Latest / Trend Watch / Episode 34: Trump's Populism, Harris' Strategy, and Israel's Fight with Hezbollah

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Episode 34: Trump's Populism, Harris' Strategy, and Israel's Fight with Hezbollah · Trend Watch

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: Ready to take a deeper look at where history, politics, and economics all intersect?
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well, then you've come to the right place.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: Each week,
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: here's where we pull back the headlines and focus on the big trends,
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: the stuff that actually shapes our future.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: Through the noise, we focus on the signal.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, Neil Howe, and this is TrendWatch.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: Today is July 24th, 2024, and this is Trend Watch.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome back, everybody.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: As usual, I have on my fellow analyst, Christian Ford.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: So, Christian, how was your week?
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Neil, as you know, for the third time, I have come down with COVID.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think we need an immune system booster for you.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: That's all I got to say, you know.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, it's interesting.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: To my knowledge, I have never had COVID.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, I may be one of those asymptomatic super spreaders.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: You never know, right?
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's funny.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of those things I was kind of in the kind of forgot about it.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: And all of a sudden I got really sick and fun.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: COVID is still around.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: Apparently there is a summer surge.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: There is.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I know a couple of people who have it.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, the president had it.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, it's it's going around.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, all I can say is I wish you a speedy recovery.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: Speaking of sickness, let's get on to our farewells, right?
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: We have a number of them.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's been about two weeks since we did our last podcast, actually.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: We have a number of them,
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: and a few of them I'm going to abbreviate,
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: but I'm going to start off with a couple that certainly have been in the news.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: And the first one is, I always go oldest to youngest, but I'm going to start with Ruth Westheimer.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: This was,
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: as I'm sure all the audience knows,
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: the taboo-breaking sex therapist who gave advice on topics like oral sex,
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: premature ejaculation,
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: and masturbation back in an era when such things were never mentioned in public,
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: much less discussed.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: She died last week at 96.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: And Christian, Ruth Westheimer had a fascinating early life, which I'm sure not everyone's aware of.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: She was born in Germany in 1928 to Jewish parents.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: After Kristallnacht in 1938,
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: once her father was deported by the Gestapo,
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: her mother and grandmother sent her at age 10 to a school in Switzerland for safety.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: She never saw any of her relatives again, all of whom were presumably killed in concentration camps.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: She served in the schools less as a student and more as a servant, actually.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: But immediately after the war...
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: When she was still a teenager,
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: she emigrated to British-controlled Palestine,
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: where she joined the Haganah,
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: which was the mainstream Zionist paramilitary group organized to defend Jewish
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: settlements against Arab attacks.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: And after independence, Haganah became the Israeli Defense Forces, right?
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: The IDF, we now know.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: Because of her small stature, she was only four foot seven inches.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: She was trained as a scout and a sniper just in time for the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: And on her 20th birthday, she was injured in a mortar blast and came close to losing her feet.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that's sort of the hidden story, right, behind someone you never would have thought, right?
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: After recovering,
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: she moved to Paris,
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: where she studied at the Sorbonne,
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: then to the U.S.,
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: where she worked as a maid to put herself through graduate school,
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: eventually earning a doctorate in 1970 from Teachers College,
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: Columbia University.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: During the 70s, while teaching, she started a private sex therapy practice.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: And in 1980,
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: she started the Radio Colin talk show,
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: Sexually Speaking,
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: which became the top-rated radio show nationwide in 1983,
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: leading her to start her TV show,
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: The Dr.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: Ruth Show,
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: which by 1985 attracted 2 million viewers a week.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: Sooner,
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: thoughts were being summarized on everything from Playboy forums to dozens of
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: self-help sex books.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: Probably, you know, serving Oliver, you know, neurotic silent generation peers.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard to imagine how,
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: from today's perspective,
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: hard to imagine how sensational Dr.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: Ruth's show was at the time.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: All those deep,
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: dark secrets about sex were at last being explicitly talked about with honesty,
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: common sense and a bit of humor.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: All this was delivered in a voice that one journalist described as a cross between
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: Henry Kissinger and Minnie Mouse.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's that's pretty good.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: She talked like she might have been giving you a recipe for apple strudel.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: When one broadcaster asked her why America needed a talk show about sex, she answered, why not?
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: Why not share a few recipes on the air promoting sexual literacy in a time of
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: unprecedented sexual freedom?
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's hard to argue with her there.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: By the late 80s and 90s,
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: when a lot more radio and TV shows began talking about sex,
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: Ruth's shows began encountering a lot more competition.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: But by that time, her mission had been successful.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: She led the way.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: She recalled,
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: even as a child,
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: being the only girl willing to find out and explain the answers to all the
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: questions about sex that all her friends wanted to know about.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: even back in that Swiss school,
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: decades later,
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: like so many of her peers,
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: she wanted to do her best to bring those answers out of the closet and make them
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: available to everyone.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: And oh,
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: by the way,
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: just in case you're wondering,
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: Christian,
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: she swears that she never killed anyone as an Israeli soldier.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: But she says she did learn to shoot very well and throw grenades.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: And once at age 90, she demonstrated her competence by assembling a Sten gun with her eyes closed.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, you be careful.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: Dr. Ruth Westheimer, gone at age 96.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to move on to Bob Newhart.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: Bob Newhart,
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: always the straight man whose dry deadpan and stammering sense of humor entertained
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: America for decades.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: He died last week at age 94.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: Newhart was born in 1929 in Oak Park, Illinois.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: His father was part owner of a plumbing supply business.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: He went to local Catholic schools in the Chicago area,
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: graduated from Loyola University in 1952,
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: and then served in the U.S.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: Army during the Korean War.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: After the war, he worked as an accountant, an occupation he admitted later to which he was utterly unfit.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: That's close enough was his motto at the end of the day.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's not very good if you're an accountant.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: And he said he regularly adjusted petty cash imbalances at the end of the day with his own money.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: In his spare time,
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: he traded jokes with coworkers,
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: and after taping some of them,
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: he persuaded Warner Brothers to try him out in 1959.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: This led to Newhart's 1960 comedy album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, which had several sequels.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: His typical stand-up shtick was to imagine one half of a telephone conversation.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: For example, imagine a press agent talking to Abraham Lincoln about the Gettysburg Address.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: You what?
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: You typed it?
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: Abe, how many times have we told you?
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: On the backs of envelopes.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: I understand it's harder to read that way, but it looks like you wrote it on the train coming down.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, that was a difficult step.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: Through the 1960s, Newhart appeared on various TV variety and interview shows.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: By 1972,
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: CBS gave him a sitcom called The Bob Newhart Show,
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: in which he played a mild-mannered psychiatrist surrounded by all kinds of eccentric,
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: nearly bipolar personalities.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: It aired through 1978, and then in 1982, CBS gave him another sitcom just called Newhart,
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: about a do-it-yourself author and his wife who moved from New York City to run an
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: historic old inn in rural Vermont.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: It ran until 1990.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: Newhart also found his way into several movies, and he never stopped doing stand-up routines.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: He said he hated the idea of retirement.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: He explained why to an AARP convention in 2007.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: I call the alternative Sunset Boulevard,
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: sitting in a darkened room and having Eric von Stroheim come in and ask me what
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: episode of New Art I would like to see today.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: That is the Sunset Boulevard.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, that isn't the way I'd like to spend the rest of my time, he said.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: Well, to me, Newhart's humor played off the collective persona of the silent generation.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: Newhart was the average Joe,
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: the unassuming regular guy who followed the rules and was always trying to do his
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: job while also trying to be attentive to the needs of others.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: He was both self-deprecating and sensitive,
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: and he made audiences laugh both at him and at others seen through his eyes.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like Rodney Dangerfield, Christian, he just got no respect.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: But the actor I think he had the most in common with,
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: actually,
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: and was born only a couple of years before him,
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: was Jack Lemmon,
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: the over-socialized straight man in so many movies.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact,
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: in The Apartment,
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: which is a movie I think came out around 1960,
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: I believe Jack Lemmon actually plays a mild-mannered accountant working at a big firm,
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: just like Bob Newhart did in real life.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: Bob Newhart, who so often played the decent, super-sensitive nice guy, gone at age 94.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: And Christian,
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: when we talk about the silent generation's role in exposing dark secrets,
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: let me mention briefly two journalists of this generation who passed away last week
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: who both played that role.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: One is Peter Baxton.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: who passed away last week at age 86.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: He was an employee of the US Public Health Service in the early 1960s,
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: working as a venereal disease investigator when he came across the Tuskegee study
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: on syphilis taking place in rural Alabama.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: Back in 1932, U.S.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: public health workers started a research project that enrolled 400 uneducated black men with syphilis.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: The purpose was to investigate the progression of the disease without treatment.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: And back then, there really was no effective treatment.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: By the late 1940s, there was.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: Penicillin.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: Astonishingly,
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: however,
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: the researchers never started treatment on these subjects,
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: whose symptoms were allowed to worsen until many of them died.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: Back soon, the son of a Jewish father who fled Czechoslovakia before World War II
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: just couldn't get the U.S.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: public health personnel to re-examine its experiment.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: So he eventually gave all of his data and evidence to an AP reporter,
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: and the story ran on the front page of the New York Times in 1972.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: That raised a public furor,
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: obviously,
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: followed by congressional hearings,
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: which closed down the experiment,
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: and ultimately an apology from President Clinton and compensation for all of the
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: victims and their families.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: The other journalist is Robert Allen, who passed away at age 82.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: And he was the historian who wrote the book The Port Chicago Mutiny,
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: which told the story of the largest mass mutiny trial in U.S.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: history.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: I know about this.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: I actually read about it recently.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's fascinating and it's not well known.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: The narrative begins at the height of World War II at Port Chicago,
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: a shiploading dock for munitions in California's Central Valley.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: On the night of July 17th,
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: 1944,
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: while over a thousand sailors,
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: mostly African-Americans,
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: were loading ordnance,
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: something ignited a massive explosion,
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: leveling the entire port.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: An enormous fireball.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: It was like an A-bomb.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: You can just imagine thousands and thousands of...
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: tons of the stuff going up, while killing 320 sailors instantly and injuring hundreds of others.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: Several weeks later, when all the sailors were ordered to continue loading the ships, 258 refused.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: Of these, 50, the so-called Chicago 50, were tried and convicted of mutiny.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: But at the trial, all sorts of mitigating circumstances surfaced.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: None of the sailors were trained how to handle munitions safely.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: Officers wanted their teams to compete with each other for speed in loading the ships.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: And many of the safety devices had been disabled.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: African-American newspapers soon made the mutiny trial part of their double V
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: campaign for victory,
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: victory over the fascists and also victory over discrimination.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: Thurgood Marshall, then a special counsel for the NAACP, then initiated an appeal campaign.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: By August of 1945,
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: with the war winding down and all the publicity about Truman integrating the armed forces,
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: the Navy commuted the long sentences and reinstated the workers' honorable discharges.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: But full exoneration of these men.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: did not come until many decades later.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, it came largely thanks to Robert Allen's book.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: And it only became effective July 17th,
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: 2024,
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: just a few days ago on the 80th anniversary of the explosion.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: And this was sadly one week after Robert Allen's death.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: Who else do we have here?
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: Well,
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: How about Richard Simmons, right?
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: Richard Simmons,
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: the clown,
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: I say the crown prince of exercise,
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: the clown prince of exercise,
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: as he was often called,
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: who for decades,
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: it seems,
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: put his short shorts on,
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: his tank top on and led everyday Americans to exercise.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: Simmons, by his own description, started out as a fat kid who grew up in New Orleans.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: He later moved to Hollywood and there,
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: while he was working odd jobs,
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: decided to lose weight and get into shape.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: He was a boomer.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think he was probably around, you know, 30 at the time.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: Once his routine worked on himself,
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: he began introducing it to other people,
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: and pretty soon he had film stars in his studio.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: Next stop, it turns out, was national TV.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: In 1980,
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: Simmons started his own TV show,
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: The Richard Simmons Show,
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: which earned him multiple Emmy Awards.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: And after that came the inevitable payoff stage,
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: the huge lineup of Richard Simmons diet and exercise products,
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: which he marketed relentlessly.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: He was gushingly emotional.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: Christian, you ever see Richard Simmons perform?
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I've seen some of the videos before.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: He's quite energetic, but a little strange at the same time.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's one way of describing it.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: He was kind of the uncomfortable authenticity of those who are genuinely outrageous
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: is the way some people have put it.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: His biggest fans were women.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: And clearly he stood at the opposite end of the gender role divide from a man's man
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, a boomer who was only one year older than Simmons.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the Arnold also got his start in Hollywood, as I recall, right down there in the L.A.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: area.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: And finally, let's talk about a late Gen Xer.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: This is Evan Wright.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: The award-winning journalist who's reporting from Iraq in 2003 inspired his
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: best-selling book,
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: Generation Kill.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: He died last week by suicide at age 59.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: Wright was once asked why he went into journalism, and this was his answer.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: I failed at everything else.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: I was optimistic.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: It was a refuge for rogues and miscreants.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: OK, he I think he saw himself as a sort of modern day Hunter Thompson.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: He always seemed attracted to fringe movements and publicized them in places like
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: Rolling Stone,
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: Hustler and Vanity Fair.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: In 1996, he covered the Aryan Nations World Conference or Congress.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was called in 1999.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: He covered the anarchist Battle of Seattle.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: And after 9-11, he rode with the U.S.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: Marines into Iraq, where he gained the respect of the troops by never flinching in the face of combat.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: His reporting became not only a best-selling book,
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: but also a seven-part TV miniseries that gave Americans one of their best upfront
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: views of what happened during the war,
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: including all of the soldiers' gallows humor.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: The best part of his Marine stint,
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: Wright said,
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: is that it forced him to give up drinking in order to concentrate.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: His advice to young writers, never go into a creative writing program.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: It'll ruin you.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: Just go after real life.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well,
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: as always,
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: let me remind you,
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: if you like this podcast,
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: please go ahead and share it with your friends,
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: family,
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: repost it on social media.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: From now on, only some episodes will remain free.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: I have no idea which.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe, Christian, you control that.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: We should probably take a moment here to clarify to listeners that this podcast
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: isn't all we do on Substack,
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: but we also put out a lot of written content under the name of Demography Unplugged.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's where we break down demographic, economic, and generational trends.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's right, Neil.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I would always recommend to our listeners, go and check out some of our recent pieces.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you've done a few actual videos about the election.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: You've done a long piece on it.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: And we have some other really great content on the website.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: So check it out.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's get into today's podcast.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: As always, we have a lot to talk about.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: First, we've got market news.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then as usual, we will be covering stories from around the world.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: So here's what we got coming up.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: Undoubtedly,
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: a lot of you have been following the news,
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: so you won't be surprised at some of these headlines.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_01: On July 13th,
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: 20 year old Thomas Crooks attempted to assassinate Donald Trump at a rally in Butler,
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: Pennsylvania.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: Last week,
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: Republicans held their national nominating convention in Milwaukee,
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: Wisconsin,
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: where Trump was again chosen as the GOP presidential candidate and the 39-year-old J.D.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: Vance was chosen as the vice presidential candidate.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: Over the weekend,
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: President Joe Biden announced that he was dropping out of the presidential race and
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: immediately endorsed his vice president,
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: Kamala Harris,
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: to run in his place.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: Moving now internationally,
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: NATO has publicly and for the first time demanded that China stop supplying weapons
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: components to Russia.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: U.S.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: intelligence has informed NATO that Russia has been plotting to assassinate the CEO
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: of one of Germany's largest defense firms.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: Moving now to the Mideast,
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hezbollah's leader,
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: Hassan Nasrallah,
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: has threatened to send rockets deeper into Israel,
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: sparking fears of an imminent war and another Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: And finally, moving to South Asia, large-scale protests.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: Large-scale protests in Bangladesh have turned deadly,
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: with at least 150,
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_01: possibly more,
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: killed after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina cracks down on students unhappy with her regime.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, with that, Christian, you can go into the markets.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: All right, Neil, well, it was a bad day for the markets.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: The S&P closed down 2.31%, and over the last five market days is down 2.88%.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: As for the global Dow, that closed today down 0.92%, and over the last five market days down 2.11%.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: The VIX, that closed at 18.04%, which is quite a bit of a rise that we've been seeing normally.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: And as for the 10-year treasury, that is at 4.288%.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: Over the last five market days, that's a rise of 12.7 basis points.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: The VIX up at 18.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: We're no longer talking about a smooth mirror-like surface of the lake, are we?
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: A little ruffled now.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: And look, it was brutal today for the S&P, starting with NVIDIA and all of the AI stocks.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: I have always thought that the collective revenue projections underlying the
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: earnings assumptions by all of these
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: AI firms, I mean, all the firms involved in AI have been utterly absurd.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: And there's some great stuff on that by David Kahn at Sequoia,
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: who's just talked about how pan-glossy these assumptions have become.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: What about other indicators?
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: Do we have PMIs at this time of year, maybe some leading ones?
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we have some S&P Flash PMI readings for July, Neil.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: Manufacturing fell from 51.6 to 49.5.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's the lowest reading we have seen this year, but services rose from 55.3 to 56.5.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: Some other indicators I have for you.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: Unemployment claims rose by 20,000 to 243K for the week ending on July 13th.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: This was above expectations and marks the highest level of weekly claims since August 2023.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: We also have the June reading for the Chicago Fed National Activity Index, which fell from 0.23 to 0.05.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: While this was a large decline, Neil, it was still above expectations.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, that's interesting.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: We'll see about unemployment.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's still within the, you know, within the broad range.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: It was this high at the very beginning of the year, but it's something to keep our eye on.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: How about abroad?
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: Anything?
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: We have a couple things from the Eurozone.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: We also had flash PMIs for July.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: Manufacturing slightly declined from 45.8 to 45.6.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: And services fell from 52.8 to 51.9.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: We also had flash consumer confidence for July, which slightly rose from negative 14 to negative 13.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: While this is still highly negative,
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: Neil,
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: it's actually the highest level the Eurozone has seen since February 2022.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, the Eurozone has not been in a good place, you know, for since the pandemic, frankly.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: So right.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: So there you have it.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: Not nearly as hot as the United States economy.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: That's for sure.