9/11/26: Houthis Hit Saudi Pipeline, Trump Pledges Voters Should Cheat, AOC Courts MAHA, Wall Street City Killer

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It works on over 100 stains, and it's America's number one stain-fighter additive brand. It's color-safe and chlorine-free. So, I use it on whites, colors, and dark fabrics. And OxyClean isn't just for laundry. Mix it with water for use all around the house, kitchens, bathrooms, and even floors. When my kids go all in, I say go for it. Because I've got OxyClean to get the stains out. It's not clean unless it's OxyClean. Hey, guys. Ready or not, 2024 is here. And we, here at Breaking Points, are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Good morning, everyone. We have an incredible show here on Friday, September 11th. How's everybody doing? Crystal? Ryan? And Emily returning? Full Friday crew. Yeah, I feel like it's been a minute since we've all been together. Yeah, I agree. So I'm so excited to be here with all of you. Indeed. And also, I was just thinking that, again, I gave tremendous investment advice. Now, legally, we have to offer the disclaimer that this is not investment advice and you should speak to your investment professional. But we did say that if the choice was big. Between $100 barrel of oil and a month free at Breaking Points, either was a good investment. And if you'd have bought that $100 barrel of oil on Wednesday, you made 10%. That's right. For 48 hours. We're inflation safe right here. If the hedge fund makes 10% in a year they're celebrating, you would have made 10% in two days. Now, what is the premium subscription trading at this morning? It's still trading at zero for the first month. That's right. And then. After that month, when you stop paying attention, boom, you start getting. Is it annual? I guess it's. Or do you start getting charged monthly? Well, listen, Ryan, this is my only opportunity. Report back to us. to pitch and get some numbers on the board here, okay? BreakingPoints.com, you can do a free monthly or yearly trial. I'm not trying to compete with Ryan or Sagar. I'm just trying to get some points on the board here. So if you sign up today, leave a comment on this video, points on the board for Griffin. Griffin's just trying to get his paycheck to clear. It's subscription rips for Griffin. I'm never trying to be first. I just want to be on the podium. But let's get to some really important news that's happening this morning. You are the Riley Gaines of Breaking Points. I've always said it. That's right. That's right. And this is why when we got asked this week who was the funniest on Breaking Points, I said Emily. Thank you. Sagar was arguing for Ryan, but I was saying Emily, although we did all agree Griffin is also very funny. But they were asking specifically about the. Four main hosts. Well, there's one place that you don't want to be swimming right now, and that's, of course, the Red Sea. We got a lot to talk about. The Saudis have been routed by the Houthis. We're going to be getting a lot into that and an East-West Saudi pipeline that has been struck by the Houthis. We're going to take a look at some incredible, interesting, bizarre quotes from the GOP midterm convention. And we're going to get our little. We're going to get our little Maha hats on for a sec to talk about food safety. So get excited for that. And finally, Emily is going to be going in with an interview about private equity, our favorite type of business. Lots to get into, but let's just start with this image here that I want everyone to react to of the East-West pipeline that has been struck. We've got this image here of a black plume of smoke. If I scroll down here, we've got. We've got another one that's from Satellite. When the black smoke is rising, that means a new leader of the Middle East has been chosen. We also have a video here. Yes. We have a video here of the Saudi troops surrendering en masse. Let me get that up here on screen. My understanding is that these are not actually Saudi troops. According to the community note here, these were the, you know, quote-unquote, internationally recognized Yemeni government direct troops. But in any case. You see a mass surrender event here as the Houthis have really, I mean, stunning offensive, taken control of the entire Red Sea coast, effectively, key islands. And so when we think about the Iran war, this is about their own war, let's be clear. But when we think about their ability to also affect global oil prices and have an impact in terms of the Iran war, this is obviously extremely, extremely significant, especially when you combine together the potential, certain damage and potential destruction of the East-West pipeline, which has been one of the key ways that we've been able to still get some significant amount of barrels of oil out of the Middle East. It's a pretty dire situation, and especially coming at a time when already oil markets were looking very shaky, prices going up and up. We had Brent crude hitting $107 a barrel yesterday. We have diesel over, well over $200 a barrel at this point. So. So. So. So. So you already had kind of run out of the limits of Trump's ability to manipulate the markets and jawbone. China is reentering the market in, you know, not back to where they were in terms of the level of import, but increasing what they're bringing in. This looks like a pretty dim scenario for the global economy and certainly for gas prices. Yes. And, Griffin, do you have the Barak Ravid scoop? Yes. Barak Ravid reported that Prince MBS called President Trump twice Thursday, urging him to launch strikes against the Houthis as the Iran-backed group closed in on vital Red Sea checkpoint. Trump declined for now. And Trump is declining because in the spring of 2025, after Trump said that he was going to absolutely obliterate Yemen or the Houthis, answer Allah, they withstood an extraordinarily punishing attack and then reached. reached a ceasefire that was direct with the United States, a one-to-one ceasefire. In other words, the Houthis could still continue to fight the Saudi-backed and Emirati-backed forces in Yemen. They could continue to launch strikes on Israel. They could continue to strike Israeli ships or Saudi ships. But they reached an agreement with the United States, letting American and other international ships through. And clearly, Trump is not prepared to blow that ceasefire up because if he does, then American and international ships, are facing the choke point of Bab al-Mandeb Strait, which is now even more firmly controlled by the Houthis, and you'd see another uptick in inflation. And so the people are also wondering what is up with the Saudi Air Force. Like you have something like 150 very fancy planes that you bought from the United States. You've got the pilots that are trained. You've got the equipment. Like what is going on? Like why? You don't, you don't have one or two that can fly. It's, that is fascinating to watch. But so the timeline here, so after this ceasefire was struck, you remember August of 2025, when the Israelis came in and just assassinated the entire Yemeni civilian government, the Ansar Allah government. Like they killed the, in one giant meeting, they found a cabinet meeting and killed everybody in the building, like the prime minister, you know, the cabinet secretary for this, that, and the other thing. All of these civilian officials, and here we are just a little more than a year later and they're in effective control of most of the government. And it wouldn't have happened if MBS in July, this July had not bombed the Sana'a airport. Like there was a ceasefire between the Houthis and the Saudis. And the Iranians were kind of itching, like kind of nudging the Houthis. Like, come on guys, we're like getting, we're getting hammered over here. You keep getting called Iran's problem. Proxies, we're going to see some missiles flying from the Houthis over here. Like we're dying here and they weren't doing anything. And then in July they get hit by Saudi Arabia. So they're like, okay, well now we're going to respond. The, the level of like kind of hubris from both Trump and then from MBS is incredible. Like none of this, none of this would be happening if MBS and Trump had just done nothing. Whether you're talking about Iran or whether you're talking about the situation in Yemen. and now like saudi is screwed like what are they going to do now so the you uh griffin you have anything else you want to play this um this kind of pro houthi analyst that was on al jazeera yeah let me pull this up for you right here oh yeah i've i've i can play it here he he this uh hussein um al buccati uh he's a kind of a pro houthi analyst who's joining al jazeera from uh from Sana'a here, and we can roll some of this. I think this is where he asks them, what are you going to do with international ships here? Can you give the international community there about the future and safe passage of vessels through the Bab al-Mandab? I mean, Yemeni armed forces has not targeted any ships, only designed straight ships because they want to force Israel to stop the genocide. So what Yemen was doing, they were trying to implement international law by forcing the Zionist state of Israel to stop the genocide. We know that the International Criminal Court has issued a warrant against Netanyahu and as well against his minister of defense, and the international community has failed. The Palestinian people, they should actually be the one who have a blockade against the Zionist state of Israel, like they did decisions either against Iraq or against Libya or against Sudan. So Yemeni were the one. And about the international community, they have failed Yemen. And Yemen will only target ships that belong to any country who have aggression or war against us. Any other ship, they could just go through the Red Sea safely. Let's stop on that one for a second. Crystal, any thoughts on that? They're being very clear. If you're at war with the Houthis, like the Saudis, then your ships are jammed up. And if the international community, the International Criminal Court, has an arrest warrant out for you, then the Houthis are going to take action there. But everybody else is able to go through. Yeah. But, of course, with greater control over the region, the threat of, you know, that ceasefire collapsing and them changing their minds about that approach looms large. And I think with all of this, you know, Trump's whole strategy with the Iran war at this point was to slowly strangle Iran and hope that that was going to lead to a different result over the long term. But the long term has to survive the short term. You have to get through the short term. And so what we have all been saying is, why would Iran just sit there and take it? Conditions on the ground could change. They're going to escalate. They have escalated. And now we have another variable that's entered into the mix that very much cuts against, you know, the U.S.'s plans here in terms of, you know, the U.S.'s plans here in terms of, you know, in terms of the slow economic bleed that they were trying to effectuate, that they were hoping there would be much greater costs on Iran. There are greater costs on Iran, but Iran is also in an existential war, whereas the U.S., we don't even support this war. We don't want to be in this war at all. The vast majority of the public is like, what are we doing and why are we still doing it? Well, it reminds me of that interesting report in The Washington Post leading up to Trump's decision on February 28th to launch the war that he was being nudged into it, according to this report, by MBS, that there was a significant amount of pressure from MBS. And I remember we were sort of skeptical of that report at the time, and reasonably so, because you could look ahead to scenarios like this one and ask, why is MBS pushing for this war? But on top of that, the Axios report, as Griffin laid out, says MBS called Trump twice on Thursday. Twice. Just to remind everyone, that's a lot of foreign press coming from a man who is so heavily invested in Trump's son-in-law's firm, in Affinity Partners. It was like the seed money for Jared Kushner's Affinity Group. I think that's what it's called, Affinity Group. So the pressure is not just coming from Affinity Partners. It's not just coming from any foreign leader. It's coming from a foreign leader who has a significant amount of family and business ties to Trump himself. I think that's actually pretty frightening because I think in the past, Trump has shown that he's willing to take that pressure seriously and to take those connections seriously. Yeah, is there a retinue now? I saw Trita Parsi tweeting this morning, you know, how's that U.S.-led defense pact in the region looking at this point? Because, I mean, that was what the whole petrodollar, the whole regional, you know, concept from the U.S.'s perspective was built on the idea that. You're going to sell oil and it's going to be denominated in U.S. dollars and we are going to reap tremendous benefits from that in terms of investments in our bond market and in our stocks and in our country. You are going to get our defense umbrella. That is the deal. How is that deal looking at this point? How is that going? You know, it's one more blow to the not only petrodollar, but U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency. And there are also reports that the Gulf countries are thinking, you know, getting together and meeting directly with Iran about, hey, let's work this out ourselves in terms of the Strait of Hormuz and what the new reality is going to look like. And so in the rest of this interview, they get into kind of where this conflict goes from here. And the interesting background really is that, you know, Saudi Arabia and the UAE collectively were part of a joint coalition fighting against the Houthis starting in 2015-16. And over the last several years, the UAE and Saudi, you know, have been fighting against each other. They have fallen out. The UAE is, you know, significantly in control of Aden. The Saudi-backed forces that were in retreat went to Aden and now are not even being led into the city by the UAE-backed forces. So there's this kind of comical pileup of junkers and armed men who have kind of nowhere to go outside the city limits. And meanwhile, the Saudis made sure to keep every little town and village and kind of. you know, area of the part of Yemen that their forces controlled separated and weak because they wanted. they didn't want the Houthis to control Yemen, but they also didn't want an actual state of Yemen that had independent decision-making authority to take power either. And it was really that decision by MBS to weaken his own partners that allowed the Houthis to roll through here. There was a 2022 truce that led to a 23 agreement, which is kind of a roadmap piece. And you'll see that the Houthi analyst here is saying that that's kind of off the table at this point. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan could become operational. How concerned is the. Oh, yeah, and here he's asking about this recent pact that Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey agreed to, this defense pact. Are the Houthis scared that Pakistan and Turkey are going to enter the fray? The answer to the Houthi leadership about that. I mean, silly for Pakistan even to sign that agreement. I believe the main reason for Turkey and Pakistan to sign that agreement is because they want to get money and fund and help from the Saudi regime, especially Pakistan. They've been getting billions of dollars in funds and aid to the Pakistani economy because the Pakistani and the Turkish government should know and should remember that during the prosperity guardian with the United States and as well with the Zionist state, the state of Israel and United Kingdom and many countries have targeted Yemen with thousands of airstrikes. They couldn't even stop Yemeni from blocking the Red Sea in front of the Zionist state of Israel. So what could Pakistan and Turkey add to that? We know that the United States is one of the most powerful countries in the world, and they couldn't do that. As well, during the 10 years of war, the Saudi conducted 3,000 airstrikes against Yemen, destroyed almost all infrastructure, but all Yemeni ability or army, was not intact. So is the peace process now dead once and for all? I can say that at this point there is no any negotiation, but a Yemeni demand before attacking Saudi Arabia when Saudi broke the ceasefire two months ago by targeting the airport, the demand was to lift the blue gate and to implement the roadmap that was signed, agreement that was signed in 2020, after the truce that was as well agreed in 2022. But I believe the demand of today, it will be different than the demand of yesterday. The demand of today will be different than the demand two months ago, because now I believe that Yemeni here government, their demand now will be different. It's not about implementing the roadmap. It is now it will be about that the Saudi must withdraw from all Yemen. They must stop funding and sending logistic supplies and as well money and any type. Of weapons to any of the groups in Yemen. And as well, they should stop interfering in Yemen. They should as well. They must pay a compensation to everything that has been lost or destroyed in Yemen. And I believe that Yemeni Yemeni government will will will make sure that those demand are implemented because it will be silly that you has been asking. We have been asking since 2023 here in Sanaa for the Saudi to implement the roadmap map. And now when we are advancing when we are attacking, when we are liberating our country, we're going to go back to the same demand. This will be actually the silliest at the most stupid. That'll be the stupidest thing. could do is so yeah and and he starts with look you came at us with the americans the israelis the saudis the british you bombed the hell out of us for 10 years and look at us like what are the pakistanis and turks gonna do it's a reasonable question and ryan like so you know trump has been reluctant to end this war and pay off iran for all these damages and give them control but now we have a second straight that we're also going to have to pay off and still somehow that seems cheaper than continuing this war like please just pay both these people off cnn was reporting we better hurry up and end this before we find a third straight that we're gonna have to yeah there cannot be a third straight complete the straight of taiwan another body is in play yeah it's in place walter's like wait a minute these cruise ships are paying and and and and like we mentioned the top of show but we it's good to go back to this east west pipeline that's been destroyed as well for the saudis is pumping what 60 70 of the oil they're putting out a month right now and so we're not we the diesel just broke six dollars here nationally for the first time historically in the country and that's going to look cheap soon i mean are we going to get into energy rationing are they're going to start to be lines at the gas pumps like crystal emily what do we have to do we're going to have to make sure that we're going to have to do the right thing and we're going to have to make sure that we're going to be doing the right thing and we're going to have to do the right thing and we're going to have to do the right thing and we're going to have to do the right thing and we're going to have to do the right thing and we're going to have to do the right thing and we're going to have to do the right thing and we're going to have to do the right thing what is the breaking point uh i didn't even mean to say that but what is the breaking point for the public in terms of gas and diesel prices and we i think i said i don't know is it six dollars like two days later here we are so i don't think it's going to be any type of breaking point with the public because the public is already furious and the public is already in complete and total opposition to this but that's insane and we're not we haven't even seen the ripple effects throughout the rest of the economy yet yeah i mean i would say the public if you look at the fact that of the political ramifications um that could be in play when you're talking about a nebraska and a kansas and an iowa and a texas that are now legitimate targets for in the case of nebraska with an independent candidate but are now um you know legitimately at risk for republicans i think you have to say the public has already hit their breaking point even if the politicians in dc are very much insulated from the way that the already high gas prices have deeply hurt people with diesel i mean this is really gets to the lifeblood of your entire economy because you have obviously this goes into farming you know farmers are already suffering in so many ways and then every good that's shipped to the store in a big diesel truck the prices are going to be going up i watched a video yesterday of a guy who runs um some sort of a business a trucking business and he was saying i can't i've voted for you i still support you which is kind of wild to me but anyway i voted for you i still support you i can't run my business like this truck cannot leave this garage with prices as they are because i can't charge my customers anymore this is going to be a big deal for me i can't run my business like this truck still just say hey i'll do the project later i'm not paying this increased price so i'm at the max of what i can charge it does not cover my cost you know this is just one guy but you can imagine this playing out over and over and over across the entire economy so you know the diesel prices are not the ones that most people feel immediately in terms of the sticker shock but as far as the impact on the broader economy diesel arguably even more important and have you seen the scandal uh that's hit roger marshall in kansas the incumbent republican senator he's he's a doctor and it emerged that he had sued something like 700 plus of his patients in this extraordinarily draconian fashion um over bogus you know bogus billing practices that he was engaged in driving these patients like into bankruptcy and misery his own his own patients um and so this is now becoming a major story in kansas because people are like you know people like they hate this stuff like it's it's the epitome of the kind of thing that they hate these these fake you know fabricated medical bills that nobody can really understand um where you just layer on top charge after charge after charge and then set you know bounce it off between the insurance company and the and the patient then you sue over it like that that's the level where it gets to the most predatory most times they don't you know they'll they'll stop it like um you know debt collection or something along those lines he's taking it all the way to the courts and suing his own patients uh driving them into bankruptcy and so people are like wait a minute you're a public servant united states senator and you're running against a liberal church pastor who seemed fine and which i didn't know was the thing by the way an entire state yeah emily so what what is the uh what is the liberal mega church world well you've just opened up a can of worms ryan but um because a lot of you know evangelicals would say many mega churches or or catholics also would say many mega churches even if they're uh are already too liberal they have sometimes female pastors and that sort of thing but like genuinely overtly sort of episcopalian uh like that would have the politics of an episcopalian or like alka type uh evangelical lutheran type environment that is actually a thing and especially in places like in the middle of the country where yeah they tend to be more liberal it's not as common as more conservative evangelical churches but it is a thing it's a i don't know much about that congregation but uh it is interesting like i don't know that we've ever had a major democratic candidate with that background before uh well going back to the battlefield for just a second like what do you guys make of the fact that the saudis just kind of folded like a paper tiger even though they have all this tech it's very reminds me a lot of our own tech um being because it is ours it is yeah that's true you know what that's why it they're about to have laundry fires on their boats um and you know which leads me to this reporting that there are yemeni actors running clod to create missile guidance systems uh this report says we identified a cell of threat actors based in northern yemen running three weapon development programs a guided rocket that uses a commodity phone class flight computer with final phase homing guidance the actors use clod code in place of human software engineers to develop the guidance navigation and control software that steers and stabilizes a flying vehicle for example they use clod to integrate an open source autopilot onto a phone class flight computer writing the control and position estimation software turning the control settings running a firmware firmware build pipeline and performing a flight simulation the actors manage several clod instances at once assigning each one a role much as a lead would delegate work on a small engineering system so they thank you thank you big tech for contributing to this war in some way this shit is insane but it is kind of wild that they have just let this technology just fly and now they're it's being used against us well i mean it's so predictable right no it's so obviously pretty i saw it not to pick on him i saw matt stoller tweeting out like hey if this ai is so powerful how come we're getting our ass kicked by iran when we've got all this fancy ai enabled stuff and it's like well maybe there's the answer they can use it that's what they can also use the ai that's available so not only but iran also has been using apparently clod for um their own purposes very predictably which again real targets not anthropic had that huge blow up with the pentagon and which was actually just like very interesting it raised like interesting questions about the effects of having these massive super powerful ai companies and do i think pete hex's rationale for wanting to like have anthropic totally under the control of the pentagon was pure no but it of course comes to the enormous potential these things could be used for military purposes either by us or against us and anthropic just casually drops this report after they have their guy out there responding to coxson saying yeah we think there's like a 10 percent as you guys covered a 10 percent threat to humanity from it but it's still it hasn't gotten that high 10 that's their own person who hasn't even resigned or quit saying that so then they casually drop this report about how enemies actually are using their own shit and we're just supposed to go about life business as usual um and hope jim cliburn figures out how to use he's already mastered chat gpt um next up he'll he'll master how to use clod and so somehow the government will regulate this in a way that makes sense yeah i mean there's a lot of the concerns that are being raised now on the existential front especially after the the Hugging Face hacking and other similar incidents were about what if AI is misaligned from humans? What if it sort of goes rogue and you have these rogue swarms? The immediate problem we're facing is what are the humans doing with the AI? Because humans are not always particularly aligned with human values. And there are a lot of conflicts about what those values are and what they should be and the way that tech should be deployed. There's another report yesterday, I think also from Anthropic, that they stopped a number of scientists from using their products because they thought that it looked like they were trying to develop biological weapons, which is, again, something that has been anticipated and warned about. So that's already the realm that we're in right now, is that you have technology, which is quite capable already. They mentioned the IRGC in that report. Yes, exactly. Technology that is quite capable already. That's in the hands of anybody who wants it. And there's no real government regulation. There's certainly no international cooperation around what the boundaries and the guidelines should be. And I think most people find that to be very troubling. So, yeah, I mean, it's an incredible amount of American arrogance that we just assumed, like, only we're going to use this product that's completely publicly available. We should have known when we saw the, like, Lego videos coming out and they were kicking our ass just in propaganda, in, like, AI slot propaganda that they were going to put Claude and everything else to use to the fullest extent possible. And so that's what we're learning now. I'm petitioning to change the Department of Justice to the Department of Human Alignment. We should get some human alignment first. Your local police, they're human aligners. Yeah. I mean, it's not looking good for Trump leading into these midterms. For us, Griffin, it's not looking good for anyone. You're right. You're right. But I think the only way that Trump could actually take these midterms is if he starts arresting people at these companies. I think that would be the only thing that would turn the country around. But I think that leads us nicely to a riveting midterm GOP convention. Let's take a look over there now. Do you hear that? That sound, right? That means that Summer's officially here. It means that grown adults just sprint into the street for a frozen dessert. Shaped like a cartoon. But this summer, Mint Mobile has a better treat. Every plan, including Unlimited, is $15 a month. And unlike ice cream, it won't drip down your wrist or look nothing like the picture. Does anyone have any cash? Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for a 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent to taxes and fees extra. New customer offer for initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. Don't make it harder with a dozen apps that don't talk to you. Don't make it One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. Why not you? That's odoo.com. We know kids don't know. Don't hold back. Get in there. Make a mess. Slide for home. Bring on the stains. It works on over 100 stains, and it's America's number one stain fighter additive brand. It's color safe and chlorine free. So I use it on whites, colors, and dark fabrics. A riveting, jam-packed GOP midterm convention was had, and we just wanted to flag a few eyebrow raising quotes from Mr. President Trump. Let's start with this one, where Trump asked for a pledge from the audience. This was last night. Please raise your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. I pledge to the greatest president in the United States. Put your hand down, Ryan. I want to hear the pledge first. I can't even breathe. Hashtag, I can't breathe. I will go out with my family, my friends. I'll do it anyway. I don't care if I'm registered or not. I'm going to try and cheat like hell like they do. There's never been bigger cheaters. I don't care. I am going to go out, and I'm going to get my friends, my family, and we are going to vote on November 3rd, or we are going to vote before that. All right, so our new election security is fine. You don't have to register. You don't have to register anymore, Ryan. You missed the part where he said that if you don't, you go to hell. That was also another. Joke's on me, though. There's nobody running in D.C. because we don't have senators or representatives. Yeah. Yeah. So this speech. This speech was last night. He gave nearly a two-hour speech the night before. And last night was J.D. Vance as the keynote. J.D. gives a normal speech, and then Trump comes out apparently just to close the convention. And it did not go as expected, or it went exactly as you might expect. He got up there and started riffing, telling people they're going to go to hell if they don't vote. It had to have been close to a half an hour. That was rather unexpected. Unexpected from, I guess, the people who organized the convention, who thought that he was just going to come out there and close it. But indeed, he was not capable of saying, the convention is over. Thank you for coming. It went much longer than that. Well, there is certainly not beating the cult allegations between the creepy pledges. And then, Griffin, can you cue up the montage that they did, a spinoff of, yes, the famous Paul Harvey speech, which was probably made even more famous by the Super Bowl Dodge Ram commercial that used the speech. They did their own version of this. And I'm particularly interested in Emily's view of this. They've done this before, by the way. Oh, really? I forgot about it. 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, I need a caretaker. So God gave us Trump. Good Lord. I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the war. I need somebody with arms strong enough to rustle the deep state and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild. Somebody to ruffle the feathers. Tame, cantankerous world economic forum. Come home hungry. Have to wait until the first lady is done with lunch with friends. I need somebody who can shape an axe, but wield a sword. Have courage to step foot in North Korea. Make money from the tar of the sand. Turn liquid to gold. Who understands the difference between tariffs and inflation will finish his 40 hour week by Tuesday noon, but then put in another 72 hours. So God made Trump. God had to have somebody willing to go into the den of vipers. Call out the fake news for their tongues as sharp as a serpent's. The poison of vipers is on their lips and yet stop. So God made Trump. God said, I need somebody who will be strong and courageous, who will not be afraid or terrified of the wolves when they attack. A man who cares for the flock. A shepherd to mankind who won't ever leave nor forsake them. I need the most diligent worker. A shepherd to mankind. Remain strong in faith and know the belief of God. Oh, Paula. Somebody who's willing to drill. Is this going to go forever? I feel like I've been watching this for half an hour. 30 more seconds. Come on. We got it. We got to power through. It's too good. Farm the lands, secure our borders, build our military, fight the system all day, and finish a hard week's work by attending church at the golf course. Church on Sunday. Yeah. He never goes. To be the envy of the world again. Why is God made Trump? Why is Don Jr. getting a shout out here? I don't know. I probably because he spoke last night would be my guess. I don't know. He was a lead in. Yeah. People were saying he's a little too sober and the speech was boring. So I don't know. I didn't watch it myself. That's just. That's what the Internet commentary was saying. But I know for some reason, Emily, the part of that that triggered me the most was when they talked about how hard he worked, given the fact that this man is like, first of all, at every sporting event, that's anything on the golf course, like multiple times during the week has way more leisure time than literally any one of us and is somehow president of the United States. Yeah, there's that. And it's also I saw that they had aired this right after listening to J.D. Vance's speech, which I thought technically just from a political standpoint. intentionally trying to draw contrast out of in his speech is kind of the weird he was doing tim wallace like a reverse tim wallace he was trying to like depict all of the dsa candidates as weird and wacky and it's like you cannot pull that off if at the exact same night of the convention you're rolling this like abject mega cringe about god creating trump to be a shepherd for mankind it is so deeply bizarre that it undermines any effort that you were making at this convention to depict the left which was basically clearly an intentional strategy so it was basically the through line of the entire two-day convention was vance making this pitch to vance and all the other republicans yes we have some problems like we understand the trump administration you know they didn't outright say this we understand the trump administration you may not agree with us on everything vance was like straight to camera last night going to young men who may not be happy with the iran war may not be happy with certain choices the trump administration has made but said basically we're better than the other guys hell of a political pitch but it's really hard to say everyone else is weird griffin you can pull that clip back up so it actually is a great segue here when you're rolling uh god made trump or god sent trump to be the shepherd of mankind but god also made talarico 's web browser history this talarico guy he will not shut up about how there are six genders he will not shut up about how quote god is non-binary i don't know what the hell that even means my friends he won't shut up about having traditional christian values makes you a bigot and i gotta say a guy that age who was so obsessed and focused on transgender children i don't know about you but i never want to see that guy's web browser history i think that's an enormously cynical thing to say like i was listening to this we'd rather be here i was listening to this live last night and i actually again i thought he technically delivered a pretty strong speech but listening to that live it struck me as enormously cynical to accuse someone of implicitly being a pedophile basically from the vice president of the united states it's not something i think we should be particularly numb to there's absolutely no evidence that james talarico as much as you may disagree with him or dislike him as many people myself including do that he is a pedophile and i don't want to get numb to some of these like trump era reflexes that republicans have developed but again on the politics you're trying to make democrats look completely like they're bizarre they're weird it's a reverse tim walls and then trump with god sent trump to be a shepherd of mankind and all the other weird trump stuff that happened at the convention a little hard to pull that off and as long as we're just yeah just from a political point of view i think that's a really good point i think that's a perspective night one you had the montage featuring hassan piker's meat and night two you had god made trump which one do you think was more politically salient and effective i mean did you see did you see hassan using the the meat photo it with his join the dsa griffin you got to find that yes yes and and also the google searches at the convention some of the top three were is hassan piker gay hassan piker shirtless these were some of some of the top google searches typical grinder outages all around yes i said they should use the picture of him in the dress they should have used the picture of him and as long as we're leveling charges without evidence like how many people at that convention would flunk the browser test like just just ballpark percentage let's release jd i want to see jd's browser history go up against talarico's i i think it's an interesting inquiry let's see them all i think we need to know less about people after i watched that bill maher episode with that only fans chick actually i didn't watch it but i saw the clips unfortunately i could not avoid the clips because kyle was like did you see this so i kyle talks to you at home like i like headlines last night i have a view we need to know less about all public figures i'm tired of this oversharing i don't want to know about your browser history i don't want to know how many times you're jerking off a day bill maher at 70 years old i don't want to know any of these so could we just keep that to ourselves please i think bill maher needs a restraining order against any woman under the age of 45 you need to be using anthropic to figure out how to uh metaphorically neutralize bill maher so last last night i did an event at uh in dc with medea benjamin i interviewed her on stage with some other folks and uh before hand they were all talking about did you see what they did at the republican convention to hassan and you had this multi-generational group of women who were just scrolling through their phone and all passing it around for research purposes only of course all of them it was one of the funniest scenes that i've ever seen all i'm just ogling this like but just for ironically and just laughing of course that's you know we're on that's none of us are it was so good the funniest thing to me is how at the convention how they blurred out his package like what are we only forcing the google more yeah shows the picture but we need to have some decorum about this that's right that's right yeah well going going into the convention there were all kinds of leaks to places like puck and playbook from mostly republican consultants and insiders one lobbyist uh close to the white house according to playbook said quote the vibes are very bad dems are salivating our people are debating israel are melting down about this or that no one is motivated to vote only the dsa rise is what's keeping us in the game another person said my only hope is that no one watches it referring to the convention since it's competing versus nfl opening games hopefully nobody notices the embarrassing show i don't think it will matter no one knows about it no enthusiasm and it's during football only dc people care um the other point not only did they schedule this going up against football but another point that people were making is this is the week of this is your crescendo is the anniversary of the death of charlie kirk and the week of 9 11 and so instead of republicans being able to capitalize politically on both of those uh commemorations and the commemoration of 9 11 and the first anniversary of charlie kirk's death they're at this convention for lobbyists in dallas uh and you have way less control of the messaging because it's in the hands of the rnc so instead of having those conversations they're listening to a two-hour speech from trump where he's bragging about the iran war and calling ken paxton dumb and ugly which i think is actually brilliant because it neutralizes the main concern people have when they look at ken paxton like i can't vote for this guy he's dumb and ugly and yeah and trump is like yeah we know we know don't worry don't worry like we got it we understand that he's just a really good attorney general but anyway uh it's just the i know i have no idea what they were thinking when they put this together yeah i mean they were thinking i i'm sure this was all trump's idea it's all about his ego that's why he has to speak both nights of the convention and it's and say you know just pretend like i'm on the ballot and make it all about himself and run a bunch of ads spend a bunch of money running ads about how great he is so i don't think it's really a political strategy i think it's an ego-stroking strategy and that's why it doesn't make any real political sense i mean trump is as unpopular a president as you could possibly get we're talking george w bush towards the end of his term levels of unpopularity at this point the last thing you want to do is make that person the center of attention and make them as visible as possible and for some of your candidates like mike rogers was there for some of your candidates who are trying to do a little bit of distancing to have to go and pay fealty and be part of all the spectacle and all the weirdness so you know on the talarico thing i wonder what you guys think but they have been running these attacks on him the whole time that talafrico you know the six genders and the non-binary god and all this all this stuff according to polls it's not really working he's close to getting 50 in most of the polls and you'd have to have all of the undecideds go to paxton if you presume that the polling is correct it seems like the latinos in the rio grande valley have wildly shifted back towards the democrats after a dalliance with um with trump specifically if any of that is actually true then you know talarico's got a real shot in this race so i think they underestimate him at their peril and uh it reminds me of here in virginia in the gubernatorial election year abigail spanberger was the democratic nominee they all the ads against her that i saw on tv were about trans and sports and trans and bathrooms and they really leaned hard into the culture war and it just fell flat because jd manz is out there saying like oh james talarico's obsessed with talking about six genders you guys are the ones that come off as obsessed about this stuff you're the ones running ads about it all the questions on fox news are about this you end up being the ones that look like you're obsessed with this culture war wedge issue so um you know at a time when the economic landscape is incredibly grim and probably getting only grimmer by the day and trump is a historically unpopular president i don't think it's it's not looking like it's going to be enough especially given that trump himself is acknowledging now that gasper prices are not going to come back down before the midterms. They are only likely to continue to escalate. Yeah. Importantly, in 2024, when everyone went to vote in the Biden economy, inflation had been coming down month to month. And so it wasn't such a precarious situation. And I think people are much more willing to engage with some of the cultural questions in a better economy when you don't have what feels like an emergency to a lot of people, to farmers. You have crude at 100, diesel at six. Again, we haven't quite even seen the ripple effects of that, which is why Trump also floated the idea of just giving Americans $5,000. Another extremely cynical move to make people who trust him, because there are still some of our fellow countrymen who trust Donald Trump, whether we think it's crazy or not. That's a really sad thing to do, to make them feel like you might have an extra $5,000 in your pocket if you go out and vote for Republicans. That plan is not going to happen. He's not actually going to do that. So it's another piece of. I think really serious cynicism from Trump. There are people who trust him. But on that, I think also Tallarico, let me share this, has done. I meant to do a segment on this recently. He has done. The messaging on the trans stuff from his campaign has been, I think, pretty close to the best I've seen a Democrat handle that. Now, you have to be willing to be like Tallarico and say you made a mistake when you were talking about there being six genders. He said, obviously, I misspoke on that. Obviously, there are. There are two sexes and there's a small amount of the population that has. That identifies in different ways, something like his answer on that. He says, obviously, I believe that sports need to be safe. And so I don't support. Wherever safety is in question, I don't support boys and girls sports. That's been his answer. So I think partially he has changed on the issue and that's helped him. But look at this. Look at this. Since he. This race was tied, according to RCP. In RCP's average, until July, Tallarico starts pulling away and the gap has only widened. They're doing absolutely nothing to make the gap go in the opposite direction. They haven't figured out a single way to do it yet. It's kind of plateaued, but it's way wider than it was over the course of the summer. And this is the opposite of what was the case between Cruz and Beto. In that race, Beto never led in the RCP average. Never even led. Beto has been leading for months in the RCP average and it's only. It's only been going in a good direction for him. I'm sorry. Tallarico has been leading for months and it's only been going in a better direction for him. Well, Beto was born to run. But, you know, we've got one last clip here. You mentioned Ted Cruz and there is one area where the entire convention was laser focused and productive. And that was in wanting to shoot Abdul El-Sayed. Let's take a listen. And you're going to have to hear this from the crowd. Oh, wait. This is about Tallarico. Is it? No, it's about both. El-Sayed is also mentioned. And Zoran. Yes. All right. So it's a hit list. When Mondami says he wants to seize the means of production, he means it. When Abdul El-Sayed says he has a, quote, obligation to comply with Sharia law, he means it. And when James Tallarico says he wants to dismantle capitalism, he means it. So, you know, the first Trump term, it was lock him up. But now it's he should be shot. How are we feeling about that new slogan? Pretty disturbing. Yeah. And, you know, by the way, on the one year anniversary of Charlie Kirk's assassination, too. So there's that as well. Yes. They are not carrying the flame. And that was the midterm convention. Much more, I'm sure, to be made of that in the weeks to come. But why don't we take a look at another area of American life that is going swimmingly under Trump? And that, of course, is our food. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, fully integrated, easy to use, and built to grow with your business. Why not you? That's odoo.com. We know kids don't hold back. In there, make a mess, slide for home, bring on the stains. I've got OxiClean Versatile Stain Remover. And OxiClean isn't just for laundry. When my kids go all in, I say go for it, because I've got OxiClean to get the stains out. It's not clean unless it's OxiClean. Hey, everyone. It's the Jonas Brothers with the We've been catching up with some great friends, Paul Rudd, Michael Bublé, Seth Meyers, Niall Horan, Jake Shane. And making some new friends while getting into what's really like to have sisters, like Alex and Ashton Earle. She likes to control everyone and tell everyone what to do. Okay, well, control is a harsh word. I would say that's a harsh word. I am more outspoken. Growing up a lot of the times, because she was so quiet, I would speak for, like, the both of us. Now I'm working on, like, taking a moment, reeling it in, thinking before I speak. And Joey King. You know like, mom is yelling at your sibling, and even if you're annoyed with your sibling, you just, like, won't let that slide. It's like, only you can yell at your sibling. I'm like, you can't do that here. That is not how you talk about her like that. Only I talk about her like that. Plus, we've been taking your calls, listening to your voicemails, and giving you advice. Or at least trying to. So if you've got catching up to do, now's the perfect time. Listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's talk a little bit about food. Everyone put your Maha hats on. Groceries are expensive, and they're also filled with glass and other things that you may not want to consume. But we wanted to raise an interesting little note here that AOC has been doing Maha outreach. She may still be mulling what she does in 2028, but her outreach to one particularly disaffected and surprising slice of the future. What are your reactions to this, this left Maha alliance? And maybe I start with Emily. Is Maha feeling rejected, isolated from the Trump administration? I mean, they got their guy in there. Like, are they feeling disappointed? Why are they interested in speaking to AOC? Maha is absolutely split on this question because many of them are close to people in the administration. I mean, basically all of the major Maha leaders are close to people in the administration. But even the ones who are close to people in the administration have started to kind of isolate themselves, or not isolate themselves, but kind of ostracize the people in the administration because predictably, they're losing trust. They have been furious. People like Alex Clark have been furious since the glyphosate emergency declaration was granted to Bayer back in, I think that was January. And after that, it got really dark with about half, my estimation of what's going on. And I think those are the people you can basically draw a direct line after that to the people who are now willing to talk to AOC. I don't know what you guys think. I think it's absolutely brilliant on AOC's behalf. I think it would be really foolish of the left to leave Maha on the table. Having covered the Maha MAGA rally on the National Mall ahead of the 2024 election, firsthand, I'm looking at people who have mostly voted Bernie or people in the Bernie for probably their entire lives. It was like the barefoot hippies with Christian evangelicals who have always voted Republican. But the barefoot hippies had this moment of optimism because of Trump seeing some political value in bringing RFK Jr., who was deemed too liberal for the Obama EPA administrator position. And people were like allowed themselves to be optimistic for a fleeting moment. And I don't think they, you know, necessarily were unaware that this could happen. But it did happen. And so that's just leaving politically. It's leaving a lot of capital and votes on the table to not at least try to make amends with people who have good intentions about glyphosate, about PFAS and all of those sorts of things. So I think it's really smart. Yeah. I mean, to your point, a lot of these folks were previously on the left. These are issues that have naturally landed on the left. They were cynically exploited by Trump, who saw an opening of a coalition that was dissatisfied with the Trump administration. And so I think it's really dissatisfied, and especially after COVID, kind of up for grabs. And, you know, and I just generally think that any constituency that has an actual principle that they're committed to and care about are up for grabs at this point. You know, it's a relatively small proportion of the actual MAGA base. But these other pieces that were brought in or the parts of the MAGA base that were genuinely principled, which, again, is unfortunately, I think, a small percentage, for example, that wanted to avoid a war with Iran, those are the people who you can do something with either. If you can't bring them directly into the coalition because of social cultural values or whatever, they could be depressed and not show up. They could vote for independence. They could be taken out of the sort of MAGA coalition tent. But I do think there are some folks in MAHA world who, if you had someone who was serious about things we would all care about, you know, healthy food and a clean environment, that you should 100 percent take advantage of that. Ryan, I'm curious your insights into where this strategy perhaps comes from. There was a funny quote in there from one of the activists who was like, I can't believe I'm agreeing with AOC. I'm like, why? Because the left has always opposed these sorts of chemicals and wanted more regulations and wanted to make sure that we had more inspectors to make sure we're not having the food disasters that we're currently having. So it just demonstrated to me the level of propaganda against, you know, against the left that has been taken in by a lot of these folks. Well, it depends on what parts of MAHA you're talking about, because even in your summation there, some of MAHA, correct me if I'm wrong, Emily, would say, well, hold on, there'll be a record scratch at the inspections. Like, do they, because some of MAHA doesn't. Yeah, they don't want the raw milk inspected. Yeah, seriously. Some of MAHA thinks of these food and some of the food inspectors as authoritarian, you know, telling people, you know, what, yeah, exactly what milk they can drink or whatever. But when it comes to fighting the chemical companies and the other corporations, somebody like AOC has the most credibility there because she does not need and does not have the support of corporate America. Like, that's clear. Like, whatever you want to say about her, like, her funding base, her social base, her political base does not involve multinational chemical corporations at all. And so if anybody's. Yeah. Whereas Trump, as soon as he gets in. Yeah. He's a chemical lobbyist in charge of, like, making the policies. Mm-hmm. And so if anybody's going to be remotely trustworthy on that, it'd be somebody like AOC. But then you run into vaccine stuff. Right. Do the MAHA people think that she's too valorous of science? Quote, unquote, they put science in quotes. Or do they think that some of the inspections, you know, are draconian and are preventing genuinely healthy. The question is, how big is that? Because she also wants to appeal, I think, to many millions of people who are sick of every day being told, you got. Now guacamole is going to kill you. Now lettuce is going to kill you. Now this is going to kill. Like, it's like, enough. Yeah. Well, I was going to say. Let's lift this list up, Brian. I was just. Just to get you guys to react to this list for a sec. This is from September 1st, from last week. 14 current food recalls. Shoppers should know about this week. Just to give you an insight. Yeah, this week. And I'll get to the list for a second. But I wanted to read some of these numbers here. In President Donald Trump's second term, the FDA has lost 20% of its workforce and the Center for Disease Control about 25%. That includes eight of the 11 scientists tasked with tracking food parasites. I mean, that's like basically all of them. Going through this list here, we've got everything sprout. E. coli and salmonella. Panorama mangoes, salmonella. Grand Central Bakery, sourdough bread. Metal fragments, dryers. I hate when that happens. Fruit bars, glass. Glass in your fruit bars. We've got jalapenos, salmonella. There's salmonella in everything. I didn't know that. Jalapeno avocado salad, salmonella. Salmonella, salmonella. Listeria? No. Salmonella. Mix it up. Mix it up a little bit there. Frozen berries have E. coli in the mix. E. coli. Yes, it's discriminating. Does that say frozen berries? Oh, come on. Yes. Yeah, I know. Yeah, you know, that's the other thing that's been freaking me out. Actually, Tim Dillon had a whole bit about now the healthiest thing to eat is like a fast food burger with no lettuce. But then when you add in the mystery meat that's being imported, I think that even takes that off the list. So now what do we do? Veggie burger. Yeah, because a lot of these things are actually like, you know, healthy. Griff, you've got to get that motel denim. Sorry. The lettuce. It was in the cyclospora epidemic, you know, as the central culprit, the guacamole, the frozen blueberries, all this stuff. And Axios had a report that the number of current investigations is at an all-time high. Some of the cope that I've seen is, oh, well, if there's all these recalls, that means they're doing their job. But no, what that means is that they're not catching it before it goes out to the consumer and the consumer bites into their dull fruit bar and is like, there's a piece of it. There's a piece of glass in here. Somebody should do something about this. So the whole goal of the food inspection regime is that you catch it before the consumer eats glass or metal or has exposure to salmonella or listeria or E. coli. And since the whole, you know, FDA and CDC has been just stripped to the bones, and specifically some of the key people in being able to identify and track and some of the key programs, that we're meant to identify and track some of these parasites, that's why we're ending up with this situation. I mean, there's a direct line between these things. So what I was going to say to tie it in with the Maha folks is perhaps they can be persuaded that genuinely healthy food does require some government oversight, because otherwise you just have giant corporations that don't give a shit about your health whatsoever that are just looking to cut corners and, you know, and make their progress. And so I think that's a really good point. How we're reporting and tracking those things. Back to AOC, this partnership has already borne fruit. When she questioned Lee Zeldin, I forget whether it was Politico, the article we referenced that reported this, but actually her conversations with Maha pointed her toward a very particular line of questioning that made Lee Zeldin look utterly foolish about who he had met with. I think it actually was about glyphosate. I think it was, too. They gave her a pretty real substantive. piece of information that led to a substantive line of questioning, which I think shows good faith on both sides. And the last thing I wanted to mention is that it's not just about the narrow political coalition of Maha. It's also about the fact that we have record low institutional trust almost across the board in the country. And that means there are all kinds of people who are way less trusting of major corporations in charge of the food supply, everything. So it's voters in general that want to see a kind of corporate accountability. And this is the one that affects people as much as they can. It's what you're putting in your body every single day. So it's very, very smart to try to take a leadership position on this policy issue from AOC, because it's not even just about potentially making inroads with a pretty strong political coalition that has a network of inroads with major podcasts. A lot of Maha people have been on Rogan. A lot of Maha people go on very popular shows and have popular platforms themselves. Instagram, TikTok. So it's smart, but it's also about the whole country, I think, which has record low institutional trust in corporate America. And I think that is an important point, too, is that, you know, the whole food safety, the fact that you can no longer just inherently trust what you're buying at the grocery store when you go to a restaurant, it speaks to this overall sense of decline, the sense that of a shitification, that things that you previously. Took for granted that you could fly and it would be safe, that you can go to the grocery store and just grab whatever you want off the shelf and not check the recall list and not check the history of this particular brand. Those sorts of things are falling away. And so, you know, I think it goes beyond just that concern, specific concern about, like, can I eat the frozen blueberries? It speaks to this deeper sense that things are getting worse. Things that I used. To have that used to be good that I used to take for granted are no longer there. So, you know, I was talking to Griffin about this when I was pitching these stories were actually supposed to cover them earlier in the week with Sager. This is one of those things that the normies in my life are talking about constantly. Oh, you know, they're very, I mean, understandably very disturbed by like, OK, there's metal in the bread. Like, what are we doing? And every day there's a new horrifying story. The whole cycle got kind of kicked off with the explosion. The whole cycle got kicked off with a explosive diarrhea epidemic that got traced down to lettuce from then you start to learn about, oh, this farm conglomerate that makes all these bagged salads that whether you're buying them at Wegmans or you're buying them at Target or Walmart, maybe getting some of these whole foods. That's the one I was trying to think of. Whether you're paying a large price for it or a relatively discount price, it's the same damn lettuce and you still have exposure. It's very unsettling, especially for people who thought they could sort of like buy their way out of any sort of food crisis. Well, and also it's like this is this is lettuce. It's fairly easy to grow domestically. And we now have to worry about. whether it was upstream or downstream, of a sewage spill in Guatemala and Mexico. And it's like, you're in Iowa or you're in Rhode Island. Like, why do you have to worry about a sewage spill in a river in Mexico? Griffin, can you put the beef one up on the screen? And this is where it all comes together with, like, Trump's corruption. You know, he took a meeting with the owner of JBS, a Brazilian company that has also, you know, a lot of meat processing here in the U.S. And the guy had donated to him. So he's got all this influence. And Trump decides that in order to deal with the rising prices of beef, that he's going to order up this, you know, this mystery meat into our food system. And it's very disturbing because already you have a situation where you don't have country of origin labeling on beef. This is something that we have all talked to ranchers about and how hard it makes for them to be able to distinguish their product. And it makes it very it makes it impossible for unless you're buying directly from a farmer, which if you can do, I recommend doing. It makes it impossible for consumers to know where this beef is being sourced from and whether it's safe to consume or not. China just rejected a shipment of some of this beef because it had way too high level of antibiotics in it, because that's the sort of thing that you do to cut corners if you're keeping your cattle in horrific conditions. And they're all getting sick. What do you do? You blast them with antibiotics so that you can get them to market. You know, that's this kind of ties back into the midterms thing, because in Texas, they may be benefiting somewhat economically from the spike in oil prices. But the ranching industry there is really suffering both from a combination of, you know, all of these things that are going on with with cattle and Trump's decision to import this beef. Everyone is very upset about. And then you also have this. Screwworm epidemic, which also ties back to a bunch of these cuts on programs that sounded ridiculous when they were on a Fox News hit, you know, about tracking the the old world screwworms mating habits or whatever. But turns out it actually kind of mattered. That was actually some money that was being well spent. So we're we're in the reaping phase here of all of the cuts that were made at the very beginning of the administration when Elon was going through. With his chainsaw and everybody thought there'd be no consequences for anything ever. We're now in the phase where we're finding out where that money, you know, maybe was being spent to actually something that was useful, something that we took for granted, that something that was happening behind the scenes that we weren't even aware of, but enabled our our ability to go to the grocery store and just buy a package of salad off the shelf and not have to do an intensive check over whether or not this is tied to the latest recall. Yum, yum, yum, yum. I was going to say that Trump is forcing us on his diet of Diet Cokes and patties, but now the patties aren't even safe. That's upsetting to me in my personal diet. I wanted to ask one last question of all of you all about AOC and this Maha outreach. You know, this Maha outreach, which is kind of a national project, doesn't really seem like something you would do if you're running for senator AOC. I mean, it's like, you know, it's kind of like you're running for president of the United States, but you're running for president of the United States. And it's kind of like, you know, you're running for president of the United States. She went to the South and political reporting here down to Florida to speak on a panel at the annual session of the National Baptist Convention. I like how you made it sound like Nixon going to China. She went to the South. Listen, I haven't seen her in Florida in a minute, but it's the nation's oldest and largest African-American religious organization. What do we make of all this? Is this really her starting to put out feelers for a potential 2028 presidential run? Well, if she ran for Senate, she would need I mean, Ryan, you would know this, but like New York has a lot of rural areas. She'd probably be fine. But if she wanted to put up like really good numbers, you could still do. It doesn't hurt to do outreach to like Trumpier versions of or Trumpier slices of the population. But it does look like more and more. I mean, I can't imagine why she would go straight to president and not do the Senate route. But that's just me. I'm curious. She could also do both because they're on different calendars. The presidential race has basically started, but, you know, it starts, you know, people by, you know, by November through January, people are going to start launching. Bernie launched late. Right. And that was like April, maybe of of 2019. So we're talking like next spring. So she would know by. January, February, whether or not she's in line for the nomination and the New York primaries are extremely late, like June, usually like mid-June. So she could launch in March for Senate. So what you're saying is she could be it could be the case she hasn't made a decision, but she's keeping her options open kind of a deal. Right. Because one doesn't foreclose the other. Like you can run for president. And then if you decide. That it's not going to go your way by March, which you should know by March, you'd still have plenty of time to run for Senate. That's interesting. Yeah, that is. But it is looking like she's leaning towards actually launching a presidential bid. She entertains those questions when Julian asked them or anybody Pablo asked them much more willingly now. And I agree, Griffin, that just some of these decisions do smack of presidential ambitions. All right. Keep your eyes on that. Keep your eyes on the food. Keep your eyes everywhere right now because no one else's head on a swivel head on a swivel. All right. It's our favorite time of the show and something that you can contribute to. If you sign up for a free trial at breaking points, you can submit written questions that we'll answer here on the Friday show. Hashtag points on the board for Griffin. If you sign up today, this one's from Raphael Dimion. Do you guys have any personal 9-11 stories? And how do you remember pre-9-11 America all these years later? My dad tells me it was a better time. I was born in 2004, so I've always been curious. After frantically leaving the WTC complex, my dad and his co-workers watched United Flight 175 fly over the Verrazano Bridge and crash into the second tower. Jesus. Wow. Well, Griffin and I were, I think, like eight or nine. So I have like hazy childhood memories. But you guys were like full adults, weren't you? Yeah, I was in college. I was like my sophomore year. And I was on my way to French class and I was running late. And some girl in my class like grabbed me and was like, something is going on. And this is obviously before we had smartphones. So we ran around the building trying to find a TV and found it and then saw what was going on. And, you know, I was at UVA. So there were a lot of people who had family member working at the Pentagon. So that's kind of my memory of the day. I mean, in terms of the pre versus post, it kind of fits with some of the things we were talking about, about the loss of institutional trust. Like there's just the sense of an America where you can just leave your door unlocked and, you know, or go to the airport security protocols, like all of these sorts of things changed. And then we had the advent of the mass surveillance era, which was, you know, embraced by a partisan on a bipartisan basis. Obviously, we're on terror. Yeah. Terror, Iraq war, Afghanistan war. And we've just sort of been on the same slide since then. And the thing that is one of the things that's really blown my mind about the Iran war is just how many villains from the Iraq war are still around to cheerlead us into this next stupid war. That's one of the most disturbing things to me is just how little was apparently learned by our elite political class from this, what we turned into a multi-decade disaster. Yeah, I think I mentioned this to Emily recently, but in like mid-August, so I was about a year out of school, I had turned down a job at Morgan Stanley, which was in one of the buildings of the World Trade Center. Wow. Almost everybody at Morgan Stanley survived. For years, I carried around with me the, like to get to the interview, which had been maybe the month before that, they give you a plastic card that said like, you know, 44th floor. So for years, I carried that around in my wallet as like, remember, but it was, yeah, mid-August, I said, no, no, thanks, that job. And I was working in a middle school, my own middle school on the eastern shore of Maryland. And I still remember that the teachers knew that I read the newspaper. And, you know, actually, many of them had been my teachers when I had gone to middle school there. And so they were all asking me, like, what happened? Like, who is this? And I remember teaching this, giving a little lecture to a special ed class. About who Osama bin Laden was. And so that's a reminder that, like, if you were reading the newspaper in 2001, you knew on that day, like, who was behind this. And so whenever the CIA is like, I knew immediately because of my sources and my knowledge. It's like, okay, everybody knew. Everybody who was paying attention to basic news knew who that was. And the kids were. The fear was just incredible. They're like, are they coming here? I'm like, I promise. must see they're not coming here. I guarantee that. That was my memory because, again, I was eight. And I remember, you know, they didn't stop school because Wisconsin, everyone is probably at least two degrees of separation from people in New York City or is very different than the East Coast. Talking to some of my friends who grew up in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, they just had Virginia. They just had different experiences on 9-11 than people in the Midwest and Griffin, maybe in the West Coast as well. And but I do remember, you know, as an eight-year-old or a nine-year-old looking out my bedroom window that evening and seeing a plane fly over and thinking, are they, is that, like, I was scared. I was scared of seeing a plane. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if this happened at your school, Emily, or if you were, you were probably in second grade. I think I was in third or fourth. I was in third. Yeah. But one experience for kids that age that I've seen a lot of people online talk about that had a very similar experience is, you know, I woke up on the West Coast. Both towers had already been hit by that point. I saw my parents watching it on TV, but they didn't really say much about it. Then I go to school and my teacher just wheels out that classic TV on a cart and just turns it on. No context, no explanation. And we just watched it for like two hours and then they sent us home. No one explained anything. Just tried to absorb it. That is so insane. Apparently that happened in classrooms, all over the country, this TV cart, 9-11 viewing experience. You didn't have a Ryan Grimm to come in and explain it to Little Griffin. Ryan, did you read them Bin Laden's letter to America? I'm sure that I told him like, yeah, he didn't like that we have troops and Saudi Arabian. The kind of detached Zoomer irony about 9-11, I actually don't begrudge because if you're experienced with 9-11, you're going to be like, oh, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't is just through pixels and memes, then it's very different. But I do think one big difference is that if you were old enough to remember 9-11, even if you're young, it was legitimately national terror. Like it was there was if you lived through that day and the days afterwards, there was a experience of real fear. And I think that just changes the like your ability to to totally be in on all of those like memes and jokes, because sometimes it's like, guys, sometimes it's sometimes if it's well done, it's funny. And sometimes it's like, guys, you just slow your roll on this. Like people were fucking horrified for for days and weeks. Like people didn't know if their loved ones who were in the towers made it. So they were in anguish for weeks and months. And so it's just a generational divide that I don't think we're fully prepared for the implications of. Yeah. We just are so used to feeling invulnerable in the U.S., you know, feeling like nothing we do, like we can just do whatever and no one can do anything. To us. And obviously that was really deeply disturbed on that day, although I sort of feel like we've gone back to this concept of like we can just do whatever in the world and there's never going to be any any any ability to do anything to us, because otherwise, why would we fund and support a genocide in Gaza? Why would we, you know, attack Iran aggressively, offensively with really zero pretext or justification? Like, why would we do the anthropic stuff? Like what we're talking about? Completely. Yeah. I don't think we would behave the way that we do as a nation or leaders would if we had really internalized that actually, you know, yes, these oceans help protect us, but they're not we are not invulnerable. Yeah. We were supposed to have Glenn Greenwald on this week to not only talk about 9-11, but the post 9-11 era of America and the surveillance state, which, you know, of course, connects to the flock cameras and everything else. So we hope to have him back on sometime in the future to talk about all of that. Another question here from Adam Dean. Thoughts on the Lindsay Clancy trial and the insane discourse around it? We have not mentioned. Is anyone really tracking this one? Yes, I am, of course. I knew you were. I knew it. I knew you'd be the one. Give us a taste. No, I mean, there's there are a bunch of videos on the After Party channel, if anybody's interested in my take. But after party with Emily. What's up? I'm just plugging you. Oh, thank you. But no, I mean, Megan's been tracking this as like an attorney who's obsessed with true crime. So it's been I've taken calls about it every day for like two or a month now from people around the country. You know, it's horrible. But Massachusetts law is also really weird. Like their voluntary manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter is is genuinely strange. And so obviously, the medical system also failed. Lindsay Clancy, Lindsay Clancy failed Lindsay Clancy. Lindsay Clancy's children in a terrifying and dramatic way. And I think all these things can be true at the same time. Mm hmm. I think that's a plenty. I don't think any of us have other strong opinions on that. So you're pro murder. That's what you're saying. Pro murder. No, I mean, like, listen, I actually think she should like I think she should be in prison, not in a mental facility. But the actual like one of the big parts of the story is how telehealth like you can just log on to telehealth. She was prescribed by one of these physicians who never saw her in person, different cocktails like Zoloft and then another SSRI and then was given. Well, she was given Ativan, but also Klonopin. And they were just switching her medications. And some of it was over a physician who purely saw her on telehealth. She tried to check herself in to inpatient facilities twice. It didn't work either time. And part of it does sound like their civil suit against these medical practitioners is very strong. Both of them, Patrick and Lindsay, have civil suits. It's against the some of the practitioners. And so when you say she failed to they wouldn't take her at the inpatient facilities. Why is that? One of them wouldn't take her. They just said she wasn't a good fit for the program. So I'm sure more will come out in court. Another one did take her, but it was over the new year that year. And so a lot of the physicians weren't present. She asked to leave to go to one of her kids birthday parties and they let her leave. And she just didn't go back after that. But so because she checked in over the new year, there were a lot of people who were out. And it sounds like they did. Did not at all adequately attend to her. I think nobody was taking. I think there's some some of the like, I guess, lib white women who have latched on to this case are correct that she was not being taken. Like the threats were not being taken seriously. The postpartum potential for postpartum psychosis was not being taken seriously. Wow. Yes, a lot of inpatient programs will reject people unless there's like already a direct violent occurrence of some sort. So it can be very difficult to hold people there, even if they want to be there. All right. This one Ryan, Ryan, this one blew my mind two days ago when I saw you tweet this. This is from Sabas 101 for glorious comrade Ryan with the discovery of you liking attack on Titan. What other animes have you watched? Have you watched Ghost in the Shell or Saigo Bass? And Ryan, but me first. Ryan, you watch attack on Titan. How have we not talked about this? This is greatest show of all time was because you got you're not in the studio. Mac and I have bonded over this bunch. Yeah, you got to get in there. My my oldest and youngest kids love anime. Iris and George got me into it. The way the way they talked me into it. Iris is like you keep talking about this show Sopranos and Breaking Bad and all these like ancient things. She's like, but attack on Titan. Attack on Titan is discussed in the same conversation as those. And I was like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And so then she's like, no, we'll look it up. Google it. And I'm like, so I Googled. I'm like, oh, wow, people do actually put these shows in the same category in the same conversations. So like, okay, let's let's do it. And so my 15 year old and 10 year old, we every time we get an opportunity at night, we'll watch. We'll watch it. My 10 year old had already seen it all the way through. And I spoiled part of it for me. Oh, no. But we're now in the final season and we have the last three long episodes to go. You know, there's like three. Yes. Now, they're movie length. Yes. What age do you recommend for Ryan? It's, it's, it's, it's a little dark and then there's horror elements. So maybe like 11 or 12. I said, George is 10 and this is watching it. Okay. All right. Kids are advanced, though. I think it's horrifying. Like these, it's scary. These Titans are, you know, these mindless beasts that are just getting just eating people, including like in the whatever. And then getting just torn to shreds. So it's extremely gory and gross and there's sad parts and people die. But then, Crystal, have you seen it yet at all? There are all these themes. There's these really fascinating themes about, about genocide and victims becoming oppressors. The stories we tell. And, you know, the, the, the Eldians have to wear patches on their arms, which has some obvious parallels to the Holocaust era. But I also wonder how much of it is kind of an allegory. about Japan's own experience of being under attack and then becoming this imperial genocidal almost yes genocidal and certainly in parts of china regime and how much they're grappling with that through this but it's interesting i recommend it it's good it's a it's incredibly political a little too much yelling like to some of the characters about yelling yes it's very political um i i think uh people would say like if you really like game of thrones and you like the public the politics of that i think it's a big entry point for people that are like is anime too weird for me um but yeah there's a lot of interesting political uh stuff in the show a lot of emotional stuff and a lot of different ways that you could look at the real world and you know you mentioned japan but also um you know something the main character in the show is kind of occupied by this evil force outside the gates and they're put into smaller and smaller concentrates camps because the titans are this force outside that will eat all of them and the main character holds a key around his neck to the home that he used to live in much like palestinians do in gaza um and that he always hopes to return home and that is one of the original goals of the show um all to say there's so much there to mine and think about um and it's also one of the most incredible action uh shows of all time and i always recommend it to people who are interested in anime and i always recommend it to people who are interested in anime and i always recommend it to people that are not sure if anime is for them or too weird um so very excited that ryan is into it and maybe it's the only anime i've seen to answer that other part of the question okay nice speaking of sopranos i got a notification while we were talking that my i swear to you my uh order of a picture that i'm putting in a gold frame of tony soprano with uh pie oh my is on my doorstep and i will be fan of it for that and this week the reason it came up online this week was a national attack on titan day in japan yes also my sounds like sounds like my son could be a fit for my son i don't think my daughter he'd love it yeah i had to get freaked down by like gore and horror she wouldn't like it but uh my daughter told me that the uh voice actor for jean the characters did you hear this griffin uh just passed away oh no i didn't know that oh that's mike mcfarland so mike rest in peace mike right yeah rest in peace and maybe around christmas time we can do a long extra episode ryan breaking down the themes of the show for some christmas holiday break one that's a good idea okay uh that is going to do it for our ama this week again you can submit a question to us about politics anime uh whatever i guess um fashion tips and uh don't do that dot com monthly you can you can send that shit to saga if you want but can i ask crystal is your cat wearing a bow yeah he's got a little bow tie yeah it's because he has to wear a tracker because his little crazy ass is constantly trying to escape the house like constantly plotting against us and he's very smart so he has to wear a gps tracker the other male cat socks also has to wear a gps tracker even though he escapes a little bit less but that's your fashion tip if you have my fashion tip put it cats and bow ties and trackers that's right all right and emily we're going to throw to a segment that you recorded earlier this week uh why don't you throw to it let us know a little bit about who you talked to yeah i talked to joe lawler he's a great reporter great journalist who's been doing a series of pieces for the new atlantis basically on how finance uh in tandem with you know when you have big corporations they're able to get their will in the government um but kind of how they have made our suburbs ugly and alienating places to live how so much of it goes back to this the schemes of these major financial corporations in some cases private equity we touch on as well you know why do the exurbs look disgusting why are there these like awful 7-elevens that look bad feel bad on different street corners and how does that go back to uh financialization so it was a really interesting conversation and i hope everyone enjoys them well i'm very excited to be joined by joe lawler he's the policy editor at the washington city council and he's going to be working with the washington examiner and a writer over at the for the new atlantis where he has done a great series on the influence of government and big business importantly big business on uh home ownership costs and also just what has what all this has wrought in our suburbs which are now dotted with hideous developments and buildings and uh sucking the soul out of a beautiful country so joe first of all thank you so much for being here thank you and you just said it's more colorfully than i ever did so well i have a i have a lot of great quotes from the series that you've done over the at the new atlantis that i want to ask you about because okay as i just mentioned you cover this from both perspectives one regulations but two regulations that have been shaped by big business so there are a lot of different factors going on and you've written about this from different vantage points your most recent article is on how we all own the local 7-eleven and i'll start with this one because you write actually me pull the article up on the screen uh so that folks know where they can go read it and they absolutely should go read it you write in the lead uh this 7-eleven this hypothetical 7-eleven you say the building in the land it sits on are not owned by 7-eleven or by an individual instead the 7-eleven is the tenant of a real estate investment trust a financial structure that allows huge numbers of people to invest in real estate without having to worry about the details of what it is they're investing in and uh you break down why exactly this 7-eleven is a real estate this all happened but you say this framework helps strip plots of their local context and make them legible as investments every real estate investment involves what is known as a capital stack which is the combination of debt and equity used to finance the construction and then maintenance of the project so i think this is a good starting point joe if you could just explain to us with the 7-eleven example why this is happening why this has spread rampantly throughout the american suburbs and exurbs and even some some rural areas what's going on absolutely and just to be clear this is not a hypothetical 7-eleven that's a real 7-eleven in williamsburg and we did trace the reit that that owns the land and is leasing it to the 7-eleven and that reit is owned by a lot of index funds and others that if you have any savings most likely you are a landlord of that 7-eleven i am i know most people i've asked are so yeah it's a good distinction that's a hypothetical yeah um i think the point that you raised is a good one which is that when it comes to neighborhoods when it comes to buildings when it comes to aesthetics scale is kind of the enemy of beauty and charm and this is something that that came up speaking to a lot of urbanists a lot of designers a lot of others when i was working on this series but what what makes people feel charm what makes people think that a neighborhood is lovely is just that the scale is human scaled and if you orient your regulations your rules your tax laws your credit policies to favor big corporations then you're putting yourself at odds with creating lovely unique charming walkable human scaled neighborhoods so that's that's a key point that i heard talking to these um to these developers to these experts to um to investors to lenders and all the rest well yeah and you've you've focused both on as i mentioned finance and government and i want to focus on finance for a second because sure you do such a good job with both of them uh i love this headline from a new atlantic piece you wrote the demise of real neighborhoods is a story of finance and one quote that i pulled from this one is you're talking about kind of the nimby laws and you say as significant as those laws are they're only half the story the other half of the story which has received much less public attention is that the financial system makes it very hard to build traditional mixed-use buildings and that's why i'm talking about the financial system because neighborhoods rules promulgated by federal agencies and government-run corporations put mixed-use development at a disadvantage so to do finance industry practices that have developed over decades in response to government regulations at the same time you write that it disadvantages traditional neighborhoods the whole set of rules the scaffolding of the financial system makes it easy to fund the alternatives the single-use projects whether the strip mall the hotel off the highway or above all the single family housing tract and you could add to this joe i suppose the 7-eleven and i i think a lot of people look around them and are so disappointed what's become of their communities but they don't understand that our entire as you say financial scaffolding that benefits these big business owners is behind it so walk us through a little bit of how finance shaped our communities absolutely and you think about it we are the wealthiest country in the world and how is it that we struggle to have neighborhoods that we think are are lovely that are that we want to visit that we want to take photos in that we want our that we see as aspirational for our families and how did we end up with this this form of what you just mentioned the tract single family development single family housing development it's in some ways it's nice but but who doesn't want to live near a cafe who doesn't want to live near their church who doesn't want to live near their family and friends in walking distance if we could all have that obviously we would and the key point which you just you just mentioned is that these development typologies like the single family housing tract are subsidized. And I think a critical point is they're regularized by the rules and regulations that make it easy for a tract developer to go in, buy a huge plot of land on a greenfield development outside of a city and build 100 or 200 units of single family housing and then move on and then move on to the next project. And, you know, they're not doing anything wrong. They're playing by the rules. They're playing by the rules that were set up by the system, by the government, by the zoning laws. And they're just businesses. And the interesting thing is that when they've also lobbied for those laws, too, like you mentioned some interesting lobbying in the tax cut that Trump passed, like that's that's pretty to me an interesting aspect of it, too. They want to preserve the system now that they've kind of gamed it. True. That's true. So over the years, the the home builders and and lenders and other parts, realtors, realtors who are part of the system, clearly, yeah, clearly they benefit from it. That's that's correct. And what's what's been interesting to me in reporting this piece, and I didn't really mention these in the in the series, but talking to a track developer who builds single family housing out somewhere outside of a city in a red state where there's lots of open land, you know, they really don't think about. Is this beautiful? Is this maybe they think about that for the homes, but for the neighborhood, they're not even trying to build neighborhood that are lovely, that are beautiful, that you'd want to visit, that you'd want to maybe retire like people would love to retire. Who wouldn't love to retire in Charleston, South Carolina or Venice, for that matter, right? Like these are really nice places. And we're not trying to build neighborhoods like that anymore. They're just sort of most of these developers. To them, it's a business. You the the the land, the develop the develop a land developable land. Is the input and the tract development is the output. And that's the business, right? And those considerations don't even factor in. And one thing that you touched on as well in this and you have touched on it in the series is scale. And this is one of the things that's happened with a lot of the big apartment buildings that we're talking about single family mostly right now. But you're in Washington, D.C. and every major city, basically private equity comes in, incentivizes as do building codes and regulations and that sort of thing. These massive, cheaply, built apartment buildings and they can spread out the cost because they're building at scale and they're massive. And it sounds to me like that's a bit what's happening where you have a developer buying 200 plots, building 200 houses. And you don't necessarily have to worry too much about the local community after you do that because you're making money at scale. The costs are so spread out that am I making sense? Because that's kind of how I that's what I took away from it a bit. Absolutely. And I would add something else to that, which is you may not be even in that community. So you might be you might be building on behalf of a set of investors who are a pension fund for teachers in Ontario or shakes from the Middle East or whoever it is. Right. You know, the great example that I had in the last story I wrote was that the Alaska Permanent Fund owns half of Tyson's Corner in northern Virginia. Right. So these Alaskans have no idea that they that their money is going to Tyson's Corner. I'm sure you've been there. It's not a very organic, lovely place. Like there's there's nice things about Tyson's Corner. I don't mean to bash it or to sing without unnecessarily. But the point is that that the people of Alaska, they're not living in Tyson's Corner. They don't know what their money is doing. And that's the situation that we've created for ourselves, which is different from past regulatory and ownership regimes and ones that exist in other countries where there's more of a connection between the people who own the land and the people who own the land. And the people who actually live there. But the guys who are putting the money in to create Tyson's Corner, which, as you correctly note, has been there's been a desperate effort to make it habitable for years. And it's mostly just like tech money. People who live here, my impression of it, at least, is those apartments get filled by tech money. People who spend part of their year here or corporate money, people who spend because there's so many corporate headquarters in Tyson's. It's not a place where most people are living year round. But the people who run those funds like the fund, they can still get their paycheck at the end of the day. And they're still trying to deliver on their pension funds. But they're getting paid a lot of money to spread this money out and create these types of or respond to these incentive systems and destroy the suburbs and exurbs. Yeah. And I mean, you say destroy. So but you also just mentioned financially, it's a success financially. It's a success in those narrative for them. Right. But I think that the point you just raised is a good one is the investors. In that particular community and the town itself, the local government, they're actually intentionally trying to make it more walkable and to make it more of a real city. And they're not getting very far. And it shows just how difficult these things are to do artificially. Organically, they happened with no thought, right? Like a neighborhood like the North End in Boston, which was once regarded as a slum. And it developed based on the investments or really development by people who were in a lot of cases cash strapped or immigrants or whatever. They really didn't put a lot of thought into it, but they were able to organically create that really lovely, charming, prototypically American neighborhood. And now with all of the money in the world, we're finding that if you're not actually living there, if you're not investing in your own neighborhood, if you're not building your own home or your own shop or whatever it is, it's very, very difficult to do that. And I think that's a really good point. To recreate those circumstances that make a neighborhood lovable. And so this really resonates with me because I'm from the exurbs of Milwaukee, where you start to see this creep coming. First, it hits the places that are five minutes outside, then 10 minutes outside, then 20 minutes outside. And especially post-COVID, you start seeing that because people have different commuting schedules and abilities with it, you start seeing it go further and further into what used to be exurbs. And then in some cases, what used to be rural areas, because there's some demand, people can live further away. So I think this is happening all over the country right now. But to think of a Tyson's Corner type development coming to the exurbs of Cincinnati or Milwaukee or Minneapolis, something like that, people should, if they're not familiar with this example, read your piece and be aware that it's not a real place. It's where there's so many corporate headquarters, but there's not really any local community. There actually aren't a lot of single family homes, if that's something you're interested in. Right, right. If you're interested in Joe, they basically bulldozed this whole swath of land for high-rise condos, apartments, and shopping and corporate headquarters. But it's not clear to me. I mean, I guess the typical argument would be, well, GDP and the people of Alaska are profiting off of this. Their pensions are more secure because of this. And it's been great for everyone all around. But if you care about the community, for example, you grew up in, the risk is maybe you bring in more tax revenue, but it's not necessarily that you're going to have stronger communities, strong families that come with these big developments, right? That's right. And again, part of the motivation for this entire series is the question of how is it that we're so wealthy, and yet we are not making these kinds of these forms of wealth? What could be more important to your personal well-being than to live in a house that you love or in a home that you love in a neighborhood that you love? And not only are we struggling, with it relative to other countries in some cases, but we're also struggling to compete with our own past when we were poor, when we had a United States that was not as wealthy as it is today. And we had more, all of the neighborhoods that people love, all the neighborhoods that people post Instagram photos from are built like from before, basically are built from before World War II. And in the meantime, that's taken away this real form of deep wealth that may not show up in GDP and made it harder to attain. Right. And on that point, let me also share this article, how the government built the American dream house. And you go in here to Fannie and Freddie and actually some of the big history, not just of the government, but also of finance before World War II. Hoover is such an interesting history. And I was hoping, Joe, that you could take us a bit through how the government shaped some of this as well. Absolutely. And the key point is that we've come to this situation where we see a house as a financial product. People think about home buying as a decision that's made on the basis of their wealth and their future retirement and a lot of other things that are related to economic security and to finance. And less and less is it a decision about where to live, what, where your family is, what the neighborhood is actually like and so forth. And for that article, I went through some examples of people who bought a home because they kind of bought into this narrative that a home is the path to financial security. And they regretted it because then they had to live their life where they lived. Right. So you move into a neighborhood with it, you get your single family home, and then suddenly you realize that it's harder to meet up with your friends after work or you're not seeing your family as often and you don't have other amenities close by. And this is a phenomenon that was 100% driven by the federal government over the course of decades, promoting through policy and also through exhortation, every president, almost every president talking it up like housing is the way to build wealth, never talking about let's build beautiful neighborhoods, let's build beautiful cities, saying a home is how you build financial security. And then the policies you meant, you touched on the policies, which I go through, I went through a lot and there's a lot more that I could have, I could have listed, but the big ones are, there's two really, the tax code and the huge number of tax breaks for mortgages specifically for taking on mortgage debt, not for buying a home per se, but for taking on debt. And then the other one is the government sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which also encourage through a completely different side of the government. Families to load up on debt and to leverage themselves as much as they can for this one specific financial asset. And who pushed this? I mean, because when you look at the system, actually, Arthur Brooks, I'll just put it this way, has great numbers on how material wealth has technically expanded over time, meaning people live in bigger houses. And yet our happiness, collectively, the American people's happiness has declined as material wealth has gone up. And again, this is technically as material. Wealth went up. And I believe these are pre-COVID numbers. So some of that may have changed. But the point remains that we were living in bigger houses, but we were less happy and we had more stuff, you know, cheaper TVs, that sort of thing. But we were less happy. And when you go back and you look, you think, well, who would design the system this way? Can you explain to us, Joe, a little bit about who pushed for this, who benefited from this? Yeah. And the short answer is it was really everyone. It's hard to pick a specific point, but I think that the best place to start, really, is Hoover and creating the so he so this zoning is a local and state phenomenon. They're the ones who implement zoning codes. But what's not widely known is that this was promoted by Herbert Hoover as commerce secretary and was really pushed throughout the entire country. And the reason for that, the logic for that was was twofold. Part of it was to sort of rationalize the. Entire real estate system. But another part of it was to make life easier for companies that built at scale. Because if if if zoning and building codes are regularized throughout the country, you don't have to worry too much about which neighborhood you're building in. You can be much bigger, right? You don't have to be a builder that's built in one neighborhood or knows the lay of the land in that city. You can build in multiple cities or across the entire Midwest or the entire all of California. And then the other huge part. Of it was the New Deal programs that encouraged mortgage debt and housing also a lot of housing tax breaks. What's happened is these have become just part of the underlying financial and economic substrate of the United States. Most of the people in the industry have no awareness of these things that happened in the distance, distant, distant past. They're just part of the landscape. They're just part of life. But it didn't have to be that way. It was promoted. All of these things were promoted by people with that with a specific agenda, which was to facilitate, make things easier for big businesses and to and also to bail out the housing industry and during the depression was also a big part of it. Every time these conversations are broached, especially by people on the right, you know, I actually heard an interesting Jeremy boring kind of rant on this recently where he was he was saying that things in America were built cheaply. And they look kind of ugly because we had to build fast and that's kind of a testament to American innovation and ingenuity and entrepreneurialism and anytime you brush this on the right as I'm sure you've experienced Joe just looking at any right wing reaction to things that you've written it's well do you want people to be poor you're advocating for the Alaskan pensioners to be poor you're advocating for Tyson's corner to be you know farmland and nothing else as though that's a bad thing but anyway you're you're advocating for Fairfax County to have ways. tax revenue and those sorts of things to fund schools and what would your response be first of all I get it because we hear so often a certain urban agenda which is based on which is very left wing so of course right wingers are not going to like it it's about taking away your car it's about taking away your gas stove it's about taking away your police and no one single family home. Right so I think when people hear talk about neighborhoods walkability livability they think that it's bundled with this left wing agenda and of course if you're right when you're you're not gonna like that I think that's fair enough but we want everyone wants abundance everyone wants prosperity why is is a lovely neighborhood not a form of prosperity again what could be more important to your personal well-being than to feel. secure safe and happy in your own home where you go it's the place where you you leave every morning from that home and you return to it every day of life every day at the end of the day it's where your family is going to be isn't that such a key component of your well-being that not just your own home but they but your neighborhood where you live don't you want to live in a healthy safe thriving beautiful neighborhood so I totally understand the impulse. that any time this entire topic of of cities comes up to to kind of be on guard I that's one of the things that I think has been inculcated over the course of decades because this the people who've been talking about this disproportionately have been anti car they have been anti big house and they've been more skeptical of policing and all the rest. The bike lane people I do exactly bicycles yeah anyway as someone who uses a lot of bike lanes but Joe. your seven eleven piece was I think so helpful because it actually reminded me a lot of the dollar general discourse and just thinking about like having lived in private equity owned apartment buildings the option shouldn't be you either live in private equity owned apartment buildings where you can hear every sneeze that your neighbor makes or you live or you have a seven eleven or nothing else there you know that we've we've come to accept this choice where it's like you get your seven eleven you get your dollar general that pays people shitty wages back to a multinational corporation. or you have farmland like we've got that to me feels like a false choice and that's the one that I would imagine without putting words in his mouth and Jeremy boring would say you if it's not the seven eleven if it's not the dollar general if it's not the damn shipping container starbucks it's it's nothing it's it's that or you just have you know farmland or in the rust belt you have these old factories that sort of thing that just feels like an unacceptable false choice and I don't know if I'm naive Joe you spent more time in the space and I have it seems like. it's not a real false like it's not a real choice it doesn't have to be that dichotomy right exactly and we can look at the different ways the system has the thumb on the scale for the dollar general or the seven eleven versus a small neighborhood that has a mom and pop store that can survive right next to a bookstore or restaurant or a small hotel or whatever it is in a mixed use. setting so you I think again you one way to one good way to look at this is the incentives that are in the system for building a really large apartment building that's like private equity or reowned that has nothing else has no retail nearby or attached to it and can house a thousand people housing a thousand singles who go back to their apartments are on their phones at night and are not interacting with each other or whatever. it is right yeah and that is a product that's that can be defined it can be legible to big investors who don't need to care about where they're investing right and it's it's a it's a it's a packaged understandable financial product right and it's fine if someone wants to build those in a free market but why not take the thumb off of the scale and make it just as advanced. advantageous or just as easy to build the mixed use development that has maybe bottom floor retail two stories of apartments above it people seem to like that in Paris that kind of neighborhood you know a bakery with apartments a restaurant with a hotel a church right next to a daycare or whatever it is those are products that are discouraged under the current system. right and it's fine if someone wants to build those in a free market but why not take the thumb off of their phones at night and are not interacting with each other or whatever it is those are products that are discouraged under the current system. right and it's fine if someone wants to build those in a free market but why not take the thumb off of their phones a church right next to a daycare or whatever it is those are products that are discouraged under the current system. and all of that, Joe. So if you don't want spoilers to Downton Abbey, maybe 2.9. but I think these would only be gentle spoilers because we're talking about real history, Joe. And I was wondering if you could kind of flesh out for us what happened or how the West kind of came to think about all of this stuff vis-a-vis the Downton Abbey example. Yeah. And I confess that I don't have complete mastery of the plot of Downton Abbey. But yeah, so this is a great example, right? The entire premise of the show was based on the fact that the property was going to be given to someone who the main characters didn't even know because of England's very strict property rights laws. So the general point is that the family was extremely tightly connected to the land by the law. And so they had a great incentive to make it as lovely, as successful, and as beautiful as possible because it's their family. Not just their house, but their actual town reflected their family name and it's a point of pride. And the fact that it could be potentially given to someone who they don't even know was causing a ton of trouble for them, of course. But the property rights laws have changed completely. In the United States, we basically never had laws like that that tied the property so closely to a family that would be there for generations and would invest in it over the course of generations. And for some good reasons, because we're not an aristocracy, but yeah, we don't have the feudal history, right? Yeah, of course. And instead, we went in the other direction, which makes land much more of a commodity that can be bought and sold. And of course, there's good things about that. Globally. Exactly. Globally. And there's good things about that. And that allows for rapid development. That allows for industrialization if it's going to occur very quickly. But we do have this. It's just an example that shows some of the downsides of losing that connection between the people who own the property and the people who live there. Joe Lawler, thank you for taking the time to walk us through all this. I can't recommend enough your series of about all of this in the New Atlantis, which is long. We didn't even basically scratch the surface because your reporting is so in-depth. Really appreciate you taking the time, Joe. Thank you so much, Emily. Don't make it harder with a dozen apps, that don't talk to each other. Why not you? People use ChatGPT to answer questions. Others use it to get real work done. With ChatGPT Work, you bring the goal, plus real inputs like briefs, notes, files, feedback, data, and project plans. It can help turn them into an analysis, tracker, deck outline, prototype, or workflow you can review and keep shaping. You stay in control, giving direction and choosing the final output. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. 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