Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 11/26/25: Job Loss Surge, Leaked Witkoff Putin Call, Epstein Dershowitz Conspired Against Mearsheimer, Tucker Flips On GOP, Venezuela War Push

Episode Date: November 26, 2025

Ryan and Emily discuss job losses surging in the US, leaked Witkoff Russia call, emails expose Epstein and Dershowitz conspiring to crush Mearsheimer, Tucker flips on GOP, Venezuela war push. To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc. And send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you.

Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. check out the second season of my podcast shell game on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts on this week's episode of next chapter i t dj sit down with denzel washington a two-time academy

award winning actor and cultural icon i don't take any credit for it i just didn't put me first i just put god first and he's carrying me listen to the next chapter podcast on the i heart radio app Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast, new episodes drop weekly. On the podcast Health Stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night. I'm Dr. Priyankawali, a double board certified physician. And I'm Hurricane Dibolu, a comedian and someone who once Googled, Do I Have Scurvy at 3 a.m? And on our show, we're talking about health in a different way, like our episode where we look at diabetes.

In the United States, I mean, 50% of Americans are pre-diabetic. How preventable is type 2? Extremely. Listen to health stuff on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Saga and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to breakingpoints.com, become a member.

today and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at breaking points.com. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to breaking points. Thanks so much for joining us on this pre-holiday episode. Ryan actually, you know, it's the day before Thanksgiving, but what else is Ryan Grimm doing other than breaking news? So he has a news story getting into additional Epstein emails that DropSight has obtained where we learn about Epstein doing a little behind the scenes work in the case of John Meersheimer. Ryan, you're going to break that story down for us.

And of course, a fan of the show and friend of the show, Alan Dershowitz, is involved, who if you haven't seen Dropside also posted this clip of Barry Weiss saying that her method of kind of controlling the media going forward is she wants to cancel everybody outside of the center left and the center right. She said there will be no Hassan Pikers, no Tucker Carlson's,

and as a model for how she would like to see discourse go on between the 40-yard lines, she said, which I don't understand because you can actually, so there's no red zone activity. Tucker scoring the touchdowns. That part, like I think the analogy kind of fell apart, but this is what she said, within the 40-yard

lines, those are the only player. She wouldn't let the players go beyond the 40-arlands. But the players she cited were a debate between Dana Loche, former NRA spokesperson, or maybe still current, and Alan Dershowitz. And Glenn Greenwald went and found that debate, which they actually did host on CBS, and it had like 850 views over like 24 or 48 hours. So, yeah, Alan Dershowitz turns up in this story, working directly. In one week, he's working with Jeffrey Epstein to push back against Stephen Walt and Meersheimer's paper called Israel Lobby, major kind of watershed moment in 2006.

And they're working to push back against allegations of sexual abuse leveled by a 14-year-old at Epstein. And they're talking about how they've worked with a private investigator to uncover all sorts of, they say, sort of details about this girl to undermine her credibility. It was a really busy day in Palm Beach. in 2006. Yes, busy day for that crew. So, Ryan's going to break that story down. We'll break that down. Stay tuned.

We're here at home because, you know, it's the holidays. Let the crew take it easy, start hitting the road. You know, hope everybody's traveling safely if they have to travel. I'll be here in D.C. we're hosting. What about you? We'll be in D.C. for Thanksgiving, then heading to Wisconsin the next day. But you guys are hosting. Wow.

That'll be. Yes. they'll be quite a lot yes we like good americans will be deep frying a turkey in our in our driveway which which reminds me like we and i think i speak for you too here we're so grateful uh for the audience here and you know for the people who continue to watch this show and allow it without the audience the crazy stuff we said we say would not have to be taken seriously in our discourse So the people we bring on here and the news that we break could just be ignored. That is the preference by the power centers, that they just are able to ignore the stuff they don't want to hear.

But when there are millions of people listening to it, they just have no choice but to grapple with it. And so that's a thank you. And if you're not already a subscriber, like doing that helps make this show possible. Like this is not funded by corporate advertising, by philanthropy, anything else. This is a viewer-supported program, which is a really a beautiful thing. Yeah, that's so true. I saw somebody in my Twitter mentions the other day saying Breaking Points is it's well-known that it's funded by Cutter.

If you actually watch the show, that's obviously hilarious because maybe we have some people who watch us in Qatar, but the only way it would be funded by Cutter is if a subscriber individually was subscribed over at BreakingPoint.com. $99 a year. What is it now, $80, $100 a year? You, if you're the Emir of Qatar, or if you're just a very wealthy citizen of Qatar, the same price for you. There you go. But yes, I just want to underline what Ryan said. We are so grateful, grateful, grateful. And especially because, you know, we're going to be covering the jobs numbers in just one moment. It's tough times and could be tough times ahead. So that makes us extra grateful. We do have new ADP data, which is what we're relying on now, on. jobs to get to and more and more updates on the Ukraine peace plan, a interesting rant from Tucker Carlson on the Sean Ryan show. So we are going to get to all of that in just one moment. Let's start with those ADP numbers. You just saw them up on the screen. And Ryan, this is looking

bleak. So the headline, private payroll loss is accelerated in the past four weeks, according to ADP. And they're saying private companies lost an average of 13,000, 500 jobs a week, according to ADP data over the past four weeks. What's your reaction? Yeah, and that's up from an average of 2,500 job losses per week. So those are not the kinds of changes you like to see with a quintupling of job losses. It's not Armageddon. You know, it's not what we saw in, you know, 2007, 2008, where you're losing hundreds of thousands of jobs a month plus, but it's not going in the right direction. And we don't know more broadly what the circumstances are in the economy because BLS was shut down. One employee at the BLS was deemed to be

essential or accepted from getting shut down. As you can imagine, one person is not enough to collect data on the economy from around the country. In fact, they probably need 10 times as many people as they have to collect genuinely accurate or as accurate data as possible. So we're relying on ADP and other private data collectors or private companies that work in employment and then spit out data as a result of it. But all of this is indicating that at least we're going to get a, you know, we're likely to get in December a rate cut from the Federal Reserve, which is finally pushing down somewhat on mortgage rates.

I think they're down to roughly 6%. You know, they haven't cracked underneath 6%, but if they can get under 6%, that's a little bit, you know, more bearable for people. What was your reaction to this? I mean, not the sound. I actually think I might be trusting ADP's numbers for the governments. We're expecting more government numbers in December, but ADP should have a pretty good pulse of what's happening across the sector or across sectors. And so I think this probably matches people's experience. we can put the next element up on the screen.

CNBC also reporting consumer confidence is hitting its lowest point since April as job worries grow. April, of course, was post-liberation day. So they're reporting now consumers soured on the current economy and their prospects for the future with worries growing over the ability to find a job, according to a conference board survey released Tuesday. So if we combine that with the prior CNBC report from yesterday about ADP's jobs numbers, and you combine it with consumers saying they're increasingly worried over the ability to find a job. It sounds like that's a pretty decent picture, sadly, of what's happening across the country right now, Ryan. Yeah, and what's so disturbing about this survey here is that people are saying that they expect six months from now

that we're really going to be circling the drain. They have a higher impression of the current situation than they do of the future one. And, you know, the reason that the, you know, they survey consumers on this is because that obviously then has a self-fulfilling effect where if you are thinking about some type of significant purchase, you're going to then hold off on that. And then when you are not making those significant purchases, then that has the knock-on effects throughout the economy. the prices and inflation, according to this survey, still remain, even though job loss and the difficulty of finding a job is growing in the kind of anxiety index, prices inflation are still, number one, tariffs and trade are mixed in there, along with what they describe as politics and the federal government shutdown. And so people are like nervous about the stability of the economy. Like they're seeing the tariffs up, down, do we have a deal? We don't have a deal.

The court strikes it down. Well, we're going to appeal it. Now the Supreme Court's going to hear it. Supreme Court didn't seem to like tariffs. What's going to happen if they do that? Plus, I think by politics, I think people mean like, this is just a weird time. Like, this is what is going on? Like, Marjorie Taylor Green is just resign.

out of nowhere. Like, it just kind of, you know, this is a confidence survey. Our system is not inspiring confidence right now. Yes, that much is clear. And I wanted to go back and look at this. I mean, Oren Kass was pointing out that the CPI, the Consumer Price Index, increased 1.5% over the past six months, which is since Liberation Day. That's actually the same increase during the six months prior. There's that evidence, of course, that 20% of tariff costs are what's being passed to consumers lower than some people expected. So at the same time, that's a little, that's the anti-dumer tariff pitch right now. At the same time, this lingering uncertainty, it feels, Ryan, like that hasn't quite, what's the right word, manifested? That hasn't quite,

the lingering uncertainty hasn't quite climax, I guess, in the economy. And that, you know, we talk about the AI bubble. The uncertainty, maybe it wouldn't be such like a bubble pop, but it could be something that's more gradual because you're going to see companies amidst all of this, to the point Ryan was just making about things feeling unsettled, betting either fully in the United States like Sharpie, which was an incredible story.

The Wall Street Journal had about Sharpie relocating to Tennessee and doing almost everything in Tennessee or you're just going to say screw it we're not even dealing with this at all. Yeah, and I feel like that sense of

paralysis comes from primarily from people's assessment around the AI economy because I think people people know that like people know that we're in a bubble. Like we're in a pre-pop era and the last

bubble was close enough that enough people, you know, remember having lived through it. And then the tech, you know, the tech bubble for anybody, you know, Gen X or even millennial or up has, you know, we understand that this is a bubble economy. We know, we know what this looks like. We can see the signs. But then if the fear comes from this kind of, you know, doomed if you do, doomed if you don't. Because if the bubble doesn't pop, and AI does keep going, they keep talking about how that's going to take everybody's job. And people are seeing at work, like, not necessarily that they're buying a robot and firing a worker, but when people are leaving, they're just not being replaced at the same pace. And people, if you're watching this, like, you tell us if that's an accurate

assessment. But from everybody I talk to, that's, that's the way they're seeing job long is going, that somebody will move on to another job or they'll quit or retire, and they'll just figure out a way not to, not to hire for that position. And that's, and that some of that is automation, that things are becoming a little more efficient. But what that means is that the efficiency gains are going to the owners of the company, the shareholders of the company, not, it's not as if, oh, now my life is just a little bit easier as a worker. No, you're, now you have to be more productive to make up for the fact that, these other folks are leaving. So if the AI bubble pops, you're screwed because we're going to, you know, the economy is based on it right now. If the AI bubble doesn't pop, you're still screwed because that means it's working. And this, the data that you're seeing there of how hard it is to get a job is just going to, you know, go through the roof. Yeah. And a couple thoughts on that before we move to Ukraine is, you know, we're looking already at catastrophic numbers for college graduates or,

catastrophic relative to the last decade, really high levels of unemployment for recent college graduates, really high projections of what that unemployment is going to look like for recent college graduates as the economy calibrates. That's an optimistic way to put it to AI. I mean, Ryan, I was reading this, another long CNBC dive, actually into data centers, particularly in Wisconsin yesterday, because they're trying to bring one into the empty Foxcon, The Eighth Wonder of the World, of course, Foxxon. What are they trying to bring there? Data Center.

I think it's Microsoft. And it's being protested. I mean, one of the, there are a couple dueling data centers in the area, but one of the local meetings, it was like a planning commission meeting. 40 of the 49 people who spoke were against the data center. And it's this. So the AI boom is promising these massive sprawling data centers that will actually only in the long term supply a fairly small, number of jobs compared to factory work. It's not like that at all. It's not like they're rebuilding Chrysler, a Chrysler plant. That's not what's happening. And so you're seeing AI shave off all of these

jobs and then come into communities and build these massive factories that'll use up, or massive data centers will use up all of this electricity. And at the end of the day, they're employing like a thousand people, still a lot in some communities. They can make a big difference, but it's, again, not factory levels. So this is this adjustment period. We're in the very early, early, early phases of it. And it's a bit frightening, honestly. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And I think we're seeing that reflected. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan.

his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person, billion dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product, run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan.

Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers,

but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast Health Stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night.

Yes, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally, a double board certified physician. And I'm Hurricane Dibolu, a comedian and someone who once Googled, do I have scurvy at 3 a.m. On health stuff, we're talking about health in a different way. It's not only about what we can do to improve our health, but also what our health says about us and the way we're living. Like our episode where we look at diabetes. In the United States, I mean, 50% of Americans are pre-diabetic.

How preventable is type 2? Extremely. Or our in-depth analysis of how incredible mangoes are. Oh, it's hard to explain. Explain to the rest of the world that you, like, your mangoes are fine because mangoes are incredible, but like, you don't even know. You don't know. You don't know. It's going to be a fun ride.

So tune in. Listen to health stuff on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Some serious drama going on with the Ukraine, Russian negotiations. That's right. the so the sort of have a deal not exactly have a deal there's some some dispute over that but it appears like somebody's trying to sabotage it by leaking um phone calls of russians russia's foreign minister uh the implication from russians and i think from anybody who's kind of following it objectively is that either that ukraine or the, you know, two groups here would be tapping the Russian foreign minister's phone, Ukraine or be the United States, or the Europeans, actually. So there's potentially three groups, actually.

The assumption is that Ukraine is doing this and leaking it. But I think it's just as possible that some European, you know, Intel agency is doing this. Totally. Or the U.S. I mean, this is, Glenn already made the comparison, but it's not entirely, out of the realm of possibility, given what happened to Michael Flynn during the Trump 1.0 transition with Sergey Lavrov when that entire situation popped. So I don't think it's out of the question that could be some element within the U.S. that wants to undermine Whitkoff. And yeah, I mean, that's also possible. A lot of, a lot of fingerprints could be on this knife. That's, that's for sure. And not to say that Roger doesn't do this as well. You know, they famously, I mean, we presume. It was them that got this, like, incredible audio of Victoria Newland during the 2014, you know, made-on coup, where she basically says, like, F, the EU, you know, we're putting our guy in. Like, it was really kind of blunt talk where you're like, whoa, this is the gloves off U.S. approach behind the scenes.

This is what you hear about, but you never actually hear. directly. So everybody's tapping everybody here. So what the Russian foreign minister and Whitkoff are talking about, it happens right before Zelensky's coming to the White House. And Whitkoff is like, look, I really think it'd be a good idea if your boss Putin called Trump before this meeting. And the guy's like, oh, before, really? It's like, yes, you should do this before. And at that meeting, Trump was prepared to greenlight a bunch of tomahawks because Trump was getting increasingly frustrated with Putin.

Like, why won't this guy just do a peace deal? You know what, screw it. I'm just going to give Zelenskyy whatever he wants and see how that goes. So Whitkoff seems to be trying to stave that off and say, no, no, no, have your guy call and stop with the details. He's like, you and I understand what the details are going to be. He says, Donets, you know, some type of agreement around, you know, some type of security agreement, but don't get into the details. Just talk in hopeful terms and call Trump a man of

peace and say that we all want peace. And the guy's like, okay, man of peace. We'll do man of peace. I'll have Putin call. So Putin calls and they do a two and a half hour call before this Zelensky meeting. And then Trump goes into the Zelensky meeting. He's like, I talked to Putin. He said, you know, said I'm a man of peace. You say he want, I think he really wants a piece. So we're going to hold off on these long-range missiles. And, you know, in the, yeah, and this, here's the transcript. Should we do the Russian accent and do a dramatic reading of it? I think you should definitely do that.

How's your, how's your, how's your, how's your, how's your Lavrov? No, no, it's not Lavrov. What's his name? Lavrov is the other guy. There's so many of them. Yuri or Yorov. What's it meant? Yeah, the whole, the whole, the whole thing.

The whole thing is worth reading. I would go and I would go and check it out. And then out of that, Wittkoff gets a lot more room to negotiate. Right. And he says basically he's having Putin kind of do his own work for him. He's like tell, you know, tell Putin to tell Trump that you want Steve to be able to cook. Let Steve cook. It's like it's kind of a.

How do you say that in Russian? He says, think about how Steve Cooked and guys with that 18-point plan or the 21-point plan. He's like, let's do a similar thing between you guys. Don't, he's like, but don't talk about the points, what the points are, just that it's a pointed thing. And, you know, Steve, Steve Whitkoff knows his man. Like, he knows, everybody thinks they know Trump because Trump is just, he is who he is, but Whitkoff really knows Trump. Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. and what it did it does seem to have worked so so then what so we got a 24 point plan

that included that was very friendly to so it's funny how this goes so they're like the russians are skeptical they're like well wait a minute if we propose doing a point plan and then if we put the plan together they're going to say they're going to then just kind of change it and then accept it and say we have a deal like that's what the russians are worried about because they were watching the extremely bad faith negotiations go on in Gaza, where, you know, Hamas would like get a 18 point plan. They'd accept it all, except for like one tweak. And then then they would say, oh, now this is a Hamas plan and yeah, and Hamas won't even accept it. Like the whole thing, it was just completely incoherent start to finish. Like Whitkoff would present a plan. And then

Whitkoff himself would reject it after Hamas would. accept it. Um, or they would, or they would claim that somebody accepts some, it was, it was just bad faith all around. And so I think Russians were nervous about getting caught in that. So they say, well, let's do this informally. Uh, this is not our plan. But clearly what, like, so they put together their, the points. Um, the U.S. tweaked them. It was very friendly to Russia, included giving up territory in the east, uh, that they don't even occupy yet. And included, you know, not allowing, you know, not allowing, you know, European forces in Ukraine, not allowing NATO, et cetera. And then sounds like from the reporting that Rubio and others got involved and took out a lot of those provisions.

Now it's down to like an 18-point plan. And so now, but now it looks like they might reject it. Well, I was saying you're actually the perfect person given drop sites very detailed reporting on the TikTok back and forth with the Gaza peace plan, which was also heavily being negotiated by Steve Whitkoff, of course. And then Rubio was sort of dip in, Trump would sort of dip in. And I think we're seeing a European struggle over that process, to be honest. Because, of course, if you're, I mean, this is the thing with the neocons, absolutely losing their mind over the transcript of the call, especially some of them, like I'm thinking Republican congressmen who are losing their minds over the transcript of the call. It's like you are licking Trump's boots and Steve Whitkoff does exactly what Trump does and you lose your minds because it's coming from Steve Wickoff and not Donald Trump himself. When Donald Trump does it, you'll say, oh, he's a great leader. But what Steve Whitkoff does it, he is, you know, verging on traitorous and is a, you know, a Kremlin stooge. But I actually think if you don't include, for example, as you mentioned Ryan, that plan that looked very friendly to Russia.

because it had territory that hasn't yet actually been occupied by Russia. This is, I'm curious if there are parallels in the Gaza plan because that's how a negotiation goes. You put forward a proposal where there are things that you know you're going to take out as the negotiation is going back and forth. And so to me it's not necessarily surprising or reflective of anyone trying to do Putin's bidding so much as it is. there are leaks of a peace process that is absolutely messy and people are either taking this private information that's becoming public and treating it like the final word when it's just a little snippet from this broader process or they have bad intentions anywhere and trying to sabotage anything that Donald Trump might do for peace because it would end up giving up

parts of Dombas, which they want Ukraine to fight for every last Ukrainian men. man, you can keep. And I understand why people are upset at Whitkoff, because if you think that giving Ukraine Tomahawks and permission to fire much deeper into Russia was going to give them leverage that was going to then lead to a better deal for Ukraine, then from that perspective, Whitkoff has undermined Ukraine in the negotiations and deprived them of that leverage. But if you're somebody like Whitkoff who doesn't, who thinks that it's futile, that, you know, matter how many tomahawks you give to ukraine no matter how many they strike in russia the math

is just not going to work out in ukraine's favor right uh then you're actually you're actually helping ukraine get out of this faster than they would otherwise so i so i get why people are like this is this is wittkoff undermining ukraine and helping putin but i think from whitkoff's perspective he thinks no ukraine is diluted right now and they they may they might they might think that this is better for them. But, but in fact, you know, they're, you know, they're, they're now up to recruiting what? Five, you know, well over 50 years old. Like, they're running out of bodies to throw into the meat grinder. And so all the missiles in the world, you know, aren't going to give you the kind of leverage you're going to need to get, to get what you say

you want out of this. So let's, let's move this. Let's, let's move this. move this forward. And I think if you're going to defend Whitcock, you'd say he would do this kind of thing with when it came to Israel and Hamas as well. You know, he would give advice to the mediators.

He never ended up meeting directly with Hamas. They were about to and it blew up for various reasons. But his deputy did and they would say like here's how, here's, if you want this, like here is the way

to frame this to get it there. And so Trump was asked about this on Air Force One, and he said, I haven't listened to the recording or I haven't seen the transcript, but it sounds to me like normal diplomacy. Like this is what a mediator does, negotiator does. You tell someone, this is the thing you want, here's how you frame it to this party.

It's a little awkward for Trump that, like somebody's, you know, telling somebody else how to talk to him. Right. Like, it's a little weird. weird and awkward to have that out in public, but it's not terribly unusual, I think. No, I don't think so either. I mean, it's unusual.

You know, remember when Magidiv and Obama had that moment where Obama said he'll have more flexibility after the election, so this would have been like 2011 or 2012. People lost their minds. People on the right lost their minds. I was too young to really lose my mind. I was still in college, so you can't go back and find clips. But, you know, to some extent, maybe that's different because he was promising something, I don't know. But to some extent when these conversations, I mean, they have to have personal relationships.

And Trump is more, I don't mean this in a little sense. Like, he's more of a realist personally when it comes to those relationships as opposed to. And I actually find that kind of refreshing. Like, he does it with Xi Jinping. He does it with Kim Jong-un. Like, he does it with everyone where he just lavishes them and praise and does it in order to butter people up to make deals. that they might not otherwise make. Now, whether that works or successful, different question.

But Donald Trump is the president right now, so there's nothing surprising whatsoever about Steve Whitkoff handling business this way when he's on the phone with the Russians. Yeah, no, I think that's right. So there had been a Thanksgiving deadline that Trump gave to Zelensky that appears to have been lifted,

like giving them a little more time. Zolensky has said we have to choose between losing our dignity or losing our ally. But so that's kind of where we stand. That's maybe not the right bar for the dignity of Ukraine, which has been proven, by the way, in spades over the last couple of years as ordinary Ukrainians have sacrificed so much to keep their country. So I don't think it's appropriate.

I would be insulted if I were a Ukrainian, and Zelensky was chalking up their dignity to keeping all of the Dombos or some significant portion of it. Right. Anyway, well, speaking of foreign policy, Ryan, big new drop site report based on a tranche of emails that you all have obtained. And you'll have some insight into a week in the life of Jeffrey Epstein and Alan Dershowitz, circa 2006. That's right. And maybe we should finish this block playing the Barry Wise, Alan Dershowitz clip because it's so you've got the clip.

Excellent. Thank you, Griffin. So in 2006, there was a watershed moment in kind of U.S. Israel relations when Stephen Walt, who was at the time the dean of the Harvard Kennedy School and John Mearsheimer, who was one of the top international relations professors at the University of Chicago, published a paper called the Israel Lobby. It also ran in the London Review of Books. And you would think, okay, that's the most boring thing I can think. of like two academics published a paper that also ran in the london review of books okay that's interesting but what like why is the entire world supposed to care about that the world lit up on fire it is shot through with all of these caveats and apologetics that they're even you know broaching this subject but they make a basic argument that a loose coalition of supporters of Israel in the

States have built a network and a lobbying infrastructure that has given Israel outsized influence on American foreign policy and at times has driven American foreign policy away from its own national interests and toward the interests of Israel. That was viewed as an absolutely shocking thing to say in polite society. And what genuinely concerned the lobby was particularly that Walt was saying it because Walt as, and Mearsheimer was at the time very highly respected. He is today a highly respected

academic among people like us, but he took a huge hit in his reputation inside academia as a result of the pushback against this. Walt was, as the dean of the academic school of Harvard's Kennedy School, that's like the plum position

in that field. That's the dean of all of it, not just Harvard, but basically all of it. So to have somebody like him saying this, the fear was that this was going to open up, that this was going to create a permission structure for people just to debate and talk openly about the influence of pro-Israel lobby in the United States.

And so that had to be shut down. And the pushback against, against it was like nothing, anything academia had really ever seen. Talks were canceled. You know, it's like some pre-cancel culture type of stuff going on. What we're reporting over at Dropside. Oh, one, two other details. One, who was president of Harvard at the time?

Epstein buddy, Larry Summers. You guessed it. Who was either the main funder or one of the top fund. of the Kennedy School, less Wexner, the Wexner Foundation. And who controlled the Wexner Foundation's money?

Jeffrey Epstein. So all those facts are known. Now what we know from... Epstein himself was donating heavily to Harvard at the time as well. And EFSIEN himself was too. But he was more influential for his control of Wexner's fortune.

But yes, but he himself was giving millions. But now what we can report from his inbox, which as I mentioned last week, we have, we have, currently have exclusive access to thanks to distributed denial of secrets, which is making the, you know, they're making it available to other journalists as well, is that Epstein himself was involved with Dershowitz in kind of circulating Dershowitz,

you know, giving feedback to Dershowitz's counterargument, which the school published and helping to circulate it. And so he was involved, he was directly involved in the coordinated campaign to undermine this paper, which means that a paper making a claim that a loose kind of collection of pro-Israel supporters are leveraging their money and their resources and their connections was undermined by a loose coalition coalition of Israel supporters operating behind the scenes using their connections and their and their financial resources. as you said so it's disconnected from this pushback but that same week in the in the inbox we found dershowitz and epstein going back and forth over epstein's latest sex abuse allegation and this

one was from somebody who said she was 14 when she was abused and you have epstein with this kind of list of reasons why this girl's credibility should be called into question. Things that she had said on the internet. Because he had hired a private detective you're reporting to follow this girl around. Or to at least to research her. Yeah, I don't know if he was following or if it was just like online research. This was like one week of research. Virtually following. Right. May have gone beyond that. We don't know. But what we know is that on earthed a bunch of dirt. on this girl and he's saying

and so they're going back and forth Dershowitz telling Dershowitz who was his lawyer in this case to give this to the state attorney to tell him that he should not be going forward with these charges because this girl is not to be believed

so that was the twin campaigns that they were running at the time what of I mean these inboxes because there are multiple are such wild glimpses into what was happening

behind the scenes and how elites are operating, not just Epstein and Dershowitz and summers, but more broadly. And that last bit, Ryan, is particularly irritated because you'll remember when it was rising, there was an episode of Rising where Alan Dershowitz was booked and it was you, Robbie, and me. And at one point Dershowitz flew off the handle and said that we wouldn't have wanted John Adams to defend the Boston Massacre, the British in the Boston Massacre case, which is, I think, when you're looking at these emails that you have, about a private investigator being hired by Jeffrey Epstein to dig up dirt on a 14-year-old girl, the obvious difference, you don't even need to know that that was happening behind the scenes

to make the case that the obvious difference is John Adams believed with every fiber of his being that he was doing the right thing that he was defending. He wasn't just a defense attorney. He was defending the right cause that his side was correct in this case. Did Dershowitz think that Jeffrey Epstein was just clean as a whistle,

had never done anything wrong, morally pure? Of course not. Of course not. Right. I mean, that's laughable. And their relationship over working together on the Israel lobby actually, is directly relevant to this claim because let's say, okay, use the John Adams argument

where you say, you know, even our worst enemies in our fair system deserve representation. So that's the argument. But what if you also found out that John Adams was secretly working behind the scenes with the British on other unrelated matters in order to undermine other people? in showing that they actually are a team, that it is not that Adams is just defending the principle that everybody deserves a good lawyer. It's not that Dershowitz is representing Epstein,

even though he understands he's an awful person, but he thinks that everybody deserves an attorney. Like, that's clearly not what is happening with Dershowitz because he doesn't, he's working with him secretly to undermine Mearsheimer and Walter. book that has nothing to do you're not required to do that like you clearly believe that he's your ally yeah in this in this effort in this ideological effort so i think we can dispense with this idea that dershowitz was a reluctant uh defender of of epstein and he did it on the principle that

everybody deserves an attorney you know it's also amazing because he was secretly working with him on this israel lobby book it is amazing to go back and think of the early days of Dershowitz's self-defense of his relationship with Epstein and then compare what he said then to what we're seeing behind the scenes in these emails that I'm sure you never thought would see the light of day, which is, you know, whatever they're talking about, Meersheimer or the case, they were not just business colleagues and they were not just casual business acquaintances. They had a close relationship. Obviously, they had a close relationship. close conspirators. They were, yeah, they were allies. They were, you know, I don't mean conspirators in a legal sense. It's just being that they were behind the scenes operating closely together. Yeah, I mean, obviously in this case, there's a little conspiring that's taking place.

But it's just, I think, worth thinking back to how he said, yeah, well, you know, I defended him as his lawyer, met with him a couple of times. I'm paraphrasing, obviously what the defense was back then, but laughable at this point. Yeah, and Dershowitz is the man that Barry Weiss wants to hold up as a paragon of serious, you know, center-left, a charisma, the kind of person that's going to, you know, bring young people, you know, back. So, Griffin, if you have this, let's play it, and play the whole thing because it's funny. Yes, you got some, you got some guff. Yeah, people tried to community note this and say that she didn't actually talk about in a loche. and Dershowitz, but it's like, no, you have to watch for like three whole minutes and then and then she gets into that.

Yeah, keep your attention span, folks. Yeah, so keep your attention span. You can roll it at 2X, but here is an impersonation of an old person's version of a young person. Let's roll this. All of us see the moment that we're in. And all of us see that the choices that it feels like we have sometimes, which is Hassan, Piker and Tucker Carlson or Nick Fuentes and, you know, Andrew Tate, the kind of

kind of people that are... By the way, has said that CBS is trying to get him to do a debate. Incredible. Go ahead. Those don't actually represent our values, and I don't think that they represent the values and the worldview of the vast majority of Americans. And so this is an opportunity to speak for the 75%, for the people that are on the center left and the center right that still believe in a quality of opportunity, that still believe

passionately in the American project, that still believe in all of the things. that everyone in this room believes in, which is liberty and freedom and individual responsibility and in the most basic level, the right to know what is actually going on in the world. Not the world as propagandists and ideologues imagine it to be, but what's actually going on in the world and in your community so you can make decisions about where you're to send your kids to school,

about where to live and about how to vote. That used to just be normal. and the goal of what we're trying to do at CBS is to get back to that normalcy. And I feel incredibly energized and enthusiastic because I think that is where the vast majority of Americans actually are. And Ryan, this is recent, right?

So that articulation of that set of goals to speak into the lives of the 75%, how are you going to do that? What's your strategy for success? So I think one of the problems, is a lot of people have tried to do centrist news. I know this because I am like the target audience for those things. And the reason that they have all failed is it's like trying to force feed spinach down someone's throat, right? It's felt very like tofu, oatmeal. It's like centrist

news is choosing the midpoint between every single topic. It's felt like an absence of charisma and identity. And I, you know, as nostalgic as people might be for an era in which 30 million Americans every night watch Walter Cronkite and Psalm is the voice of truth and I understand why they're nostalgic for that. We're never, we're not going back to that. So how do you build trust in a moment of unbelievably low trust in all of our public institutions, especially the mainstream press? I don't think it's by pretending like we can go back to having a view from nowhere. I think it's about who's in the room, right? I think it's about redrawing the lines of what falls in the 40-yard lines of acceptable debate and acceptable American politics and culture. I don't mean that in like

a censorious gatekeeping way. I mean having people that are clearly identifiably on the center left and on the center right in conversation with each other. And we've been doing so much of this at the free press. I was in, uh, where was I? Chicago. Last week, I think I've lost all track of time where Dana Lash, former spokeswoman from the NRA was debating Alan Dershowitz on guns. Now, these are people that have wildly different opinions on the Second Amendment, and yet showing that they can have good, face, very passionate, very charismatic disagreement and still like each other at the end of the day, we think it's important. And so it's, for me, it's always about the curation. Like, who's in the room? How are you showing centrist news, not as the absence

of disagreement and the absence of charisma, but explicitly charismatic and disagreeable. and yet doing it in good faith. And the other way you do it is, you know, by being really honest with your audience. I think we get it. Yeah. Incredible. Also, so Glenn, I said Glenn went and found it. When he found it, it had 850 views.

Let's, here it is. This was like 24 hours ago. It was 24 hours ago. Let's see how it's doing. 4.3. So I think Barry's video has been viewed like 8 or 10 million. in times at this point, talking about Dershowitz as a charismatic leader. The dropside clip.

Yeah, we put, and we put this link here underneath, and it still was only able to drive 4.3,000 views to this free press and fire, present Alan Dershowitz, first Dain Losh. I will defend these conversations that fire is doing with the free press because they've been not just with those quote unquote centrist. And I don't think, by the way, Dana Lash is a centrist at all. I think it's crazy to call Dana Lash's center-right. I like Dana Lash, but what's the commonality, I saw people reacting this.

Dershowitz and Lash are both ardent defenders of American support for Israel and of Israel itself. And so I think that's genuinely quite interesting. Yeah, right. I actually think that's interesting. So, like, Dana, again, like I actually do like Dana. She's not, I would not describe her center right. she's like a rock-ripped conservative, whereas Dershowitz,

you can definitely describe as center. And I don't know, you can definitely describe him as charismatic. And he's a Trump supporter. And when he talks about Gaza, he talks in the most extremist genocidal terms. Yes, yes. Like, yet somehow that it's allowed to, you know,

count as center. Center. Center left even, because clearly she didn't mean that Dana is the center left one. So he must be saying that Alan Dershowitz, that Trump supporting genocidal maniac is actually on the center left, which is like...

Because he was arguing for gun control, and he has social left, social liberal perspectives. And that's where this discussion about what constitutes center left versus center right, it's really about temperament. And I feel like that's what's actually being described. It's like, Barry doesn't want people... Guns. He's like center left on guns.

It Barry doesn't want people who are... I would say temperamentally anti-establishment. Right. He's probably pro-choice, too. Well, people who are impuging the motives of the political establishment, or who started using the phrase the Epstein class. I like that. Roe-Connor.

Yeah, Roe, imputing the motives of the Epstein class. He's got people mad about that. You can think whatever you want about guns. But if you're impuging the motives of the Epstein class, that's what gets you sort of, like, in the red zone to continue. those mixed metaphor, for a lesbian, she should have better sports metaphors at the ready. Inside the 40-yard line.

Anyway, but yeah, so as I mentioned while she was talking, Hassan Piker said that CBS News has been reaching out to him to try to set up a debate, which is comical, since, like, she's explicitly saying that he's the kind of person that should not be allowed in conversation. He was fun on Triggerometry. I watched the whole thing last night.

Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Excellent. Well, looking forward to that one. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc. And send me the link.

Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff.

I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan.

have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast Health Stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at

night. Yes, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally, a double board certified physician. And I'm Hurricane Bolo, a comedian and someone who once Googled, do I have scurvy at 3 a.m. On Health Stuff, we're talking about health in a different way. It's not only about what we can do to improve our health, but also what our health says about us and the way we're living. Like our episode where we look at diabetes. In the United States, I mean, 50% of Americans are pre-diabetic. How preventable is type 2?

Extremely. Or our in-depth analysis of how incredible mangoes are. Oh, it's hard to explain to the rest of the world that you, like, your mangoes are. because mangoes are incredible, but, like, you don't even know. You don't know. You don't know. It's going to be a fun ride. So tune in.

Listen to Health Stuff on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaking of people outside the 40-yard lines, let's go ahead and take a look at this clip of Tucker Carlson on the Sean Ryan show that just, I don't know if you saw this, Ryan. No, and one of the things I love about this show is getting educated about the insanity that's going on. There's the wild circus that's going on in the right now because I need somebody to safari me through this jungle. Gladly, I'll be the Sherpa here. This is Tucker Carlson making a comment that you might not think would be controversial, but the libertarians were quite upset with it. We can roll. And on the Republican Party, which is almost to the point where it's just useless,

and I'm going to have to oppose it because they're just, I hate them too much, but because they're such betrayers. But anyway, in the Republican Party, it's like, you're a socialist? Are you from Mondani? No, not really a socialist. Just I don't want any more dollar stores. I don't want high density housing in my neighborhood. I don't want any more fucking strip malls that nobody goes to.

No more karate studios and vape shops. Like, how about now? Who, you socialists? you don't believe in the free market because you bribed a county commissioner to billboard garbage you don't even live here in a normal society we'd like burn your strip ball down so you can't do that here you can't turn my women into prostitutes sorry only fans and you can't destroy the landscape that i live in no how about no that's not crazy is it we can probably stop it there no and you can't take on my tax dollars and then stop to do anything about child molestation. Yeah. The whole reason you exist, county commissioners,

is to protect my daughters from getting molested. Fair point. But people lost their minds, particularly over the dollar store comment, Ryan, and the old right was out in spades saying,

rich guy hates dollar stores. And it's amazing because there's a wide variety of research that's been done over time showing dollar stores increase the likelihood of the small local grocery store, the small local guy being run out of business as soon as that dollar store comes into town. And so it's not as though dollar stores are uncontroversial in rural places or actually in inner city places at all. But of course, God forbid, you say something like that. I mean,

also the sentiment about the Republican Party is just like typical Tea Party era stuff. But the dollar stores, don't attack the dollar stores because, God forbid, we go after the dollar stores. Yeah, and this is an interesting one to try to parse because the people who shop at dollar stores do not like dollar stores. Or work at them. Or work of them. They hate them the most. They shop there because it's the only choice. And the system that we've built has left them with nothing.

but this dollar store. If they had any other options, it's certainly any other option to work, but any other option to shop, they would take that option. It reminds me of, did you see this Campbell Soup executive? I saw you tweeting about it,

and I was like, why the hell is Ryan tweeting about Campbell's Sues? Campbell Soup exec is getting dragged for saying that like their ravioli, they're like beef ravioli is disgusting or whatever, and then nobody knows what's in it. You know, whatever the, whatever she said or he said. And it's like, yeah, like everybody who's eating it is saying the same thing.

Like there's nobody that thinks this is anything other than like mystery meat. And they're making fun of themselves while they're eating it. Now, they don't want you making fun of them because they would prefer to be eating it, eating something else. In general, you know, some of their stuff is great. I agree. Yeah. Here we have the video from Grafman. Come on that you're like.

So healthy. Now that I don't want to f*** in it. Even in a can of soup, I look at it. Look at me. Bioengineered me. I don't want to eat a A piece of chicken I came from a 3D printer. You?

The recording. Yeah. I mean, that's how anybody's going to feel about those products. Those super processed. Like, what even is this kind of product? Now, interestingly enough, people are mistaken what people do out of necessity for, for like, their culture and how they want to defend their culture. Like, there's nobody who's like, my culture is the dollar store. And how dare you say something about it?

Right. Now, how dare a rich person? Like, it's one of those things. Like, you, like, it's like your family. Like, you can criticize them, but you don't really want somebody else to say it. that's exactly right yeah and you know I mean first of all I think Tucker was speaking pretty casually there but also just this idea that you have a massive global chain that sells all kinds of junk and to Ryan's point what they'll do is run the local guy out of business and then do you think maybe when it's safe they raise prices again do you think maybe that's what happens of course that's what happens do you think maybe they get you think maybe they get really shitty about working conditions yeah of course yeah once they've driven the other stores out, then they close some of their own stores and make you drive even further. And this is why your odds of having a better customer experience and worker experience with a local

train where the person has a stake in the community because they're going to the PTA meetings, you're going to church, they're playing baseball, whatever, with you. Well, yes. It's not always perfect. Oh, go ahead. I'll add something unpopular. A lot of these small business owners in these small, towns where you've known them your entire life.

Scrooge. They're total jerks. Yeah, I mean, of course. Of course. They're human beings. A lot of them are terrible bosses and terrible jerks. Yeah, but you're going to have a terrible boss no matter what. I guess I'd just rather be somewhat, the devil you know, versus the devil who's somewhere

in Midtown, Manhattan, and you have to get through five layers of calls just to talk to somebody with the problem. That's true. To return your damn stuff. He's our SOB, at least. Yeah. Yeah. And anyway, it does increase the likelihood that you'll have. I mean, I think it genuinely does increase the likelihood that you'll have somebody who has an incentive to have a good reputation in the community. Therefore, their incentive is not necessarily the GDP. Their incentive is to do a good job in the community because they have social ties that go along with more social ties that go along with their economic ties to the community. So anyway, just saying that mom and pop are often pretty cranky, is all I'm saying. They've been Ebenezer Scrooge, a mom and pop shop.

That's true. That's right. But yeah, this clip just, the defenders of the dollar store, it was remarkable to see all these conservative writers come out of the woodwork being like, rich guy hates the dollar store and we're supposed to believe he's a class warrior. Ha! Got him. I thought, so I watched this and like, all right, let's see, what's the controversy here?

I thought it was going to be that the Republican Party is awful and I need to oppose it. Like, I thought that was going to be the thing that people were animated about. But no, that's... They were mad about that, too. They're mad about that as well. But, again, like, I don't know. I mean, I think it depends on what, like, Republican voters have a pretty high level of support right now for the Republican Party, though it waxes and wanes. Unlike Dems who have very low favorability of the Democratic Party right now, historically low favorability of the Democratic Party right now.

But if you talk like that at most, like, county party headquarters, people are going to be like, yep, because they assume you're talking about the, like, elite, the Republican elite. They assume you're talking about like Lindsey Graham or something. So also didn't strike me as that crazy either. Well, so we need, actually, we have a main reporter who's been covering the Grand Platner race for us, Nathan Bernard. Maybe I'm going to have to ask him to go find out what strip mall was built on a road that's between Tucker's cabin and the river where he goes, fishing every day. Clearly,

clearly some county commissioner got bribed by some developer to build a vape shop. We know everything that's in the strip mall. There's a vape shop. There's a dollar store. What was the third thing he was complaining about? A karate studio. That one's funny. There's a karate studio.

So, okay, Nathan, if you're watching this, because I'm trying not to work as much on the holiday. So this is how I'll sign the story. See if you can find the strip mall. with the karate studio, the vape shop, and the dollar store that has Tucker Carlson ready to declare war on the Republican Party. Because we want to know what happened with the county commissioner. And the owner does not live there. We know that. So these are things we know. I think your experience in Vermont, I mean, I've always thought it was sort of like Vermont's

billboard, you know, when you're coming up in a conservative movement that sort of looked at like as hippie nonsense. But I feel like the difference between the old right and the new right is looking at Vermont protecting the aesthetics of the highway and saying, actually, I don't think that's an infringement on the rights of the free market, the free marketeers who want to sell their vapes or whatever on the highway. This is one of the most beautiful places in the world. And it's, it's really fun that Vermont and New Hampshire share, share this massive order because you just go from Vermont into New Hampshire and like the hippie, you know, communal-focused approach

gives way immediately to the libertarian approach. Strip balls, as far as the eye can see. Yeah, where we lived, like you had to go over there if you wanted to go to the Walmart or any of the big box stores, just right across the border, you know, liquor law is different. But yes, it just looks wildly different, the billboards and the strip malls and the character as a result is different.

Yeah. Well, that I guess is a good place to leave it for the pre- Thanksgiving show, Ryan, because on a, let's give one update on our, for the show. Well, Afton Bain. Well, yeah, okay, we could, we can roll out Honduras. We can keep rocking here. We don't, this is premature.

That's right. I have a 930 podcast. I have a couple more minutes. Um, so Afton Bain, there's a new poll out that has her down by two points. Ooh. This is the special election, um, for, uh, what's his name, Mark Green, Mark Green seat in Nashville stretches from Nashville and a bunch of rural areas outside of it. Latest poll has her down, as her down, I think down, was it down to or up to?

I'm pretty sure it was down to. Um, but this is a plus 22 district. and she has been getting just blasted with her podcast. Oh, and sometimes rightfully so, because wow. Well, it's, it's an inverse or it's a parallel even, not even inverse, to Platner in some ways. Platner, inadvisibly, spent 15 years vomiting all of his darkest thoughts onto Reddit. Afton Bain spent, has spent years vomiting all of her.

thoughts dark and otherwise into a podcast. Yeah, not anonymous. Not anonymous at all. Not pee hustle. Not pee hustle. So then there was the one, and I think though that they're over emphasizing the I hate Nashville one because that's almost too absurd. And I think people will quickly understand that the parallel would be like if a New Yorker

said, I hate Times Square. Exactly. Yeah, I think that's right. It's like, yeah, of course. Everybody hates Times Square except the tourists. So she's talking about the tourist area, whereas some of the other ones are almost worse. He's talking about people who don't have kids and like, you know, she can have more power with that. Like, it's like, whoa.

And it was 2020. So it was like as this wave of elephant in the Zoom politics, as Ryan once wrote, was cresting. And everyone, I mean, nobody really thought it was going to go away. everyone kind of thought it was going to be there for a while, and you had to be on the right side of it. You had to talk the right way about it. Yeah. Yeah.

So we'll say that's, that election is coming up. I think that today may be the last day of early voting or something. And then we'll say, you think she has any shot at all? You know, I think she's a shot of making it. Like less than 1% maybe.

Yeah, but it's certainly in a, what did you say, plus 20 something district. It's certainly a statement if you get close. that can energize the local grassroots folks. So Afton Bain, breaking points, viewer, that is a race that we are watching closely. So we had a few minutes with her last Friday that ended up, of course, on Fox News. Why else, or where else? Producer Griffin asking after Bain about her podcast has gone very, very, very, asking her about her podcast remarks on Nashville that Ryan just referenced has gone very, very viral.

Agree, they're probably over. And apparently Fox is playing our Friday show interview? Yeah, the one from last week. Yep. Congrats. Griffin, you should have said, hi, Mom. Which one did they play? They played...

So they played the one. Griffin keeps popping in trivia. I thought you guys could hear him, but you can't. He's offering very helpful tidbits throughout the show, but they played the moment where Griffin asked Afton Bain about her Nashville comments on the podcast. And she said that she was conceived with George Strait's song. Honestly, to Ryan's point, maybe not as much of a disaster as people might think.

What's wrong with that? Yeah. There you go. There you go. She said, I don't hate country music. I was conceived to a George Strait song. But if you're a real country fan like me, you don't love George Strait. So that's a little different.

So maybe that's the problem with that. That's the problem. George Strait is too soft. But it's also stolen country valor. Like your parents liked George Strait. True. I'll give. And people were looking it up.

It sounds like they played in. February of 89 in Florida. People are looking this up. Yes. You got a fact check claim like this. That's weird. So her parents, if they were in Florida in February, then that might be where they saw George Strait play.

Or they were just listening to George Strait on the radio. And they just either had a false memory or they lied to her. Also, why are you telling your daughter that? Tell your kids that. Oh, my gosh. Oh, all right. Should we take a trip down to Honduras, Ryan? Oh, yeah.

And, yeah, Griffin, I guess we could play some of this clip later. Or you're going to be added a post if you want. But so this Sunday, Honduras will have an election. And Jose Luis Granados Seja, who was on the drop site live stream yesterday. It's a reporter in Mexico City. We had him on to talk about the Mexico protests, which was actually really helpful. He's going to Honduras to cover that election. He'll be doing a dispatch for us.

You're seeing two things. One is that the current president, Shiamore Castro, is almost as popular there as Shinebaum is in Mexico. His left wing, 65-ish percent approval rating. But in their constitution, you can't serve a second term. So her husband was ousted in a. a coup in 2009, supported by Hillary Clinton and the U.S. at the time. So she comes back. She wins. And so now one of her cabinet members basically is running instead. And the U.S. is very heavily getting behind her main opponent and is sowing all sorts of doubt about the

elections, saying like, can't trust these numbers, which is always a signal that you're planning something so that when the because this is supposed to be a very close election so if the numbers come in and the left has won slightly you can probably look for u.s. proxies to call for people to go out in the streets and and demand uh you know and cry foul stop the steel so there's a there's a u.s. backed stop the steel thing going on uh and this is obviously driven by the fact that we have a South Florida, you know, leader, Marco Rubio, as our, as our Secretary of State. And he's got a bone to pick with the left all over, you know, Central and South America and the Caribbean. But also that Castro, they probably don't like that her name is Castro, but Castro, when she first came into office.

Not helpful, not helpful. She immediately went after all the crypto bros who had used the previous government, which was this run by this right-wing narco-terrorist. And when I say narco-terrorist, he's literally in federal prison now after being the U.S. is, you know, guy. And we knew he was a narco-terrorist when he was in power. So we were fighting the narco-terrorist, Ryan. We were, well, another reminder that of Kissinger's quote, that it's like, it's dangerous to be a U.S. adversary, but it's fatal to be a friend.

As soon as he was no longer useful, we literally have thrown him in federal prison. And so while he was in power, which came through after this consolidation of the U.S.-backed coup, he created all these carve-outs for crypto bros to build these basically law-free zones where they would have their own sovereignty. Castro came in and said, no, we're done with these. We're revoking those. There's a big fight going on over that. Plus, she immediately or very quickly recognized to China and broke relations with Taiwan, which, really pissed off the United States. And then so China offered, you know,

some Belt and Road style, you know, investments in Honduras. So that's the kind of... That's a... That's really important, Griffin, you can tee this clip up of South Florida Congresswoman Marie Alviour Salazar,

who's a former what, Talamunda or a university. Oh, my God. She's... This one's really good. Play this one all the way to the end. It's so amazing. She's the same, like,

mold of a cold warrior, Cuban Republican Congresswoman. Lots of fun for sure. But here's what she said about Venezuela. So we know we have information that maybe the top echelon of the military forces in Venezuela may be with Majora. And they're going to flee with him. But the middle and lower ranks are with the opposition. We're talking about that this is going to be very similar to Panama. That I was there. I was a news reporter. And I remember when the Marines were walking in and the Panamanians girls were asking them to marry them. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think it's very similar. Yeah, no, I remember well. I was there, and just after it, it kind of bled into 1990. It started in late December of 1989, bled into 1990, and that's, I went in in January, and it was remarkable how receptive the Panamanians were to the change, and it's been a relatively peaceful country since, but I'm just the transition. I mean, Maria is a wonderful woman, the opposition. leader. She's fantastic. But how will that transition take place? Will there be a snap election

after he flees or what? Well, she has a, and I have spoken to her extensively, they have a 100-day plan that they have shared with the White House. They are prepared. She knows what she's doing. I mean, they have been at this for 25 years. Like I said, 80, 90 percent of the Venezuelan people plus the eight million Venezuelans who have fled, they want to come back. This is a going to be a very major success and a success story, not only for them, but for us. And I salute President Trump for having the fortitude, the courage, the political vision to be doing this because Maduro is the head of a transnational criminal organization. Maduro is not the legitimate president of the country. So we're not invading a sovereign country that has a free and fair elected Democratic president.

No, this guy is the thug, and he's good friends with as Boland. They are giving uranium to Hamas and to Iran and to North Korea and to Cuba and to Nicaragua. Come on, it's time for the United States to do what we need to do. And thank God that Trump is doing it. And I'm telling you that these people, the Venezuelans, have the largest reserves of oil in the world. There it is. We're talking about this is going to be a windfall for us when it comes to fossil fuels. Well, and again, it's the actual transition that,

that a lot of Americans are a little wary about because of the fact that regime change always has unintended consequences. Ah, yes. So the reason this is connected with Honduran politics as well, is that what you're seeing emerge more overtly right now is the reality that this is a new Cold War dynamic, not just that we're using soft power,

but that we are planning to use hard power in this new Cold War dynamic to take, for example, oil. Really, really good example. to prevent, and this is a parallel, of course, with the Soviet Union, to prevent an alliance between places like Venezuela and Iran with Hezbollah, with Hamas, which, like, listen, you and I would probably debate the, yeah, uranium. You and I would probably debate the substance of those claims. I think neither of us would debate that there have been overtures, of course. That's a debate I think I could win. If you were required to argue that Venezuela is shipping uranium, No, I'm not arguing that. To Hamas and North Korea and Nicaragua. Iran does have a foothold in Venezuela. And I can take the other side of that one.

I am confident in my debating abilities that I could walk away with a W on that one. I think you'd have that one. I don't think either of us would debate that Iran and Maduro have had a little bit of back. North Korea. Like Venezuela is sending uranium to North Korea. And Hamas? Hamas? It's just, this is the parallel between.

How are they getting the uranium into Gaza? If you were in the 1970s, if you were a populist lefty or even not even a lefty and you talked a little bit about nationalizing this or you talked a little bit about an alliance

with the Soviets. Be careful. Be careful because or they'll make the economy scream and then do a little CIA covert action. So that's what's emerging in the region. It's been happening with like a lot of soft power, USAID stuff,

but Trump is militarizing with Venezuela obviously. And so different countries are going to have that possibility injected back into their politics. Yeah. So we'll be watching that on Sunday. Happy regime change, Thanksgiving. Another good one where David Asman was like, they were greeted as liberators after backing Noriega for however long. Who was also a narco trafficker and was our man in Panama.

He was working with the CIA. The CIA director George H.W. Bush met with him. Anyway, we don't have to get into it. And then he's removed for being a narco trafficker and just not being useful anymore. So be careful. If you're a narco trafficker, don't trust the United States. For your retirement plan, just pro-tip. All right, Ryan, I know you're hosting Thanksgiving.

So you, in addition to having a podcast coming up, have a lot of responsibilities in the next couple of days. Yes, this is important stuff. This was fun. You're doing the journalist football game again this year? Yes. every Sunday after Thanksgiving a journal football game so I think there'll be a heavy times contingent

this weekend so that'll be fun all right well happy Thanksgiving to all of you out there thank you again we're super grateful for your support even if you're not a premium sub we totally understand we appreciate you watching the videos sending them around means a lot to us so have a great one everyone. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page

as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. On this week's episode of next chapter, I, T.D. Jake, sit down with Denzel Washington,

a two-time Academy Award-winning actor and cultural icon for a conversation about change, identity, and the moment everything shifted. I mean, I don't take any credit for it. It's nothing I did as special, you know, I didn't knock down a few pegs and recognize it, but I just didn't put me first. I just put God first, and he's carried me.

Whether you're rebuilding, reimagining, or just trying to hold it together, this one will speak to you. Listen to the next chapter podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. new episodes drop weekly. Don't miss one of them.

On the podcast Health Stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night. I'm Dr. Priyankawali, a double board certified physician. And I'm Hurricane Dibolu, a comedian and someone who once Googled, Do I have scurvy at 3 a.m? And on our show, we're talking about health in a different way,

like our episode where we look at diabetes. In the United States, I mean, 50% of Americans are pre-diabetic. How preventable is type 2? Extremely. Listen to health stuff on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.