Latest / Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar / 9/11/26: Houthis Hit Saudi Pipeline, Trump Pledges Voters Should Cheat, AOC Courts MAHA, Wall Street City Killer

Transcript

9/11/26: Houthis Hit Saudi Pipeline, Trump Pledges Voters Should Cheat, AOC Courts MAHA, Wall Street City Killer · Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Hey guys, Ready or Not 2024 is here, and we
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  Speaker 6: True.
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  Speaker 4: Well, listen, Ryan, this is my only opportunity to pitch
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  Speaker 4: if you sign up today... Leave a comment on this video.
• 1:55
  Speaker 4: Points on the board for Griffin.
• 1:56
  Speaker 3: Griffin's just trying to get his paycheck to clear.
• 2:00
  Speaker 5: Subscription rips for Griffin.
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  Speaker 4: I'm never trying to be first. I just want to
• 2:04
  Speaker 4: be on the podium. But let's get to some really
• 2:06
  Speaker 4: important news that's happening this morning.
• 2:08
  Speaker 5: You are the Riley Gaines of breaking points. I've always
• 2:10
  Speaker 5: said it.
• 2:12
  Speaker 3: That's right. That's right.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: And this is why when we got asked this week
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: who was the funniest on Breaking Points, I said Emily.
• 2:20
  Speaker 3: Thank you.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: Sagar was arguing for Ryan, but I was saying Emily,
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: although we did all agree Griffin is also very funny.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: But they were asking specifically about the four main hosts.
• 2:31
  Speaker 4: Well, there's one place that you don't want to be
• 2:33
  Speaker 4: swimming right now, and that's, of course, the Red Sea.
• 2:37
  Speaker 4: We got a lot to talk about. The Saudis have
• 2:41
  Speaker 4: been routed by the Houthis. We're going to be getting
• 2:43
  Speaker 4: a lot into that and an East-West Saudi pipeline that
• 2:48
  Speaker 4: has been struck by the Houthis. We're going to take
• 2:51
  Speaker 4: a look at some incredible, interesting, bizarre quotes from the
• 2:55
  Speaker 4: GOP midterm convention. And we're going to get our little
• 3:00
  Speaker 4: Maha hats on for a sec to talk about food safety.
• 3:04
  Speaker 4: So get excited for that. And finally, Emily is going
• 3:07
  Speaker 4: to be going in with an interview about private equity,
• 3:11
  Speaker 4: our favorite type of business. Lots to get into, but
• 3:15
  Speaker 4: Let's just start with this image here that I want
• 3:18
  Speaker 4: everyone to react to of the east-west pipeline that has
• 3:22
  Speaker 4: been struck. We've got this image here of a black
• 3:26
  Speaker 4: plume of smoke. If I scroll down here, we've got
• 3:30
  Speaker 4: another one that's from satellite. When the black smoke is rising,
• 3:35
  Speaker 4: that means a new leader of the Middle East has
• 3:37
  Speaker 4: been chosen. We also have a video here. Yes, we
• 3:41
  Speaker 4: have a video here of the Saudi troops surrendering in mass.
• 3:45
  Speaker 4: Let me get that up here on screen.
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  Speaker 1: My understanding is that these are not actually Saudi troops.
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: According to the community note here, these were the, you know,
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: quote unquote, internationally recognized Yemeni government direct troops. But in
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: any case, you see a mass surrender event here as
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: the Houthis have really, I mean, stunning offensive, taking control
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: of the entire Red Sea coast, effectively, key islands. And
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: so when we think about the Iran war, this is
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: about their own war, let's be clear. But when we
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: think about their ability to also affect global oil prices
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: and have an impact in terms of the Iran war,
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: this is obviously extremely, extremely significant, especially when you combine
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: together the potential certain damage and potential destruction of the
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: East-West pipeline, which has been one of the key ways
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: that we've been able to still get some significant amount
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: of barrels of oil out of the Middle East. It's
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: a pretty dire situation, and especially coming at a time
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: when already oil markets were looking very shaky, prices going
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: up and up. We had Brent crude hitting $ 107 a
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: barrel yesterday. We have diesel over well over $ 200 a
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: barrel at this point. So you already had kind of
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: run out of the limits of Trump's ability to manipulate
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: the markets and jawbone China's reentering the market in, you know,
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: not back to where they were in terms of the
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: level of import, but increasing what they're bringing in. This
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: looks like a pretty dim scenario for the global economy
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: and certainly for gas prices.
• 5:22
  Speaker 7: Yes.
• 5:23
  Speaker 3: And Griffin, do you have the Barack Ravid scoop?
• 5:28
  Speaker 4: Yes, Barack Ravid reported that Prince MBS called President Trump
• 5:33
  Speaker 4: twice Thursday, urging him to launch strikes against the Houthis
• 5:36
  Speaker 4: as the Iran-backed group closed in on vital Red Sea checkpoint.
• 5:40
  Speaker 4: Trump declined for now.
• 5:43
  Speaker 3: And Trump is declining because in the spring of 2025,
• 5:48
  Speaker 3: after Trump said that he was going to absolutely obliterate
• 5:52
  Speaker 3: Yemen or the Houthis, answer a lot, They withstood an
• 5:57
  Speaker 3: extraordinarily punishing attack and then reached a ceasefire that was
• 6:02
  Speaker 3: direct with the United States, a one-to-one ceasefire. In other words,
• 6:06
  Speaker 3: the Houthis could still continue to fight the Saudi-backed and
• 6:08
  Speaker 3: Emirati-backed forces in Yemen. They could continue to launch strikes
• 6:12
  Speaker 3: on Israel. They could continue to strike Israeli ships or
• 6:15
  Speaker 3: Saudi ships. But they reached an agreement with the United States,
• 6:18
  Speaker 3: letting American and other international ships through. And clearly, Trump
• 6:23
  Speaker 3: is not prepared to blow that ceasefire up. Because if
• 6:27
  Speaker 3: he does, then American and international ships are facing the
• 6:32
  Speaker 3: choke point of Bab al-Mandab Strait, which is now even
• 6:35
  Speaker 3: more firmly controlled by the Houthis. And you'd see another
• 6:38
  Speaker 3: uptick in inflation. And so people are also wondering, what
• 6:44
  Speaker 3: is up with the Saudi Air Force? Like you have
• 6:47
  Speaker 3: something like 150, you know, very fancy planes that you
• 6:51
  Speaker 3: bought from the United States. You've got the pilots that
• 6:53
  Speaker 3: are trained. You've got the equipment. like what, what is
• 6:57
  Speaker 3: going on? Like, like what you don't, you don't have
• 7:00
  Speaker 3: one or two that can fly. It's, that is fascinating
• 7:03
  Speaker 3: to watch. But so the timeline here, so after this
• 7:05
  Speaker 3: ceasefire was struck, you remember August of 2025 when the
• 7:08
  Speaker 3: Israelis came in and just assassinated the entire Yemeni civilian government,
• 7:15
  Speaker 3: the Ansar Allah government, like they killed the, in one
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  Speaker 3: giant meeting, they found a cabinet meeting and killed everybody
• 7:21
  Speaker 3: in the building. Like the prime minister, the, you know,
• 7:25
  Speaker 3: the cabinet secretary for this, that, and the other thing,
• 7:27
  Speaker 3: all of these civilian officials. And here we are just
• 7:32
  Speaker 3: a little more than a year later, and they're in
• 7:35
  Speaker 3: effective control of most of the government. And it wouldn't
• 7:38
  Speaker 3: have happened if MBS in July, this July, had not
• 7:42
  Speaker 3: bombed the Sana'a airport. Like there was a ceasefire between
• 7:47
  Speaker 3: the Houthis and the Saudis. And the Iranians were kind
• 7:51
  Speaker 3: of itching, like, kind of nudging the Houthis like, come on, guys,
• 7:55
  Speaker 3: we're like getting we're getting hammered over here. You keep
• 7:58
  Speaker 3: getting called Iran's proxies. You know, we're going to see
• 8:02
  Speaker 3: some missiles flying from the Houthis over here like we're
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  Speaker 3: dying here and they weren't doing anything. And then in July,
• 8:11
  Speaker 3: they get hit by Saudi Arabia. So they're like, OK, well,
• 8:13
  Speaker 3: now we're going to respond. The the level of kind
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  Speaker 3: of hubris from both Trump and then from MBS is
• 8:21
  Speaker 3: is incredible. Like none of this, none of this would
• 8:24
  Speaker 3: be happening if MBS and Trump had just done nothing,
• 8:28
  Speaker 3: whether you're talking about Iran or whether you're talking about
• 8:31
  Speaker 3: the situation in Yemen. And now like Saudi is screwed. Like,
• 8:37
  Speaker 3: what are they going to do now? So the, uh, Griffin,
• 8:39
  Speaker 3: you have anything else you want to play this, um,
• 8:42
  Speaker 3: this kind of pro Houthi analyst that was on Al Jazeera?
• 8:45
  Speaker 8: Yeah.
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  Speaker 3: Let me pull this up for you right here. I
• 8:49
  Speaker 3: can play it here. Hussein al-Bukhari is a kind of
• 8:54
  Speaker 3: a pro-Houthi analyst who's joining Al Jazeera from Sana'a here.
• 9:01
  Speaker 3: And we can roll some of this. I think this
• 9:03
  Speaker 3: is where he asks him, what are you going to
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  Speaker 3: do with international shifts here?
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  Speaker 9: Can you give the international community there about the future
• 9:08
  Speaker 9: and safe passage of vessels through the bubble nonetheless? I mean,
• 9:16
  Speaker 9: Yemeni armed forces has not targeted any ships, only the
• 9:19
  Speaker 9: Zionist state ships, because they want to force Israel to
• 9:23
  Speaker 9: stop the genocide. So what Yemen was doing, they were
• 9:25
  Speaker 9: trying to implement international law by forcing the Zionist state
• 9:29
  Speaker 9: of Israel to stop the genocide. We know that the
• 9:32
  Speaker 9: International Criminal Court has issued a warrant against Netanyahu and
• 9:37
  Speaker 9: as well against his minister of defense. And the international.
• 9:40
  Speaker 5: Community has failed.
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  Speaker 9: The Palestinian people, they should actually be the one who
• 9:46
  Speaker 9: have a blockade against the Zionist state of Israel, like
• 9:50
  Speaker 9: they did decisions either against Iraq or against Libya or
• 9:54
  Speaker 9: against Sudan. So Yemeni were the one who were doing so.
• 9:59
  Speaker 9: and about the international community they have failed Yemen and
• 10:02
  Speaker 9: Yemen will only target ships that are that belong to
• 10:07
  Speaker 9: any country who have aggression or war against us any
• 10:10
  Speaker 9: other ship they could just go through the Red.
• 10:13
  Speaker 3: Sea safely let's stop on that one for a second
• 10:16
  Speaker 3: Crystal any thoughts on that like they're Being very clear, like,
• 10:20
  Speaker 3: if you're at war with the Houthis, like the Saudis,
• 10:23
  Speaker 3: then your ships are jammed up. And if the International
• 10:27
  Speaker 3: Criminal Court has an arrest warrant out for you, then
• 10:31
  Speaker 3: the Houthis are going to take action there. But everybody
• 10:34
  Speaker 3: else is able to go through.
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah. But, of course, with greater control over the region,
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: the threat of, you know, that ceasefire collapsing and changing
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: their minds about that approach looms large. And I think
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: with all of this, you know, Trump's whole strategy with
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: the Iran war at this point was to slowly strangle
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: Iran and hope that that was going to lead to
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: a different result over the long term. But the long
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: term has to survive the short term. You have to
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: get through the short term. And so what we have
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: all been saying is why would Iran just sit there
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: and take it? Conditions on the ground could change. They're
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: going to escalate. They have escalated. And now we have
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: another variable that's entered into the mix that very much
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: cuts against the U.S. 's plans here in terms of
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: the slow economic bleed that they were trying to effectuate.
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: that they were hoping there would be much greater costs
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: on Iran. There are greater costs on Iran, but Iran
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: is also in an existential war, whereas the U.S., we
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: don't even support this war. We don't want to be
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: in this war at all. The vast majority of the
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: public is like, what are we doing and why are
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: we still doing it?
• 11:46
  Speaker 7: Well, it reminds me of that interesting report in The
• 11:49
  Speaker 7: Washington Post leading up to Trump's decision on February 28th
• 11:51
  Speaker 7: to launch the war, that he was being nudged into it,
• 11:55
  Speaker 7: according to this report, by MBS, that there was a
• 11:58
  Speaker 7: significant amount of pressure from MBS. And I remember we
• 12:02
  Speaker 7: were sort of skeptical of that report at the time,
• 12:05
  Speaker 7: and reasonably so, because you could look ahead to scenarios
• 12:08
  Speaker 7: like this one and ask, why is MBS pushing for
• 12:12
  Speaker 7: this war? But on top of that, the Axios report,
• 12:16
  Speaker 7: as Griffin laid out, says MBS called Trump twice on Thursday.
• 12:21
  Speaker 3: Twice.
• 12:22
  Speaker 7: Just to remind everyone, that's a lot of foreign pressure
• 12:26
  Speaker 7: coming from a man who is so heavily invested in
• 12:30
  Speaker 7: Trump's son-in-law's firm and affinity partners. It was like the
• 12:36
  Speaker 7: seed money for Jared Kushner's affinity group. I think it's
• 12:40
  Speaker 7: what it's called, affinity group. But so the pressure is
• 12:43
  Speaker 7: not just coming from, yeah, affinity partners. It's not just
• 12:46
  Speaker 7: coming from any foreign leader. It's coming from a foreign
• 12:49
  Speaker 7: leader who has significant amount of family and business ties
• 12:53
  Speaker 7: to Trump himself. So I think that's actually pretty frightening
• 12:58
  Speaker 7: because I think in the past, Trump has shown that
• 13:00
  Speaker 7: he's willing to take that pressure seriously and to take
• 13:04
  Speaker 7: those connections seriously.
• 13:06
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: I saw Trita Parsi tweeting this morning, you know, how's
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: how's that? U.S.-led defense pact in the region looking at
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: this point, because, I mean, that was what the whole petrodollar,
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: the whole regional, you know, concept from the U.S. 's
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: perspective was built on the idea that you're going to
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: sell oil and it's going to be denominated in U.S. dollars.
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: And we are going to reap tremendous benefits from that
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: in terms of investments in our bond market and in
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: our stocks and in our country. you are going to
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: get our defense umbrella. That is the deal. How is
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: that deal looking at this point? How is that going?
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: You know, it's one more blow to the not only petrodollar,
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: but U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency. And there
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: are also reports that the Gulf countries are thinking of
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: getting together and meeting directly with Iran about, hey, let's
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: work this out ourselves in terms of the Strait of
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: Hormuz and what the new reality is going to look like.
• 14:05
  Speaker 9: Okay.
• 14:07
  Speaker 3: And so in the rest of this interview, they get
• 14:08
  Speaker 3: into kind of where this conflict goes from here. And
• 14:11
  Speaker 3: the interesting background really is that Saudi Arabia and the
• 14:15
  Speaker 3: UAE collectively were part of a joint coalition fighting against
• 14:19
  Speaker 3: the Houthis starting in 2015-16. And over the last several years,
• 14:25
  Speaker 3: the UAE and Saudi have fallen out. The UAE is
• 14:29
  Speaker 3: significantly in control of Aden. The Saudi-backed forces that were
• 14:34
  Speaker 3: in retreat went to Aden. And now we're not even
• 14:36
  Speaker 3: being led into the city by the UAE-backed forces. So
• 14:39
  Speaker 3: there's this kind of comical pileup of junkers and armed
• 14:44
  Speaker 3: men who have kind of nowhere to go outside the
• 14:47
  Speaker 3: city limits. And meanwhile, the Saudis made sure to keep
• 14:52
  Speaker 3: every little town and village and kind of area of
• 14:58
  Speaker 3: the part of Yemen that their forces controlled separated and
• 15:02
  Speaker 3: weak because they wanted... They didn't want the Houthis to
• 15:05
  Speaker 3: control Yemen, but they also didn't want an actual state
• 15:08
  Speaker 3: of Yemen that had independent decision-making authority to take power either.
• 15:13
  Speaker 3: And it was really that decision by MBS to weaken
• 15:16
  Speaker 3: his own partners that allowed the Houthis to roll through here.
• 15:20
  Speaker 3: There was a 2022 truce that led to a 23 agreement,
• 15:24
  Speaker 3: which is kind of a roadmap to peace and unification.
• 15:27
  Speaker 3: And you'll see that the Houthi analyst here is saying
• 15:29
  Speaker 3: that that's kind of off the table at this point.
• 15:31
  Speaker 9: Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan could become operational.
• 15:37
  Speaker 3: How concerned is this?
• 15:38
  Speaker 6: Oh, yeah.
• 15:38
  Speaker 3: And here here he's asking about this recent pact that
• 15:42
  Speaker 3: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey agreed to this defense pact.
• 15:46
  Speaker 3: Are the Houthis scared that Pakistan and Turkey are going
• 15:49
  Speaker 3: to enter the fray?
• 15:50
  Speaker 10: The Houthi leadership about that.
• 15:57
  Speaker 9: I mean, silly for Pakistan to sign that agreement. I
• 16:00
  Speaker 9: believe the main reason for Turkey and Pakistan to sign
• 16:02
  Speaker 9: that agreement is because they want to get money and
• 16:04
  Speaker 9: fund and help from the Saudi regime, especially Pakistan. They've
• 16:10
  Speaker 9: been getting billions of dollars in funds and aid to
• 16:13
  Speaker 9: the Pakistani economy because it's the Pakistani and the Turkish economy.
• 16:19
  Speaker 9: The government should know and should remember that during the
• 16:22
  Speaker 9: prosperity guardian with the United States and as well with
• 16:25
  Speaker 9: the Zionist state of Israel and United Kingdom and many
• 16:28
  Speaker 9: countries have targeted Yemen with thousands of airstrikes. They couldn't
• 16:30
  Speaker 9: even stop Yemeni from blocking the Red Sea in front
• 16:33
  Speaker 9: of the Zionist state of Israel.
• 16:35
  Speaker 5: So what could Pakistan.
• 16:36
  Speaker 9: And Turkey add to that? You know, I said it
• 16:39
  Speaker 9: was one of the most powerful countries in the world,
• 16:43
  Speaker 9: and they couldn't do that. As well, during the 10
• 16:45
  Speaker 9: years of war, the Saudi conducted 3,000 airstrikes against Yemen,
• 16:50
  Speaker 9: destroyed almost all infrastructure, but all Yemeni ability or army
• 16:56
  Speaker 9: was not intact.
• 16:57
  Speaker 3: So is the peace process now dead once and for all?
• 17:06
  Speaker 9: I can say that at this point there is no
• 17:09
  Speaker 9: any negotiation, but a Yemeni demand before attacking Saudi Arabia
• 17:15
  Speaker 9: when Saudi broke the ceasefire two months ago by targeting
• 17:18
  Speaker 9: the airport, the demand was to lift the blockade and
• 17:21
  Speaker 9: to implement the roadmap that was signed, agreement that was
• 17:24
  Speaker 9: signed in 2023 after the truce that was as well
• 17:28
  Speaker 9: agreed in 2022. But I believe the demand of today
• 17:32
  Speaker 9: It will be different than the demand of yesterday. The
• 17:34
  Speaker 9: demand of today will be different than the demand.
• 17:36
  Speaker 5: Two months ago.
• 17:37
  Speaker 9: Because now I believe that Yemeni here government, their demand
• 17:40
  Speaker 9: now will be different. It's not about implementing the roadmap.
• 17:44
  Speaker 9: It is now, it will be about that the Saudi
• 17:47
  Speaker 9: must withdraw from all Yemen. They must stop funding and
• 17:52
  Speaker 9: sending logistic supplies and as well money and any type
• 17:55
  Speaker 9: of weapons to any of the groups in Yemen. And
• 17:59
  Speaker 9: as well, they should stop interfering in Yemen. They should
• 18:02
  Speaker 9: as well, they must pay a compensation to everything that
• 18:05
  Speaker 9: has been lost or destroyed in Yemen. And I believe
• 18:09
  Speaker 9: that Yemeni government will make sure that those demands are
• 18:14
  Speaker 9: implemented because it will be silly. that you have been asking,
• 18:17
  Speaker 9: we have been asking since 2023 here in Sana'a for
• 18:20
  Speaker 9: the Saudi to implement the roadmap. And now when we
• 18:23
  Speaker 9: are advancing, when we are attacking, when we are liberating
• 18:26
  Speaker 9: our country, we're going to go back to the same demand.
• 18:29
  Speaker 9: This will be actually the silliest and the most stupid.
• 18:32
  Speaker 3: That would be the stupidest thing we could do. So, yeah.
• 18:38
  Speaker 3: You came at us with the Americans, the Israelis, the Saudis.
• 18:41
  Speaker 3: The British, you bomb the hell out of us for
• 18:43
  Speaker 3: 10 years and look at us like, what are the
• 18:45
  Speaker 3: Pakistanis and Turks going to do? It's a reasonable question.
• 18:49
  Speaker 4: And Ryan, like, so, you know, Trump has been reluctant
• 18:54
  Speaker 4: to end this war and pay off Iran for all
• 18:57
  Speaker 4: these damages and give them control. But now we have
• 18:59
  Speaker 4: a second straight that we're also going to have to
• 19:03
  Speaker 4: pay off. And still somehow that seems cheaper than continuing
• 19:07
  Speaker 4: this war. Like, please pay both these people off. CNN
• 19:10
  Speaker 4: was reporting.
• 19:11
  Speaker 3: We better hurry up and end this before we find
• 19:13
  Speaker 3: a third straight that we're going to have to start paying.
• 19:15
  Speaker 3: There cannot be a third straight.
• 19:17
  Speaker 10: The straight of Taiwan.
• 19:17
  Speaker 3: There cannot be.
• 19:18
  Speaker 5: Another body of water.
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: The straight of Gibraltar.
• 19:22
  Speaker 5: Is in play.
• 19:23
  Speaker 3: Gibraltar is like, wait a minute. These cruise ships are paying.
• 19:28
  Speaker 4: And like we mentioned at the top of the show,
• 19:30
  Speaker 4: but it's good to go back to this East-West pipeline
• 19:33
  Speaker 4: that's been destroyed as well for the Saudis is pumping, what, 60,
• 19:37
  Speaker 4: 70 percent of the oil they're putting out a month
• 19:40
  Speaker 4: right now. And so we're not the diesel just broke
• 19:44
  Speaker 4: six dollars here nationally for the first time historically in
• 19:48
  Speaker 4: the country.
• 19:49
  Speaker 6: And that's.
• 19:50
  Speaker 4: Going to look cheap soon i mean are we going
• 19:51
  Speaker 4: to get into energy rationing are they're going to start
• 19:54
  Speaker 4: to be lines uh at the gas pumps crystal emily
• 19:57
  Speaker 4: what do you think about that well.
• 19:58
  Speaker 7: We said earlier on the show this week someone asked
• 20:01
  Speaker 7: um what Someone asked Ryan and me, or maybe Ryan
• 20:05
  Speaker 7: and I were just talking, what is the breaking point?
• 20:09
  Speaker 7: I didn't even mean to say that, but what is
• 20:10
  Speaker 7: the breaking point for the public in terms of gas
• 20:13
  Speaker 7: and diesel prices? And I think I said, I don't know,
• 20:17
  Speaker 7: is it $ 6?
• 20:19
  Speaker 5: Two days later, here we are.
• 20:21
  Speaker 7: So I don't think it's going to be any type
• 20:23
  Speaker 7: of breaking point with the public because the public is
• 20:25
  Speaker 7: already furious and the public is already in complete and
• 20:28
  Speaker 7: total opposition to this.
• 20:29
  Speaker 5: But I That's insane.
• 20:32
  Speaker 7: And we're not we haven't even seen the ripple effects
• 20:34
  Speaker 7: throughout the rest of the economy yet.
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I would say the public, if you
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: look at the fact that of the political ramifications that
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: could be in play when you're talking about a Nebraska
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: and a Kansas and an Iowa and a Texas that
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: are now legitimate targets for Democrats in the case of
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: Nebraska with an independent candidate that are now legitimately at risk.
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: for Republicans, I think you have to say the public
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: has already hit their breaking point, even if the politicians
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: in D.C. are very much insulated from the way that
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: the already high gas prices have deeply hurt people. With diesel,
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: I mean, this is really gets to the lifeblood of
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: your entire economy because you have obviously this goes into farming.
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: You know, farmers are already just suffering in so many ways.
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: And then every good that's shipped to the store is
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: in a big diesel truck, the prices are going to
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: be going up. I watched a video yesterday of a
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: guy who runs some sort of a business, a trucking business.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: And he was saying, I can't, I voted for you.
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: I still support you, which is kind of wild to me.
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: But anyway, I voted for you. I still support you.
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: I can't run my business. Like this truck cannot leave
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: this garage with prices as they are because I can't
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: charge my customers anymore. They'll just say, hey, I'll do
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: the project later. I'm not paying this increased price. So
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: I'm at the max of what I can charge. It
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: does not cover my cost. You know, this is just
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: one guy, but you can imagine this playing out over
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: and over and over across the entire economy. So, you know,
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: the diesel prices are not the ones that most people
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: feel immediately in terms of the sticker shock. But as
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: far as the impact on the broader economy, diesel is
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: arguably even more important.
• 22:24
  Speaker 3: And have you seen the scandal that's hit Roger Marshall
• 22:27
  Speaker 3: in Kansas? the incumbent Republican Saturdays. He's a doctor. And
• 22:32
  Speaker 3: it emerged that he had sued something like 700 plus
• 22:39
  Speaker 3: of his patients in this extraordinarily draconian fashion, um, over bogus,
• 22:47
  Speaker 3: you know, bogus billing practices that he was engaged in
• 22:50
  Speaker 3: driving these patients like into bankruptcy and misery, his own,
• 22:56
  Speaker 3: his own patients, um, And so this is now becoming
• 23:00
  Speaker 3: a major story in Kansas because people are like, you know,
• 23:05
  Speaker 3: people are like, they hate this stuff. Like it's, it's
• 23:08
  Speaker 3: the epitome of the kind of thing that they hate these,
• 23:11
  Speaker 3: these fake, you know, fabricated medical bills that nobody can
• 23:16
  Speaker 3: really understand. Um, where you just layer on top charge
• 23:20
  Speaker 3: after charge after charge. And then, um, bounce it off
• 23:25
  Speaker 3: between the insurance company and the patient, then you sue
• 23:28
  Speaker 3: over it. That's the level where it gets to the
• 23:31
  Speaker 3: most predatory. Most times, they'll stop at debt collection or
• 23:38
  Speaker 3: something along those lines. He's taking it all the way
• 23:40
  Speaker 3: to the courts and suing his own patients, driving them
• 23:44
  Speaker 3: into bankruptcy. People are like, wait a minute. You're a
• 23:49
  Speaker 3: public servant? You're a United States senator? And you're running
• 23:52
  Speaker 3: against a liberal megachurch pastor who seemed fine.
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: Which I didn't know was a thing, by the way.
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: It's extremely a thing. They found one in the entire state.
• 24:03
  Speaker 3: Yeah, Emily, what is the liberal megachurch world?
• 24:10
  Speaker 5: Well, you've just opened up a can of worms, Brian.
• 24:14
  Speaker 7: But because a lot of evangelicals would say many megachurches are...
• 24:20
  Speaker 7: Or Catholics also would say many megachurches, even if they're conservative,
• 24:24
  Speaker 7: are already too liberal.
• 24:26
  Speaker 5: They have sometimes female pastors and that sort of thing.
• 24:29
  Speaker 7: But, like, genuinely overtly sort of Episcopalian, like, that would
• 24:35
  Speaker 7: have the politics of an Episcopalian or, like, Elka-type, Evangelical
• 24:40
  Speaker 7: Lutheran-type environment. That is actually a thing, and especially in
• 24:43
  Speaker 7: places like in the middle of the country where, yeah, they.
• 24:47
  Speaker 5: tend to be more liberal.
• 24:47
  Speaker 7: It's not as common as more conservative evangelical churches, but
• 24:51
  Speaker 7: it is a thing. It's a special thing in Black
• 24:53
  Speaker 7: evangelical churches. So I don't know much about that congregation,
• 24:56
  Speaker 7: but it is interesting. Like, I don't know that we've
• 24:59
  Speaker 7: ever had a major Democratic candidate with that background before.
• 25:04
  Speaker 4: Well, going back to the battlefield for just a second,
• 25:08
  Speaker 4: what do you guys make of the fact that the
• 25:10
  Speaker 4: Saudis just kind of folded like a paper tiger, even
• 25:13
  Speaker 4: though they have all this tech?
• 25:14
  Speaker 3: It's very.
• 25:16
  Speaker 4: reminds me a lot of our own tech.
• 25:18
  Speaker 3: Because it is ours.
• 25:20
  Speaker 6: It is.
• 25:20
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's true.
• 25:21
  Speaker 5: And you know what?
• 25:21
  Speaker 3: That's why it seems so familiar. Why it's all not working.
• 25:24
  Speaker 4: They're about to have laundry fires on their boats um
• 25:28
  Speaker 4: and you know which leads me to this reporting that
• 25:32
  Speaker 4: there are yemeni actors running clod to create missile guidance
• 25:37
  Speaker 4: systems uh this report says we identified a cell of
• 25:41
  Speaker 4: threat actors based in northern yemen running three weapon development
• 25:44
  Speaker 4: programs a guided rocket that uses a commodity phone class
• 25:48
  Speaker 4: flight computer with final phase homing guidance The actors use
• 25:52
  Speaker 4: Claude code in place of human software engineers to develop
• 25:55
  Speaker 4: the guidance, navigation, and control software that steers and stabilizes
• 26:00
  Speaker 4: a flying vehicle. For example, they use Claude to integrate
• 26:03
  Speaker 4: an open-source autopilot onto a phone-class flight computer, writing the
• 26:08
  Speaker 4: control and position estimation software, turning the control settings, running
• 26:12
  Speaker 4: a firmware build pipeline, and performing a flight simulation. The
• 26:17
  Speaker 4: actors managed several clawed instances at once, assigning each one
• 26:21
  Speaker 4: a role, much as a lead would delegate work on
• 26:23
  Speaker 4: a small engineering team. So thank you. Thank you, big tech,
• 26:29
  Speaker 4: for contributing to this war in some way.
• 26:32
  Speaker 3: This shit is insane.
• 26:35
  Speaker 4: But it is kind of wild that they have just
• 26:39
  Speaker 4: let this technology just fly.
• 26:41
  Speaker 3: And now it's being used against us.
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean, it's so predictable, right? It's so obviously predictable.
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: I saw, not to pick on him, but I saw
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: Matt Stoller tweeting out like, hey, if this AI is
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: so powerful, how come we're getting our ass kicked by
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: Iran when we've got all this fancy AI enabled stuff?
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: And it's like, well, maybe there's the answer. They can
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: use it too. They can also use the AI that's available.
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: So not only the Houthis, but Iran also has been
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: using apparently Claude for their own purposes very predictably.
• 27:12
  Speaker 7: Which, again, Anthropic had that huge blow up with the
• 27:15
  Speaker 7: Pentagon and which was actually just like very interesting. It
• 27:22
  Speaker 7: raised like interesting questions about the ethics of having these massive,
• 27:25
  Speaker 7: super powerful AI companies. And do I think Pete Hegs
• 27:29
  Speaker 7: says rationale for wanting to. like have Anthropic totally under
• 27:33
  Speaker 7: the control of the Pentagon was pure. No, but it,
• 27:37
  Speaker 7: of course, comes to the enormous potential. These things could
• 27:40
  Speaker 7: be used for military purposes, either by us or against us.
• 27:44
  Speaker 7: And Anthropic just casually drops this report after they have
• 27:48
  Speaker 7: their guy out there responding to Coxon saying, yeah, we
• 27:52
  Speaker 7: think there's like a 10 percent, as you guys covered,
• 27:54
  Speaker 7: a 10 percent threat to humanity from it. But it's
• 27:58
  Speaker 7: still it hasn't gotten that high.
• 27:59
  Speaker 5: 10 percent.
• 28:01
  Speaker 7: That's their own person who hasn't even resigned or quit
• 28:03
  Speaker 7: saying that. So then they casually drop this report about
• 28:07
  Speaker 7: how enemies actually are using their own shit.
• 28:12
  Speaker 5: And we're just supposed to go about life business as
• 28:14
  Speaker 5: usual and hope.
• 28:16
  Speaker 7: Jim Clyburn figures out how to use. He's already mastered
• 28:19
  Speaker 7: chat GPT. Next up, he'll master how to use Claude.
• 28:23
  Speaker 7: And somehow the government will regulate this in a way
• 28:26
  Speaker 7: that makes sense.
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of the concerns that
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: are being raised now on the existential front, especially after
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: the Hugging Face hacking and other similar incidents were about
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: what if AI is misaligned from humans? What if it
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: sort of goes rogue and you have these rogue swarms?
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: The immediate problem we're facing is what are the humans
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: doing with the AI? Because humans are not always particularly
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: aligned with human values. And there are a lot of
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: conflicts about what those values are and what they should
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: be and the way that tech should be deployed. There
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: was another report yesterday, I think also from Anthropic, that
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: they stopped a number of scientists from using their products
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: because they thought that it looked like they were trying
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: to develop biological weapons, which is, again, something that has
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: been anticipated and warned about. So that's already the realm
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: that we're in right now is that you have technology,
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: which is quite capable already.
• 29:25
  Speaker 5: And the IRGC. They mentioned the IRGC in that report.
• 29:27
  Speaker 3: Yes, exactly.
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: Technology that is quite capable already that's in the hands
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: of anybody who wants it. And there's no real government regulation.
• 29:39
  Speaker 5: There's certainly.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: no international cooperation around what the boundaries and the guidelines
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: should be. And I think most people find that to
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: be very troubling. So, yeah, I mean, it's an incredible
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: it's an incredible amount of American arrogance that we just
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: assumed that Like, only we're going to use this product
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: that's completely publicly available. We should have known when we
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: saw the Lego videos coming out and they were kicking
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: our ass just in like AI slot propaganda that they
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: were going to put Claude and everything else to use
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: to the fullest extent possible. And so that's what we're
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: learning now.
• 30:13
  Speaker 7: I'm petitioning to change the Department of Justice to the
• 30:17
  Speaker 7: Department of Human Alignment. We should get some human alignment first.
• 30:22
  Speaker 5: Or your local police. They're human aligners.
• 30:25
  Speaker 8: Yeah.
• 30:26
  Speaker 4: I mean, it's not looking good for Trump leading into
• 30:28
  Speaker 4: these midterms.
• 30:29
  Speaker 3: For Trump?
• 30:30
  Speaker 5: For us, Griffin? It's not looking good for anyone.
• 30:33
  Speaker 3: You're right.
• 30:33
  Speaker 6: You're right.
• 30:34
  Speaker 4: But I think the only way that Trump could actually
• 30:37
  Speaker 4: take these midterms is if he starts arresting people at
• 30:41
  Speaker 4: these companies. I think that would be the only thing
• 30:43
  Speaker 4: that would turn the country around. But I think that
• 30:45
  Speaker 4: leads us nicely to a riveting midterm GOP convention. Let's
• 30:50
  Speaker 4: take a look over there now. A riveting, jam-packed GOP
• 30:57
  Speaker 4: midterm convention was had, and we just wanted to flag
• 31:00
  Speaker 4: a few eyebrow-raising quotes from Mr. President Trump. Let's start
• 31:06
  Speaker 4: with this one, where Trump asked for a pledge from
• 31:09
  Speaker 4: the audience.
• 31:11
  Speaker 5: This was last night.
• 31:13
  Speaker 3: Please raise your right hand. I pledge.
• 31:19
  Speaker 11: To the greatest president in the history of the United States, Put.
• 31:25
  Speaker 5: Your hand down, Ryan.
• 31:28
  Speaker 3: I want to hear the pledge first. Can't even breathe.
• 31:34
  Speaker 3: Hashtag I can't breathe. I will go out.
• 31:36
  Speaker 11: With my family, my friends. I'll do it anyway. I
• 31:41
  Speaker 11: don't care if I'm registered or not. I'm going to
• 31:43
  Speaker 11: try and cheat like hell like they do. There's never
• 31:47
  Speaker 11: been bigger cheaters.
• 31:48
  Speaker 3: I don't care.
• 31:50
  Speaker 11: I am going to go out and I'm going to
• 31:52
  Speaker 11: get my friends, my family, and we are going to
• 31:55
  Speaker 11: vote on November 3rd or we are going to vote
• 31:58
  Speaker 11: before that.
• 32:01
  Speaker 3: All right. So our new election security is fine. You
• 32:04
  Speaker 3: don't have to register. You don't have to register anymore, Ryan.
• 32:07
  Speaker 7: You missed the part where he said that if you don't,
• 32:10
  Speaker 7: you go to hell.
• 32:11
  Speaker 5: That was also another.
• 32:13
  Speaker 3: Joke's on me, though. There's nobody running in D.C. because
• 32:16
  Speaker 3: we don't have senators or representatives. Yeah.
• 32:20
  Speaker 9: Yeah.
• 32:21
  Speaker 7: So this speech was last night. He gave nearly a
• 32:25
  Speaker 7: two hour speech the night before. And last night was J.D.
• 32:29
  Speaker 7: Vance as the keynote. J.D.
• 32:32
  Speaker 5: Gives a normal speech.
• 32:34
  Speaker 7: And then Trump comes out apparently just to close the
• 32:37
  Speaker 7: convention and. It did not go as expected or it
• 32:42
  Speaker 7: went exactly as you might expect. He got up there
• 32:44
  Speaker 7: and started riffing, telling people they're going to go to
• 32:46
  Speaker 7: hell if they don't vote.
• 32:48
  Speaker 5: It had to have been close to a half an hour.
• 32:50
  Speaker 7: That was rather unexpected from, I guess, the people who
• 32:56
  Speaker 7: organized the convention who thought that he was just going
• 32:58
  Speaker 7: to come out there and close it. But indeed, he
• 33:00
  Speaker 7: was not capable of saying, the convention is over.
• 33:03
  Speaker 5: Thank you for coming. It went much longer than that.
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: Well, there is certainly not being the cult allegations between
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: the creepy pledges. And then, Griffin, can you cue up
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: the montage that they did of a spinoff of, yes,
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: the famous Paul Harvey speech, which was probably made even
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: more famous by the Super Bowl Dodge Ram commercial that
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: used the speech. They did their own version of this.
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: And I'm particularly interested in Emily's view of this.
• 33:34
  Speaker 5: They've done this before, by the way.
• 33:35
  Speaker 6: Oh, really?
• 33:36
  Speaker 3: I forgot about it.
• 33:37
  Speaker 6: Yeah. Good Lord. Eat supper with G. Sounds like my everyday.
• 33:59
  Speaker 8: I need somebody with arms strong enough to rustle the
• 34:02
  Speaker 8: deep state and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild.
• 34:07
  Speaker 6: Somebody to ruffle the feathers.
• 34:09
  Speaker 8: Tame, cantankerous world economic forum.
• 34:12
  Speaker 6: Come home hungry. Have to wait until the first lady.
• 34:15
  Speaker 3: Is done with lunch with friends.
• 34:17
  Speaker 6: Tell the ladies to be sure and come back real soon.
• 34:20
  Speaker 5: I mean it.
• 34:23
  Speaker 8: So God gave us Trump. I need somebody who can
• 34:26
  Speaker 8: shape an axe but wield a sword. who had courage
• 34:30
  Speaker 8: to step foot in North Korea, who can make money
• 34:33
  Speaker 8: from the tar of the sand, turn liquid to gold,
• 34:37
  Speaker 8: who understands the difference between tariffs and inflation, will finish
• 34:41
  Speaker 8: his 40-hour week by Tuesday noon, but then put in
• 34:44
  Speaker 8: another 72 hours.
• 34:46
  Speaker 6: So God made Trump.
• 34:47
  Speaker 8: God had to have somebody willing to go into the
• 34:50
  Speaker 8: den of vipers, call out the fake news for their
• 34:53
  Speaker 8: tongues as sharp as a serpent's. The poison of vipers
• 34:56
  Speaker 8: is on their lips, and yet stopped. So God made Trump.
• 35:01
  Speaker 8: God said, I need somebody who will be strong and courageous,
• 35:06
  Speaker 8: who will not be afraid or terrified of the wolves
• 35:08
  Speaker 8: when they attack. A man who cares for the flock.
• 35:12
  Speaker 8: A shepherd to mankind who won't ever leave nor forsake them.
• 35:16
  Speaker 8: I need the most diligent worker.
• 35:18
  Speaker 5: A shepherd to mankind.
• 35:20
  Speaker 6: And remain strong in faith. And know the belief of God.
• 35:24
  Speaker 5: Oh, Paula.
• 35:26
  Speaker 6: Somebody who's willing to drill.
• 35:28
  Speaker 4: Is this going to go forever? I feel like I've
• 35:30
  Speaker 4: been watching this for half an hour.
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: 30 more seconds. Come on, Kevin. We got to stick
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: to it. It's too good.
• 35:36
  Speaker 8: Farm the lands, secure our borders, build our military, fight
• 35:42
  Speaker 8: the system all day, and finish a hard week's work
• 35:46
  Speaker 8: by attending church on Sunday.
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: At the golf course.
• 35:49
  Speaker 6: And then his oldest son turns and says.
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: Church on Sunday.
• 35:52
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 35:54
  Speaker 5: He never goes.
• 35:56
  Speaker 6: To be the envy of the world again.
• 36:00
  Speaker 4: Why is Don Jr.
• 36:06
  Speaker 3: Getting a shout out here? I don't know.
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: Probably because he spoke last night would be my guess.
• 36:12
  Speaker 6: I don't know.
• 36:12
  Speaker 3: He was a lead in.
• 36:14
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: People were saying he's a little too sober and the
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: speech was boring. So I don't know. I didn't watch
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: it myself. That's just what the Internet commentary was saying.
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: But I know for some reason, Emily, the part of
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: that that triggered me the most was when they talked
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: about how hard he worked, given the fact that this
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: man is like, first of all, at every sporting event,
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: that's anything on the golf course, like multiple times during
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: the week has way more leisure time than literally any
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: one of us and is somehow president of the United States.
• 36:40
  Speaker 5: Yeah, there's that.
• 36:42
  Speaker 7: And it's also I saw that they had aired this
• 36:45
  Speaker 7: right after listening to J.D. Vance's speech, which I thought technically,
• 36:49
  Speaker 7: just from a political standpoint, was pretty well executed.
• 36:52
  Speaker 5: And then I saw that they had run this ad.
• 36:55
  Speaker 7: And what Vance was intentionally trying to draw contrast out
• 36:59
  Speaker 7: of in his speech is. kind of the weird, he
• 37:02
  Speaker 7: was doing a Tim Walls, like a reverse Tim Walls.
• 37:04
  Speaker 7: He was trying to like depict all of the DSA
• 37:07
  Speaker 7: candidates as weird and wacky.
• 37:09
  Speaker 5: And it's like, you cannot pull that off.
• 37:14
  Speaker 7: If at the exact same night of the convention, you're
• 37:16
  Speaker 7: rolling this like abject MAGA cringe about God creating Trump
• 37:22
  Speaker 7: to be a shepherd for mankind.
• 37:25
  Speaker 5: It is, So deeply.
• 37:27
  Speaker 7: Bizarre that it undermines any effort that you were making
• 37:31
  Speaker 7: at this convention to depict the left, which was basically
• 37:36
  Speaker 7: clearly an intentional strategy. So it was basically the through
• 37:40
  Speaker 7: line of the entire two day convention was Vance making
• 37:44
  Speaker 7: this pitch to Vance and all the other Republicans. Yes,
• 37:49
  Speaker 7: we have some problems. We understand the Trump administration. They
• 37:52
  Speaker 7: didn't outright say this. We understand the Trump administration. You
• 37:54
  Speaker 7: may not agree with us on everything. Vance was straight
• 37:57
  Speaker 7: to camera last night going to young men who may
• 38:00
  Speaker 7: not be happy with the Iran war, may not be
• 38:02
  Speaker 7: happy with certain choices the Trump administration has made, but
• 38:04
  Speaker 7: said basically we're better than the other guys. Hell of
• 38:07
  Speaker 7: a political pitch, but it's really hard to say everyone
• 38:10
  Speaker 7: else is weird.
• 38:11
  Speaker 5: Griffin, you can pull that clip back up because it
• 38:12
  Speaker 5: actually is a great segue here.
• 38:14
  Speaker 7: When you're rolling God made Trump or God sent Trump
• 38:18
  Speaker 7: to be the shepherd of mankind.
• 38:21
  Speaker 4: But God also made Tallarico's web browser history.
• 38:25
  Speaker 3: This Tallarico guy.
• 38:26
  Speaker 12: He will not shut up about how there are six genders.
• 38:29
  Speaker 12: He will not shut up about how, quote, God is non-binary.
• 38:32
  Speaker 12: I don't know what the hell that even means, my friends.
• 38:37
  Speaker 12: He won't shut up about having traditional Christian values makes
• 38:40
  Speaker 12: you a bigot. And I got to say, a guy
• 38:43
  Speaker 12: that age who was so obsessed and focused on transgender children,
• 38:48
  Speaker 12: I don't know about you, but I never want to
• 38:50
  Speaker 12: see that guy's web browser history.
• 38:54
  Speaker 5: I think that's an enormously cynical thing to say. It's
• 38:57
  Speaker 5: not a good place.
• 38:58
  Speaker 3: We'd rather be here.
• 38:59
  Speaker 7: I was listening to this live last night, and I actually, again,
• 39:02
  Speaker 7: I thought he technically delivered a pretty strong speech. But
• 39:05
  Speaker 7: listening to that live, it struck me as enormously cynical
• 39:09
  Speaker 7: to accuse someone of implicitly being a pedophile, basically, from
• 39:14
  Speaker 7: the vice president of the United States. It's not something
• 39:16
  Speaker 7: I think we should be particularly numb to. There's absolutely
• 39:19
  Speaker 7: no evidence that James Tallarico, as much as you may
• 39:21
  Speaker 7: disagree with him or dislike him, as many people, myself including, do, that.
• 39:25
  Speaker 5: He is a pedophile.
• 39:27
  Speaker 7: And I don't want to get numb to some of
• 39:29
  Speaker 7: these Trump-era rumors. that Republicans have developed. But again, on
• 39:33
  Speaker 7: the politics, you're trying to make Democrats look completely like
• 39:37
  Speaker 7: they're bizarre, they're weird.
• 39:39
  Speaker 5: It's a reverse Tim Walz.
• 39:41
  Speaker 7: And then Trump, God sent Trump to be a shepherd
• 39:44
  Speaker 7: of mankind and all of the other weird Trump stuff
• 39:47
  Speaker 7: that happened at the convention.
• 39:48
  Speaker 5: A little hard to pull that off.
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: So Ryan, just from a political optics perspective, night one,
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: you had the montage featuring Hasan Piker's meat and night two,
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: you had God made Trump. Which one do you think
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: was more politically salient and effective?
• 40:06
  Speaker 3: I mean, did you see Hasan using the meat photo
• 40:15
  Speaker 3: with his join the DSA? Griffin, you got to find that.
• 40:18
  Speaker 5: Yes.
• 40:19
  Speaker 4: And also the Google searches at the convention, some of
• 40:23
  Speaker 4: the top three were, is Hasan Piker gay? Hasan Piker shirtless?
• 40:27
  Speaker 4: These were some of the top Google searches.
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: Typical Grindr outages all around.
• 40:32
  Speaker 11: Yes.
• 40:32
  Speaker 5: I said they should use the picture of him in
• 40:33
  Speaker 5: the dress. So I think night one more effective. They
• 40:35
  Speaker 5: should have used the picture of him in the cosplay.
• 40:37
  Speaker 3: As long as we're leveling charges without evidence, how many
• 40:40
  Speaker 3: people at that convention would flunk the browser test? Just ballpark, percentage-wise.
• 40:46
  Speaker 4: I want to see JD's browser history go up against Tallarico's.
• 40:50
  Speaker 4: I think it's an interesting inquiry. Let's see them all.
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: I think we need to know less about people. After
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: I watched that Bill Maher episode with that OnlyFans chick. Actually,
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: I didn't watch it.
• 41:00
  Speaker 3: Why did you watch that?
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: Unfortunately.
• 41:01
  Speaker 3: Because Kyle covered it.
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: I could not avoid the clips because Kyle was like,
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: did you see this?
• 41:09
  Speaker 5: Kyle talks to you at home like headlines.
• 41:13
  Speaker 3: Last night. I love The View.
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: We need to know less about all public figures. I'm
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: tired of this oversharing. I don't want to know about
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: your browser history. I don't want to know how many
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: times you're jerking off a day. Bill Maher at 70
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: years old. I don't want to know any of these things.
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: So could we just keep that to ourselves, please?
• 41:29
  Speaker 3: He didn't say that, did he?
• 41:30
  Speaker 4: Bill Maher needs a restraining order against any woman under
• 41:33
  Speaker 4: the age of 45.
• 41:35
  Speaker 7: We need to be using anthropic to figure out how
• 41:37
  Speaker 7: to metaphorically neutralize Bill Maher.
• 41:42
  Speaker 3: So last night I did an event in D.C. with
• 41:45
  Speaker 3: Medea Benjamin. I interviewed her on stage with some other folks.
• 41:49
  Speaker 3: And beforehand, they were all talking about, did you see
• 41:52
  Speaker 3: what they did at the Republican convention to Hassan? And
• 41:55
  Speaker 3: you had this multi-generational group of women who were just
• 42:00
  Speaker 3: scrolling through their phone and all passing it around for
• 42:02
  Speaker 3: research purposes only, of course.
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: Of course, obviously.
• 42:06
  Speaker 3: All of them. It was one of the funniest scenes
• 42:09
  Speaker 3: that I've ever seen. All of them just ogling this like,
• 42:14
  Speaker 3: Ironically and just laughing, of course. None of us are.
• 42:19
  Speaker 3: It was so good.
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: The funniest thing to me is how at the convention,
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: how they blurred out his package.
• 42:27
  Speaker 3: Only forcing the Google more.
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: Shows the picture, but we need to have some decorum
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: about this.
• 42:32
  Speaker 3: That's right. That's right.
• 42:34
  Speaker 6: Yes.
• 42:34
  Speaker 7: Well, going into the convention, there were all kinds of
• 42:38
  Speaker 7: leaks to places like Puck and Playbook from mostly Republican
• 42:42
  Speaker 7: consultants and insiders. One lobbyist close to the White House,
• 42:45
  Speaker 7: according to Playbook, said, quote, the vibes are very bad.
• 42:49
  Speaker 5: Dems are salivating.
• 42:49
  Speaker 7: Our people are debating Israel or melting down about this
• 42:52
  Speaker 7: or that. No one is motivated to vote. Only the
• 42:53
  Speaker 7: DSA rises. What's keeping us in the game? Another person said,
• 42:57
  Speaker 7: my only hope is that no one watches it, referring
• 42:59
  Speaker 7: to the convention, since it's competing versus NFL opening games.
• 43:02
  Speaker 7: Hopefully nobody notices the embarrassing show. I don't think it
• 43:06
  Speaker 7: will matter. No one knows about it.
• 43:07
  Speaker 5: No enthusiasm. And it's during football. Only D.C. people care.
• 43:12
  Speaker 7: The other point, not only did they schedule this going
• 43:15
  Speaker 7: up against football, but another point that people were making
• 43:17
  Speaker 7: is This is the week of night. This is your
• 43:21
  Speaker 7: crescendo is the anniversary of the death of Charlie Kirk
• 43:25
  Speaker 7: and the week of 9-11. And so instead of Republicans
• 43:29
  Speaker 7: being able to capitalize politically on both of those commemorations
• 43:38
  Speaker 7: and the commemoration of 9-11 and the first anniversary of
• 43:41
  Speaker 7: Charlie Kirk's death, they're at this convention for lobbyists in Dallas.
• 43:47
  Speaker 7: And you have way less control of the messaging because
• 43:50
  Speaker 7: it's in the hands of the RNC. So Instead of
• 43:53
  Speaker 7: having those conversations, they're listening to a two-hour speech from
• 43:57
  Speaker 7: Trump where he's bragging about the Iran war and calling
• 44:00
  Speaker 7: Ken Paxton dumb and ugly, which I think is actually
• 44:03
  Speaker 7: brilliant because it neutralizes the main concern people have when
• 44:06
  Speaker 7: they look at Ken Paxton.
• 44:08
  Speaker 5: Like, I can't vote for this guy. He's dumb and ugly.
• 44:09
  Speaker 3: Because he's ugly.
• 44:11
  Speaker 8: Yeah.
• 44:11
  Speaker 5: And Trump is like, yeah, we know. We know. Don't worry.
• 44:13
  Speaker 3: Don't worry.
• 44:14
  Speaker 7: Like, we got it. We understand that. He's just a
• 44:16
  Speaker 7: really good attorney general. But anyway, it's just.
• 44:21
  Speaker 5: I have no idea what they were thinking when they
• 44:23
  Speaker 5: put this together.
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, they were thinking, I'm sure this was
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: all Trump's idea. It's all about his ego. That's why
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: he has to speak both nights of the convention and say,
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: you know, just pretend like I'm on the ballot and
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: make it all about himself and run a bunch of ads,
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: spend a bunch of money running ads about how great
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: he is. So I don't think it's really a political strategy.
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: I think it's an ego-stroking strategy, and that's why it
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: doesn't make any real political sense. I mean, Trump is
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: as unpopular a president as you could possibly get. We're
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: talking George W. Bush towards the end of his term,
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: levels of unpopularity at this point. The last thing you
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: want to do is make that person the center of
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: attention and make them as visible as possible. And for
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: some of your candidates, like Mike Rogers was there, for
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: some of your candidates who are trying to do a
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: little bit of distancing, to have to go and pay
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: fealty and be part of all the spectacle and all
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: the weirdness.
• 45:15
  Speaker 6: So.
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: You know, on the Tallarico thing, I wonder what you
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: guys think, but they have been running these attacks on
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: him the whole time, the Tallarico, you know, the six
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: genders and the non-binary God and all this stuff. According
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: to the polls, it's not really working. He's close to
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: getting 50% in most of the polls, and you'd have
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: to have all of the undecideds go to Paxton. If
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: you presume that the polling is correct, it seems like
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: the Latinos in the Rio Grande Valley have wildly shifted.
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: back towards the Democrats after a dalliance with Trump specifically.
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: If any of that is actually true, then, you know,
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: Tallarico's got a real shot in this race. So I
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: think they underestimate him at their peril. And it reminds
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: me of here in Virginia in the gubernatorial election here,
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: Abigail Spanberger was the Democratic nominee. All the ads against
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: her that I saw on TV were about trans in
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: sports and trans in bathrooms. And they really leaned hard
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: into the culture war. And it just fell flat because J.D.
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: Vance is out there saying like, oh, James Tallarico is
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: obsessed with talking about six genders. You guys are the
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: ones that come off as obsessed about this stuff. You're
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: the ones running ads about it. All the questions on
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: Fox News are about this. You end up being the
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: ones that look like you're obsessed with this culture war
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: wedge issue. So, you know, at a time when the
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: economic crisis landscape is incredibly grim and probably getting only
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: grimmer by the day, and Trump is a historically unpopular president,
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: I don't think it's not looking like it's going to
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: be enough, especially given that Trump himself is acknowledging now
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: that gas prices are not going to come back down
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: before the midterms. They are only likely to continue to escalate.
• 47:03
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 47:03
  Speaker 7: Importantly, in 2024, when everyone went to vote in the
• 47:05
  Speaker 7: Biden economy, inflation had been coming down month to month.
• 47:09
  Speaker 7: And so it wasn't such a precarious situation. And I
• 47:12
  Speaker 7: think people are much more willing to engage with some
• 47:16
  Speaker 7: of the cultural questions in a better economy when you
• 47:19
  Speaker 7: don't have what feels like an emergency to a lot
• 47:22
  Speaker 7: of people, to farmers.
• 47:23
  Speaker 5: You have crude at 100, diesel at six.
• 47:25
  Speaker 7: Again, we haven't quite even seen the ripple effects of that,
• 47:27
  Speaker 7: which is why Trump also floated the idea of just
• 47:29
  Speaker 7: giving Americans five thousand dollars for another extremely cynical move
• 47:33
  Speaker 7: to make people who trust him, because there are still
• 47:36
  Speaker 7: some of our fellow countrymen who trust Donald Trump, whether
• 47:38
  Speaker 7: we think it's crazy or not.
• 47:40
  Speaker 5: That's a really sad thing to do, to make them feel.
• 47:43
  Speaker 7: Like you might have an extra $ 5, 000 in your pocket
• 47:45
  Speaker 7: if you go out and vote for Republicans. That plan
• 47:47
  Speaker 7: is not going to happen. He's not actually going to
• 47:50
  Speaker 7: do that. So it's another piece of, I think, really
• 47:53
  Speaker 7: serious cynicism from Trump.
• 47:55
  Speaker 5: There are people who trust him.
• 47:57
  Speaker 7: But on that, I think also Tallarico, let me share this,
• 48:01
  Speaker 7: I meant to do a segment on this recently. The
• 48:05
  Speaker 7: messaging on the trans stuff from his campaign has been,
• 48:09
  Speaker 7: I think, pretty close to like the best I've seen
• 48:12
  Speaker 7: a Democrat handle that. Now, you have to be willing
• 48:15
  Speaker 7: to be like Tallarico and say you made a mistake
• 48:18
  Speaker 7: when you were talking about there being six genders.
• 48:20
  Speaker 5: He said, obviously, I misspoke on that.
• 48:22
  Speaker 7: Obviously, there are two sexes and there's a small amount
• 48:24
  Speaker 7: of the population that has that identifies in different ways.
• 48:29
  Speaker 7: Something like his answer on that. He says, obviously, I
• 48:32
  Speaker 7: believe that sports need to be safe. And so I
• 48:34
  Speaker 7: don't support wherever safety is in question. I don't support
• 48:38
  Speaker 7: You boys and girls sports. That's been his answer. So
• 48:40
  Speaker 7: I think partially he's changed on the issue and that's
• 48:43
  Speaker 7: helped him.
• 48:44
  Speaker 5: But look at this. Look at this.
• 48:46
  Speaker 7: Since he this race was tied, according to RCP. In fact,
• 48:50
  Speaker 7: Paxton was ahead of Tallarico in RCP's average. until July.
• 48:55
  Speaker 7: Tallarico starts pulling away, and the gap has only widened.
• 48:59
  Speaker 7: They're doing absolutely nothing to make the gap go in
• 49:01
  Speaker 7: the opposite direction. They haven't figured out a single way
• 49:04
  Speaker 7: to do it yet. It's kind of plateaued, but it's
• 49:07
  Speaker 7: way wider than it was over the course of the summer.
• 49:09
  Speaker 7: And this is the opposite of what was the case
• 49:11
  Speaker 7: between Cruz and Beto. In that race, Beto never led
• 49:15
  Speaker 7: in the RCP average, never even led. Beto has been
• 49:19
  Speaker 7: leading for months in the RCP average, and it's only
• 49:22
  Speaker 7: been going in a good direction for him. I'm sorry,
• 49:24
  Speaker 7: Tallarico has been leading for months, and it's only been
• 49:27
  Speaker 7: going in a better direction for him.
• 49:29
  Speaker 4: Well, Beto was born to run. But, you know, We've
• 49:33
  Speaker 4: got one last clip here. You mentioned Ted Cruz. And
• 49:36
  Speaker 4: there is one area where the entire convention was laser-focused
• 49:41
  Speaker 4: and productive. And that was in wanting to shoot Abdul El-Sayed.
• 49:47
  Speaker 4: Let's take a listen. And you're going to have to
• 49:49
  Speaker 4: hear this from the crowd. Oh, wait.
• 49:53
  Speaker 3: This is about Tallarico.
• 49:54
  Speaker 6: Is it?
• 49:54
  Speaker 5: No, it's about both.
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: El-Sayed is also mentioned.
• 49:57
  Speaker 6: And Zoran.
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: Yes, all of them.
• 49:58
  Speaker 6: All right.
• 49:59
  Speaker 3: So it's a hit list.
• 50:00
  Speaker 6: All right.
• 50:01
  Speaker 13: When Mondami says he wants to seize the means of production,
• 50:06
  Speaker 13: he means it. When Abdul Al-Sayed says he has a, quote,
• 50:12
  Speaker 13: obligation to comply with Sharia law.
• 50:16
  Speaker 10: He means it.
• 50:18
  Speaker 13: And when James Tallarico says he wants to dismantle capitalism,
• 50:26
  Speaker 13: he means it.
• 50:28
  Speaker 4: So, you know, the first Trump, term it was lock
• 50:31
  Speaker 4: him up but now it's he should be shot how
• 50:34
  Speaker 4: are we feeling about that new slogan.
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: Pretty disturbing yeah and uh you know by the way
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: on the one year anniversary of charlie kirk's assassination too
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: so there's that.
• 50:49
  Speaker 4: As well yes they are not carrying the flame uh
• 50:54
  Speaker 4: and that was the midterm convention uh much more i'm
• 50:59
  Speaker 4: sure to be made of that in the weeks to come.
• 51:02
  Speaker 4: But why don't we take a look at another area
• 51:05
  Speaker 4: of American life that is going swimmingly under Trump. And
• 51:08
  Speaker 4: that of course is our food. Let's talk a little
• 51:14
  Speaker 4: bit about food. Everyone put your Maha hats on. Groceries
• 51:19
  Speaker 4: are expensive. And they're also filled with glass and other
• 51:23
  Speaker 4: things that you may not want to consume. But we
• 51:26
  Speaker 4: wanted to raise an interesting little note here that AOC
• 51:31
  Speaker 4: has been doing Maha outreach. She may still be mulling
• 51:36
  Speaker 4: what she does in 2028, but her outreach to one
• 51:38
  Speaker 4: particularly disaffected and surprising slice of the electorate could offer
• 51:42
  Speaker 4: a clue how she's preparing for her future. What are
• 51:46
  Speaker 4: your reactions to this, this this left Maha alliance? And
• 51:52
  Speaker 4: maybe I start with Emily. Is Maha feeling rejected, isolated
• 51:57
  Speaker 4: from the Trump administration? I mean, they got their guy
• 52:00
  Speaker 4: in there. Like, are they feeling disappointed? Why are they
• 52:04
  Speaker 4: interested in speaking to AOC?
• 52:06
  Speaker 7: Maha is absolutely split on this question because many of
• 52:09
  Speaker 7: them are close to people in the administration. I mean,
• 52:11
  Speaker 7: basically all of the major Maha leaders are close to
• 52:13
  Speaker 7: people in the administration, but Even the ones who are
• 52:17
  Speaker 7: close to people in the administration have started to kind
• 52:20
  Speaker 7: of isolate themselves or not isolate themselves, but kind of
• 52:23
  Speaker 7: ostracize the people in the administration because, predictably, they're losing trust.
• 52:28
  Speaker 5: They have been furious.
• 52:29
  Speaker 7: People like Alex Clark have been furious since the glyphosate
• 52:33
  Speaker 7: emergency declaration was granted to Bayer back in, I think
• 52:36
  Speaker 7: that was January. And After that, it got really dark
• 52:40
  Speaker 7: with about half, my estimation would be about half of Maha.
• 52:44
  Speaker 7: And I think those are the people you can basically
• 52:46
  Speaker 7: draw a direct line after that to the people who
• 52:49
  Speaker 7: are now willing to talk to AOC. I don't know
• 52:51
  Speaker 7: what you guys think. I think it's absolutely brilliant on
• 52:54
  Speaker 7: AOC's behalf. I think it would be really foolish of
• 52:58
  Speaker 7: the left to leave Maha on the table. Having covered
• 53:02
  Speaker 7: the Maha MAGA rally on the National Mall ahead of
• 53:04
  Speaker 7: the 2024 election, firsthand, I'm looking at people who have
• 53:09
  Speaker 7: mostly voted Bernie or people in the Bernie.
• 53:13
  Speaker 5: Lane for probably their entire lives.
• 53:15
  Speaker 7: It was like the barefoot hippies with Christian evangelicals who
• 53:19
  Speaker 7: have always voted Republican.
• 53:20
  Speaker 5: But the barefoot hippies had this moment of optimism because
• 53:25
  Speaker 5: of Trump is seeing some political value in bringing RFK Jr.,
• 53:29
  Speaker 5: who was deemed too liberal for the Obama EPA administrator position.
• 53:34
  Speaker 5: And people were like allowed themselves to be optimistic for
• 53:38
  Speaker 5: a fleeting moment. And I don't think they necessarily were
• 53:42
  Speaker 5: unaware that this could happen. But it did happen. And
• 53:45
  Speaker 5: so that's just leaving politically.
• 53:47
  Speaker 7: It's leaving a lot of capital and votes on the
• 53:49
  Speaker 7: table to not at least try to make amends with
• 53:52
  Speaker 7: people who have good intentions about glyphosate, about PFAS and
• 53:57
  Speaker 7: all of those sorts of things.
• 53:57
  Speaker 5: So I think it's really smart.
• 54:00
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: I mean, to your point, a lot of these folks
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: were previously on the left. these are issues that have
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: naturally landed on the left. They were cynically exploited by Trump,
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: who saw an opening of a coalition that was dissatisfied,
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: and especially after COVID, kind of up for grabs. And,
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: you know, and I just generally think that any constituency
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: that that has an actual principle that they're committed to
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: and care about are up for grabs at this point.
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: You know, it's a relatively small proportion of the actual
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: MAGA base. But these other pieces that were brought in
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: or the parts of the MAGA base that were genuinely principled, which, again,
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: is unfortunately, I think, a small percentage, for example, that
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: wanted to avoid a war with Iran. Those are the
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: people who you can you can do something with either
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: if you can't bring them directly into the coalition because
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: of social cultural values or whatever. They could be depressed
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: and not show up. They could vote for independence. They
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: could be taken out of the sort of MAGA coalition tent.
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: But I do think there are some folks in MAHA
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: world who, if you had someone who was serious about
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: things we would all care about, you know, healthy food
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: and a clean environment, that you should 100 percent take
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: advantage of that. Ryan, I'm curious your insights into where
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: the strategy is. perhaps comes from. There was a funny
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: quote in there from one of the activists who was like,
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: I can't believe I'm agreeing with AOC. I'm like, why?
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: Because the left has always opposed these sorts of chemicals
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: and wanted more regulations and wanted to make sure that
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: we had more inspectors to make sure we're not having
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: the food disasters that we're currently having. So it just
• 55:38
  Speaker 1: demonstrated to me the level of propaganda against, you know,
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: against the left that has been taken in by a
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: lot of these folks.
• 55:46
  Speaker 3: Well, it depends on what parts of Maha you're talking about,
• 55:49
  Speaker 3: because even in your summation there, some of Maha, correct
• 55:53
  Speaker 3: me if I'm wrong, Emily, would say, well, hold on,
• 55:55
  Speaker 3: there'd be a record scratch at the inspections. Like, do they,
• 56:00
  Speaker 3: because some of Maha doesn't.
• 56:01
  Speaker 5: Yeah, they don't want the raw milk inspected.
• 56:03
  Speaker 7: Yeah, seriously.
• 56:04
  Speaker 3: Some of Maha thinks of these food, some of the
• 56:06
  Speaker 3: food inspectors as authoritarian, you know, telling people, you know, what, yeah,
• 56:12
  Speaker 3: exactly what milk they can drink or whatever. But when
• 56:17
  Speaker 3: it comes to fighting the chemical companies and the other corporations,
• 56:21
  Speaker 3: somebody like AOC has the most credibility there because she
• 56:25
  Speaker 3: does not need and does not have the support of
• 56:30
  Speaker 3: corporate America. Like, that's clear. Like, whatever you want to
• 56:33
  Speaker 3: say about her, like, her funding base, her social base,
• 56:36
  Speaker 3: her political base does not involve multinational chemical corporations at all.
• 56:42
  Speaker 3: And so if anybody's... Whereas... Trump, as soon as he
• 56:45
  Speaker 3: gets in, puts a chemical lobbyist in charge of making
• 56:48
  Speaker 3: the policies. And so if anybody's going to be remotely
• 56:52
  Speaker 3: trustworthy on that, it'd be somebody like AOC. But then
• 56:56
  Speaker 3: you run into vaccine stuff.
• 57:00
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 57:01
  Speaker 3: Do the Maha people think that she's too valorous of science? Quote, unquote,
• 57:06
  Speaker 3: they put science in quotes. Or do they think that
• 57:10
  Speaker 3: some of the inspections... you know, are draconian and are
• 57:13
  Speaker 3: preventing genuinely healthy alternatives from people who just want to
• 57:17
  Speaker 3: make autonomous decisions about their own nutrition. The question is,
• 57:22
  Speaker 3: how big is that? Because she's also wants to appeal,
• 57:25
  Speaker 3: I think, to many millions of people who are sick
• 57:27
  Speaker 3: of every day being told you got now guacamole is
• 57:31
  Speaker 3: going to kill you. Now lettuce is going to kill you.
• 57:33
  Speaker 3: Now this is going to like it's like enough.
• 57:35
  Speaker 9: Yeah.
• 57:36
  Speaker 3: Let me pull this list up, Ryan.
• 57:38
  Speaker 4: Just to get you guys to react to this list
• 57:40
  Speaker 4: for a sec. This is from September 1st from last week.
• 57:43
  Speaker 4: 14 current food recalls shoppers should know about this week.
• 57:47
  Speaker 3: Just to give you an insight. Yeah, this week.
• 57:50
  Speaker 4: And I'll get into the list for a second, but
• 57:53
  Speaker 4: I wanted to read some of these numbers here. In
• 57:56
  Speaker 4: President Donald Trump's second term, the FDA has lost 20%
• 57:59
  Speaker 4: of its workforce and the Center for Disease Control about 25%.
• 58:01
  Speaker 4: That includes 8% Of the 11 scientists tasked with tracking
• 58:07
  Speaker 4: food parasites. I mean, that's like basically all of them.
• 58:12
  Speaker 4: Going through this list here, we've got everything sprouts, E. coli,
• 58:17
  Speaker 4: and salmonella. Panorama mangoes, salmonella. Grand Central Bakery, sourdough bread.
• 58:23
  Speaker 4: Metal fragments, dryers.
• 58:25
  Speaker 1: I hate when that happens.
• 58:27
  Speaker 4: Fruit bars, glass. Glass in your fruit bars. We've got jalapenos, salmonella.
• 58:33
  Speaker 4: There's salmonella on everything. I didn't know that.
• 58:35
  Speaker 3: Jalapeno avocado salad. Salmonella.
• 58:38
  Speaker 4: Salmonella. Salmonella. Listeria.
• 58:44
  Speaker 3: Salmonella.
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: Mix it up a little bit there.
• 58:46
  Speaker 3: Frozen berries have E.
• 58:48
  Speaker 4: Coli.
• 58:49
  Speaker 3: Yes, it's... We're not discriminating. Did I say frozen berries? Oh,
• 58:51
  Speaker 3: come on.
• 58:52
  Speaker 8: Yes.
• 58:52
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I know.
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, that's the other thing that's been freaking
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: me out. Actually, Tim Dillon had a whole bit about
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: now the healthiest thing to eat is like a fast
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: food burger with no lettuce. But then when you add
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: in mystery meat that's being imported, I think that even
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: takes that off the list. So now what do we do?
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: But yeah, because a lot of these things are actually like,
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: you know, healthy. Griff, you've got to get that Montel denim.
• 59:14
  Speaker 4: Sorry.
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: The lettuce that was in the cyclospora epidemic, you know,
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: is as the central culprit, the guacamole, the frozen blueberries,
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: all this stuff. And Axios had a report that the
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: number of current investigations for is at an all-time high.
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: Some of the cope that I've seen is, oh, well,
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: if there's all these recalls, that means they're doing their job.
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: But no, what that means is that they're not catching
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: it before it goes out to the consumer, and the
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: consumer bites into their dole fruit bar and is like,
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: there's a piece of glass in here. Somebody should do
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: something about this. So The whole goal of the food
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: inspection regime is that you catch it before the consumer
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: eats glass or metal or has exposure to salmonella or
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: listeria or E.
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 6: Coli.
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: And since the whole, you know, FDA and CDC has
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: been just stripped to the bones, and specifically some of
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: the key people in being able to identify and track
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: and some of the key programs that were meant to
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: identify and track some of these parasites, that's why we're
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: ending up with this situation. I mean, there's a direct
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: line between these things. So what I was going to
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: say to tie it in with the Maha folks is
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: perhaps they can be persuaded that genuinely healthy people Food
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: does require some government oversight because otherwise you just have
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 1: giant corporations that don't give a shit about your health
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: whatsoever that are just looking to cut corners and, you know,
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: and make their product as cheaply as they possibly can
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: that your health and the health of your children is
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: then in hands of.
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 7: Poynter went through some of the numbers. They say so
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 7: far in 2026, the FDA has posted approximately 2.71 investigations
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 7: each month. In the first seven months of 2025, the
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 7: FDA posted 2.29 investigations per month. In 2024, it was
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 7: 1.43 per month, 1.86 per month in 2023, and 2.29
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 7: in 2022. But there's some question as to how we're
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 7: under the kind of Kennedy regime, how we're reporting and
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 7: tracking those things.
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 5: Back to AOC. This partnership has already borne fruit.
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 7: When she questioned Lee Zeldin, I forget whether it was Politico,
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 7: the article we referenced that reported this, but actually her
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 7: conversations with Maha pointed her toward a very particular line
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 7: of questioning that made Lee Zeldin look utterly foolish about
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 7: who he had met with.
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 5: I think it actually was about glyphosate.
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: I think it was too.
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 5: But they gave her a pretty real.
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 7: Substantive piece of information that led to a substantive line
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 7: of questioning, which I think shows good faith on both sides.
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 7: And the last thing I wanted to mention is that
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 7: it's not just about the narrow political coalition of Maha.
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 7: It's also about the fact that we have record low
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 7: institutional trust almost across the board in the country. And
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 7: that means there are all kinds of people who are
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 7: way less trusting of major corporations in charge of the
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 7: food supply, everything. So it's voters in general that want
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 7: to see a kind of corporate accountability. And this is
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 7: the one that affects people as much as big pharma.
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 7: It's what you're putting in your body every single day.
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 7: So it's very, very smart to try to take a
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 7: leadership position on this policy issue from AOC, because it's
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 7: not even just about potentially making inroads with a pretty
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 7: strong political coalition that has a network of inroads with
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 7: major podcasts.
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 5: A lot of Maha people have been on Rogan.
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 7: A lot of Maha people go on very popular shows
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 7: and have popular.
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 5: Platforms themselves, Instagram, TikTok.
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 7: So it's smart, but it's also about the whole country,
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 7: I think, which has record low institutional trust in corporate America.
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think that is an important point, too,
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: is that, you know, the whole... food safety, the fact
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: that you can no longer just inherently trust what you're
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: buying at the grocery store when you go to a restaurant,
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: it speaks to this overall sense of decline. The sense that...
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: Of shitification. That things that you previously took for granted,
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: that you could fly and it would be safe... that
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: you can go to the grocery store and just grab
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: whatever you want off the shelf and not check the
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 1: recall list and not check the history of this particular brand.
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: Those sorts of things are falling away. And so, you know,
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: I think it goes beyond just that concern, specific concern about, like,
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 1: can I eat the frozen blueberries? It speaks to this
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: deeper sense that things are getting worse. Things that I
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: used to have, that used to be good, that I
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: used to take for granted are no longer there. So,
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: you know, I was talking to Griffin about this when
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: I was pitching these stories. We were actually supposed to
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 1: cover them earlier in the week with Sagar. This is
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: one of those things that the normies in my life
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: are talking about constantly. Oh, yeah.
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 5: Big time.
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: I mean, understandably, very disturbed by like, OK, there's metal
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: in the bread. Like, what are we doing? And every
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: day there's a new horrifying story. The whole cycle got
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: kind of kicked off with the explosive diarrhea epidemic that
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: got traced down to lettuce from then you start to
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: learn about, oh, this virus.
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 5: Right.
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 6: Right.
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: It's very unsettling, especially for people who thought they could
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: sort of like buy their way out of any sort
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: of food crisis.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 7: Well, and also it's like this is this is lettuce.
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 7: It's fairly easy to grow domestically. And we now have
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 7: to worry about whether it was upstream or downstream of
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 7: a sewage spill in Guatemala and Mexico. And it's like
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 7: you're in Iowa or you're in Rhode Island. Like, why
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 7: do you have to worry about a sewage spill in
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 7: a river in Mexico? Yeah.
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: And Griffin, no fertilizer. The beef one up on the screen,
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: because and this is where it all comes together with
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: like Trump's corruption. You know, he took a meeting with
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 1: this the owner of JBS, Brazilian company that has also,
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 1: you know, a lot of meat processing here in the U.S.
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: And the guy had donated to him. So he's got
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 1: all this influence. And Trump decides that in order to
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 1: deal with the rising prices of beef, that he's going
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 1: to order up this, you know, this mystery meat into
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: our food system. And it's very disturbing because already you
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: have a situation where you don't have country of origin
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: labeling on beef. This is something that we have all
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: talked to ranchers about and how hard it makes for them–
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: to be able to distinguish their product. And it makes
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: it very, it makes it impossible for, unless you're buying
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: directly from a farmer, which if you can do, I
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: recommend doing, it makes it impossible for consumers to know
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 1: where this beef is being sourced from and whether it's
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 1: safe to consume or not. China just rejected a shipment
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: of some of this beef because it had way too
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: high level of antibiotics in it, because that's the sort
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: of thing that you do to cut corners. If you're
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: keeping your cattle in horrific conditions, And they're all getting sick.
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: What do you do? You blast them with antibiotics so
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: that you can get them to market. You know, that's
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: this kind of ties back into the midterms thing, because
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: in Texas, they may be benefiting somewhat economically from the
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: spike in oil prices. But the ranching industry there is
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 1: really suffering both from a combination of, you know, all
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 1: of these things that are going on with oil. with
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: cattle and Trump's decision to import this beef everyone is
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: very upset about. And then you also had the screwworm epidemic,
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: which also ties back to a bunch of these cuts
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: on programs that sounded ridiculous when they were on a
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 1: Fox News hit, you know, about tracking the old world
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: screwworms mating habits or whatever. But turns out it actually
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 1: kind of mattered. That was actually some money that was
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: being well spent. So we're in the reaping phase here
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: of all of the cuts that were made at the
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: very beginning of the administration when Elon was going through
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 1: with his chainsaw and everybody thought there'd be no consequences
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: for anything ever. We're now in the phase where we're
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: finding out where that money, you know, maybe was being
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 1: spent to actually something that was useful, something that we
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: took for granted, something that was happening behind the scenes
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: that we weren't even aware of. but enabled our ability
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: to go to the grocery store and just buy a
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 1: package of salad off the shelf and not have to
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 1: do an intensive check over whether or not this is
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: tied to the latest recall.
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 7: Yum.
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 3: Yum, yum, yum.
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 4: I was going to say that Trump is forcing us
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 4: on his diet of Diet Cokes and patties, but now
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 4: the patties aren't even safe. That's upsetting to me in
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 4: my personal diet. I wanted to ask one last question
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 4: of all of you all about AOC and this Maha outreach.
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 4: You know, this Maha outreach, which is kind of a
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 4: national project, doesn't really seem like something you would do
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 4: if you're running for senator. AOC also went to the South.
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 4: She went to the South in political reporting here. down
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 4: to Florida to speak on a panel at the annual
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 4: session of the National Baptist Convention.
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 7: I like how you made it sound like Nixon going
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 7: to China. She went to the South.
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 4: Listen, I haven't seen her in Florida in a minute,
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 4: but it's the nation's oldest and largest African-American religious organization.
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 3: What do we make of all this?
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 4: Is this really her starting to put out feelers for
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 4: a potential 2028 presidential run?
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 7: Well, if she ran for Senate, she would need... I mean, Ryan,
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 7: you would know this, but like... New York has a
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 7: lot of rural areas. She'd probably be fine. But if
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 7: she wanted to put up really good numbers, you could
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 7: still do... it doesn't hurt to do outreach to like
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 7: Trumpier versions of, or Trumpier slices of the population. But
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 7: it does look like more and more, I mean, I
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 7: can't imagine why she would go straight to president and
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 7: not do the Senate route, but that's just me.
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 5: I'm curious what you guys think of that.
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 3: She could also do both because they're on different calendars.
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 3: Like the presidential race has basically started, but you know,
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 3: it starts, you know, people, but you know, by November
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 3: through January, people are going to start launching Bernie Sanders,
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 3: Launched late, right? And that was like April, maybe, of 2019.
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 3: So we're talking like next spring. So she would know
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 3: by January, February, whether or not she's in line for
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 3: the nomination.
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 6: And the.
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 3: New York primaries are extremely late, usually like mid-June. So
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 3: she could launch in March for Senate.
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: So what you're saying is she could be it could
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: be the case she hasn't made a decision, but she's
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: keeping her options open kind of a deal.
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 6: Right.
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 3: Because one doesn't foreclose the other. Like you can run
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 3: for president. And then if you decide it's not going
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 3: to go your way by March, which you should know
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 3: by March, you'd still have plenty of time to run
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 3: for Senate.
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: That's interesting.
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 5: Yeah, that is.
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 7: But it is looking like she's leaning towards actually launching
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 7: a presidential bid. She entertains those questions when Julian asks
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 7: them or anybody Pablo asks them much more willingly now.
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 7: And I agree, Griffin, that just some of these decisions
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 7: do smack of presidential ambitions.
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 3: All right.
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 4: Keep your eyes on that. Keep your eyes on the food.
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 4: Keep your eyes everywhere right now because no one else is.
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 3: Head on a swivel. Head on a swivel.
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 4: All right, it's our favorite time of the show and
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 4: something that you can contribute to if you sign up
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 4: for a free trial at Breaking Points. You can submit
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 4: written questions that we'll answer here on the Friday show.
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 4: Hashtag points on the board for Griffin if you sign
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 4: up today. This one's from Raphael Dimian. Do you guys
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 4: have any personal 9-11 stories? And how do you remember
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 4: pre-9-11 America all these years later? My dad tells me
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 4: it was a better time. I was born in 2004.
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 4: So I've always been curious. After frantically leaving the WTC complex,
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 4: my dad and his co-workers watched United Flight 175 fly
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 4: over the Verrazano Bridge and crash into the second tower.
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 9: Jesus.
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 4: Wow.
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 7: Well, Griffin and I were, I think, like eight or nine.
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 7: So I have like hazy childhood memories. But you guys
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 7: were like full adults, weren't you?
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I was in college. It was like my sophomore year.
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 1: And I was on my way to French class and
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: I was running late. And some girl in my class
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: like grabbed me and was like, something is going on.
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 1: And this is obviously before we had smartphones. So, we
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: ran around the building trying to find a TV and
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: found it and then saw what was going on. And,
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 1: you know, I was at UVA, so there were a
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: lot of people who had family member working at the Pentagon. So,
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: that's kind of my memory of the day. I mean,
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 1: in terms of the pre versus post, it kind of
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: fits with some of the things we were talking about
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 1: about the loss of institutional trust. Like, there's just.
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: The sense of an America where you can just leave
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 1: your door unlocked and, you know, or go the airport
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 1: security protocols, like all of these sorts of things changed.
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 1: And then we had the advent of the mass surveillance era.
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 1: which was embraced on a bipartisan basis. Obviously, war on terror,
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 1: Iraq war, Afghanistan war, and we've just sort of been
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 1: on the same slide since then. And one of the
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 1: things that's really blown my mind about the Iran war
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: is just how many villains from the Iraq war are
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 1: still around to cheerlead us into this next stupid war.
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 1: That's one of the most disturbing things to me is
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 1: just how little was apparently learned by our elite political
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: class from this, what we turned into a multi-decade disaster.
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I think I mentioned this to Emily recently, but
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 3: in like mid-August, so I was about a year out
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 3: of school, I had turned down a job at Morgan Stanley,
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 3: which was in one of the buildings of the World
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 3: Trade Center. Almost everybody at Morgan Stanley survived. For years,
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 3: I carried around with me the like to get to
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 3: the interview, which had been maybe the month before that, uh,
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 3: they give you a plastic card that said like, you know,
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 3: 44th floor. Um, so for years I carried that around
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 3: in my wallet as like, remember, but it was mid August.
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 3: I said, no, no thanks to that job. And I
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 3: was working in a middle school, my own middle school
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 3: on the Eastern shore of Maryland. And, uh, I still
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 3: remember that, that the teachers knew that I read the
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 3: newspaper and, you know, actually many of them had been my,
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 3: teachers when I had gone to middle school there. And
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 3: so they were all asking me like, what happened? Like,
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 3: who is this? And I remember teaching this, giving a
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 3: little lecture to a special ed class about who Osama
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 3: bin Laden was. Uh, and so that's a reminder that like,
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 3: if you were reading the newspaper in 2001, you, you
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 3: knew on that day, like who was behind this. And
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 3: so whenever the CIA is like, I knew immediately I'm
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 3: because of my, sources and my knowledge it's like okay
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 3: everybody knew everybody who was paying attention to basic news
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 3: knew who that was and the kids were like the
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 3: fear was just incredible they're like are they coming here
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 3: like i promise you they're not coming here like.
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 7: I guarantee that that was my memory because again i
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 7: was eight and i remember um you know, they didn't
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 7: stop school because Wisconsin, everyone is probably at least two
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 7: degrees of separation from people in New York City or
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 7: is very different than the East Coast. Talking to some
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 7: of my friends who grew up in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts,
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 7: they just had Virginia. They just had different experiences on
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 7: 9-11 than people in the Midwest and Griffin, maybe in
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 7: the West Coast as well. And but I do remember,
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 7: you know, as an eight year old or a nine
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 7: year old looking out my bedroom window that evening and
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 7: seeing a plane fly over and thinking.
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 3: Are they?
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 5: Is that like I was scared. I was scared.
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 4: I don't know if this happened at your school, Emily,
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 4: or if you were you were probably in second grade.
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 3: I think I was in third or fourth.
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 5: I was in third. Yeah.
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 4: But one experience for kids that age that I've seen
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 4: a lot of people online talk about that had a
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 4: very similar experience is, you know, I woke up on
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 4: the West Coast. Both towers had already been hit by
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 4: that point. I saw my parents watching it on TV,
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 4: but they didn't really say much about it. Then I
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 4: go to school and my teacher just wheels out that
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 4: classic TV on a cart and just turns it on.
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 4: No context, no explanation. And we just watched it for
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 4: like two hours and then they sent us home. No
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 4: one explained anything. Just tried to absorb it.
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 5: That is so insane.
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 4: Apparently that happened in classrooms all over the country, this
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 4: TV cart 9-11 viewing experience.
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 1: You didn't have a Ryan Grimm to come in and
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: explain it to Little Griffin. Ryan, did you read them
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 1: Bin Laden's letter to America?
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 3: I don't know if he had posted it yet. I'm
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 3: not sure. I had to double check. I'm sure that
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 3: I told him like, yeah, he didn't like that we
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 3: have troops and Saudi Arabians.
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 7: The kind of detached Zoomer irony about 9-11, I actually
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 7: don't begrudge because if your experience with it is just
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 7: through pixels and memes, then it's very different. But I
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 7: do think one big difference is that if you were
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 7: old enough to remember 9-11, even if you're young, it
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 7: was legitimately national terror. Like it was there was if
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 7: you lived through that day and the days afterwards, there
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 7: was an experience of real fear. And I think that
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 7: just changes your ability to totally be in on all
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 7: of those memes and jokes. Because sometimes it's like, guys,
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 7: sometimes if it's well done, it's funny. And sometimes it's like, guys,
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 7: you gotta slow your roll on this. People were fucking
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 7: horrified for days and weeks. People didn't know if their
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 7: loved ones who were in the towers made it. So
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 7: they were in anguish for weeks and months. And so
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 7: it's just a generational divide that I don't think we're
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 7: fully prepared for the implications of.
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah. We just are so used to feeling invulnerable in
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: the U.S., you know, feeling like nothing we do, like
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: we can just do whatever and no one can do
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 1: anything to us. And obviously that was really deeply disturbed
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 1: on that day, although I sort of feel like we've
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: gone back to this concept of like, we can just
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 1: do whatever in the world and there's never going to
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: be any ability to do anything to us because otherwise,
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: why would we fund and support genocide in Gaza? Why
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 1: would we, you know, attack Iran aggressively, offensively with really
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: zero pretext or justification?
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 3: Like, I don't think we would behave.
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 5: Why would we do the anthropic stuff? Like what we
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 5: were talking about earlier in the show. Completely.
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I don't think we would behave the way that
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: we do as a nation or our leaders would. if
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: we had really internalized that actually, you know, yes, these
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: oceans help protect us, but they're not, we are not invulnerable.
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 4: We were supposed to have Glenn Greenwald on this week
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 4: to not only talk about 9-11, but the post 9-11
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 4: era of America and the surveillance state, which, you know,
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 4: of course connects to the flock cameras and everything else.
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 4: So we hope to have him back on sometime in
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 4: the future to talk about all of that another question
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 4: here from Adam Dean thoughts on the Lindsay Clancy trial
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 4: and the insane discourse around it we have not mentioned
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 4: is anyone really tracking this one yes.
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 1: I am of course I knew you were I knew
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: it I knew you'd be the one.
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 7: Give us a taste No, I mean, there are a
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 7: bunch of videos on the After Party channel if anybody's.
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 5: Interested in my take.
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 3: After Party with Emily.
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 5: What's up?
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 3: I'm just plugging you.
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 5: Oh, thank you.
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 7: But no, I mean, Megan's been tracking this as an
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 7: attorney who's obsessed with true crime. So it's been, I've
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 7: taken calls about it every day for like two or
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 7: a month now from people around the country. You know,
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 7: it's a horrible thing. But Massachusetts law is also really weird.
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 7: Like their voluntary manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter is genuinely strange. And
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 7: so obviously the medical system also failed. Lindsay Clancy failed
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 7: Lindsay Clancy and Lindsay Clancy's children in a terrifying and
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 7: dramatic way.
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 5: And I think all of these things can be true
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 5: at the same time.
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 4: I think that's a plenty. I don't think any of
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 4: us have other strong opinions on that.
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 1: So you're pro-murder. That's what you're saying.
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 5: Pro-murder.
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 7: No, I mean, like, listen, I actually think she should
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 7: like I think she should be in prison, not in
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 7: a mental facility. But the actual like one of the
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 7: big parts of the story is how telehealth like you
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 7: can just log on to telehealth. She was prescribed by
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 7: one of these physicians who never saw her in person.
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 7: Different cocktails like Zoloft and then another SSRI and then
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 7: was given. Well, she was given Ativan, but also Klonopin
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 7: and they were just switching her medications. And some of
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 7: it was over a physician who purely.
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 5: Saw her on telehealth.
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 7: She tried to check herself into inpatient facilities twice. It
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 7: didn't work either time. And part of it does sound
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 7: like their civil suit against these medical practitioners is very strong.
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 7: Both of them, Patrick and Lindsay, have civil suits against
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 7: some of the practitioners.
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: When you say she failed, they wouldn't take her at
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 1: the inpatient facilities? Why is that?
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 7: One of them wouldn't take her. They just said she
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 7: wasn't a good fit for the program. So I'm sure
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 7: more will come out in court. Another one did take her,
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 7: but it was over the new year that year. And
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 7: so a lot of the physicians weren't present. She asked
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 7: to leave to go to one of her kids' birthday
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 7: parties and they let her leave and she just didn't
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 7: go back after that. But so because she checked in
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 7: over the new year, there were a lot of people
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 7: who were out. And it sounds like they did not
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 7: at all adequately attend to her. I think nobody was taking.
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 7: I think there's some some of the like, I guess,
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 7: lib white women who have latched onto this case are
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 7: correct that she was not being taken. Like the threats
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 7: were not being taken seriously. The postpartum potential for postpartum
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 7: psychosis was not being taken seriously.
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 5: Wow.
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 4: Yes, a lot of inpatient programs will reject people unless
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 4: there's already a direct violent occurrence of some sort. So
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 4: it can be very difficult to hold people there, even
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 4: if they want to be there.
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 6: All right.
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 3: This one, Ryan.
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 4: Ryan, this one blew my mind two days ago when
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 4: I saw you tweet this. This is from Sabas101. For
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 4: glorious comrade Ryan... with the discovery of you liking attack
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 4: on Titan, what other animes have you watched? Have you
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 4: watched ghost in the shell or psycho bass and, and Ryan, me,
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 4: but me first, Ryan, you watch attack on Titan.
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 3: How have we not talked about this?
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 5: This is the.
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 3: Greatest show of all time. It was cause you got,
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 3: you're not in the studio. Mac and I have bonded
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 3: over this, uh, punch.
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 3: You got to get in there. Uh, My oldest and
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 3: youngest kids, Iris and George, got me into it. The
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 3: way they talked me into it, Iris was like, you
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 3: keep talking about this show Sopranos and Breaking Bad and
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 3: all these ancient things. She's like, but Attack on Titan
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 3: is discussed in the same conversation as those. And I
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 3: was like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. and
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 3: so then she's like no we'll look it up google
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 3: it i'm like so i googled i'm like oh wow
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 3: people do actually put these shows in the same category
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 3: in the same conversations i was like okay let's let's
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 3: do it and so uh my 15 year old and
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 3: 10 year old we every time we get an opportunity
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 3: at night we'll watch we'll watch it um my 10
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 3: year old had already seen it all the way through
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 3: and kind of spoiled part of it for me oh
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 3: no punk um but we're now uh in the final
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 3: season and we have the last three long episodes to
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 3: go you know there's like three yes now they're movie
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 3: length yes what age.
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 1: Do you recommend for ryan it's it's it's.
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 4: It's a little dark and then there's horror elements. Um,
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 4: so maybe like 11 or 12. Well, like I said,
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 4: George is 10 and this is 10.
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 3: I'm watching it.
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 7: Okay.
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 1: All right.
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 3: Well, kids have changed.
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 1: Kids are advanced though.
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 5: I think 10.
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 3: I mean, it's horrifying. Like these, it's scary. These Titans are,
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 3: you know, these mindless beasts that are just getting, just
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 3: eating people, including like in the, whatever. Uh, and then
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 3: getting just torn to shreds. So it's extremely gory and
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 3: gross and there's sad parts and people die. But then, Crystal,
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 3: have you seen it yet at all?
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 6: Mm-mm. Nothing.
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 3: There are all these themes. There's these really fascinating themes
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 3: about genocide and victims becoming oppressors.
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 6: Mm-hmm.
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 3: The stories we tell. And, you know, the Eldians.
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 3: Have to wear patches on their arms, which has some
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 3: obvious parallels to the Holocaust era. But I also wonder
• 1:24:44
  Speaker 3: how much of it is kind of an allegory about
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 3: Japan's own experience of being under attack and then becoming
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 3: this imperial genocidal almost. Genocidal and certainly in parts of
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 3: China regime. And how much they're grappling with that through this.
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 5: Interesting.
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 3: I recommend it. It's good. It's incredibly political. A little
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 3: too much yelling. Some of the characters yell too much.
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 3: Anime is about yelling.
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 6: Yes.
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 3: It's very political.
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 4: I think people would say if you really like Game
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 4: of Thrones and you like the politics of that, I
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 4: think it's a big entry point for people that are like,
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 4: is anime too weird for me? Um, but yeah, there's
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 4: a lot of interesting political, uh, stuff in the show,
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 4: a lot of emotional stuff and a lot of different
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 4: ways that you could look at the real world. And,
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 4: you know, he mentioned Japan, but also, um, you know, something,
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 4: the main character in the show is kind of occupied
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 4: by this evil force outside the gates and they're put
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 4: into smaller and smaller concentration camps because. The Titans are
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 4: this force outside that will eat all of them. And
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 4: the main character holds a key around his neck to
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 4: the home that he used to live in, much like
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 4: Palestinians do in Gaza, and that he always hopes to
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 4: return home. And that is one of the original goals
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 4: of the show. All to say, there's so much there
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 4: to mine and think about. And it's also one of
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 4: the most incredible action shows of all time. And I
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 4: always recommend it to people. that are not sure if
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 4: anime is for them or too weird.
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 3: So very excited. that Ryan is into it, and maybe...
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 3: It's the only anime I've seen, to answer that other
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 3: part of the question. Okay, nice.
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 7: Speaking of Sopranos, I got a notification while we were
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 7: talking that my, I swear to you, my order of
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 7: a picture that I'm putting in a gold frame of
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 7: Tony Soprano with Paiomai is on my doorstep.
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 3: And this week, the reason it came up online this
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 3: week was National Attack on Titan Day in Japan.
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 6: Yes. Also, my.
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 1: Sounds like my son could be a fit for my son.
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 1: I don't think my nine-year-old daughter would be.
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 3: He'd love it.
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 1: Ida gets freaked out by, like, gore and horror.
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 3: She wouldn't like it. But my daughter told me that
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 3: the voice actor for Jean, the character, did you hear this, Griffin?
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 3: Just passed away. Oh, no, I didn't know that. Oh,
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 3: that's sad. Mike McFarlane. So, Mike, rest in peace, Mike. Yeah,
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 3: rest in peace.
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 4: And maybe around Christmas time, we can do a long
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 4: extra episode, Ryan, breaking down the themes of the show
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 4: for some Christmas holiday break one.
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 1: That's a good idea.
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 4: Okay, that is going to do it for our AMA
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 4: this week. Again, you can submit a question to us
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 4: about politics, anime, whatever, I guess, fashion tips, and breakingpost.com monthly.
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 3: Don't do that.
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 1: You can send that shit to Sagar if you want, but.
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 5: Can I ask, Crystal, is your cat wearing a bow?
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, he's got a little bow tie.
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 7: That's for Salem.
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's because he has to wear a tracker because
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 1: his little crazy ass is constantly trying to escape the house. Like...
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 1: constantly plotting against us. And he's very smart. So he
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 1: has to wear a GPS tracker. The other male cat, Socks,
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 1: also has to wear a GPS tracker, even though he
• 1:28:15
  Speaker 1: escapes a little bit less.
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 5: But that's your fashion tip.
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: If you have to track your cat, put it in
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: a bow. Cats and bow ties and trackers.
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 6: That's right. All right.
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 4: And Emily, we're going to throw to a segment that
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 4: you recorded earlier this week. Why don't you throw it
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 4: to let us know a little bit about who you
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 4: talked to?
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I talked to Joe Lawler.
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 7: He's a great reporter, a great journalist who's been doing
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 7: a series of pieces for the New Atlantis basically on
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 7: how finance in tandem with, you know, when you have
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 7: big corporations, they're able to get their will in the government,
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 7: but kind of how they've made our suburbs ugly and
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 7: alienating places to live. How so much of it goes
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 7: back to the schemes of these major financial corporations, in
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 7: some cases private equity, we touch on as well.
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 5: Why do the exurbs look disgusting?
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 7: Why are there these awful 7-Elevens that look bad, feel
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 7: bad on different street corners, and how does that go
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 7: back to financialization? So it was a really interesting conversation,
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 7: and I hope everyone enjoys it. I'm very excited to
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 7: be joined by Joe Lawler. He's the policy editor at
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 7: the Washington Examiner and a writer over at the New Atlantis,
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 7: where he has done a great series on the influence
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 7: of government and big business, importantly, big business on homeownership
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 7: costs and also just what has what all of this
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 7: has wrought in our suburbs, which are now dotted with
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 7: hideous developments and buildings and sucking the soul out of.
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 5: A beautiful country. So, Joe, first of all, thank you
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 5: so much for being here.
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 3: Thank you.
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 10: And you just said it much more colorfully than I
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 10: ever did.
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 7: Well, I have a lot of great quotes from the
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 7: series that you've done over at the New Atlantis that
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 7: I want to ask you about because... as I just mentioned,
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 7: you cover this from both perspectives, one regulations, but two
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 7: regulations that have been shaped by big business. So there
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 7: are a lot of different factors going on and you've
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 7: written about this from different vantage points. Your most recent
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 7: article is on how we all own the local seven 11.
• 1:30:15
  Speaker 7: I'll start with this one because you write, actually let
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 7: me pull the article up on the screen so that
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 7: folks know where they can go read it.
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 5: And they absolutely should go read it.
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 7: You write in the lead, uh, This 7-Eleven, this hypothetical 7-Eleven,
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 7: you say the building and the land it sits on
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 7: are not owned by 7-Eleven or by an individual. Instead,
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 7: the 7-Eleven is the tenant of a real estate investment trust,
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 7: a financial structure that allows huge numbers of people to
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 7: invest in real estate without having to worry about the
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 7: details of what it is they're investing in. And you
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 7: break down why exactly this all happened, but you say
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 7: this framework helps strip plots of their local context and
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 7: make them legible as investments. Every real estate investment involves
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 7: what is known as a capital stack, which is the
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 7: combination of debt and equity used to finance the construction
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 7: and then maintenance of the project. So I think this
• 1:31:02
  Speaker 7: is a good starting point, Joe, if you could just
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 7: explain to us with the 7-Eleven example, why this is happening,
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 7: why this has spread rampantly throughout the American suburbs and
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 7: exurbs and even some rural areas.
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 5: What's going on?
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 10: Absolutely. And just to be clear, this is not a
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 10: hypothetical 7-Eleven. That's a real 7-Eleven in Williamsburg. And we
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 10: did trace the REIT that owns the land and is
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 10: leasing it to the 7-Eleven. And that REIT is owned
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 10: by a lot of index funds and others that if
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 10: you have any savings, most likely you are a landlord
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 10: of that 7-Eleven.
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 1: I am.
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 10: I know most people I've asked are. So It's a
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 10: good distinction.
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 5: Not so hypothetical.
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 10: I think the point that you raised is a good one,
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 10: which is that when it comes to neighborhoods, when it
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 10: comes to buildings, when it comes to aesthetics, scale is
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 10: kind of the enemy of beauty and charm. And this
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 10: is something that came up speaking to a lot of urbanists,
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 10: a lot of designers, a lot of others when I
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 10: was working on this series. But what what makes people
• 1:32:11
  Speaker 10: feel charm, what makes people think that a neighborhood is
• 1:32:14
  Speaker 10: lovely is just that the scale is human scaled. And
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 10: if you orient your regulations, your rules, your tax laws,
• 1:32:21
  Speaker 10: your credit policies to favor big corporations, then you're putting
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 10: yourself at odds with creating lovely, unique, charming, walkable, human
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 10: scaled neighborhoods. So that's, that's a key point that I
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 10: heard talking to these, to these developers, to these, experts,
• 1:32:40
  Speaker 10: to investors, to lenders, and.
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 6: All the rest. Well, yeah.
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 7: And you've focused both on, as I mentioned, finance and government.
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 7: And I want to focus on finance for a second
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 7: because you do such a good job with both of them.
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 7: I love this headline from a New Atlantic piece you wrote,
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 7: the demise of real neighborhoods is a.
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 5: Story of finance.
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 7: And One quote that I pulled from this one is
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 7: you're talking about kind of the NIMBY laws and you say,
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 7: as significant as those laws are, they're only half the story.
• 1:33:09
  Speaker 7: The other half of the story, which has received much
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 7: less public attention, is that the financial system makes it
• 1:33:13
  Speaker 7: very hard to build traditional mixed-use neighborhoods. Rules promulgated by
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 7: federal agencies and government-run corporations put mixed-use development at a disadvantage. So, two,
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 7: do finance industry practices that have developed over decades in
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 7: response to government regulations fail? At the same time, you
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 7: write that it disadvantages traditional neighborhoods. The whole set of rules,
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 7: the scaffolding of the financial system, makes it easy to
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 7: fund the alternatives, the single-use projects, whether the strip mall,
• 1:33:35
  Speaker 7: the hotel off the highway, or above all, the single-family
• 1:33:38
  Speaker 7: housing tract. And you could add to this, Joe, I suppose,
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 7: the 7-Eleven. And I think a lot of people look
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 7: around them and are so disappointed what's become of their communities,
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 7: but they don't understand that our entire, as you say,
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 7: financial scaffolding that benefits these big business owners is behind it.
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 7: So walk us through a little bit of how finance
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 7: shaped our communities.
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 10: Absolutely. And you think about it, we are the wealthiest
• 1:34:03
  Speaker 10: country in the world. And how is it that we
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 10: struggle to have neighborhoods that we think are lovely, that
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 10: we want to visit, that we want to take photos in,
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 10: that we see as aspirational for our families? And how
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 10: did we end up with this form of of what
• 1:34:23
  Speaker 10: you just mentioned, the tract single-family development, single-family housing development.
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 10: In some ways, it's nice, but who doesn't want to
• 1:34:32
  Speaker 10: live near a cafe? Who doesn't want to live near
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 10: their church? Who doesn't want to live near their family
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 10: and friends in walking distance? If we could all have that,
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 10: obviously we would. And the key point, which you just mentioned,
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 10: is that these development typologies like the single family housing
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 10: tract are subsidized. And I think a critical point is
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 10: they're regularized by the rules and regulations that make it
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 10: easy for a tract developer to go in, buy a
• 1:35:02
  Speaker 10: huge plot of land on a greenfield development outside of
• 1:35:05
  Speaker 10: a city and build 100 or 200 units of single-family housing,
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 10: and then move on, and then move on to the
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 10: next project. And, you know, they're not doing anything wrong.
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 10: They're playing by the rules. They're playing by the rules
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 10: that were set up by the system, by the government,
• 1:35:18
  Speaker 10: by the zoning laws. And they're just businesses. And the
• 1:35:21
  Speaker 10: interesting thing is that when I- But they've also.
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 5: Lobbied for those laws too, right?
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 7: Like you mentioned some interesting lobbying in the tax cut
• 1:35:27
  Speaker 7: that Trump passed. Like that's pretty, to me, an interesting
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 7: aspect of it too. They want to preserve the system
• 1:35:32
  Speaker 7: now that they've kind of gamed it.
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 6: True.
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 3: That's true.
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 10: So over the years- The home builders and lenders and
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 10: other parts.
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 3: Realtors, right?
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 10: Realtors who are part of the system. Clearly, yeah, clearly
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 10: they benefit from it. That's correct. And what's been interesting
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 10: to me in reporting this piece, and I didn't really
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 10: mention these in the series, but talking to a track
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 10: developer who builds single family housing somewhere outside of a
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 10: city in a red state where there's lots of open land.
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 10: you know, they really don't think about, is this beautiful?
• 1:36:10
  Speaker 10: Is this, maybe they think about that for the homes,
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 10: but for the neighborhood, they're not even trying to build
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 10: neighborhoods that are lovely, that are beautiful, that you'd want
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 10: to visit, that you'd want to maybe retire. Like people
• 1:36:24
  Speaker 10: would love to retire. Who wouldn't love to retire in Charleston,
• 1:36:28
  Speaker 10: South Carolina or Venice for that matter, right? Like these
• 1:36:31
  Speaker 10: are really nice places. And yeah, We're not trying to
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 10: build neighborhoods like that anymore. Most of these developers, to them,
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 10: it's a business. The developable land is the input, and
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 10: the tracked development is the output, and that's the business, right?
• 1:36:52
  Speaker 10: And those considerations don't even factor in.
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 7: And one thing that you touched on as well in
• 1:36:58
  Speaker 7: this and you have touched on it in the series
• 1:37:00
  Speaker 7: is scale. And this is one of the things that's
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 7: happened with a lot of the big apartment buildings that
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 7: we're talking about single family mostly right now. But you're
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 7: in Washington, D.C. and every major city, basically private equity
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 7: comes in, incentivizes as do building codes and regulations and
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 7: that sort of thing. these massive, cheaply built apartment buildings,
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 7: and they can spread out the cost because they're building
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 7: at scale and they're massive. And it sounds to me
• 1:37:23
  Speaker 7: like that's a bit what's happening where you have a
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 7: developer buying 200 plots, building 200 houses, and you don't
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 7: necessarily have to worry too much about the local community
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 7: after you do that because you're making money at scale.
• 1:37:36
  Speaker 7: The costs are so spread out that... Am I making sense, Joe?
• 1:37:40
  Speaker 7: Because that's kind of how I... That's what I took
• 1:37:41
  Speaker 7: away from it a bit too.
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 10: Absolutely. And I would add something else to that, which
• 1:37:44
  Speaker 10: is you may not be even in that community. So
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 10: you might be building on behalf of a set of
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 10: investors who are a pension fund for teachers in Ontario
• 1:37:56
  Speaker 10: or shakes from the Middle East or whoever it is, right?
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 10: You know, the great example that I had in the
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 10: last story I wrote was that the Alaska Permanent Fund
• 1:38:06
  Speaker 10: owns half of Tyson's Corner in Northern Virginia, right? So
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 10: these Alaskans have no idea that their money is.
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 10: I'm sure you've been there. It's not a very organic,
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 10: lovely place. Like there's there's nice things about Tyson's Corner.
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 10: I don't mean to bash it or to sing without unnecessarily.
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 10: But the point is that the people of Alaska, they're
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 10: not living in Tyson's Corner. They don't know what their
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 10: money is doing. And that's the situation that we've created
• 1:38:34
  Speaker 10: for ourselves, which is different from past regulatory and ownership
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 10: regimes and ones that exist in other countries, where there's
• 1:38:41
  Speaker 10: more of a connection between the people who own the
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 10: land and the people who actually live there.
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 7: But the guys who are putting the money in to
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 7: create Tyson's Corner, which as you correctly note, there's been
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 7: a desperate effort to make it habitable for years. And
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 7: it's mostly just like tech money. People who live here,
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 7: my impression of it at least, is those apartments get
• 1:39:02
  Speaker 7: filled by tech money. People who spend part of their
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 7: year here or corporate money. Because there's so many corporate
• 1:39:07
  Speaker 7: headquarters in Tyson's. It's not a place where most people
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 7: are living year round. But the people who run those funds,
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 7: like the Alaska Fund, they can... they still get their
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 7: paycheck at the end of the day, and they're still
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 7: trying to deliver on their pension funds, but they're getting
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 7: paid a lot of money to spread this money out
• 1:39:24
  Speaker 7: and create these types of, or respond to these incentive
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 7: systems and destroy the suburbs and exurbs.
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 10: Yeah, and I mean, you say destroy, but you also
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 10: just mentioned, financially, it's a success. Financially, it's a success
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 10: in those areas for them, right? But I think that
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 10: the point you just raised is a good one, is the...
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 10: Investors in that particular community and the town itself, the
• 1:39:49
  Speaker 10: local government, they're actually intentionally trying to make it more
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 10: walkable and to make it more of a real city.
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 10: And they're not getting very far. And it shows just
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 10: how difficult these things are to do artificially. Organically, they
• 1:40:05
  Speaker 10: happened with no thought, right? Like a neighborhood like the
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 10: North End in Boston, which was once regarded as a slum.
• 1:40:14
  Speaker 10: And it developed based on the investments or really development
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 10: by people who were, in a lot of cases, cash-strapped
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 10: or immigrants or whatever. They really didn't put a lot
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 10: of thought into it, but they were able to organically
• 1:40:26
  Speaker 10: create that really lovely, charming, prototypically American neighborhood. And now
• 1:40:32
  Speaker 10: with all of the money in the world, we're finding
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 10: that if you're not actually living there, if you're not
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 10: investing in your own neighborhood, if you're not building your
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 10: own home or your own shop or whatever it is,
• 1:40:42
  Speaker 10: it's very, very difficult. to recreate those circumstances that make
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 10: a neighborhood lovable.
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 7: And so this really resonates with me because I'm from
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 7: the exurbs of Milwaukee, where you start to see this
• 1:40:54
  Speaker 7: creep coming, you know, first it hits the places that are,
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 7: you know, five minutes outside, then 10 minutes outside, then
• 1:40:59
  Speaker 7: 20 minutes outside. And especially post COVID, you start seeing
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 7: that because people have different commuting schedules and abilities with it,
• 1:41:04
  Speaker 7: you start seeing it go further and further. into what
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 7: used to be exurbs and then in some cases what
• 1:41:09
  Speaker 7: used to be rural areas because there's some demand. People
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 7: can live further away. So I think this is happening
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 7: all over the country right now. But to think of
• 1:41:18
  Speaker 7: a Tyson's Corner type development coming to the exurbs of
• 1:41:21
  Speaker 7: Cincinnati or Milwaukee or Minneapolis, something like that, people should,
• 1:41:28
  Speaker 7: if they're not familiar with this example, read your piece
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 7: and be aware that it's not a real example.
• 1:41:33
  Speaker 10: Place.
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 7: It's where there's so many corporate headquarters, but there's not
• 1:41:38
  Speaker 7: really any local community.
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 5: There actually aren't a lot of single family homes, if
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 5: that's something you're interested in, Joe.
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 7: They basically bulldozed this whole swath of land for high-rise condos, apartments,
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 7: and shopping. And corporate headquarters, but it's not clear to me.
• 1:41:55
  Speaker 7: I mean, I guess the typical argument would be, well,
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 7: GDP and the people of Alaska are profiting off of this.
• 1:42:02
  Speaker 7: Their pensions are more secure because of this. And it's
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 7: been great for everyone all around. But if you care
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 7: about the community, for example, you grew up in, the
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 7: risk is maybe you bring in more tax revenue, but
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 7: it's not necessarily that you're going to have stronger communities,
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 7: strong families that come with these big developments, right?
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 10: That's right. And again, part of the motivation for this
• 1:42:23
  Speaker 10: entire series is the question of how is it that
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 10: we're so wealthy and yet we are not making these
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 10: kinds of these forms of wealth? What could be more
• 1:42:34
  Speaker 10: important to your personal well-being than to live in a
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 10: house that you love or in a home that you
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 10: love in a neighborhood that you love? And not only
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 10: are we struggling with it relative to other countries in
• 1:42:46
  Speaker 10: some cases, but we're also struggling to compete with our
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 10: own our own past when we were poor, when we
• 1:42:56
  Speaker 10: had a United States that was not as wealthy as
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 10: it is today. And we had more, all of the
• 1:43:02
  Speaker 10: neighborhoods that people love, all the neighborhoods that people post
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 10: Instagram photos from are built like from before, basically are
• 1:43:09
  Speaker 10: built from before World War II, right? And so what
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 10: is it that's happened in the meantime that's taken away
• 1:43:15
  Speaker 10: this real form of deep wealth that may not show
• 1:43:18
  Speaker 10: up in GDP? from and made it harder to attain.
• 1:43:25
  Speaker 7: Right. And on that point, let me also share this article,
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 7: how the government built the American dream house. And you
• 1:43:34
  Speaker 7: go in here to Fannie and Freddie and actually some
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 7: of the big history, not just of the government, but
• 1:43:39
  Speaker 7: also of finance before World War II.
• 1:43:42
  Speaker 5: Hoover is such interesting history.
• 1:43:44
  Speaker 7: And I was hoping, Joe, that you could take us
• 1:43:46
  Speaker 7: a bit through how the government shaped some.
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 5: Of this as well.
• 1:43:50
  Speaker 10: Absolutely. And the key point is that we've come to
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 10: this situation where we see a house as a financial product.
• 1:43:58
  Speaker 10: People think about home buying as a decision that's made
• 1:44:02
  Speaker 10: on the basis of their wealth and their future retirement
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 10: and a lot of other things that are related to
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 10: economic security and to finance. And less and less is
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 10: it a decision about where to live, what where your
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 10: family is, what the neighborhood is actually like, and so forth.
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 10: And for that article, I went through some examples of
• 1:44:26
  Speaker 10: people who bought a home because they kind of bought
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 10: into this narrative that a home is the path to
• 1:44:31
  Speaker 10: financial security. And they regretted it because then they had
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 10: to live their life where they lived, right? So you
• 1:44:36
  Speaker 10: move into a neighborhood, you get your single family home,
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 10: and then suddenly you realize that it's harder to meet
• 1:44:42
  Speaker 10: up with your friends after work, or you're not seeing
• 1:44:46
  Speaker 10: your family as often, and you don't have other amenities
• 1:44:48
  Speaker 10: close by. And this is a phenomenon that was 100%
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 10: driven by the federal government over the course of decades,
• 1:44:57
  Speaker 10: promoting through policy and also through exhortation, every president, almost
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 10: every president talking it up, like housing is the way
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 10: to build wealth. Never talking about let's build beautiful neighborhoods,
• 1:45:10
  Speaker 10: let's build beautiful cities, saying a home is how you
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 10: build financial security. And then the policies, you touched on
• 1:45:17
  Speaker 10: the policies, which I went through a lot. And there's
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 10: a lot more that I could have listed, but the
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 10: big ones are, there's two really, the tax code and
• 1:45:28
  Speaker 10: the huge number of tax breaks for mortgages specifically for
• 1:45:33
  Speaker 10: taking on mortgage debt, not for buying a home per se,
• 1:45:36
  Speaker 10: but for taking on debt. And then the other one
• 1:45:39
  Speaker 10: is the, the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,
• 1:45:44
  Speaker 10: which also encourage, through a completely different side of the government,
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 10: families to load up on debt and to leverage themselves
• 1:45:51
  Speaker 10: as much as they can for this one specific financial asset.
• 1:45:56
  Speaker 5: And who pushed this?
• 1:45:57
  Speaker 7: I mean, because when you look at the system, actually,
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 7: Arthur Brooks, I'll just put it this way, has great
• 1:46:01
  Speaker 7: numbers on how material wealth has technically expanded over time,
• 1:46:06
  Speaker 7: meaning people live in bigger houses. And yet our happiness collectively,
• 1:46:11
  Speaker 7: the American people's happiness has declined as material wealth has
• 1:46:15
  Speaker 7: gone up. And again, this is technically as material wealth
• 1:46:18
  Speaker 7: went up. And I believe these are pre-COVID numbers. So
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 7: some of that may have changed. But the point remains
• 1:46:22
  Speaker 7: that we were living in bigger houses, but we were
• 1:46:26
  Speaker 7: less happy and we had more stuff, you know, cheaper TVs,
• 1:46:29
  Speaker 7: that sort of thing.
• 1:46:29
  Speaker 5: But we were less happy.
• 1:46:30
  Speaker 7: And when you go back and you look, you think, well,
• 1:46:32
  Speaker 7: who would design the system this way? Can you explain
• 1:46:34
  Speaker 7: to us, Joe, a little bit about who pushed for this,
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 7: who benefited from this?
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 10: Yeah, and the short answer is it was really everyone.
• 1:46:42
  Speaker 10: It's hard to pick a specific point, but I think
• 1:46:45
  Speaker 10: that the best place to start really is Hoover and
• 1:46:51
  Speaker 10: creating the... So this zoning is a local and state phenomenon.
• 1:46:58
  Speaker 10: They're the ones who implement zoning codes. But what's not
• 1:47:02
  Speaker 10: widely known is that this was promoted by Herbert Hoover
• 1:47:05
  Speaker 10: as Commerce Secretary and was really pushed throughout the entire country.
• 1:47:09
  Speaker 10: And the reason for that, the logic for that was twofold.
• 1:47:15
  Speaker 10: Part of it was to sort of rationalize the entire
• 1:47:18
  Speaker 10: real estate system. But another part of it was to
• 1:47:20
  Speaker 10: make life easier for companies that built at scale. Because
• 1:47:24
  Speaker 10: if zoning and building codes are regularized throughout the country,
• 1:47:30
  Speaker 10: you don't have to worry too much about which neighborhood
• 1:47:32
  Speaker 10: you're building in. You can be much bigger, right? You
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 10: don't have to be a builder that just builds in
• 1:47:37
  Speaker 10: one neighborhood or knows the lay of the land in
• 1:47:39
  Speaker 10: that city. You can build in multiple cities or across
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 10: the entire Midwest or all of California. And then the
• 1:47:46
  Speaker 10: other huge part of it was the New Deal programs
• 1:47:50
  Speaker 10: that encouraged mortgage debt and housing, also a lot of
• 1:47:55
  Speaker 10: housing tax breaks. What's happened is these have become just
• 1:47:59
  Speaker 10: part of the underlying financial and economic substrate of the
• 1:48:05
  Speaker 10: United States. Most of the people in the industry have
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 10: no awareness of these things that happened in the distant, distant,
• 1:48:11
  Speaker 10: distant past. They're just part of the landscape. They're just
• 1:48:14
  Speaker 10: part of life. But it didn't have to be that way.
• 1:48:16
  Speaker 10: It was promoted. All of these things were promoted by
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 10: people with a with a specific agenda, which was to facilitate,
• 1:48:23
  Speaker 10: make things easier for big businesses, um, and to, and,
• 1:48:26
  Speaker 10: and also to bail out the housing industry. And, um,
• 1:48:30
  Speaker 10: during the Great Depression was also a big part of it.
• 1:48:33
  Speaker 9: Hmm.
• 1:48:34
  Speaker 7: Every time these conversations are broached, especially by people on
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 7: the right, you know, I actually heard an interesting Jeremy
• 1:48:40
  Speaker 7: Boring kind of rant on this recently, where he was
• 1:48:43
  Speaker 7: saying that things in America were built cheaply and they
• 1:48:47
  Speaker 7: look kind of ugly because we had to build fast.
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 7: And that's kind of a testament to American innovation and
• 1:48:53
  Speaker 7: ingenuity and entrepreneurialism. And anytime you broach this on the right,
• 1:48:56
  Speaker 7: as I'm sure you've experienced, Joe, just looking at any
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 7: right-wing reaction to things that you've written, it's, well, do
• 1:49:02
  Speaker 7: you want people to be poorer? You're advocating for the
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 7: Alaskan pensioners to be poorer. You're advocating for Tyson's Corner
• 1:49:09
  Speaker 7: to be farmland and nothing else, as though that's a
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 7: bad thing. But anyway, you're advocating for Fairfax County to
• 1:49:16
  Speaker 7: have way less tax revenue and those sorts of things
• 1:49:19
  Speaker 7: to fund schools.
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 5: And what would your response be?
• 1:49:22
  Speaker 10: First of all, I get it because we hear so
• 1:49:26
  Speaker 10: often a certain urban agenda, which is based on, which
• 1:49:32
  Speaker 10: is very left wing. So of course, right wingers are
• 1:49:34
  Speaker 10: not going.
• 1:49:34
  Speaker 6: To like it.
• 1:49:35
  Speaker 10: It's about taking away your car. It's about taking away
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 10: your gas stove. It's about taking away your police. And
• 1:49:43
  Speaker 10: no one wants- Or your single family home. Or your
• 1:49:45
  Speaker 10: single family home, right. So I think when people hear
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 10: talk about neighborhoods, walkability, livability, they think that it's bundled
• 1:49:55
  Speaker 10: with this left wing agenda, And of course, if you're
• 1:49:59
  Speaker 10: a right-winger, you're not going to like that. I think
• 1:50:01
  Speaker 10: that's fair enough. But everyone wants abundance. Everyone wants prosperity.
• 1:50:08
  Speaker 10: Why is a lovely neighborhood not a form of prosperity? Again,
• 1:50:13
  Speaker 10: what could be more important to your personal well-being than
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 10: to feel secure, safe, and happy in your own home?
• 1:50:19
  Speaker 10: Where you go, it's the place where you leave every
• 1:50:22
  Speaker 10: morning from that home and you return to it every
• 1:50:24
  Speaker 10: day of life, every day at the end of the day.
• 1:50:27
  Speaker 10: It's where your family's going to be. Isn't that such
• 1:50:30
  Speaker 10: a key component of your well-being that not just your
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 10: own home, but your neighborhood where you live? Don't you
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 10: want to live in a healthy, safe, thriving, beautiful neighborhood?
• 1:50:42
  Speaker 10: So I totally understand the impulse to think that this,
• 1:50:47
  Speaker 10: that anytime this entire topic of of cities comes up to,
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 10: to kind of be on guard. I, that's one of
• 1:50:54
  Speaker 10: the things that, um, I think has been inculcated over
• 1:50:56
  Speaker 10: the course of decades because this, the people who've been
• 1:50:59
  Speaker 10: talking about this disproportionately have been anti-car. They have been
• 1:51:03
  Speaker 10: anti-big house and they've been, um, more skeptical of policing
• 1:51:07
  Speaker 10: and all the rest.
• 1:51:08
  Speaker 5: The bike lane people.
• 1:51:10
  Speaker 3: Um, yeah, exactly. Bicycles. Yeah.
• 1:51:13
  Speaker 7: Anyway, as someone who uses a lot of bike lanes, but, uh, Joe, um,
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 7: Your 7-Eleven piece was, I think, so helpful because it
• 1:51:19
  Speaker 7: actually reminded me a lot of the Dollar General discourse.
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 7: And just thinking about having lived in private equity-owned apartment buildings,
• 1:51:27
  Speaker 7: the option shouldn't be you either live in private equity-owned
• 1:51:31
  Speaker 7: apartment buildings where you can hear every sneeze that your
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 7: neighbor makes, or you have a 7-Eleven or nothing else.
• 1:51:39
  Speaker 7: We've come to accept this choice where it's like you
• 1:51:41
  Speaker 7: get your 7-Eleven, you get your Dollar General, that pays
• 1:51:44
  Speaker 7: people shitty wages back to a multinational corporation, or you
• 1:51:48
  Speaker 7: have farmland.
• 1:51:49
  Speaker 5: That, to me, feels like a false choice.
• 1:51:51
  Speaker 7: And that's the one that I would imagine, without putting
• 1:51:53
  Speaker 7: words in his mouth, Jeremy Boring would say, if it's
• 1:51:57
  Speaker 7: not the 7-Eleven, if it's not the Dollar General, if
• 1:51:59
  Speaker 7: it's not the damn shipping container Starbucks, it's nothing.
• 1:52:03
  Speaker 5: It's that.
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 7: Or you just have farmland, or in the Rust Belt,
• 1:52:07
  Speaker 7: you have these old factories, that sort of thing. That
• 1:52:10
  Speaker 7: just feels like an unacceptable false choice. And I don't
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 7: know if I'm naive, Joe, you've spent more time in
• 1:52:14
  Speaker 7: the space than I have. It seems like it's not
• 1:52:18
  Speaker 7: a real choice. It doesn't have to be that dichotomy.
• 1:52:22
  Speaker 3: Right, exactly.
• 1:52:24
  Speaker 10: And we can look at the different ways the system
• 1:52:28
  Speaker 10: has the thumb on the scale for the Dollar General
• 1:52:32
  Speaker 10: or the 7-Eleven. Versus a small neighborhood that has a
• 1:52:36
  Speaker 10: mom-and-pop store that can survive right next to a bookstore
• 1:52:41
  Speaker 10: or a restaurant or a small hotel or whatever it
• 1:52:43
  Speaker 10: is in a mixed-use setting. So I think, again, one
• 1:52:52
  Speaker 10: good way to look at this is the incentives that
• 1:52:55
  Speaker 10: are in the system for building a really large apartment
• 1:52:59
  Speaker 10: building that's like private equity or re-owned that has... Nothing
• 1:53:04
  Speaker 10: else has no retail nearby or attached to it. It
• 1:53:07
  Speaker 10: can house a thousand people, a thousand singles who go
• 1:53:12
  Speaker 10: back to their apartments or on their phones at night
• 1:53:14
  Speaker 10: and are not interacting with each other or whatever it is, right?
• 1:53:17
  Speaker 10: And that is a product that can be defined and
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 10: it can be legible to big investors who don't need
• 1:53:24
  Speaker 10: to care about where they're investing. And it's a packaged,
• 1:53:30
  Speaker 10: understandable financial product, right? And it's fine if someone wants
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 10: to build those in a free market, but why not
• 1:53:41
  Speaker 10: take the thumb off of the scale and make it
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 10: just as advantageous or just as easy to build the
• 1:53:50
  Speaker 10: mixed use development that has maybe bottom floor retail, two
• 1:53:55
  Speaker 10: stories of apartments above it. People seem to like that
• 1:54:00
  Speaker 10: in Paris, that kind of neighborhood, you know, a bakery
• 1:54:04
  Speaker 10: with apartments, a restaurant with a hotel, a church right
• 1:54:09
  Speaker 10: next to a daycare or whatever it is. Those are
• 1:54:13
  Speaker 10: products that are discouraged under the current set of government
• 1:54:17
  Speaker 10: regulations and business practices. So definitely what you're saying is correct.
• 1:54:23
  Speaker 10: It's a bit of a false choice that we've been
• 1:54:25
  Speaker 10: pushed into.
• 1:54:26
  Speaker 7: Before I let you go, I had to ask about
• 1:54:28
  Speaker 7: what I thought was a fascinating counterexample in Downton Abbey,
• 1:54:31
  Speaker 7: because there's this great subplot in Downton Abbey of the
• 1:54:34
  Speaker 7: closing of the commons. And if people haven't watched Downton Abbey,
• 1:54:37
  Speaker 7: this is not a spoiler, just to say, because of
• 1:54:39
  Speaker 7: the historic time period that the show takes place, they
• 1:54:42
  Speaker 7: are grappling with the closing of the commons and arguably
• 1:54:45
  Speaker 7: globalization and all of that, Joe.
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
• 1:54:48
  Speaker 7: If you don't want spoilers to Downton Abbey, maybe tune out.
• 1:54:50
  Speaker 7: But I think these would only be gentle spoilers because
• 1:54:53
  Speaker 7: we're talking about real history, Joe. And I was wondering
• 1:54:56
  Speaker 7: if you could kind of flesh out for us what
• 1:54:57
  Speaker 7: happened or how the West kind of came to think
• 1:55:00
  Speaker 7: about all of this stuff vis-a-vis the Downton Abbey example.
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 10: Yeah, and I confess that I don't have complete mastery
• 1:55:06
  Speaker 10: of the plot of Down Nabi anymore.
• 1:55:08
  Speaker 3: You forget it.
• 1:55:09
  Speaker 10: But yeah, so this is a great example, right? The
• 1:55:12
  Speaker 10: entire premise of the show was based on the fact
• 1:55:14
  Speaker 10: that the property was going to be given to someone
• 1:55:19
  Speaker 10: who the main characters didn't even know because of England's
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 10: very strict property rights laws. So the general point is
• 1:55:28
  Speaker 10: that these, the general point is that they, the family
• 1:55:34
  Speaker 10: was extremely tightly connected to the land by the law.
• 1:55:38
  Speaker 10: And so they had a great incentive to make it
• 1:55:41
  Speaker 10: as lovely, as successful and as beautiful as possible because it's,
• 1:55:44
  Speaker 10: it's their, it's their family. The, the, the, not just
• 1:55:47
  Speaker 10: their house, but their actual town reflected their family name.
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 10: And it's a point of pride. And, um, and the
• 1:55:55
  Speaker 10: fact that it could be potentially given to someone who
• 1:55:58
  Speaker 10: they don't even know was causing a ton of trouble
• 1:56:00
  Speaker 10: for them, of course. But the property rights laws have
• 1:56:04
  Speaker 10: changed completely. In the United States, we basically never had
• 1:56:07
  Speaker 10: laws like that that tied the property so closely to
• 1:56:11
  Speaker 10: a family that would be there for generations and would
• 1:56:13
  Speaker 10: invest in it over the course of generations.
• 1:56:15
  Speaker 7: And for some good reasons, because we're not an aristocracy.
• 1:56:18
  Speaker 7: But yeah, we don't have the feudal history, right?
• 1:56:20
  Speaker 10: Yeah, of course. And instead, we went in the other direction,
• 1:56:24
  Speaker 10: which makes land much more of a commodity that can
• 1:56:27
  Speaker 10: be bought and sold. And of course, there's good things
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 10: about that.
• 1:56:30
  Speaker 3: Globally.
• 1:56:30
  Speaker 8: Exactly.
• 1:56:31
  Speaker 6: Globally.
• 1:56:31
  Speaker 10: And there's good things about that. And that allows for
• 1:56:34
  Speaker 10: rapid development. That allows for industrialization if it's going to
• 1:56:38
  Speaker 10: occur very quickly. But we do have this. It's just
• 1:56:42
  Speaker 10: an example that shows some of the downsides of losing
• 1:56:46
  Speaker 10: that connection between the people who own the property and
• 1:56:49
  Speaker 10: the people who live there.
• 1:56:51
  Speaker 7: Joe Lawler, thank you for taking the time to walk
• 1:56:54
  Speaker 7: us through all this. I can't recommend enough your series
• 1:56:57
  Speaker 7: about all of this in the New Atlantis, which is long.
• 1:57:00
  Speaker 7: We didn't even basically scratch the surface because your reporting
• 1:57:02
  Speaker 7: is so in-depth. Really appreciate you taking the time, Joe.
• 1:57:05
  Speaker 10: Thank you so much, Emily.