauren: And Andrews is on the ballot November third. Charleston pediatrician, she ran against Mace in the first district in twenty twenty-two, so people here have seen her name before. She launched expecting to run against Lindsey Graham himself, which is —
Mark: [flat] Yeah.
Lauren: — a strange year.
Lauren: >> One more thing on this and then I'll stop. Charleston County election officials say this is the highest number of elections in a two-month span in the county's history.
Mark: Wait, wait — in the history of the county? Ever?
Lauren: Okay, so who eats that? Because it's not a line item that fell out of the sky. It's poll workers. It's county staff running an emergency schedule nobody budgeted, on top of a general in November.
Mark: And most of those poll workers are retired folks doing it for basically nothing.
Lauren: [dry] Right. A guy dies, a governor appoints, a party schedules — and the cost lands on forty people in a church fellowship hall on Ashley River Road at five-thirty in the morning.
Lauren: Three separate times.
Mark: [exhales] Man. Yeah.
Lauren: [flat] And nobody's sending them a thank-you note.
Mark: >> Okay, so — speaking of "affordability crisis" as a phrase versus a thing. This one's hitting my job sites, like, next month.
Lauren: Go.
Mark: Live 5 again. Canada's putting twenty billion dollars of counter-tariffs on more than seven hundred U.S. goods. Response to the weekend tariffs.
Mark: And the list includes up to fifty percent on steel, wood, aluminum.
Lauren: [beat] Fifty.
Mark: Fifty. Effective September eighth.
Lauren: That's two weeks.
Mark: Barely. And they talked to Adrian Cain — he's the CEO of the Lowcountry Home Builders Association — and the quote that got me was about what actually crosses that border. It's not just two-by-fours. He said Canada does a lot of specialty lumber. Compressed plywood. And, uh — headers.
Mark: Headers. The thing over every doorway you walk through.
Lauren: [thoughtful] Huh.
Mark: Every single door in your house has one and you've never once thought about it.
Lauren: Never.
Mark: And Cain's point is it's stacking. High interest rates, supply chain stuff already, and now this on top. And they had a College of Charleston economist in there too, Frank Hefner, just kind of dryly explaining what a trade war is, which — [laughs] that's where we are.
Lauren: Okay so where's the fifty percent actually land?
Lauren: Because it doesn't land on Canada.
Mark: No. Suppliers pass it to the stores, stores pass it to builders, builders pass it to buyers. Cain says that straight out. And here's the part that made me put my coffee down — he says builders are going to move away from fixed-price contracts toward dynamic pricing.
Lauren: [flat] Say that again.
Mark: Dynamic pricing. On a house. On a house, dude.
Lauren: [pause] Bullshit.
Mark: [rushed] Okay but hear me — I've sat in these meetings. You genuinely cannot quote a material sixty days out right now. You can't. If I sign a fixed price in September and the lumber package moves eleven percent in October, I'm eating it, and I'm a small builder, I don't have eleven percent.
Lauren: I know. I'm not saying he's lying about the risk.
Mark: Right —
Lauren: I'm saying the risk didn't go anywhere. It got moved. It moved from the person who buys lumber for a living and understands the market, to a couple who've never bought a house before and are already stretched to the last dollar of what the bank said yes to.
Mark: [conceding] Mm.
Lauren: And it floats one direction. Show me the dynamic pricing contract where lumber comes in cheap and they cut you a check in March.
Mark: [beat] ...no. No, that contract does not exist.
Lauren: It doesn't exist. So it's not a pricing model. It's a transfer.
Lauren: That's all it is.
Mark: Okay, that one lands. [exhales] And Cain's out here saying we need sixty to eighty thousand homes today just to hit equalization in the Lowcountry.
Lauren: [flat] Hm.
Mark: Today. Right now. And we just put fifty percent on the headers. Great.
Lauren: [flat] Great. Love it. Everybody's doing a fantastic job.
Mark: >> Which brings me to Berkeley County, weirdly.
Lauren: [curious] How?
Mark: Because it's the same story from a different door. Live 5 had this one too. Berkeley County Planning Commission is looking at a brand-new zoning category.
Mark: Transitional Agricultural Zoning.
Lauren: Uh huh.
Mark: Eastwood Homes wants to use it. Two hundred-plus acres, about a hundred forty-seven subdivision rentals, and the zoning preserves at least fifty percent as conservation space. Smaller lots, more land left alone.
Lauren: Okay, and on paper that's — I mean that's the right answer. That's the thing you actually want. Smaller lots, less sprawl.
Mark: Right, and the folks who live out there are pissed.
Mark: They talked to a woman named Nicole Burbage. Her line was, at the end of the day it's the same number of residents using the existing infrastructure. Same two-lane roads.
Lauren: >> Okay, so here's where I get annoyed, and it's not at her.
Mark: [amused] Go.
Lauren: "Improve the roads first" has been the polite way to say no for thirty years. I've watched it here. It is the most respectable sentence in local government and it has never once resulted in a road.
Mark: [interrupting] Okay but —
Lauren: Let me finish, because the other half is worse. The thing Burbage flagged is that the moratorium does not apply.
Lauren: That's her quote — that's the most concerning part.
Mark: Okay, wait — go on.
Lauren: So somebody wrote a brand-new zoning category, and the new category happens to sit outside the pause that's supposed to be slowing this exact thing down. That's not reform. That's a workaround with a nice name on it.
Mark: [defensive] Or it's a county trying to get density approved in a place where density can't get approved.
Lauren: Sure. Both can be true and I still want to know who drafted the damn thing.
Mark: Okay but here's what actually bugs me and it's not the moratorium. A hundred forty-seven rentals means one owner. Not a hundred forty-seven owners — one outfit holds the whole damn street, sets the rent on the whole street, answers to nobody living on it.
Lauren: [beat] Yeah, that's — okay. That's the objection that actually holds up.
Mark: I've done badge readers in those offices.
Mark: You call about a roof and you get a portal. A portal, man.
Lauren: [dry] A portal. For a roof.
Mark: And council punted last night — they discussed it and postponed. Doesn't stop the Planning Commission from recommending, and if they do, it goes to the Land Use Committee September fourteenth.
Lauren: So the body that punted gets it back with a recommendation stapled to it. Which makes saying no much harder.
Mark: [pause] Wait, what do you mean?
Lauren: I mean once a commission's on record recommending it, voting no isn't "we disagree," it's "we overruled our own experts." That's a much bigger political thing.
Mark: [beat] Ohhh. Okay. Yeah.
Mark: [amused] You realize we're just having the three-funds argument again in a different county.
Lauren: [laughing] We are a little bit.
Mark: [amused] More shots on goal, same nobody in charge.
Lauren: One number, one body accountable to it. And we're not settling it today either.
Mark: We are not. [beat] Okay, the only thing more reliably expensive around here than building something is getting sick, which is a terrible segue and I know it.
Lauren: >> [dry] It's terrible. I'll take it, though, because I read something in Stateline yesterday that I genuinely did not expect to be good news.
Mark: [surprised] From Stateline?
Lauren: I know. So — private equity in healthcare. The deal count is down since last year, and the value of the deals in the first half of twenty twenty-six is lower than the same stretch in twenty twenty-five.
Lauren: That's PitchBook data, they're the shop that tracks private capital.
Mark: Down how much?
Lauren: They don't put a headline number on it, in what I read. Just down. Count and value.
Lauren: And the report's authors say a big part of the reason is state law. At least twenty-five states have proposed or passed something in the last few years — more oversight on healthcare transactions, limits on companies that aren't run by physicians controlling medical practices, that kind of thing. California, Oregon and Rhode Island all had rules take effect this year that require more documentation and transparency on mergers and acquisitions.
Mark: Huh.
Lauren: And this is the part I'm enjoying, genuinely. Nobody banned anything.
Mark: [curious] Meaning what?
Lauren: Meaning there's no law that says private equity can't buy a practice. The laws just made it take longer and cost more. That's it.
Lauren: That's the whole intervention.
Mark: And that actually works?
Lauren: For the roll-up strategy, yes. Because the roll-up only works on volume. You buy forty practices in three years, you consolidate the back office, you cut the staff, you raise the prices. If every single one of those forty needs a filing and a review and six months, the math falls apart.
Mark: [drawn out] So you're not stopping them, you're just making it annoying.
Lauren: [amused] Annoying at scale. Which — [laughs] that's my entire job description, so.
Mark: [amused] Yeah, you love this.
Lauren: I love this. And the sector that got hit hardest is the practice management side.
Lauren: The scheduling and billing end.
Mark: Which is the part that shows up on my bill, yeah.
Lauren: It's the only part most people ever see. Nobody knows who owns their orthopedist. They know that suddenly there's a facility fee.
Mark: >> Okay, so — skeptical question.
Lauren: Please.
Mark: How do you know this isn't just interest rates? Because we literally just did fifteen minutes on how high rates are crushing homebuilding. Deals get expensive to finance, deal volume drops.
Mark: Same story, different industry.
Lauren: [pause] Yeah, that's a real confounder. I can't rule it out, and honestly neither can they.
Mark: So we might be pinning a medal on a law for something the Fed did.
Lauren: Maybe half a medal. But here's why I don't think it matters for the policy question — friction is cheap. A disclosure requirement costs a state almost nothing. You're not building anything, you're not staffing a new agency, you're asking for paperwork. Rates go up and down on their own. The paperwork stays.
Mark: [conceding] ...okay. That's a good answer.
Mark: >> But there's a catch in there, right? I thought you said there was a catch.
Lauren: I did. The report flags that private equity can route around a lot of this by partnering with healthcare nonprofits.
Mark: [flat] Course they can. Of course.
Mark: And I'll tell you exactly what that looks like from where I sit. The announcement says "community nonprofit health partners." Lovely. Local. Somebody cuts a ribbon. And then the operating agreement says something completely different, and you find out which one is real about fourteen months later when your practice starts routing your billing questions to an office in another state.
Lauren: Mm.
Mark: And you can't get a person. That's the tell. When you can't get a human being on the phone about a bill, somebody bought something.
Lauren: [dry] That's a good heuristic, actually.
Mark: So doesn't that make the whole thing toothless? If the loophole's that easy?
Lauren: [beat] No — I'd read it the other way. Nobody builds a workaround for a rule that doesn't bite.
Lauren: The workaround is the compliment.
Mark: [skeptical] That's a very optimistic reading for you.
Lauren: [laughs] It's the one time a year, enjoy it.
Lauren: And South Carolina is obviously not one of the twenty-five.
Mark: [dry] Was never going to be. Come on.
Lauren: No. And I'd love to be wrong about that too, but our attorney general is not going to issue a statement about giving his office a bird's-eye view on medical group mergers. Rhode Island's did. Neronha. That's a real quote from January — he said market consolidation drives up the cost of care and inhibits patient access.
Mark: [flat] And that's the radical position now. Wild.
Lauren: [flat] It's not radical. It's just said out loud.
Lauren: [beat] Anyway. The only people who've solved health insurance are the ones who post about it on Reddit.
Mark: [groans] Oh no.
Lauren: >> Oh yes.
Mark: [laughing] Okay, so this is r/financialindependence, and I want to read you the numbers in the order he gives them, because that's the experience. Guy's a business owner, semi-retired — he says he doesn't run the business anymore but still pulls a lot of income out of it. Says he could retire without it anyway, the business is "gravy."
Lauren: Gravy.
Mark: Net worth, twelve to fifteen million. Family of four. He's fifty, the oldest of them.
Lauren: Okay.
Mark: And then: "It costs me over thirty-two thousand dollars a year to provide me and my family with health insurance." And he says this is "especially stupid" because they use maybe a few thousand of care a year.
Lauren: [flat] Mm.
Mark: [laughing] And I know what you're about to say, but I actually think it's kind of great that this is the problem money doesn't fix. Fifteen million dollars and he's sitting there at his kitchen table just as annoyed as anybody.
Lauren: He's describing insurance working exactly as designed and calling it stupid.
Mark: Okay but he's allowed to notice a bad deal even if it doesn't hurt him.
Lauren: [flat] That's the thing, though — it isn't one. He paid thirty-two grand and got nothing, which is what happens when nothing goes wrong. That's the product.
Lauren: The product is the year where something does.
Mark: [conceding] ...yeah.
Lauren: But here's the part that actually gets me. Thirty-two grand is what it costs to leave a job in a country where coverage is attached to jobs. He can pay it. Good. Everybody below him in the exact same situation — same age, same tired, same business they'd like to step back from — they just don't leave.
Mark: Mm. Yeah.
Lauren: They stay ten more years. That's the policy. Not a side effect — the design. It's been the design my entire working life.
Mark: [flat] Yeah. My dad did that.
Lauren: Right.
Mark: [beat] Alright, well. That got heavy in a hurry.
Lauren: >> So let me do a palate cleanser that is also, uh — me continuing to process being wrong about the runoff thirty minutes ago.
Mark: [delighted] Oh, this is therapy.
Lauren: [dry] It is. Of Dollars and Data ran a post called "Why I Was Wrong to Be Bearish on U.S. Stocks."
Mark: [amused] Perfect.
Lauren: He wrote it a year ago. Since then U.S. stocks are up sixteen percent, total return. So he goes back through his own reasoning to find where it broke — which nobody does. Nobody.
Mark: Okay, what'd he have?
Lauren: Three signals that all reminded him of twenty twenty-one. One, Chamath filing for a new SPAC. Two, Meta paying two hundred fifty million plus to hire individual AI researchers.
Lauren: Three, the S&P's price-to-sales ratio back near an all-time high.
Mark: [beat] Two fifty for one person?
Lauren: Two-fifty-million-plus for individual researchers, yeah.
Mark: [incredulous] That IS a bubble signal, what are you talking about, that's insane.
Lauren: That's what he thought!
Lauren: And his own conclusion, a year later — Chamath filing a SPAC means nothing, he'll do whatever cashes in, crypto, AI, doesn't matter. And Zuckerberg overpaying is just... what Zuckerberg does. He points out everybody said the billion for Instagram was crazy.
Mark: [grudgingly] Okay, fine.
Lauren: And then the third one. [pause] The third one is my favorite thing I read all week.
Mark: Go on.
Lauren: The price-to-sales data he built the whole call on was wrong.
Mark: [surprised] Wrong how?
Lauren: Just wrong. Bad series. He'd noted it peaked at three-forty-one in nineteen ninety-nine, and the numbers have since been revised.
Lauren: So the load-bearing chart was garbage, and he says so, in public, with the old chart still in the post.
Mark: [laughing] That's so good.
Lauren: It's the most honest thing in finance writing. And it's the same failure as chasing a network problem for two days because your monitoring's lying to you. You reason beautifully. Off garbage.
Mark: [amused] You've done that.
Lauren: I've done that for two days. Two days, and it was —
Mark: [interrupting] Don't.
Lauren: — it was a bad SNMP counter.
Mark: [flat] Okay but I'm not letting you have this one.
Lauren: [curious] Why not?
Mark: Because admitting you were wrong is easy when you were wrong about being too careful. Nobody blows up being bearish. You just miss out.
Mark: It's the cheapest mistake there is to confess to.
Lauren: [beat] Missing sixteen percent is losing money.
Mark: It's not the same as —
Lauren: Not the same as blowing up, no. But it's not free. [pause] And yes, I'm aware I'm talking about myself and the runoff.
Mark: [warmly] I know you are. That's why I said it.
Lauren: [dry] Thank you for that.
Mark: [laughing] Anytime.
Mark: >> Okay. Speaking of things that aged badly, I've got two quick ones and one is genuinely grim.
Lauren: Do the grim one.
Mark: [flat] Pennsylvania confirmed two measles deaths in Lancaster County. Both people unvaccinated. First confirmed measles deaths in the country this year. That's Stateline.
Lauren: [pause] Okay.
Mark: The CDC's got two thousand seven hundred seventy-seven confirmed cases this year. Last year, all of last year, was two thousand two eighty-nine.
Lauren: [flat] So we blew past a full year. In August.
Mark: In August. And Pennsylvania alone's got three hundred ninety-three cases across twenty-nine counties. Eighty-six of those in the last week. Seventy hospitalizations.
Mark: Nearly half the state's cases are in one county.
Lauren: [flat] Eighty-six in a week.
Mark: And their health secretary — Dr. Bogen — she said the thing that stuck with me, that people aren't familiar with the disease because it was gone for thirty years. So nobody knows how bad it gets.
Lauren: [flat] The U.S. declared measles eliminated in the year two thousand.
Mark: Yep.
Lauren: And it turns out "eliminated" was a maintenance contract. That somebody stopped paying.
Mark: [exhales] Yeah. That's exactly what it is.
Lauren: Two people are dead in Lancaster County and it was completely preventable, and we're going to do this again in October about some other county.
Lauren: That's the part that makes me want to throw something across the room.
Mark: >> [beat] Okay. Lighter. Post and Courier, Folly Beach — nearly a hundred surfers out there have gotten certified in CPR and first aid to help with the lifeguard shortage.
Lauren: Uh huh.
Mark: A hundred people, Lauren. Volunteering their own time. That is a genuinely lovely story about neighbors and you are doing the face.
Lauren: I'm not doing a face.
Mark: You're doing the face.
Lauren: [flat] The city hired forty-nine lifeguards. Out of a hundred ninety-six applicants.
Mark: [pause] ...okay.
Lauren: A hundred ninety-six people wanted that job.
Lauren: So it's not a shortage of people willing to sit on a beach and save lives. It's a shortage of anybody willing to pay a hundred ninety-six people to do it.
Mark: So that's a budget line, not a labor market. Okay, that's annoying.
Lauren: Right. And now a hundred surfers backfill it for free, and next year that's just the plan. That's how it goes — you volunteer once and it's the baseline.
Mark: [grudgingly] ...I still think the surfers are great.
Lauren: They are! They're the only people in this story doing anything. [beat] Which — one actionable thing, twenty seconds. There's a Special Public Safety Committee meeting tomorrow.
Lauren: Thursday the twenty-seventh, four-thirty, City Hall council chamber, eighty Broad.
Mark: [amused] And?
Lauren: And if anybody's going — there are still some outstanding questions about a certain camera contract. Term length. Whether it auto-renews. What the retention clause actually says.
Mark: [laughing] She is never letting this go.
Lauren: Who signed it, Mark.
Mark: >> [laughing] Okay, my last one and it's pure joy. Holy City Sinner had it. Char House Social — Texas-style steakhouse and bar, from the folks behind The Harlow on James Island.
Mark: Going into the old Smoky Oak space this fall, and I am so ready.
Lauren: [surprised] Oh, in there? Huh.
Mark: Owner's Josh Drewry, and he's very clear it's not a formal steakhouse and not an "overly themed Western concept" — his words. Neighborhood place first. Brett Riley's the exec chef, he's a partner, came up through some serious New York kitchens.
Lauren: Okay, that's a real crew.
Mark: [rushed] And Lauren, they have a thing called the Tumbleweed Onion. It's a towering pile of thinly sliced crispy fried onions with a house dipping sauce.
Lauren: [dry] It's a haystack.
Mark: It's a GODDAMN haystack of onions and I want it immediately.
Lauren: [flat] There's also an espresso martini on the early cocktail list. Called the Texspresso.
Mark: [delighted] Yeah there is! Of course there is.
Lauren: [flat] And that is a reason to stay home.
Mark: [laughing] Unmoved. Completely unmoved. I'll be there in October eating a pile of onions the size of my head.
Lauren: [warmly] Alright. That's us. Thanks for hanging out with us — we're back Friday.
Lauren: [beat] And I am not looking at the router logs.
Mark: [flat] She's absolutely going to look.