Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 10/11/21: Jobs Report Fail, Mass Shortages, Facebook Freakout, Gifted & Talented, McConaughey, Crisis of Men, Trust Collapses, China Eyes Taiwan, and More!

Episode Date: October 11, 2021

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Marshall Kossoff is in for Crystal Ball. It's good to see you, Marshall. How are you, my man? I'm really good. I'm excited to kick off Monday with everyone here. Let's get into it. Let's do it. Okay, so we've got some really great topics for everybody today. First of all, for the guests, you've got a guy, Jacob Helberg. He just wrote a book about China, how the U.S. should respond in terms of technological warfare and more. Obviously, it's very timely given all the stuff that's going on with Taiwan. We're going to delve into all of that. Matthew McConaughey breaking his silence in terms of whether he's going to run for the governor of Texas or not. It's an incredible interview, but it actually says a lot about our current political moment. We're going to dive into all of that. New York City is nuking its gifted and talented program.

A lot of hot takes. Both sides, we're going to delve into what exactly is happening, whether it's a good decision, bad. What are the justifications and why you should care? Is it coming to a school near you? Facebook whistleblower, we've got some more follow-up on some interesting things going on with her. And really just what is the broader conversation? Should we even care about Facebook, period? Economic shortages, something you guys know that I care a lot about.

But we got to start with the very, very top line of what's happening, which is the horrific jobs report that happened for the Biden administration. So let's go ahead and put that up there on the screen. September job creation came in short with just 194,000 jobs. So just so people know, that is horrific. They were looking for something like 700,000 to 800,000 jobs is what the number needed to be. Now, the real issue is that once you start going in and looking at what's happening, the unemployment rate still stands at 4.8%. This, of course, comes at a time when the unemployment benefits have expired. 4.8% actually isn't terrible necessarily in a normal economy, but the targeted areas of unemployment, Marshall, are where it's a total disaster. So even though leisure and hospitality

did gain net jobs, the unemployment rate, though, for the sector is still 7.7%. And then professional and business services, it's the same thing. So when you go and you look sector by sector, very critical places, leisure, hospitality, and more, it's pretty clear that Delta, the Delta variant in September in particular, just put a stranglehold on the entire economy. And this is what's dragging Joe Biden down. I mean, everything that we've seen so far, he barely had a 50-something percent approval rating whenever it came to his handling of the economy. When he came into office, now he's in the sub, you know, 30s, 40s, something like that. This is absolutely what will drag him down. It was the only area where Trump was ever outperforming him throughout the entire general election. If this doesn't turn around fast, it's going to be a big problem for him. Yeah. And I really like how you laid out how many different interlocking parts are coming together here. The narrative that's been disproven, and you and Chris did a great job of covering this, was last month, a lot of people said, well, with the unemployment

expansion, insurance coverage expansion coming to a close, people are going to go back to work. Yeah, that worked out. Guess what did not happen? Now, that's not to say that the policy should have continued. That's not to say that everything was working perfectly. It's just to say that anyone who's coming to you with a very convenient, very easy story about how the economy is reacting to COVID, the Delta rise, all these interlocking factors, how individual states are performing, how individual cities are performing, how individual employers are performing, is just not going to be selling you an accurate bill of goods. Yeah, it's really—let's put a Washington Post tear sheet up there on the screen.

This is actually very important. So the key takeaway is that we have an extremely uneven and bumpy recovery. I like the way that Heather Long put this, which is that some people say they'll go back to work when they feel safe and well compensated. So actually, one of the biggest problems, Marshall, that has happened here is that the conventional narratives around what happened just all don't seem to make any sense whatsoever. Everybody, and I really mean everybody, in the conservative movement said that when these unemployment benefits expire, we are going to see a mass rush

to jobs. Guess what? It just literally did not happen. In fact, we saw a retraction, or at the very least in the sectors where this was supposedly impacting, we didn't see any growth whatsoever. So what's the answer? And this is something that I've been saying over and over again, and I know it doesn't make economic widget sense as if people are widgets. Some people just don't really like the job that they used to do. And it turns out after a year and a half, people go, hey, you know, driving for Uber, that sucks. And no matter how much you're going to, the money you're going to throw at me, all your fake little bonuses, I do not want to sit in a car and drive for 13 hours a day and only make like $60,000 a year. That's just not going to work for me. Same thing whenever it comes to dining, right? I've

talked to a lot of the waiters. I've just been like, hey, how's it going? They're like, hey, you know, like I'm doing this because right now, you know, we're making a lot in terms of tips and the restaurant raised its wages. But, you know, a lot of people say, I just don't want to go back, especially in non-metro areas. Guess what? Waiting for tables, that sucks too. Ask anybody who works in the service industry. They hate it. And especially in terms of the tip minimum wage, now we've had an option, or people have seen a different life. A year and a half out of the market, they say, maybe I'm going to go back to school. Maybe I'm going to go do this. Hey, I met my cousin. He's got a shop or whatever who does this. And I just don't want to do it anymore. And that is the problem, which

I don't think that can be solved. I don't think it's a policy thing. You know, you and I were talking this morning. It turns out that when you shut down the global economy for a year, some really crazy stuff happens. This is one of them. And I want to pick up on what you just made about shutting down. Right. The key thing here is I know a lot of people are probably reacting, thinking, see, this is what happens when blue states shut down. This is what happens when Joe Biden puts in a vaccine mandate. Something that you and Crystal should cover later in the week is this whole story about the Southwest Airlines and possible strikes that could be happening. The point is, all of these things are coming together. And even without a vaccine mandate, even without a mask debate,

even without whatever California or New York or D.C. are doing, there's all these things that are coming together. And another part of this data that's so interesting is the fact that there's this white-collar, blue-collar divergence here when it comes to coming back to work. For you and I, we have these white-collar professions. We're in media. This is really great. We're very flexible. We're doing everything remotely. But if you are the type of person, this was covered in some of the Washington Post reporting, there's this guy who used to have this really awesome job where he would install alarm systems in old folks' homes and old folks' houses. He really enjoyed it.

He liked talking to people. And he said to himself, I can't have that job anymore. That job collapsed. I don't want to just go work in retail right now. And even without the unemployment expansion, he is just going to continue trying to find something that really fulfills him. So trying to have a system where people can feel like, hey, can I find work that's fulfilling to me? Can I accomplish what I'm trying to accomplish in my life has been a really important point. And that is the part that no policymaker, Democrat, Republican, local, national has anything to do with.

You can't fix that. Exactly. It's like people have had a great reassessment of work, of life. You know, I've been recently talking to people, the amount of mobility in terms of moving would defy the mind. Now, you would think, oh, but it's a pandemic. No, a lot of people had a lot of assessments and saying, you know, I don't want to live here anymore. I'm going to go live somewhere else. Obviously, those people were privileged and they had the financial means to do so. But I'm just giving you an example on the highest end of the scale of the income spectrum. On the low end, it's, I don't want to work this job anymore. I want to go do something else. Hey, I don't really like this.

I like spending time with my kids. Or I want to spend more time with my kids because I actually had to work conversely more. You know, I mentioned that the unemployment rate actually declined. But one of the problems, I want to make sure I shout this out here, is that the reason why is not for a good reason. It's because the labor force actually shrank, which is that the amount of people who were actively looking for a job declined by hundreds of thousands. And a lot of it was women. A lot of women in particular just said, you know what? I don't want to work anymore. They were mentioning childcare. They're not even necessarily the cost. They're just saying like, look, I like spending time with my kids. There's nothing wrong with that whatsoever. But that's

going to have a lot of economic outsized factors. Matt Brunig, who has been hammering this point home for a long time, let's put this up there on the screen around unemployment benefits. This was the worst month of job growth since the Biden administration became president, and the second worst since May of last year, when the pandemic labor market recovery began. So as he points to, it's not like the unemployment insurance cuts did not work, or the unemployment insurance cuts squarely did not work. As you said, look, should unemployment be that high all the time? That's a debate. You know, I don't. Not necessarily in terms of the incentives or whatever, but in terms of the idea that everybody was making more on unemployment,

and thus that's why they're not going back to work at Jamba Juice for $7.25 an hour, this has pretty much just been explicitly disproven. Same whenever it comes to restaurants. We've had a full month now where a lot of this stuff has not been there, and we haven't seen any recovery whatsoever. If anything, we've seen the opposite. Let's put Heather's tweet up there. She also did a great sum up, which is that the key takeaway is that the Delta variant obviously took a toll because hotels only added 2,100 jobs in the last month, which is horrible considering the baseline on which they started. Unemployment aid was not the big factor holding people back. Labor force participation is weak. Child care obviously weighing on the ability to work. And actually, I think this is where the schools start to come into play.

Because even though the school system is back, just speaking with Crystal, I mean, you know got this sheer amount of chaos, which comes with little children and, oh, he's got to get out for two weeks and, oh, now he's back in and, oh, some kid on the soccer team, you know, over there sneeze and he's got COVID. So apparently that's a whole thing. That level of chaos in young kids' lives, that just flushes right up in terms of the parents who have said, you know what, I can't deal with this right now. I got to focus on making sure that, you know, my kid is eating three meals a day and being able to go to work. So I think you put that all together. And like I said, it's going to look at the end of the day, Joe Biden is the president. And no matter what,

he's the person who's going to have to, quote unquote, take responsibility for this. Even though I personally think these are all just massive macro forces which are in and out of his control. To the extent of his control, it's marginal. You can't force somebody to go back to work. See, here's the part which is difficult for me. And I don't actually know how I feel about this long term. As you said, there's all these macro, micro forces combining themselves together. The thing that's driving the unemployment issue, it's these spikes in COVID. It's the COVID spikes

up and down. And look, at the end of the day, I hate to sound like that super conventional wisdom person, but the US does have some of the worst spikes in the entire world. So it's not as if there aren't lessons we could take from other countries, especially in Europe, who are doing a better job of managing that part of the pandemic. Like, once again, like a dynamic in a conversation we're having with people is people say, hey, like, why did Joe Biden aggressively put down this mandate? Whether you support the mandate or not, what's clearly driving him is the fact that they have calculated a better risk to take is that people will be ticked off by the mandate than allowing COVID to continue to spread. And the part that if I'm Joe Biden and I'm that administration that I'm thinking right now

is if this is happening at the end of summer, what is COVID winter going to look like? The prediction I'll make that I'll probably have to eat is just that, you know, if this will probably be like another winter where there's just very, very, very, very, very aggressive spread. So the question is,

what are they going to be able to do in the months before then to actually restore trust and address some of the problems that you're describing there? My hope is that September was a high watermark, that Delta was so infectious. I mean, I got infected, I got COVID. And that enough people now have both vaccine immunity and natural immunity such that the winter surge won't happen. That being said, there's still 68 million people who haven't been vaccinated. And in terms of the amount of that population which hasn't had COVID, it's just, you know, it's larger.

And that means they'll have clusters. You'll see the same thing that's happening across the American South. So look, I don't know how it's going to shake out, but the key point is that COVID is putting a stranglehold on the economy. And at the very same time, when you shut people out of work for a year, some crazy stuff is going to happen.

And that's what we're seeing manifest in the jobs report. All of that politically, not good for Biden. Let's move on to the shortages discussion. This actually fits perfectly with what we were just talking about in terms of the jobs report, which is that we have some crazy shortages right now of literally everything. I did a monologue a couple of months ago with chlorine, all the way from chlorine, semiconductors, you guys know I care a lot about, that goes into the phones, PS5, that's how you probably have had it manifested in your life. That's why the used car market is totally out of control because nobody can buy a new car right now. It's the same thing whenever – actually, we just had to – we have some very special announcements here at Breaking Points, which are basically taking forever for the same reason because of that.

Whenever we bought the new computer in order to edit our show and we needed some high-end thing, it took like two and a half months. This is happening everywhere. I'm sure every person out there is having this manifested. Well, CNN, for once, actually went out and did some great journalism here. You'll rarely hear me say it, but they got onto a helicopter and actually showed everybody what the backup at the U.S. ports look like. For those who are just listening, they do a decent job of narrating. For those who are watching, you guys are going to enjoy this. Let's take a listen. This is where the global supply chain meets the U.S. economy, says Coast Guard Commander Stephen Boer.

It's record-breaking. It's unprecedented. There are more ships than there are parking spots. We are effectively operating a cell phone waiting lot in the Pacific Ocean. This bottleneck of container ships, as far as the eye can see, carries more than half the made-in-Asia items purchased by the American consumer. You're looking at all of the electronics. You're looking at all of the home goods. You're looking at all of the things that people are looking forward to buy this coming holiday season. Zero ships usually stay parked here. But on this day, Commander Bor counts 55 in the ports and

more drifting further out in the Pacific. While worst here, the backup is at all West Coast U.S. ports. What does that indicate to you about what's happening in the supply chain? You know, I think everybody can see that things are slowing down. Slowing down and piling up at sea and at the ports of entry. This is what happens when a global economy snaps back after the COVID slump of 2020. American consumers are back buying with force, but the supply chain is struggling to catch up. No, she's getting to exactly what I'm talking about there, Marshall. And you could see that 55 ships sitting out there circling the port of Los Angeles.

You know, I'm looking here at a CBS Los Angeles local story. Half a million shipping containers right now are sitting off of the coast of Los Angeles and Long Beach waiting to be unloaded. And, you know, another thing I recently found out, which is that part of the problem is that our past system, there was a decent equalizing flow of shipping containers to the United States and back to China. Well, guess what? Because it's a one-way relationship right now, we've got all the shipping containers coming here, but we don't have anything going back to China. So the Chinese woke up one day and they're like, hey, we don't have any shipping containers. So then what's even worse is we had to send entire ships back of just empty shipping containers back to China. That's a huge drag on the global supply chain. It creates all

kinds of crazy stuff. I was listening and talking over the weekend with somebody who's familiar with semiconductors. I don't know if you guys know this. It takes 200 days, 200, from conception to production for a single semiconductor chip in the world's best fabs. So you take that and you multiply it across everywhere. That's part of the reason that we're seeing such massive and crazy price fluctuations across everything. All of it, it seems to be, you can trace back to screwing around with the economy is crazy. And right now, if you're going to order something for Christmas for your significant other, for your parent or wife or whatever, I would start ordering right now, folks, because it is not going to get better by December.

I can guarantee you that. Yeah. And look, the big key thing here, I saw this joke on Twitter where someone said, look, if you're going to buy anything for your kids, buy them an NFT because it literally will be the only thing available on the stores here. Once again, the story here is much similar to the job story we just told, which is that they're all at least interlocking figures. You could look at every single thing that Sauri just talked about and you could say, hey, it's the fact that the Longshoremen's Union in L.A. is not unloading things at the proper rate. You could say, hey, there's the fact that the Longshoremen's Union in LA is not unloading things at the proper rate. You could say, hey, there's something about China. There's something about stores not being able to keep up with supply.

The bigger point here, and this is once again a conventional wisdom COVID take, is we have this massive interlocking system pre-COVID. It's globalization. It's the fact that you could transfer goods with shipping containers across the entire world. You can get your Ikea. You can get your IKEA. You can get your thing at CVS, Walgreens, Fred Meyer, Albertsons, no matter where you are in the country.

We had access to a ridiculous amount of goods, services, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And because of all the stresses with COVID, there is just a total inability of that system to work perfectly so that when you have a longshoremen's union strike, when you have issues with individual truckers not being able to be hired, there's all these other factors that are going across. We really recommend you all read a piece by Derek Thompson at The Atlantic. Just one second. Let's put this up there on the screen. Put it up there, friend of the show, Derek Thompson. Just explain what Derek is talking about in here. Yeah. He's once again just illustrating everything that we are talking about here,

which is the fact that you have a global supply chain that is slowed down right at the moment when everyone is trying to do things. Everyone has a decent amount of savings, given the stimulus checks, given the unemployment insurance, given the fact that people weren't traveling as much for the past year and a half. People are trying to buy things, yet the supply is going low, which is why everything's rising. This is also another reason why people can't just give cold takes about government spending causing inflation, because actually there are some pretty straightforward reasons why that's actually being driven. And once again, it's unclear. We're not just trying to explain for Joe Biden here.

We are trying to say, because I know that there's someone who's throwing their phone at the screen saying, hey, story, there is not one clear policy fix that would actually adjust. Even if you just got down to the longshoremen's union and forced them to unload every single thing, it would not actually solve the fact that there are not enough truckers who would actually move those goods off of the area and that actually leads to the buildup. That's why I love this. I'll just go ahead and do it. I'll push the button and piss off those people.

This has nothing to do with government spending whatsoever. Literally not a single thing, which is that government spending has nothing to do. My favorite meme is gas prices. Guys, no matter who the president is, they don't have a goddamn thing to do with gas prices. And you can say all you want about the strategic petroleum reserve or whatever. It has to deal with OPEC. And look, we had a time when people weren't driving, so we dramatically reduced supply. And it turns out it's actually pretty hard in order to just ramp up immediately. And you're seeing the LNG tankers and all that other stuff in terms of how long it's getting in order to cross the Persian Gulf. Same thing, ramp up production here in the

US. I've grown up around the oil industry for my entire life, and everybody there knows that the boom and bust cycle is part of the hardest problem of the industry, and that can cause some really crazy price fluctuations. And one of the things that Derek gets to here, and I'm just going to read this, quote, the best solution to the everything shortage is to have a policy to make more of just about everything. Containers, like I was talking about earlier, which carry 90% of the world's traded goods, are overwhelmingly manufactured in China. Why does America not make more? Car parts, semiconductors, and home goods have all been offshored, making the United States solely reliant on overseas factories. Why can't America make more? At-home COVID tests, that's another

perfect one. Those things saved my ass whenever I had COVID, and that's how I initially got the tests, and they were cheap and they were available. But from what I hear, you can't buy one in a CVS right now. That is actually the real policy, if I were to point to a single thing, which is, hey, let's increase domestic manufacturing capacity for some of these goods now that we have lived through a crazy event. And we say, hey, actually, it's probably not good to be relying on everyone. I'm looking right now at the United Kingdom. It's the same thing. We were recently talking with someone, Marshall and I, on our podcast, The Realignment, and somebody was saying they're blaming Brexit. And I was like, no, it has nothing to do with Brexit, or maybe it does

to a marginal event. The Britain is an island nation. So it would make sense to me that in the middle of the greatest supply crisis since, what, World War II that we've seen on the global economy, in a highly more integrated, just-on-time delivery world, that yeah, the islands are going to be the people who suffer the most. If that's one takeaway, for me, that's what it is. Let's make more stuff. Let's go back to this weird period, March, April, May 2020. Everyone is peak unified in terms of COVID is a threat we're concerned with, which it obviously is a threat. That's not disparagingly, but it wasn't quite the culture war take that it is today.

We all have to dance around to certain degrees. We all agreed, hey, actually like domestic, resilient supply chains are incredibly important. Everyone agreed on this. This world that we're describing, once again, this obviously takes over globalization after Trump's election. But the part that everyone likes, a.k.a. the fact that we can get goods, we can move around relatively freely more than at any other time in human history, that's all great. But there's going to be no other pandemics.

There are going to be other problems. It's just very clear that, once again, if we talk about foreign policy, we have this idea during the 1990s that because the Soviet Union's gone, everything's going to be chill. Guess what the lesson in 2020 is? That world where we just saw the benefits of globalization, where we just said, hey, we can get whatever we get from whatever, who cares? If we get our oranges from Mexico

and our semiconductors from Taiwan, that's whatever. We are never going back to that world. And there's something that President Biden has to do, despite the cultural aspects of it. And this is to anyone who succeeds Joe Biden, too. They have to focus on those resiliency things. What do we do once we actually finally move past this? How do we not just let that May 2020 consensus go away? Because it's going to be so easy to say, you know what?

Let's just get back to that. That was really great. We don't have to be able to manufacture at-home tasks or even containers, the least sexy thing ever. Domestically, that clearly is true, especially when we want to have a good Christmas, Hanukkah, holiday season. And this was the biggest failure of Trump. I mean, and people get mad when I talk about it because, yeah, he might have been the first president to talk about it. But he was president during a time where he could have done something about it. And guess what? Net imports from China are up 54% under the Trump administration

in the year 2020. And you know why? It's because Steve Mnuchin and a lot of people who worked in his administration explicitly blocked a Buy American executive order, which was sitting inside of the National Security Council written by Peter Navarro, because they didn't want to piss off the Chinese and ensure that we could continue to have just-in-time delivery. And listen, maybe they were right. Maybe it would have led to the current situation that we had right now. But at what point do we deal with it? You have to do something. I mean, we have to make sure, like the shipping containers. Okay, it sounds like we need to build some shipping containers in this country. It sounds like at-home tests. I mean, this is the most basic medical infrastructure. These COVID tests, they're not rocket science, folks. They

make them all over the world. In Europe, from what I hear, it's even government subsidized and it costs like a dollar in order to get it. Why do we have to go out and buy it? What was I talking about earlier with Crystal's kids? Why do we require these expensive PCR tests for families? I've had to go get a last minute PCR test. It cost me like $250 for a rapid PCR. I mean, yeah, I can afford it, but what about somebody else if you're out there? That sucks, man. I mean, what are you supposed to do? That's a huge hit in order to have just a last minute increase. We're all getting taxed effectively for the failure of government after government after government in order to have just a last-minute increase. We're all getting taxed, effectively, for the failure of government after government after government

in order to make the country more resilient. And so when you're a leader, it's your job in order to do something about that. Of course, Congress right now is more focused on whatever subpoenas are going out for January 6th, so I congratulate them on chasing the biggest story of the year. But in my opinion, this is it. Everybody at home can see, hey, when I order stuff, it takes a long time. And you just

wait. Come Christmas, it is going to be national headlines. I ordered something for Christmas, and it didn't get here until January or something. Or I tried to order this, and they were out of stock. Everybody in America is about to feel the consequences of this. And you should make sure, maybe send them a segment, send them something in order to explain to them. Be like, no, this is a very long time thing coming that policymakers saw. We were set up this way. We've had multiple opportunities now to at least try and get on the better path. And we haven't been doing it. And that, you know, is a huge failure whenever it comes to Washington. Hey, so remember how we told you how awesome premium membership was? Well, here we are

again to remind you that becoming a premium member means you don't have to listen to our constant pleas for you to subscribe. So what are you waiting for? Become a premium member today by going to breakingpoints.com, which you can click on in the show notes. Let's go ahead and move on here to the Facebook whistleblower. Now, I could put my cards on the table. Crystal was more sympathetic to this person. She seems to me like a total and complete setup. And I mean by that in terms of I could not think of somebody better crafted in order to serve the mainstream narrative of MSNBC, CNN, and Fox, or not Fox, actually, in this particular case, MSNBC and CNN, that Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, in particular, are uniquely responsible for the ills of America, as in,

their algorithms are what caused Trump, January 6th, all of that. And oh, it didn't have anything to do with their own coverage or many of the people who were on their network, the government policy, so that they pushed while they were in power. Can't think of anything better than Nicole Wallace from the Bush administration over at MSNBC. I just want to give people an example of how this Facebook whistleblower is being used by the mainstream media in order to push for rampant more censorship. So like here is the takeaway for Nicole Wallace from this whistleblower. Let's take a listen to that. Explosive new allegations from a whistleblower at Facebook who alleges that the social media company's practices played a role in emboldening the January 6th insurrection,

prioritizing its own profits and its own bottom line over the danger to democracy, a pattern the whistleblower Frances Hogan calls a betrayal. Here were her comments last night on 60 Minutes when she revealed her identity for the very first time after leaking troves of documents to the Wall Street Journal. Watch. And one of the consequences of how Facebook is picking out that content today is it is optimizing for content that gets engagement or reaction, but its own research is showing that content that is hateful, that is divisive, that is polarizing, it's easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions. Misinformation, angry content is enticing to people and keeps them on the platform.

Yes. Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they'll click on less ads, they'll make less money. Haugen says Facebook understood the danger to the 2020 election, so it turned on safety systems to reduce misinformation. But many of those changes, she says, were temporary. And as soon as the election was over, they turned them back off or they changed the settings back to what they were before to prioritize growth over safety. And that really feels like a betrayal of democracy to me. Betrayal of democracy, Marshall? I mean, is she right?

What do you make of this whole thing? You've followed Facebook and all that for a long time. She's obviously being propped up by every single establishment network there is. They seem to believe that she is exposing some grand plan by Mark Zuckerberg to tear us all apart. I mean, I'm not saying technology isn't having a course in that, but I think it's probably a natural extension of what's going on here. So what do you think? Yeah, look, the one thing I would push back on, because I think people may misinterpret it, is the idea that she's just propped up. I think the whistleblower actually authentically really speak. She obviously believes this,

like frankly, her Harvard background, the company she's worked at is not a surprise that given the educational demographic factors that we actually cover all the time, it is not surprising that a center left to left person who works at a tech company would believe those things. So I don't think this is propped up. And I think actually, once again, this is the problem.

This is why nothing actually ever happens with tech policy regulation. We always hit this point. 50% of the country actually agrees with her. So I don't want it to say, because propped up suggests it's inorganic. It's all sorts of narratives. How about this? It's a marriage of convenience. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. That's actually very important, which is that there's a situation where she is saying exactly what a very specific set of actors, which you and oftentimes this show are very, very, very unhappy with, and frankly, this audience too, with those factors there. So several things. Number one, look, there are things that she is describing that are not good that are going on there, right? There's this whole conversation about the role and Facebook's decision to not implement changes based on the fact that they actually, within their own programs, have serious research

indicating that Instagram and other social apps owned by Facebook actually play a role in dramatically lowering self-esteem of teen and young girls and those different factors there too. So if there's actually significant evidence within these leaked documents that that's actually happening,

we cannot just dismiss that and say that none of that stuff really matters. The part here that's just interesting to me and I think what people should take a step back from is say, hey, look, what problems, and this isn't my take, a friend told me this this weekend, what problems are Facebook problems and what problems are internet problems? An internet problem seems to me to be the fact that, hey, we are throwing out billions,

if not trillions of images that people can see. Because this isn't just Instagram. This is TikTok, which Sagar and I obviously have views on. But this doesn't exist on TikTok regardless. So trying to encapsulate all this story down to Mark Zuckerberg makes the story pointless. Because rather than having to be able to have a conversation of, hey, how should we as a society think about algorithmic governance? How should we think about the issue of what actually affects people's self-esteem? Like, you know, another take people were putting out this week was, hey, in the 1980s and 1990s,

we were worried about magazines and the role that played in bulimia. And these were real things, but we didn't regulate the magazine industry. Like Sports Illustrated. Yeah. There's an actual dynamic here that we as a society have to come to. The part that just frustrates me is I'm just – I'll just put my cards on the table. You did this last segment. I'm just tired of the Facebook story.

At this point, this has just become such a 50-50 partisan issue where Facebook is operating – once again, like Mark Zuckerberg is obviously liberal. It's obviously like a democratic company. But the way these stories play out in terms of tribalism, this is operationally going to be a 50-50 story. So rather than having a conversation about, hey, how should Facebook think about the way that groups are run? How should Facebook manage these controversies? What content should Facebook amplify? This, this, this, or that is going to turn into, did you think January 6th was the worst day in American history? Or did you think that it was just this fine—no, not even fine.

It was bad, but whatever. But it doesn't change everything. It was not the second 9-11, as some people have really said here. And that means if that's the framing, we're not getting anywhere. We're never going to get anywhere. To me, the meta story and the big one is actually the most overlooked part of the documents, but actually the most important. Let's put it up there on the screen from Kevin Roos, which is Facebook, it turns out, is a lot weaker than we knew. And Facebook's own data, which was inside the company, shows that Facebook acknowledges two things. It's a massive behemoth, which has a virtual monopoly

on old people, as in a lot of old people, 40 and upward, use the site every day. They get a lot of their news from it. But in terms of its future, it's terrible. Old, young people are dropping off like flies from Big Blue, which is like the Facebook Blue icon. To the extent that they use it, they use Instagram. TikTok just this year surpassed Instagram for time on app. Time on app, obviously, is the most valuable commodity whenever it comes to advertisers because the more time you spend on the app, the more times that the company knows

about you, thus the more they can tweak their algorithm in order to better serve advertisements to you in between. And that young people who are even way younger than us, Marshall, 20 years younger than us, like 11-year-olds and 10-year-olds, say Facebook is for old people, and they don't even use Instagram, period. They'll just use TikTok. And so if you're really looking at the big meta story, Facebook has become almost like AOL. Like I actually recently found out AOL still exists. It doesn't just exist, but there are still a lot of old people who have like AOL accounts. And I was like, why?

And it's like, oh, well, they're just really old, and they just never- Onboarded. Yeah. They were like, hey, AOL is the internet in like 1999 and they just never stopped paying their bill. I think that's kind of like Facebook. It makes a lot of money. It makes a hundred billion dollars a year or something like that. But think about its cultural relevance today. Obviously, Instagram is there, but think about where things are trending. TikTok came in and within a couple of years effectively nuked it in terms of its supremacy for what was happening there on the stage. So that's a more important discussion, in my opinion, which is, oh, it turns out Facebook is a dying star. Like, you know, it was like a big thing, but it is exploding. Like with stars, though, it takes a long time for that to happen. Well, and what's funny is there was another good newsletter that someone put out this weekend where

they said, Facebook's business is still going up. This is an incredible business. That's why this isn't quite AOL, because the secret of AOL is it's actually a terrible business. When it merged with Time Warner, it became one of the biggest mergers in American history. Now it's only worth like $5 billion, which given how it was worth hundreds of billions of dollars, that's a disaster, terrible business. But the brand is dead. We talk about how Facebook shouldn't have been allowed to acquire Instagram or WhatsApp. Guess what? They're not going to be allowed to acquire anything. Back when Clubhouse was hot earlier this year, that wasn't even on the table for something that Facebook could actually purchase. I don't quite then think the metaphor is Facebook

equals AOL, because once again, the business still works. Facebook equals Microsoft. And this is what people really have to understand when they're talking about monopoly, when they're talking about these decisions, and they're talking about, should we frame the tech industry around this topic? The year is 2001. There's this massive antitrust case because Netscape created the first internet browser and people said that Microsoft used very anti-competitive tactics to have Internet Explorer be Netscape. That all happens.

Microsoft doesn't end up getting broken up, but it's very hobbled. The world moves on. Facebook rises. Google rises. All these new competitors happen. That's what's happening now. Microsoft is still an excellent business.

It makes a lot of money. It's not just an excellent business. It's an incredible business. It's a great place to actually use products. I've got my Microsoft Surface here. Wink, wink, wink. But the key thing here is that at the end of the day, it is not the Death Star that's controlling the tech industry, and that is Facebook. And it's so frustrating to have these conversations where we are acting as if Facebook is like a literal or figurative monopoly in the space.

It's not 2014. It's not 2016. It's not 2017. And any conversation about this space that pretends as if Mark Zuckerberg still controls social platforms and the very internet itself is missing it and is not going to go anywhere. Instead, what we should all do is think, hey, moving forward, what does this actually mean? Right. Moving forward, let's take a look over at Beijing and what's going on with TikTok. But that's another story for another day. Let's move on to education. This was something, Marshall, you're pretty interested in. I didn't know a lot about it, but the more that I look into it, it actually is seem

pretty troubling. So let's put this up there on the screen in terms of what we've got going on here. Bill de Blasio, as one of those last acts of mayor, is actually going to go in and kill the New York City Gifted and Talented Program. So what it is, is that the highly selective program, which was a symbol of what the New York Times says is segregation for incoming students, is now going to be effectively killed. The people who are inside the program, they said, it will not go away, but new people will not be accepted. Should be clear here, he's making this a matter of policy, but what they say is that Eric Adams would actually have to implement that policy if and when he is elected. I mean, I assume that's going to happen. So what do you make of this whole thing, Marshall?

I mean, the New York Times, it seems pretty inflammatory for them to say, literally point to it as a, quote, glaring symbol of segregation in school. They don't even quote somebody whenever they make that claim. I mean, that seems pretty outrageous whenever it comes to what they're claiming here, you know, in terms of obviously brings up matters of race and more. What do you make of it in terms of what's going on here? Yeah, most of you know that I recently moved from D.C. to Brooklyn, so I'm actually, you know, I don't know. Oh yeah, you're a constituent. Yeah, yeah. So I'm technically a constituent. I don't have kids or anything. So I'm not quite making decisions about public schooling.

But if we're looking back over the past few months of breaking points and stuff we've discussed in the realignment, it's actually crazy how much local schooling has become this hyper important issue. So even if you don't live in New York, even if you're not, you know, even if your kid isn't in a gifted and talented program,

a quick statement that should be made to address my own biases. I was tested in fourth grade, did not make it into a gifted and talented program. So maybe there's a set of, you know, deep frustrations there. But here's the thing that is really interesting to me. I hated the use of segregation in the way they're framing this program. Because here's the thing that is really interesting to me. I hated the use of segregation in the way they're framing this program because here's the context.

Context, if you look at these gifted and talented programs, 75% of these students are Asian or white. the debate about schools like Stuyvesant, which are these very elite test admittance-based schools where the actual vast majority of people who attend the schools are actually Asian and are not black or Hispanic, causing, once again, a conversation about race and equity. And here's the thing. I'm not just trying to junk to dunk on people who are liberal Democrats like Left of Center. The actual conversation about, hey, like how do we ensure that, especially in public schools, people get proper educations, people have access to resources.

That's an incredibly important one. So I'm not trying to come in here and say, hey, like everything that was happening in New York City was totally okay. In the article, because once again, like despite the annoying segregation where there's some interesting reporting here, there's all sorts of conversations

about how you could modify these programs to make them more equitable. For example, under the status quo, parents have to actually say, hey, I want to have my kid tested. So hey, exactly. That could be a policy that could say, hey, there could obviously be a disparate level of parental engagement. But hey, maybe rather than testing, because they do the testing in kindergarten, we could be like Oregon, where I'm from, and test in fourth grade. You could have a totally fair and honest conversation about these equity points, about the points for there. But the second you throw in segregation, it completely, once again, this goes back to our Facebook

conversation, something the two of us are obsessed with. We cover this on the realignment. We cover this here is what language are we using to describe very complicated public policy programs? The word segregation suggests that there is some person sitting in the New York City public school's offices twirling his or her, I guess his in this case, mustache, making the statement that, oh, now Asians control the gifted. That's not happening. Like, segregation in the Deep South was an actual evil plan that was implemented by actual people, and the solution to that actual evil plan was, frankly, to pass laws and to make Supreme Court

decisions saying, hey, you cannot literally say black people go to one school, white people go to another school. In New York, we have this issue where there are disparate levels of access. There are different levels there. But the second you make this about that type of word, you not only mischaracterize the actual issue, but you basically make it so that a politician, in this case, Bill de Blasio, could effectively just basically say, hey, we're facing this out. We now have equity now. Everything's fair. We're reducing segregation. But at no point are those metrics he's establishing actually helping us have a deeper conversation. Hey, to quote former President George W. Bush, is our children learning?

It's actually a very important question despite the mangled syntax. It actually is an important question of, hey, of those kids who are now going into less segregated schools, by his statement, are we learning more? Is there more opportunity there? Is a meritocracy, which is a very important part of our country, actually operating? You know, what's interesting, too, is to put this New York Post thing up there on the screen. When you go ahead and you look in there, there are a lot of quotes in this story from people who are in Queens and representatives from areas with a higher Asian population in New York City itself. And they're outraged by it. So this could absolutely galvanize a pretty engaged segment of the population, to say the least.

But like you said, it's not like somebody is out there who is saying, oh, you know what, we're going to take these whites and Asians and we're going to separate them from all of these Hispanic black kids and other poor whites and poor Asians. And we're going to create some sort of bifurcated system. Nobody's saying that. I didn't even know that point about testing. That makes complete sense to me.

If I recall in Texas, everybody was tested. So why don't you just do that? You could just make it so that everybody could be tested and make it so that there obviously we would see an increase in equity or whatever as long as the test is okay. And then, okay, like you said, move the test from kindergarten to third grade or fourth grade. These things have been studied for a long time. The message they're sending is that gifted and talented was inherently racist. And that is where I just completely, obviously, get off the train. And I see this very much in the vein of some other craziness that we see kind of happening across the nation where racial outcomes themselves

are the sole determinant of what we should be looking at. And yeah, it should be one determinant. It should be a consideration. It should be something where if you see 0% of people who are black or whatever, I'm not saying that's the case, who are getting in, you say, hey, what's going on here? We have X amount of population. What can we do? Maybe we could try this or that. But instead, they look at it and they just go, that is inherently terrible. And then they just kill it. And in terms of the political implications of this, this is the type of stuff which drives people crazy. I mean, when you start to mess parent teacher conferences or whatever like that before. Critical race theory, obviously.

Whichever way you fall on that, people feel real hot and they go to the mat for it. People getting recalled on school boards and more. This is the same type of thing, Marshall, where you could absolutely see some sort – I don't even necessarily think it would be a Republican. Because some of the people I'm seeing here quoted who are protesting are actually Democrats who represent a lot of Asians. To be clear, this is New York City. Everyone we're talking about is operationally liberal here. Right, but so from what I see is, oh, this just sets another perfect, if I'm Eric Adams, it's one of the first things that I do in order to try and reverse. If I'm Eric Adams, one of the very first things I'm going to be like, hey, you know what?

That was stupid. We're going to do what you said, which is that we're going to test everybody and have all this, and brilliant NYC is going to be our thing. Well, here's what's interesting about that, and this is the part which is super difficult here. Eric Adams, once again, Eric Adams is, I think, despite everything, a very good actual politician keeping his ear down to the ground. Eric Adams has spoken up in favor of the gifted and talented program. Yeah, there you go. Here is the thing, though, and this is why you probably just can't just say we're going to reverse it.

The guidance is already out. So the way it works is this year's incoming cohort of gifted and talented students are going to be the last cohort. So when it comes to these testing questions, the system has been set up. And once again, he hasn't even technically been elected mayor yet. So this has happened. So the broader takeaway that I want people to really think about here is as we're going into these really hyperpolarized, actually for once localized debate, no one's bringing in this is like a Trump thing or this is like a Joe Biden thing. This is actually this very specific issue. issue, as we are looking at these complicated issues, as the country's demographics actually change, we should say to ourselves, hey, is the word segregation particularly useful when we're talking about majority of Asian immigrant students here? Is that quite it? Because I don't think it

actually is. No, I don't just think I know that's not actually it. There is a different, better word. There's a different, better framework because you cannot have the message. The number one thing that I saw people just pushing out on Twitter when they saw this story, because look, it's Twitter, people aren't going into the nuance here. The message seems to be to folks that, wow, New York City just is totally giving up on meritocracy. New York City doesn't care about excellence. New York City doesn't want to offer people who are working really hard, oftentimes are immigrants, the actual opportunity to level themselves up. That is the wrong takeaway. And if you are a person, if you are a part of the left part of this audience, and you actually wake oftentimes are immigrants the actual opportunity to level themselves up, that is the wrong takeaway.

And if you are a person, if you are a part of the left part of this audience, and you actually wake up every day thinking that like equity, racial equality, every number one issues you care about, you do not want to have the reaction people have to these sort of policies be like, wow, like New York City just doesn't care about merit. That is the last thing you want this national hyper-polarized electorate to see your policies through. No, I completely agree. And I think it is going to be a big problem for them in the future, especially if Adams can't reverse it. So let's move on to a story very close to our hearts. I love this story. You guys know I love outsiders and I love whenever they start to engage in politics. This one, Matthew McConaughey, who I've watched for quite a long time. Now remember,

he's leading in the polls there, Governor Abbott, by nine points. Now, you could say, look, he hasn't been defined yet. He hasn't picked a political party and all that. Well, he has broken his silence about whether he's going to run for governor. He's even addressed why he hasn't actually waded into any specific actual policy matters. And Marshall and I found it really interesting. It was an interview with The New York Times, which, Matthew, if you're ever listening or watching, go to somebody else next time because you'll get a better interview. Let's take a listen. You said politics needs

redefinition, so why not redefine it? What's that? Right? Yeah. I mean, please help. I'd love to hear some definitions. I'm working on what I'm trying to understand politics to be. I think we've got to redefine politics. If each party is only about preservation of party, well, I'm almost arguing that's undemocratic. If you're only there to by hook or or by crook, preserve your party, you're leaving out 50% of the people. So I think politics needs a redefining. Look, are the parties so extreme right now that they're going to walk their way into extinction? I don't know. What our fear is, great nations aren't taken over from the outside. They implode. Civil war, that's the big fear for me, for the country, is this path we're going.

It's not constructive. I don't see the way out right now through politics unless it redefines itself and repurposes itself. Why are you not doing that? Letting anybody know who you're for, who you're against. Room for issues where I'm standing on this and bills and laws and policies, et cetera. Yeah. On purpose. I figured it's on purpose. On purpose right now. Taking sides on a political issue right now, to me, precedes the discussion of something larger and much more important. Like the questions we were asking a minute ago, definitions,

what the hell is politics? But you got to read before we start saying, hey, this is where I stand, this is where I stand, which creates already a divide or some 50% of the people that come at you. Let's answer these other questions about purpose of democracy. All right. What is progress? How about this question? Do we really want to be a United States of America? And I don't say that with arrogance or condensation. It's a question we got to answer. What is leadership? Why is our nation's trust level so low with our leaders, with ourselves, with each other? That's more interesting to me before we start hopping in the middle of politics going, well, this is where I stand here and this is where I stand here.

Everybody needs to be in the conversation to answer the questions that I was just bringing up. What do you think of that, Marshall? Well, Sagar, I want you to bring up something you said on Twitter because it really speaks to why we both had a really deep reaction. You said that in that segment, Matthew McConaughey showed a better understanding of politics than people in this space were in D.C. What did you mean by that? Yeah, I've explained it here on the show. Right now, we're the number one podcast on Spotify for news. Thank you.

Shout out to everybody. And people ask me in D.C. all the time because they just don't get it. They're like, how is this possible? And I go, here's the difference. You care about capital P politics. Capital P politics is exactly what he said, which is that, oh, where do you stand on Texas's SB2? Where do you stand on the abortion implementation? What about the January 6th commission? What about, this is all BS in my opinion. You know what

politics is to me? How does these economic shortages at the port of LA impact your life? This Facebook thing, should you care or not? Using technology, it's how we all, are we being governed or should we govern them? Education, the way that we have our kids in schools. Can you think of a more important question? My monologue is going to be about the crisis of American men and about the single male wages and the drop off in the last 30 years. To me, that's something called small P politics, what it means to be a human in a society. And I know that sounds really vague, but it's really important. The ways that you and I interact with the world, there are all sorts of meta choices

that are being made by people in charge that impact that on a huge day-to-day basis. The people who impacted our trade policy with China 30 years ago set us up for where we're at right now in terms of our shortages. The people who made it and, you know, internet regulations and more made it so that Amazon could exist. These are all questions that we actually have to answer. McConaughey is getting at, look, I don't think that's politics to me. What he's getting at is the major meta question that Crystal and I try to answer here every day. Why are people so angry all the time? Why does everybody hate each other? Why is negative partisanship at the highest level ever in modern American history? And why is it that Donald Trump, a buffoon of every metric, got 75 million votes in the last 2020 presidential election?

And then also, how is it that so many people could look at Joe Biden, who's almost like 80 years old, and say, you know what, that's the guy in order to save us? You can like those people, you can hate them, whatever. You should want to know the answer to that. This is our country. And what he's getting at is, do we want to be one country? A lot of people, it seems, don't.

I mean, a lot of people hate each other so much that they're at a point where they're like, it's irreconcilable differences. How much of left politics, and I mean that by like center-left establishment Democrat politics, is just, we need to deliver a knockout punch to the Republicans. Pack the Supreme Court, you know, whatever with the Senate, and just make it so that our national popular vote, and then that's it. Boom, it's over. And then how much of Republican politics is just weaponizing some of these structural advantages I just talked about, let's all be honest, and making it so that they can defend the interests of like 22% of the population who disprofessionally live in the American South? Does that sound like a good system to you? I mean, these are questions where you have to ask, is this how it's all supposed to work? Can we change it? This is why,

look, everybody was going after Andrew Yang. This is why I was interested in what Andrew Yang had to say. Andrew Yang's trying to answer the right question. He goes, hey, is there anything we can do about this? I mean, does it have to be this way? And this is what McConaughey is trying to get at too. And I know a lot of people are going to be mad or whatever. Obviously, he's obviously liberal. Okay, like that's not an issue. But to me, he is speaking to the right question. What do you think?

See, I actually disagree with what we just spoke with Andrew. I think McConaughey and Yang are doing two different things here. Sure. So I just want to pull out what is so incredibly important here for everybody, which is basically that if you're looking at what McConaughey is actually saying, because this is all over Twitter, all these people are saying like— Everyone was dunking on him. Yeah, people were dunking on him, like,

why didn't he give a specific answer on SB1? Why didn't he give a specific answer on how he would handle the abortion issue? That is zooming too far in to the political system right now. Because the key thing is, Beto O'Rourke is most likely also going to run. Kara Swisher also did an interview with Beto. And guess who's down in the polls right now? Beto is down in the polls. Dramatic.

So it's very frustrating. If you're basically a Democrat right now, you should ask yourself, hey, is Beto coming out swinging with this hyper-partisan take or that polarizing take, is that actually the particularly effective way to get elected and govern in a complicated system sort of ourselves? The part that Matthew did here that was so important, the part that I'm obsessed with is he just took a step back and said, hey, let's actually answer these questions. And this is why I'm saying this is what everyone Yang's doing. Yang is saying, what structural change do I think i need to do to the political system in his case it's the ranked choice voting it is the um overall issue

of um open primaries but once again i think that is zooming in too closely because the broader question is hey like and he said this how do you get trust back because i pushed andrew on this to be frank i wasn't particularly happy with his answer. When Andrew makes his third party, when he goes to the first forward meeting, how is he going to retain trust? How is he going to convince all these people that, hey, when they say, Andrew, we need to take a position on Iron Dome,

when he tells them, no, we're not going to do that, which he said he was going to say, guess what? They're not going to trust him. He is going to alienate a huge portion of his audience. So when you just jump in to these very political questions and don't say to yourself, wait, how do I actually answer the trust question? Hey, how do I actually deliver and conceive of

what this country is? That will actually enable you to actually do things. The key takeaway from the past few years is anytime anyone has made this effort to say, I'm AOC and I support the Green New Deal. The Green New Deal could be the greatest policy ever. I'm not dunking on anything that it's actually stating. But the second that that's done, it's over. Josh Hawley, say what you want about him. Josh Hawley has rather sophisticated thoughts on tech regulation.

The second that he gets specific, it's over. Because these people think that the way to solving these questions of trust, political unity, what does it mean to be an American citizen in the 2020s, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, by focusing on policy things, which regardless of the merits are going to be polarized, they are missing the point. And what Matthew is doing so well here and what every politician, aspirant or otherwise, should be looking at is he's taking a step back and doing what we both believe successful politicians during this moment will do, which is they will ask the right question. I think what matters about what he's saying is it's less important what he individually believes than what he's saying a specific issue. What matters is him being able to say, hey, you can trust me. Everything I do is there. And once again, something that is very important to capture in the interview is he actually, once again, this is going to piss off a portion of

this audience. He specifically says, when pushed by Cara, look, I actually supported the mask mandate in Texas. Say what you want about that. The fact that he's starting with, how do I get people to trust me? And then if you hear him care about trust, you hear him actually care what people say, whenever he supports something you don't believe, you know what, you're going to say to yourself,

he may disagree with him, but guess what? I don't think he's corrupt. I don't think he's trying to kill me. I don't think he's trying to ruin my life. We just disagree. We are always going to disagree as a society. That's how a vigorous quasi-anarchic democracy is going to work. But it's very important we have politicians that understand their first job right now is not here's a super wonky program that's definitely not going to pass anyways. It's how do I actually get at least two-thirds of the country, especially that moderate, radical, centrist majority that we always talk about, to say, hey, if this person is actually trying to do the right thing, even if we disagree with what they always say. You know, it's interesting. He actually kind of doubled down on that. He was like, hey,

60% of us are exhausted, man. He goes, 60% of us can't stand this. And he was talking exactly. I wonder if he's been listening. So Matthew, if you have, get in touch. It's funny. I take away that everybody was laughing at him in the current political system. And look, I mean, you know, he starts off and he's like, woo, sounds. And it does sound a little ridiculous. But then he starts talking. And I was like, well, you know, I was reminded of, I've interviewed Trump a lot of times in person. Whenever we would transcribe it, you'd always look at me like, this doesn't make any sense. But when I was there, it made total sense.

And I'm not defending a lot of the stuff that he said. But more what it is is that you miss out, and this is what was happening. Everyone was dunking on him for not having an answer. They saw the transcript. They saw the written transcript. What they saw was a transcript where he was like, measuring, it's a great word, right? But when you listen to it,

and what he was trying to talk about is exactly about like definitions and measuring, trying to get to a deeper question. Now, I still remain, and I still think he'll be one of the most formidable political figures ever if he did decide to run. And I absolutely do think that he would win in the state of Texas. I

mean, right now, the last poll that had him commissioned had him up like 13 points. The fact that Beto came within two points of winning just against Ted Cruz, who was a widely reviled figure, you add the McConaughey star power name recognition on top of what I think is a pretty effective political message, absolutely could do something in that state. Now, he might run even as an independent. He actually alluded to that in the segment. So that would be even more interesting to me. I really would be intrigued to see how it all shakes out. But more importantly, yeah, go ahead. I'll just give a last word on this, which is basically that what I will put forward, and I'm curious what people think about this, I would put forward if we had a president, a governor, a state representative, who's basically the only thing they thought about for their two, four, six, eight years in office was how do we restore trust?

How do we actually answer that question? I think that would be 100 times more productive than the most policy wonky, talking pointsified, DCPR shopped version here's what I believe, this specific thing about abortion. Here's what I believe, this very specific thing about voting rights. Because once again, the reason why none of those talking points will actually be implemented is that no one trusts what anyone is actually saying. Yeah. And it's funny too, whenever you're saying that, in terms of all the talking points and all that stuff, which is that, guess what, guys guys i've said this before governor of texas is basically a fake position it doesn't have a lot of power um part of the reasons w was not prepared to be commander in

chief is because the governor of texas and our state was specifically designed not to have a lot of executive power the legislature doesn't even meet that often so that they don't pass too many laws it's actually baked into the dna so it's a pretty ceremonial post. You can take a look at Rick Perry and George W. Bush and see why. And that's what would be going on here. So just my own little preface. It's going to be interesting. Wow. You guys must really like listening to our voices. Well, I know this is annoying. Instead of making you listen to a Viagra commercial, when you're done, check out the other podcast I do with Marshall Kosloff called The Realignment. We talk a lot about the deeper issues that are changing, realigning in American

society. You always need more Crystal and Saga in your daily lives. Take care, guys. Okay, let's get to my monologue. Something bad right now is happening for American men. And before I start, let me say, I don't have any answers for you as to why, and I don't have anyone to blame. I don't even really know how deep the problem goes. But what I do know is that the crisis amongst men in America today is leading some really bad outcomes for our society, and it's beginning to show itself everywhere in American life. The first warning shot across the bow came from the Wall Street Journal earlier this month. Marshall and I actually discussed this the last time he was on the show, but it's worth repeating some of the core conclusions from that story. Quote, at the close of the 2021 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students,

an all-time high, men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of that decline. Okay, that's stunning. If the trend holds within the next five years, two-thirds of all college degrees in the United States will be granted to women. The male drop-off in college holds across race, age, geography, and economic background. In other words, unlike many stories in America today, it's not class or race, it's gender. There's no one reason as to why men are choosing to forego college, but there is a consensus on one thing. This is really not good for society.

Like it or not, a four-year college degree is required for entry to the upper echelon of America. Think about how many jobs that have nothing to do with college still require a degree. And from there, that's just the entry point. Media, economics, politics, law, business, venture capital, almost all professional jobs today require a college degree. It's simply a bare minimum to even get a shot at competing. Now, not having half the population participating in that is going to lead to some real weird outcomes. But here's the thing. College numbers, it turns out, is just a bat signal for a much deeper problem. New data from Pew Research with pre-COVID

data finds that men are now much more likely to be single than women. Now, you might think, there's nothing wrong with that. Single days were fun after all. But on a societal-wide level, more single men has all sorts of downstream effects which are terrible. Listen to this, quote, single men are much more likely to be unemployed, financially fragile, to lack a college degree than those with a partner. They're likely to have lower median earnings. Single men earn less in 2019 than in 1990, even adjusting for inflation. You know what's even weirder? Single women are actually earning the exact same amount that they were 30 years ago, but those with partners are earning 50% more than previously. Something is uniquely happening

amongst men that has made them not only more single, but actually making a lot less money. And it turns out that itself is a vicious feedback loop. People who are financially stable are much more likely to find and attract a partner. Look, it's not that people are gold diggers. They're not. It's that a societal signal that you're able to provide and have a certain type of seriousness is really important. 2017 Pew Research data found that 71% of U.S. adults said that being able to support a family financially is very important for a man to be a good partner, pretty much equal amongst men and women who said that. Only 25% in the other case for both men and women said the

case was for a female partner. So like it or not, employment and earnings is pretty much tied to our dating and marriage market, if you were to say so, in America, which means that our economic conditions as a country determine one of the most important parts of our lives. Acknowledging that reality reveals a terrible reality for a lot of American men. The more and longer that you are a single male, the worse your economic, health, and marriage prospects become. The more likely you are to live with your parents and longer. And the more and longer it happens, the larger the trend amongst the male population is. And thus, the worst outcome for men on a society-wide level continues. Get this,

73% of men without a partner in 2019 were employed. 90% of those who were partnered were employed. 26% of unpartnered have attended college. 37% of partnered have attended college. The same gap exists amongst married Americans. A four-year college degree right now is the best predictor of whether you're going to get married or not as a man. Pair that with what I opened this segment with. Are you beginning to see a problem? We have a society, particularly an elite, sets the tone for the entire nation and it places an emphasis on college. Men are dropping out of college and are becoming more likely not even to try and go in the first place.

This is going to widen the income gap. The less money that you make, the less likely you are to attract a partner. And so we go. All of this has massive cultural ramifications. Take a look at China's mail imbalance and video game bans right now to see what happens when weird imbalances cause really strange social pathologies. But I think that the one thing that gives me hope is this. None of this is inevitable. It's not like China, where they literally banned having more children. this. None of this is inevitable. It's not like China, where they literally banned having more children. Instead, all of this seems to be the result of economic conditions. And in fact, within the Pew data, there is evidence that when male wages begin

to rise, partnership rises, which in turn spins the hamster wheel of all the benefits that comes with that in the right direction. Now, I told you I wouldn't give you any answers, but I can't resist just one pointing you in this direction. In 2017, David Otter over at Harvard University, he found that declining male wages as a result of departing manufacturing jobs led to increased unpartnered men, lower fertility rates, less rates of marriage, which in turn lead to worse health and income outcomes for almost everybody in our society. So if you want to live in a healthy, prosperous, stable country for years to come, solving this problem seems to be one of the key things that you can do. And the lucky thing is maybe we can do something about it. Problems of the soul are up in the air. A problem of jobs, well, at least we can try and figure it out together. So that's pretty interesting, isn't it, Marshall, that it's a causal direction in both.

One more thing, I promise. Just wanted to make sure you knew about my podcast with Kyle Kalinsky. It's called Crystal Kyle and Friends, where we do long form interviews with people like Noam Chomsky, Cornel West and Glenn Greenwald. You can listen on any podcast platform or you can subscribe over on Substack to get the video a day early. We're going to stop bugging you now. Enjoy. Marshall, what are you taking a look at right now? Yeah, so I am obsessed with the Gallup poll numbers that everyone is focusing on. It shows that trust in media has declined to almost the second lowest level in American history. Now, as breaking points,

viewers, as hopefully realignment listeners, wink, wink, wink, you know where to go. I know that you all here have heard us say, oh, like the mainstream media and CNN and this, this, and that. And I don't want to focus quite on that part because the interesting thing in the data is if you actually look at this, it actually indicates that Republicans actually trust Fox News. So the real take here is that people are kind of bad faith when they answer these questions. So what it basically just means is that trust in these institutions that used to speak for everyone is lower than ever. And that's because there's a huge portion of the country, especially Republicans, who think that these outlets are primarily Democratic. That's the reality. It's interesting to take a look at American history

and consider the fact that the whole period from the 1940s up to basically 2000, where media was seen as neutral and fair, and you had Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite and all these people be able to speak to everyone, that's just totally over. So the question for us is, as we're moving into a society where in every single category, so not just media, but in governance, in institutions, in higher education, Saras did a monologue speaking about

college. People do not trust the higher education system either. People don't trust their local school board. That is why you see these hyper-polarized, really aggressive fights with everything from critical race theory to all these other broader issues. The point is, if you are thinking about the society we live in, how we're going to live in it, to call back to the segment we just did about Matthew McConaughey, you should be opening with the question of how can we restore trust in these institutions. Trust does not equal consensus. Trust does not equal, wow, 99.9% of everyone's going to agree with whatever Sagar's saying or whatever I'm saying, whatever Karis Wisher's saying, whatever Matthew McConaughey's saying. It means that we live in a society where people say, hey, you know what?

Marshall and I may disagree about how the US should handle the Taiwan crisis, or Marshall and I may disagree on mask mandates, or we may disagree about how we should think about a gifted and talented program. But he believes what he believes because he believes what he believes, not because he's corrupt, not because he's trying to harm you, because in a democracy, we have different views and our goal is to actually reconcile them. So what I would want people to really push is to say, don't just look at these trust numbers

in the context of media, but think about them in every single aspect of your lives. Think about the question of, hey, how can I convince people that the higher education system, which will always be with us to some degree, exists to actually help people? How do I restore trust in my local school board?

How do I restore trust in a politician who has to actually govern? Because the number one thing that needs to be said to people who push the anti-corruption bit, who push against these institutions, is they are not doing the second fact. It is completely all right and completely warranted to say, hey, I think the current two-party system is corrupt. I think that politicians who are in office are not doing what's best for everyone, this, this, this, and that. But if all you do is tear down the status quo and don't actually address the trust question, you are just creating more problems because whenever you win power, you'll be hurt by the same lack of trust issue. The joke I made with Sagar during our Andrew Yang episode about the forward party is the problem that Andrew is going to run into, if he gets what he wants, is under the

current status quo where everyone doesn't trust basically everything. The second the third party comes about, people would instantly start losing trust in that institution because something did not go their way. So if you are a person who is concerned about corruption, if you're a person who sees these trends, thinks they're going the wrong direction, the question you have to answer for yourself is what are we going to do to actually long-term answer that question of a storing trust? And what really frustrates me and I think frustrates you is there are very few actors in our public system, private, public. Joining us now is Jacob Helberg. He's the author of The Wires of War, Technology and the Global Struggle for Power. Excellent book. We previously had a great conversation. I wanted to make sure that you could come over here to Breaking Points and discuss.

This book is all about a struggle for war and technology, and it's specifically about the U.S. and China. Jacob, give us a little bit of a preview of this in the context of all of the craziness that we're seeing right now with Taiwan? So as I write in the book, war has always been a spectrum. And you're not either in a total state of war or in a total state of peace. And one of the things that technology has done over the last few years is it's allowed state actors to wage war in the gray zone, which is a concept that military experts refer to to talk about attacks that don't quite rise to the conventional threshold of war. That has become a pervasive aspect of international politics because technology now infuses every aspect of our lives.

And with Taiwan, you have a situation that has been at the epicenter of gray zone conflict and what I call the gray war. And unfortunately, we're now reaching a point where it could potentially turn into a hot war. So the immediate thing that we got from listeners as they're looking at the news about Xi Jinping saying that Taiwan and China, mainland China reunifies, people are desperately afraid right now. What's just the temperature check when you're looking at the situation in Taiwan and how it relates to what you're writing about?

It's probably the most dire in our lifetimes. I don't think we've ever had a situation where we realistically face the scenario of an actual hot war between major powers that are nuclear powers nonetheless. I was born on the day of the fall of the Soviet Union, so I've never known that in my lifetime. The reason that we care about Taiwan

and that it is actually a core interest to the United States is for four main reasons. For computer chips, maritime trade routes, submarine cables, and precedent. The South China Sea is a major corridor for information infrastructure submarine cables, which carries the bulk of information that connects North America and the Indo-Pacific,

allowing China to take control of that, it would be a huge setback to American national security, to intellectual property, to the sovereignty of a lot of countries in that region, for reasons that I detail in the book. Obviously, an enormous amount of supply of computer chips get made in fabs that are in Taiwan by TSMC. And as I explained in the book, allowing China to control that would jeopardize our access to chips and also the integrity of the chips themselves. Mealtime trade route is another major issue. And the last is precedent. And this has been a very thorny topic in the foreign policy community,

but setting the precedent of allowing China to annex a democratic country like Taiwan is a really, really bad precedent to set. That is basically giving Russia the green light to invade Ukraine. It's letting China know that it can basically move forward and annex other parts of its disputed territories like the Senkaku Islands. China has disputed territories with 17 countries.

So there is a lot at play. And I think it would be in the interest of everyone in the region to make sure that that precedent isn't set. Yeah, you know, Jacob, I can already hear the comment section, people are saying, oh, you know, the military industrial complex wants war over China. This is something that, you know, you're an arm of that, you're just pushing that, all of that.

Why should people care? If you're a normal person, let's take the money out of it. Why should people care about any of this? I'm so happy you bring that up because let's remember that we got to this place because we have had a policy of engagement towards China and we've operated on the assumption that engaging with them and you know giving them the benefit of the doubt and giving them a pass every time they haven't lived up to

their international commitments would actually buy us goodwill and would buy us good behavior and it hasn't and you know the old saying that you saying that we are confronted in China with a pattern of behavior that is completely at variance with our own. This is an autocratic regime that operates very, very differently from democratic systems that we're used to at home. At the end of the day, what you're seeing is the behavior habits of Xi Jinping at home are being mirrored abroad and deterrence works. And it's worked throughout history.

And as Michelle Flournoy pointed out, it is the erosion of American deterrence in the Asia Pacific that is actually inviting the kind of aggressive behavior that could actually culminate in a war, not the other way around. I'm really glad you hit that because people should learn lessons from history. And obviously the cliche is that, you know, it doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. But when we're looking at the rhetoric that people are engaging in, people often say things like, well, you know, actually placing backing for Taiwan will actually increase

the chances of war. But if you look at the 1930s, it was the lack of commitment to democratic countries. It was actually a lack of commitment to the idea that we would defend territorial integrity that actually increased the chances of war. Once again, situations are going to differ, but it's important to look at how these things are not just as simple as pro-peace, anti-war. But the question I'd ask for you is, what drives Xi Jinping to take the approach that he's taking? Because what I don't quite understand is, if you want to reunify from their perspective China, you want to have Hong Kong, you want to have Taiwan by 2049, the 100th anniversary

of the CCP's takeover of the country, why don't you just prove that China's a good model and the Taiwanese people would want to actually join rather than just trying to take things by force? Well, Xi Jinping is 68 years old, so the window in his personal life to make this part of his legacy is finite. He doesn't have forever. He also sees that window narrowing

for strategic reasons in the region. American allies in the region like Japan, Australia, just to name a few, are actually starting to coalesce on a counter China agenda. They would never call it that, of course, but that's basically what it is. A lot of countries are growing very, very skeptical and concerned about Chinese behavior in the region, and they're starting to come on board on America's agenda to address that behavior in the region. So Xi Jinping is looking at a situation where 10 or 15 years from now, he could actually find himself in a region that has a much more unified front vis-a-vis China than it is currently. And he's also looking at a situation where

the current vice president of Taiwan, who could potentially be the next president of Taiwan, has outwardly supported independence. And so that is something that is really scary for China because it's potentially a signal that Taiwanese politics are trending in a more pro-independence direction. You see, and this is where I think it all becomes very important, which is that, you know, as we see, we see, I just saw this morning across the wire, the Chinese are practicing beach landing drills in the province across from Taiwan. They've penetrated some, not necessarily the airspace, but the air defense zone, which obviously is always in dispute whenever countries say stuff like that. All of this points to what could be an unstable China that sees what happened. The world blames them for COVID, as they should. And they see this as a reason in order to move forward. So Jacob, nobody wants war with Taiwan. It will be a disaster. And regardless

of whether it even comes to that or not, what can we do right now in the year 2021 to avoid what would be a catastrophic outcome for the U.S., for Taiwan, and for China? So Xi Jinping has made his intention of unification very, very clear. So then the question is, what do we do about it? Do we want Taiwan to, the two scenarios that we have to avoid a war is scenario number one, we just let him take the island, or scenario number two, we prevent him from taking the island in the first place, we prevent him from trying to carry out an attempt

to invade the island in the first place. If you want to pursue the latter, the question really boils down to how do you configure the map of the region in a way where his calculation changes? And I think the presence of, you know, a lot of this boils down to who's going to blink first. We dread the idea of waging war on China, but China dreads the idea of waging war on the US. So the question is, who's gonna wage war on who? And if you have US troops that are already on the island, the ball is in China's camps.

If we have no presence there, the ball is in our camp because China's gonna invade and then we're gonna have to decide whether or not we're gonna send people there. The recent reports that we actually do have a small presence that has been secretly helping train the Taiwanese forces is actually kind of good news because you're seeing an interesting reaction by Beijing where it's basically urging the U.S. to withdraw because it knows that if the U.S. is already there, the decision to invade becomes much, much more complicated. I wrote a piece about decentralizing deterrence that's basically about how one of the best, most effective ways to restore deterrence is by substantially bolstering the armament and defense apparatus of our allies so that the weight and the burden of defense doesn't entirely all rest on our shoulders. And that was the model that we carried out during World War II.

I mean, we were the arsenal of democracy, but, you know, through the Lend-Lease program and through a lot of other programs, we actually armed our allies. It was a very effective model. And I think that there's something to be said about carrying out a modern day approach version of that. Yeah, I think that's really well said. Jacob, we really appreciate you joining us. Thank you. I think the book is excellent and people should buy it. We'll have a link down there in the description. Go ahead, Marshall. And we have an excellent, excellent, excellent podcast of Jacob coming out tomorrow, day of the book launch. So be sure to subscribe to The Realignment and check that out as well too. It's really great. We get into

always broader issues, a lot of good stuff there. That's right. Thanks, Jacob. Appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. Absolutely. Okay, guys, thank you so much for watching. Marshall, thanks for sitting in.

You just plugged The Realignment, but you can go ahead and do it again. Where can people check it out? Yeah, so people can find us on YouTube. We're actually really crossing 50, so thank you to everyone for supporting there. Love getting into the comments of everyone. And you can also subscribe. We're on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, everywhere you find your downloads. There you go. And I appreciate everybody watching. We really do, both Crystal and I. It means the world. The only way really that we can keep the lights on here, given what

we're dealing with with YouTube and demonetization, is if you guys can help us by becoming a premium subscriber today. The link is down there in the description. We deeply appreciate all of the support. It makes it so that we don't have to care if we have to play a copyrighted clip or if we want to cover a certain story, even though that we know it's not going to work. It's the one way we can ensure our absolute independence. So thank you all very much. Chris will be back here in the studio tomorrow,

and we will see you all then. Thanks for listening to the show, guys. We really appreciate it. To help other people find the show, go ahead and leave us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps other people find the show. Go ahead and leave us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Really helps other people find the show. As always, special thank you to Supercast for powering our premium membership.

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I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also theard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind Boy Sober, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy. But to me, Boy Sober is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it.

Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your not the father week on the OK Storytime podcast. So we'll find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. He's trying to give it to his irresponsible son. But I have DNA proof that could get the money back.

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