Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/6/23: Trump Dominates CPAC, Bannon Declares War on Fox News, New Norfolk Southern Train Derails, MSNBC Attacks Marianne, Russel Brand on Bill Maher, Amazon Bails On HQ2, Teenage Liberal Depression, Former Navy Pilot on UFOs

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss Trump dominating at CPAC, Desantis short circuiting when asked about Trump endorsement, Steve Bannon declaring war on Fox News, another Norfolk Southern Train derails, Buttigieg concedes he needs to do more, MSNBC smears Marianne's candidacy, Russel Brand goes viral on Bill Maher, Krystal looks into Amazon rugpulling on their HQ2 facility, Saagar looks into the rise of loneliness in liberal teenagers, and we're joined by former Navy pilot Ryan Graves to discuss his piece in Politico on the continued persistent sightings of UFOs despite a lack of investigation.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Happy Monday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. Lots to get to this morning. We got all your CPAC highlights for you. President Trump winning the straw poll there quite handily and making some noteworthy comments. We also had Steve Bannon sort of declaring war on Fox News and new revelations about exactly what went down there during the election and stopped the steal and all of that, which is pretty interesting.

Also, another train derailment in Ohio. This comes as Pete Buttigieg is kind of acknowledging that he screwed all of this up. This is an amazing headline in CNN. He's rethinking how he does his job. Oh, really? Okay. We'll tell you about that. DNC rigging over the top.

They are kind of rejecting democracy in terms of the Democratic primary, as Marianne Williamson declares for president. Some interesting comments there. Interesting coverage on MSNBC. We'll break all of that down for you. And Russell Brand getting a lot of attention with some comments about cable news himself on Bill Maher's show over on HBO. We're also excited to have Ryan Graves on the show. That's yeah, that's going to be a good one. Absolutely. I think the UFO people in particular will enjoy it. But anybody, he was a pilot and he saw a lot of interesting things while he's up. And I'm excited to talk to him. Yes. Let's start with 2024, President Trump returning to CPAC in a

marathon hour and 40 minute long speech. We cut together some highlights for you. The main takeaway, I am your retribution. Let's take a listen. We had a Republican party that was ruled by freaks, neocons, globalists, open border zealots, and fools. But we are never going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, and Jeb Bush. We're not going back to people that want to destroy our great social security system, even some in our own party. I wonder who that might be, that want to raise the minimum age of Social Security to 70, 75, or even 80 in some cases, and that are out to cut Medicare to a level that it will no longer be recognizable. If you look at Ukraine, and we all feel so badly about it, but why isn't

NATO putting up dollar for dollar with us? We put up $140 billion, and they put up just a tiny fraction of that. China-loving politicians, of which there are many. You listening to this, Mitch McConnell? Are you listening? But I stand here today, and I'm the only candidate who can make this promise. I will prevent, and very easily, World War III, very easily. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.

I am your retribution. I'm not going to let this happen. I am your retribution. Powerful, I guess, grievance message. I mean, it fits a little bit with American carnage. But the reason the media was focusing in on a lot of that one, obviously, that one's on stop the steal. But the previous ones, Crystal, a lot of that is vintage Trump.

That is, I'm going to end world—I'm going to end—I'm going to—what is it? End the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. I can't tell you how I'm going to do it. No World War III on my watch, something that Biden has not yet been able to say publicly. And then, really, I think the most important one was the Medicare and Social Security, the flaying of Paul Ryan, calling out Mitch McConnell, the establishment GOP, and just saying, look what these people want to do. They want to cut benefits for hardworking, earning seniors. I am not going

to let them do that. So you put it all together. You kind of have a very traditional America first speech that he gave there, sprinkled in with like some little stop the steal there at the end, a very vague reference to all of that. Not an accident, I think, though, in order to unite the hardcore Trumpers who feel like the election was stolen with a broader economically populist message, which obviously won in the White House in 2016. Overall, I mean, you put that together like I think that we did, and that's a solid message. It's a solid message in this primary. Another thing that I was thinking about, I mean, the I am your retribution, that has always been the animating energy behind the Trump movement. That's why it was a smart wordplay.

Exactly. So even, you know, in 2016, the policy pieces loomed a lot larger than at this point they do, even as I do think he is taking out some important positions. But what people really love about this guy is that all the people that hate you or that you hate, they are livid about Donald Trump. And so leaning into that, I mean, that reminds people why they fell in love with this guy in the Republican base the first time around.

So, I mean, this guy is back. He's much more effective than he was during 2020, much more effective than he was in the office season. He's sort of back to form. He is fully back into form. He's also gave an interview with Newsmax. Newsmax's James Rosen right before where he promised that even if he does get indicted, I am still running for everybody who's maintaining a fantasy that he won't. Take a listen to that. Can you take this moment to assure your donors and your supporters

that you're in this race to stay no matter what happens with those investigations? If you are indicted one or more times? Sure. Well, they did two phony impeachments and we won that and the Republicans stuck together. And as you know, we won up very substantially in the polls. These are witch hunts. These have been going on for a long time. They've weaponized justice in our country. It's a disgrace. And I think people are very angry about it. Even Democrats are very angry about it. So you'll stay in the race? Oh, absolutely. I wouldn't even think about leaving. So there you go. He says he's going to run even if he does get indicted, for those who are wondering.

As we have previously shown, Eugene Debs, the socialist candidate for president in 1920, while imprisoned in the Atlanta federal penitentiary, actually received almost a million votes for candidates. So there is a precedent, one that you can be in prison, in a federal prison actually, and still run and receive votes for federal office. I guess that would be a fun one if it ever came down to precedent. But so many indications here about the strength of Trump. Put this next one up there on the screen. Trump overwhelmingly winning the CPAC primary straw poll. Now, does the CPAC primary straw poll matter? I mean, not really. Rand Paul has won it at certain points. You know, other politicians who never ended up having a chance in hell. But when I look at this,

what I'm looking at are these are not only Republicans, these are the faithful, you know, the people who will fly from all over the country and attend every single one of these and 62 percent in the poll crystal desantis comes in second at 20 percent and the third place pick at five percent was perry johnson a businessman yeah i know he tried to run for the governor of michigan uh i i knew his name but i had to go back and look it up. Carrie Lake actually received the most support for vice presidential candidate with 20 percent. DeSantis, she actually beat DeSantis for the VP slot. Once again, does CPAC matter? Does the primary poll matter? It is not indicative of anything other than what the people at CPAC feel.

But I can't help but pair it with that clip that we played in our previous show of Brian Kilmeade of Fox News going to the people in the diner in Florida. Yeah. And is like, hey, guys, who are you all going to vote for? All but one says

that they're going to vote for Trump. And even that one was like Trump and Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley for vice president. And she was wearing a DeSantis T-shirt. Yeah. And she wouldn't put DeSantis

on the top of her ticket. She was saying Trump or DeSantis. Right, that's right. Because Kilmeade came over and was like, you've got a DeSantis shirt on it must be for DeSantis and she was like Trump or DeSantis she felt like cornered into it because she was wearing the t-shirt but I mean listen I think it's pretty clear this is the guy to beat at this point and you know with regards to him saying he's going to run regardless of indictment, I mean, this was always obvious, but I think there was a lot of elite Republican wish casting that maybe he would just like melt away and sort of like implode and self-destruct. That's obviously not happening. And that's why you see all of this cast of characters lining up to try to jockey to be the number two choice.

Well, number two doesn't count for anything if number one is still in there and still holding strong. You know, also with regard to that, the thing from the Trump presidency that Americans really viscerally reacted against was January 6th and stop the steal. And I think that was really clear in the midterms. Republicans right afterwards, they took a shot at criticizing him over it. You know, Fox News did. Some of his allies did. Mitch McConnell did.

Nikki Haley did. And then they kind of backed away from that. And since they were not able to get the Republican base on their side with regard to January 6th and Stop the Steal, they really aren't armed with the most effective, potent attack they could possibly have against Trump. I mean, that is the thing that the American people really viscerally rejected about his administration. And so they've taken that off the table.

If he gets indicted, they're going to have to defend him or at least say nothing about it and sort of like, you know, be demure about it. And I think it leaves them in a really difficult position because other than that, he's in a better position vis-a-vis the base than they ultimately are with regard to the positions that he's staking out from an issue perspective. That's why I don't have any sympathy for them. It's like, OK, then don't say you're going to cut Social Security and pump hundreds of millions of dollars into Ukraine. It's actually not difficult to get on the right side of the base. But, you know, OK, they would rather have their elite positions. Well, then you're basically guaranteeing yourself

Trump. Trump having some fun with Nikki Haley's speech, just put this up there on the screen, putting it out saying, congratulations to Nikki Haley on drawing such a large crowd at CPAC. As I told her, Nikki, follow your heart. For those who are just listening, it shows not even half empty is generous. I'm looking at maybe one quarter. Haley also is bad. She's got to be one of the dumbest politicians I've ever seen because she gave a speech immediately after CPAC at the Club for Growth. For those who don't know, it's the Tea Party group. They got into a big fight with Trump over the Ohio primary when they backed Josh Mandel over J.D. Vance.

And they were actually attacking President Trump. They want to return to a more economically libertarian candidacy, primary, et cetera. OK, well, she spoke at the conference at the Club for Growth conference. She's like, I take great pride in being one of the politicians that was invited here. There were some other people that weren't invited here as a veiled attack at Trump. I'm like, yeah, lady, winning the club for growth primary invitation, that's definitely how you win a GOP primary because it's not like they haven't lost all the ones where they've backed somebody against Trump. Just complete and total idiocy. I mean, all I guess it will show, Crystal, is, yeah, she's going to have a hell of a lot of money.

I mean, I don't remember a time when a hell of a lot of money in a Republican primary with Trump has ever mattered at all. And maybe because, you know, it's not like she was the only candidate who was invited. Yes. It's not like DeSantis was there as well. And I think maybe, I don't know, some of the other ones were there, too. But Trump didn't get an invite because they have this rift. Like, congratulations, you won over, you know, a group of wealthy elites within the Republican Party. Maybe, maybe they're auditioning you.

Potentially you're going to get their support. But yeah, obviously all of these other contenders, they have at least one billionaire who's willing to back them. And so, you know, they've convinced themselves that they really have a shot. I think they have been imagining somehow the Trump problem would just solve itself and they wouldn't have to say anything, wouldn't have to do anything, and he would just go away. And I don't know what fantasy world they were ultimately living in when they came up with that notion. Yeah, look, it's a total fantasy.

As you can see from that speech, Trump is fully back. The party faithful, at the very least, remain with him. And it really remains his race to lose. Okay, let's go to the second part here. This is some other very interesting stuff with Ron DeSantis. DeSantis increasingly has been in a tough position. How do I differentiate myself from Trump? First, he said, quote, it's silly season, which might be the lamest possible comeback that I've ever seen. But I actually thought this was a revealing one. He is asked whether or not a Trump endorsement matters for him. And you can just see him contort and become extremely uncomfortable. He blinks like 61 times in 30 seconds as the person

who flags this for us. Everybody just take a listen. For those who are listening, we're going to describe it to you on the other side. In 2023, how much do you believe a Trump endorsement matters in American Republican politics today? You know, I don't know. I mean, I think our voters always make their own decisions and they consider, obviously, endorsements. And at that time when he was president, his was the big enchilada. But our voters want to look at you and size you up. And they take this responsibility very, very seriously. So, look, he's blinking there.

He's like, uh, uh, and clearly did not take well to answering that question. He's very clearly, lots of body language. He's very uncomfortable. I've been claimed paying close attention to DeSantis. And, look, he does not open himself up for a lot of interviews. Rupert been claimed paying close attention to DeSantis. And look, he does not open himself up for a lot of interviews. Rupert Murdoch apparently loves Ron DeSantis. And so he's been calling him all the time

and convincing him to do interviews. So DeSantis did this print interview with the Times of London. It's like a conservative paper that Murdoch owns. And he gets real testy whenever you press him on the specifics. One of them was on Ukraine and they were asking him like,

okay, do you agree with the Trump position on Ukraine? And he basically cut him off and was like, okay, let's, you know, go ahead and move on here. Now, to one extent, look, all politicians do that whenever they get uncomfortable, but also is showing a little bit that whenever it gets into the weeds, he's not comfortable just passing these things around. Now, look, he is a governor, so he doesn't necessarily have to have an answer on these. But, you know, I would you need to show a little bit more of a backbone whenever you're in these interviews if you're going to want to be a presidential candidate and have a real lane outside of where Trump is right now. He's just trying to have it all both ways. I'm not comparing Ron DeSantis to the political capabilities of

Kamala Harris. However, I will say that prior to her running for president, the word in political circles was that she was very cautious. And even with potentially friendly media personalities, she was very careful about what interviews she did. She had to be fully prepared. She's one of these that always the aides would be like, all right, what specifically are you going to ask her about before she got in there? And I think in part because she didn't get that practice of mixing it up with the press or was incapable,

I think, really of being able to mix it up with more adversarial questioning. It made her a very brittle political figure where the only thing she could really do was if she had like a set piece that she'd practiced and talking points that she practiced, she could deliver them. But outside of that, if you had an actual give and take where you have to think on your feet, which is a skill that you develop like any other skill, she is very, very, very bad. And we've seen that particularly on display during this presidency, the Lester Hold interview, or she's talking about, you know, the border situation, et cetera. So I think that Ron DeSantis is doing himself a disservice by not taking some calculated

risks here of getting the practice of mixing it up with more media figures, including some who may be more adversarial, because it's better to have some flubs and some screw ups. Now, when the stakes are a little bit less high, you think you're going to be able to mix it up with Donald Trump if you can't like handle a Fox News question here. So the fact that he is so careful and cautious and preplanned and selective about the interviews that he does, I think it's it's a telling sign. And it also, like I said, I think does him a disservice in terms of the practice that he needs to be able to handle a presidential primary. Absolutely right. And at the same time, you've got one of

the other potential rivals. I'm putting rivals in quotes here because it would have been more of a meaty creation. But honestly, I want to give the man props. Larry Hogan, the governor of Maryland, saying, I will not be a candidate in the GOP primary. Let's take a listen to what he said. I think I can continue to contribute toward getting the Republican Party back to a more traditional big tent party that can win elections again without causing being part of a train wreck that might repeat history and just allow us to nominate Donald Trump as our nominee, because I think that would be bad for the party and bad for the country. Really, I just don't believe that he was the right person to lead the party.

And we've proven that and we've lost the last three elections in a row. So, look, it gives a case there on why he entering would just make it more likely that Trump would win. And you know what? Let's respect the man. You know, I don't agree with Larry Hogan on a lot, but I think that his calculus is correct. You know, one of those where he's not letting his own narcissism get the better of him. And he's like, I think there's probably another candidate we could probably all unify around him vis-a-vis Trump.

And then that person has a more realistic chance of taking him down. If you don't want Trump to win, that's the best possible case that you could make. Unfortunately, we have seen that narcissism is pretty significant of a personality disorder amongst the Mike Pompeos and the Nikki Haley's and them of the world. I just, I don't get it. You know, I don't see their case. This is so obvious to anyone with the brain. And so I actually think we should take time to praise the politicians who are realistic. Thank you. You know, you won in Maryland. Congratulations. The idea, though, that you would ever win a GOP primary, it's a complete and total fantasy.

So let's give them props whenever they step out. Listen, it's very clear that the best chance they have of defeating Trump is if everybody who's in the Trump skeptical or never Trump faction of the party unites behind one candidate. And if you have, you know, if Larry Hogan dropped, jumped in and he got, let's say 5% of the vote, that's 5%. That's not going to Ron DeSantis that he could potentially pick up. And all of that is going to be absolutely critical when you are mounting at this point, a real come from behind campaign to try to take out the guy who is the former president and the current clear leader of the Republican party. He wrote an op-ed about this too. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen from The New York Times. He said, in part, Larry Hogan, I'm not seeking the Republican nomination for president.

I believe the tides are finally turning. Republican voters are growing tired of the drama and are open to new leadership. And while I'm optimistic about the future of the Republican Party, I'm deeply concerned about this next election. We cannot afford to have Mr. Trump as our nominee and suffer defeat for the fourth consecutive election cycle. To once again be a successful governing party, we must move on from Mr. Trump. There are several competent Republican leaders who have the potential to step up and lead, but the stakes are too high for me to risk being part of another multi-car pileup that could potentially help Mr. Trump recapture the nomination. I think all of

that is very, well, I would say, I think the, I believe the tides are finally turning part is maybe a little bit of wishful thinking, but in terms of the strategic calculus here, it's very clearly thought out. And I think very obvious that, you know, the best chance that they have is to unite behind one person. Yes. I just am in favor of people being realistic here. Like with all these politicians, everybody tries to look at the Obama campaign of 2008 as come from behind. Obama, first of all, was an already sitting senator. He was coming up against Hillary.

He had a hell of a lot of money and also an organic actual base of the party that wanted him to run. He used that to differentiate himself from Hillary and able to win those come from behind campaigns. But he was starting off almost from a DeSantis level of support before he ended up winning that primary. You have to have much more name recognition. You can't be one of these one percenters. In fact, I went back and looked. There is not a single candidate who has won a major party nomination who started off at one or two percent. Almost

every single one of them had massive name ID. The only example you might be able to point to is a Bill Clinton. But even Bill Clinton had been a governor for 12 years. He was the head of the committee. He'd given major speeches at the Democratic Committee, whenever that type of stuff mattered. And he was polling at, what, 10, 15 percent. He got third in New Hampshire, eventually was able to come back and win it in the New York primary. But even he did not start off from even close to the handicap that a lot of these people would be starting off from. So there's no historical basis for a lot of these people's candidacy. It would be one thing. You know, it is a different time now, social media, whatever.

Like, it would be one thing if these weren't individuals who had already long been on the national scene. When I'm thinking about Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, et cetera, et cetera. Right. But the American people kind of know who you are. They kind of seen you in action and they aren't supporting you yet. So what are you going to put into a campaign that is going to dramatically ultimately shift that? So I think especially for the folks who have been in the political world on the political scene for a long period of time, and they're still polling at, you know, 5, 7, 10 percent sometimes in the case of Mike Pence. I think it is unlikely that you are going to shift that dynamic, especially when, listen, they maybe had a chance to kind of, you know, stick the knife in Trump right after January 6th. He was very vulnerable. The American people were absolutely disgusted. Some of his media allies, some of his top allies, and they backed away from that.

And you're never going to get that opportunity back ultimately. Also, in the wake of the midterm elections, that was when he was kind of at his weakest. It was really clear he was electoral liability, especially his election conspiracies. In terms of the midterm results, DeSantis had a great night ultimately in Florida. And, you know, nobody really moved into action to try to take him out then either, because they're all dealing with this prisoner's dilemma of they know whoever goes after him is likely to get nuked. So they're just hoping that somebody else is going to do their dirty work for them. And ultimately, no one is. They're not going to come to your rescue. If you want to take out Trump,

you have to be able to make a cogent case against him that is going to land with the Republican base. I have yet to see any evidence that any of these people are up to the task. That I agree with. All right. So this was another little nugget from CPAC. Steve Bannon was there, and he basically declared all out war on Fox News. Take a listen. OK, Murdoch, here's the way it's going to be, brother. You've disrespected Donald J. Trump long enough. OK, he goes to East Palestine and gets the Biden administration. It's a global news event and you don't cover it live. Is there that much happening on Fox News at 2 in the afternoon that you can't cover him live?

He hasn't been on Fox News since he announced for presidency. Let me ask you, any guy that brought peace to the world for four years until the Chinese let off a bioweapon, right, wouldn't you think to have respect for the audience, you would have him back up here to talk about the geopolitics? If you had respect for people, wouldn't you do that? They don't respect you. Read the depositions. The deposition, they have a fear, a loathing, and contempt for you. He's actually right about that last part.

That was one of my takeaways from the deposition. Now, he doesn't mean it the way I do. The way I mean it is like they're willing to lie to their audience for ratings and money. His view was like, oh, they weren't willing to go along with the Stop the Steal conspiracies. And, you know, he takes sort of the opposite approach in terms of his conclusion that they have contempt for their own viewership. But I do think that that is a logical conclusion from the depositions and all of the text messages that came out during that time. I do agree that there's a lot of contempt. Yeah, you're right. And in a way, they almost realized their own power. They're like, wow, you know, people really believe a lot of what we say

and they're not even look. I mean, they're like all these people are totally captured. But I do think that he isn't wrong, which is, look, you know, with Fox, they have had a yo-yo on Trump from the beginning. They were against him. Then they were for him whenever he was good for ratings. And do any of us have any real like confidence that after he wins a nomination that they won't be covering him and going to bat for him? Of course they will. And of course they will. So just stop the game. Stop pretending. That's actually what I find most disgusting. In general, with all of these, just treat everybody fairly. They shouldn't be blocking him off. Also, I guarantee you that's not what his audience wants either.

So they're trying to have it both ways where they're an active influence in the Republican Party, but then they also bow to their viewers whenever the time comes. So you really do need to pick one. Just give people what they want. And I think that's what those people want. I think we're going to I'm going to tell you a little bit more about, you know, what's what was revealed in the depositions and all of that going on behind the scenes. Because I do think it is a fascinating look at the way these cable news outfits actually operate and what they actually care about. But a really clear takeaway here is that, you know, all of the idea of, OK, Fox News determines what the Republican base cares about. And Fox News tells the Republican base who they're going to vote for and who the right candidate is. That may have been the case at one point. Maybe 2004.

Maybe that was the case at one point. It is really not the case anymore because they wanted to push back on the Stop the Steal conspiracies. And ultimately, there was such a revolt from their own audience and like instantaneous, especially over the Arizona call, that they changed the way they were operating. And they sort of gave some of their primetime hosts in particular free reign to indulge the most insane of the conspiracy theories with regard to stop this deal. So the idea that they are going to be able to have control over

the Republican primary and that since Ron DeSantis is their guy, they're going to be able to push Ron DeSantis on the Republican base. I mean, listen, maybe the Republican base chooses Ron DeSantis. That is certainly still a possibility. I don't want to rule it out. But it's not going to be because Fox News decided this is the candidate because they have lost control of the Republican base to the extent that they ever had them. And I do think it is really obviously blatantly biased that they've been having DeSantis on for all kinds of like

puff pieces and softball interviews and going down to Florida and all of this. And we tracked this even before the midterms they started in this direction. They would put together these pieces like cherry picking voters that would say, oh, I love Ron DeSantis. Ron DeSantis is great. And Trump reportedly is on a soft ban at the network he has not been on since he announced his candidacy. And neither have any of his family members and children, I think, are also on the same soft ban. So it's really clear what side they have come down on. They definitely prefer DeSantis to Trump. Is that ultimately going to matter?

I kind of don't really think so. Yeah, I don't think so either. I mean, why don't we go to the deposition? Yeah, OK, so go ahead and put this. This is a deep dive from The New York Times about some parts of this deposition. This is all with regard to the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News. I have no insight into whether this lawsuit is ultimately going to succeed, but I can say that what has come out of it has been quite fascinating. So the headline here is inside the panic at Fox News after the 2020 election. If we hadn't called Arizona, said Suzanne Scott, who's the network's chief executive, according to a recording reviewed by The New York Times, our ratings would have been bigger.

Yeah. And the whole article, I'll give you some of the specific details here. But that's basically the whole tenor of what was going on at Fox News behind the scenes after they called Arizona, which, by the way, they were right about, they had developed their own proprietary system to predict and accurately call races across the country. That's why they were ahead of the game on Arizona,

something that news networks would typically be very proud of. Yes. But there was such a massive backlash, they actually ended up firing the two key people who were involved in making that correct decision because there was such a viewer backlash. handle ultimately calling the race for now President Biden because they knew they were likely to be first because their system was better than all of the other networks,

but they did not want to be first. So they decided to actually sandbag it and wait for the other networks to call, even though they had gotten the official call from their own election desk like a day earlier. But they waited intentionally to try to take the heat off. And then, like I said, the two people who were involved in making those accurate, correct calls first of any of the networks get fired for it. So let me read you some of the details here. They say a little more than a week after television networks called the 2020 presidential election for Biden, top executives and anchors at Fox News held an after-action meeting to figure out how they had messed up, not because they'd gotten the call wrong, but because they'd gotten it right, and they'd gotten it right before anyone else.

Typically, it's a point of pride for a news network to be the first to project election winners, but Fox is no typical network, and in the days following the 2020 vote, it was besieged with angry protests, not only from President Trump's camp, but from its own viewers, because it had called the battleground state of Arizona for Biden. Never mind the call was correct. Fox executives worried they would lose viewers to hard right competitors like Newsmax. And so on Monday, November 16th, Suzanne Scott, who was the head of the network and Jay Wallace, the network's president, convened a Zoom meeting for an extraordinary discussion with an unusual goal, how to keep from angering the network's conservative audience again

by calling an election for a Democrat before the competition. They floated a bunch of different ideas. Maybe, Fox executives used, they should abandon this sophisticated new election projecting system, which Fox had invested millions of dollars, and go back to a worse, less accurate model they had been using before. Or maybe they should base calls not solely on numbers, but on how viewers might react.

Or maybe they should delay calls, even if they were right, just to keep the audience in suspense and boost viewership. Here's a quote. Listen, it's one of the sad realities. If we hadn't called Arizona those three or four days following the election day, our ratings would have been bigger, Suzanne Scott said. The mystery would have still been hanging out there. And there's a lot more like that.

And by the way, Brett Baer and Martha McCallum, who were held on as like, you know, the pinnacle of their news gathering, whatever, they were deeply involved in this and they were on the same side of like, hey, let's wait, because they were the ones getting a lot of pushback from viewers. They didn't like taking the heat. And so they were also in favor of let's sandbag, let's let the other networks make the call, even though we are likely to know ahead of everybody else. Yeah, look, I mean, I think one of the things we always try to emphasize here is how bad all three of these cable networks are. I mean, look at this, how much contempt that they have. They are willing to abandon their proprietary system just because they're afraid of what their core viewer base may think.

That's outrageous. I mean, they're willing to abandon their actual factual calls on the state of Arizona and others based on the millions of dollars that they spent on the system and supposedly were very proud of, all because it goes against the editorial direction of the network. It just shows you that literally the feelings do trump facts over... Yes. And all of these. I really do feel that way. The money trumps facts overall. Right. And they're

and oh, our ratings would have been higher. I mean, and then going and firing some of the people that were involved. It's just totally ridiculous the way that they handle themselves. And that's why they they need to pick. You can either go editorial, you can go fax. You can't do both. You just can't. I'm reminded of back in 2012 when it was becoming – they had really sold to their audience leading up to 2012 presidential election that a toaster could beat Obama. Anybody could beat Obama. He was completely hated. Mitt Romney was a shoo-in. And so then when election night comes and the results are not turning out that way, you know, there was a lot of sort of panic and meltdown on the network. And in particular, Karl Rove was they had called Ohio and Karl Rove was like, no, no, no, this is too early.

I'm talking to people. This county's out. That county's still out. And Megyn Kelly famously said to him, like, is this real math or is this just math you do as a Republican and make yourself feel better? And it led to an extraordinary television moment where she actually, they took the camera, she walked down the hall to the decision desk, they live on air, justified why they made that call, et cetera, and didn't back down. And that was in the pre-Trump era when I think they still felt a lot more confident with their position vis-a-vis the Republican base. Now they don't have that same level of confidence that they can stick to the facts when it comes to something as black and white as did the president win this state or not. They clearly don't feel that same

level of confidence and they are terrified that their viewer base is going to abandon them in droves. But I think it really is an extraordinary window into not just Fox News, but CNN and MSNBC. I mean, they have these same business incentives. Ultimately, it is not about facts. It's not about journalism. You could see this certainly in the Russiagate coverage, for example, over at MSNBC. It's about feeding an audience the things that they want to see and feeding them the things that they can tell are going to juice ratings, regardless of whether they are the most important stories or whether those stories are ultimately accurate. So I think that's why these texts and these internal meetings are so extraordinary to actually watch it laid out in

black and white, like on their own voices. These are all recordings from the Zoom meeting, explaining that the thing they care the most about is the ratings and that they're terrified of their own audience. There's one more piece of this that I think is worth getting into. Rupert Murdoch admitted as part of his deposition, go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen, guys, that some Fox News hosts had endorsed Trump's false election fraud claims. He acknowledged this in unveiled question and answers from his deposition. He was asked if he was, quote, now aware that Fox endorsed at times this false notion of a stolen election. Murdoch responded, quote, not Fox, meaning not the network.

No, not Fox. But maybe Lou Dobbs. Maybe Maria Bartiromo as commentators. He went on to say some of our commentators were endorsing it. They endorsed. So an acknowledgment there of, you know, what was kind of plainly obvious to anyone who was watching this all unfold at the time.

All I would say is this is a sign of a dying organization. You know, whenever you're dying, one of the ways that you want to make sure that you're not in a precarious spot is to get to some tipping point where you may tip you over to the point where you're just ultimately going to fail. The 2020-12, that's when their ratings were much stronger.

They had a much better hold on linear TV. They didn't feel as under threat by newsbacks, by OAN, and all these others. There were no real competitors. You know what the irony is to all of this? This whole thing, this all is idiocy, might cost them a billion six in a settlement with Dominion. And not to mention the reputational damage

of all of the depositions that now Steve Bannon, your enemies from the left and the right, are using against you. So not playing it straight may actually cost you even more in the long run. Just an idiot move from the very beginning. The last thing I want to say about this, because we see this in independent media as well.

In fact, you see it in some ways more often in independent media because cable news networks, I mean, a lot of their pay comes from advertisers, from other corporations, from the cable news carry rates. Ratings are actually kind of secondary in terms of their profit and business model. But audience capture is very real. And if you go down the path of consistently just leaning into feeding your audience whatever it is you think that they want to hear, this is the place you're going to end up in and where you have backed yourself into a corner where you increasingly compromise your own ethics, morals, and integrity to try to guess what the audience really wants

to hear versus cultivating an audience that expects to be challenged at times that expects that sometimes they're going to disagree with you and is not going to have like a panic attack and freak out and melt down and run away the minute that that happens. So listen, they've walked themselves up to this ledge over many, many years, and it's no surprise that at this point they feel like they can't possibly back away from it. Sometimes you got to take the hit. Maybe one day we'll tell you about how much money we lost on Afghanistan and on Ukraine. Maybe one day we'll reopen the wounds of what it cost to actually just tell you what we really thought about Afghanistan. I have no regrets about that entire situation. Absolutely not.

All right. All right, guys, let's turn back to Ohio. This is a story we do not want to stop focusing on. And we've got some news this morning, which is there was another Norfolk Southern train derailment in the state of Ohio. Let's go ahead and take a look. This is some extraordinary video we're going to put up on the screen. You can see someone is recording this from their car. They're at a train crossing. The train starts to come off the tracks. It's hitting like the sign posts there that, you know, that tells you you need to stop for the train. Car starts backing up. He probably needs to turn around and get the hell out of there. Absolutely terrifying to watch this unfold.

And ultimately, about 20 cars of this cargo train derailed. As they point out in this article, put this up on the screen, this is the second derailment, obviously, of the company's trains in Ohio in a month. Unlike the February 3rd derailment, obviously, of the company's trains in Ohio in a month. Unlike the February 3rd derailment, now they did initially respond with hazmat, you know, with first responders in hazmat suits just to make sure there was nothing toxic aboard this train. Apparently, there were no hazardous materials aboard this train, according to the Columbus dispatch. It had no passengers. It derailed about 5 p.m. on Saturday by State Route 41 near the Clark County Fairgrounds. And they asked residents initially within a small radius,

about a thousand feet of the derailment, to shelter in place. But they did not issue formal evacuation orders. Once again, Sagar, highlighting just how common derailments are in this country. And again, this is not something that is a global phenomenon, specifically a problem here because of industry capture and the fact that we have rolled back so many safety regulations that are designed to try to prevent terrifying incidents such as this one. Well, yeah. And 5,000 residents had to evacuate. It's not a joke, right? I mean, people are terrified, obviously, especially with all the shelter in place. And they didn't know exactly what they were going to do. People are still afraid of what's happening with the toxic chemicals. They don't have any response. They don't have any confidence right now

in the government over their handling of the crisis. And I mean, really, why should they? So, you know, we're almost over a month now into this entire thing. It's beginning to move and slightly out of the headlines. And one of the things we're learning is that there's almost a thousand train derailments a year in this country. And everyone's like, see, why are you focusing? I'm like, wait, hold on a second. So how many are in the rest of the developed world? Oh, we're orders of magnitude higher than everybody else. OK, America's a big country. We certainly have more rail lines, mileage, et cetera, than many others, maybe China and a few others that might even come close. But why does this keep happening here?

And look, in those countries, you know, there's pluses and minuses to any system, but over there they have much more stringent regulation and bigger fines and bigger punishment for anybody who is caught breaking the rules like this. Yes, exactly right. At the same time, pretty extraordinary interview with our friend Pete Buttigieg, Secretary of Transportation. Let's go and put this up on the screen.

This was a CNN interview that he gave, I presume thinking that he was going to get a softball friendly treatment here. The headline is just incredible. Pete Buttigieg starts to rethink how he does his job in wake of Ohio trade disaster. Oh, really? Oh, really, Pete? It wasn't enough, you know, the supply chain crisis wasn't enough. The airline crisis, the fact that we've had, you know, multiple issues and catastrophes in terms of air travel as well. It took you till this moment to realize maybe that you weren't handling things in quite the right way by being completely absentee and seemingly only caring about like ribbon cutting ceremonies something that he by the way admits to in this this is what i find so extraordinary because we've been saying

this for a while like obviously he wanted this job because he wanted to be transportation sector secretary so he could dole out checks fly fly around the country, take pictures with mayors, take pictures with governors, do the ribbon cutting ceremonies. He actually acknowledges in this piece that that is precisely what he wants to do. It's astonishing. He says, Buttigieg says what he'd rather be doing is trips like what he did on Monday, opening the first new airport terminal in Kansas City since Vice President Spiro Agnew was there for a ribbon cutting. Buttigieg arrived late, courtesy of being stuck on his own delayed Southwest Airlines flight, LOL, celebrating the groundbreaking on a record-busting $4 billion

electric vehicle battery plant in DeSoto, Kansas, and talking transportation programs with students at the University of Missouri. So openly admits here that is the sort of thing that he would rather be doing as opposed to holding corrupt industries like the airline industry and like the rail industry to account. He does acknowledge he should have gone to East Palestine, Ohio earlier. He said he failed to anticipate the political fallout from the toxic train derailment despite months of transportation problems like mass flight cancellations and air traffic control system shutdown that left many Americans frustrated. But he also punched back at critics, arguing that many of the problems he's being blamed for are only partially connected to his portfolio and mostly out of his direct control. So once again, Sager, it's not his fault.

He's powerless. He can't really do anything. This isn't in his portfolio. And he only cares that he didn't go to East Palestine, Ohio earlier because it became a political problem for him. That's pretty obvious from his comments. We just had another near miss on the tarmac. The FAA is in a complete disaster. You know, I think we'll probably cover it tomorrow. There's a major conference being called about these terrible safety events. And with the shutdown, the FAA is in bigger shambles than it's been in a long, decades actually, according to the pilots and the regulators themselves.

What are you doing? You know, you can claim all day that you didn't have responsibility, but you do now. You were the Secretary of Transportation. And really when he says that, he's saying, I don't want to do my job. I don't want to get intimately involved. You know, people who are in positions of power like this,

they wrangle the troops, they cut through the red tape, and they try and deliver. And I also found it was extraordinary, as you said, at the top of it, just knowing what he really admits is, yeah, I didn't expect that I would have to work this hard. I think he's absolutely fundamentally lazy, having come from the corporate world and being a small-town mayor of where it's, you know, know plot twist actually didn't do that good of a job we covered uh some of the transportation and infrastructure failings that he had while he was the mayor of south bend he was completely unqualified and worse now that he's in this position he is using his allies in the media to do little puff pieces like this where even this like moderately strong piece he you know the other thing that drove me crazy is he tried to conflate criticism of him with people online who were criticizing the boots that he was wearing.

Maybe there was—I didn't see it. I didn't even see that. I didn't even see much of that commentary. What I did see are people saying, hey, you know, it's BS that you didn't come here for days and that you're not taking responsibility. He says, quote, it's bullshit that it's the idea that he went there because Trump had already gone there. It was apparently already on the books. I don't know if I believe that. I'm not sure I believe that at all.

I think Biden probably called and said, you can get your ass to East Palestine right now. Listen, I don't know if it was specifically because of the Trump visit, but it was 100% because of the political pressure and the fact that this became very hot. And yes, the right picked up on this and wanted to use it as a cudgel, no doubt about it.

Although I want to give a lot of credit to the Republican senators who have signed on to a bipartisan bill that would actually do something real about rail safety. We'll see if that goes anywhere in the Republican House. President Biden just endorsed it. So that's a big deal. President Biden endorsed it. That is all that is all genuinely positive to see that kind of progress. But yeah, the right picked up on this. But it wasn't only the right. I can promise you it was not only the right. Plenty of people on the left and even a few members of his elected members of his own party were critical of this response as well. And his takeaway from this piece, too, what he lays out is he doesn't feel that the actual actions that he took with regard to his job, he doesn't feel like that's where he messed up.

He feels like he messed up on the optics. Why does he feel that way? Because optics are all this man really genuinely cares about. That's a good point. And it's not the optics. I mean, him going to East Palestine, it does matter when you have government officials show up and make it clear that we are focused on this. This is a priority. We care. We see you. We understand the pain. He even says himself being there, seeing the twisted metal and smelling the chemicals in the air, it is much different than reading some report, some sort of like, you know, arm's length distance report, sanitized report about what's going on in the ground. So it matters being there.

But what matters a hell of a lot more is what you did up to this point and what you're going to do moving forward from this point. And he continues in this piece to just pretend like, oh, this isn't really my fault. I really can't do anything about it. Yeah, he congenitally is unable to take responsibility. Correct. 100 percent correct. At the same time, still a lot of questions about what is in the air, what is in the water.

Is it actually safe in this town, and are there going to be long-term health impacts from this quote-unquote controlled release of toxic cancerous chemicals? Let's put this up on the screen for The Washington Post. The EPA has now, what, a month later, ordered testing for highly toxic dioxins at the Ohio derailment site.

The agency ordered rail company Norfolk Southern to test the Ohio derailment area for dioxins as a dangerous and persistent class of pollutants. I don't know why the hell they're asking Norfolk Southern to do it, too. By the way, just go do it yourself. My God, like, why are we trusting the polluters to be the ones that are handling these critical tests, do you really think that residents are going to feel confident in tests that were paid for and managed by Norfolk Southern, the very people that caused this catastrophe? Putting that aside, they say here after weeks of questions about contamination associated with this train derailment, they ordered Rail Company Norfolk Southern to test the area for dioxins. That's a dangerous class of pollutants that is created when plastic is burned.

The train, of course, that crashed was carrying chemicals that were used to make plastics. They go on to say, of course, academics, environmentalists, and residents have been raising alarm about potential dioxin contamination because days after the derailment, authorities, who were seeking to avoid an explosion, purposely released and burned chemical vinyl chloride. That is a key component of PVC plastics. EPA officials say it's a low probability of dioxin contamination, but they want to go ahead and test to make sure. Just so you guys know a little bit more about what dioxins are, because this wasn't something that I think was broadly known before this situation. They're produced when you burn anything from wood and fossil fuels to municipal waste and cigarettes.

Combustion releases chlorine stored in those substances. It reacts with other compounds to form dioxins. The pollutants are of particular concern when plastic is burned because chlorine is a key element of plastics. They are linked to cancer, reproductive and developmental problems, and immune system damage. They're particularly troublesome because they are slow to break down in the environment. They build up in the food chain. And the EPA said that most human exposure dioxins in the U.S. is tied to releases that occurred decades ago. They didn't respond to questions about why it was Norfolk Southern who was tasked with conducting these tests. Why are they the ones who are conducting the tests? Why did the EPA wait so long to conduct

this test? And at one point, you got to wonder, are they waiting for stuff to dissipate? Like, how does that work? Why did they wait a month in order to order this?. And at one point, you've got to wonder, are they waiting for stuff to dissipate? How does that work? Why did they wait a month in order to order this? They should have ordered it within the first week. So still a lot of questions. Who knows if that test does pop positive

and if North or Southern is even going to give you the proper data. These are not a trustworthy custodian of data and has a direct financial interest in terms of fines and in future regulatory authority

to hold them accountable for making sure that they don't have to pay as much as possible. This is this is total craziness. I don't understand why they waited so long. I don't understand why you would use Norfolk. Well, I do understand. It's because they want this all to go away. That's the reason. OK, let's not be clueless here. Yeah, they wanted to go away. So they they put it off as long as they could. But there have been too many people and not just like random people like us who don't know anything about chemicals on tv talking about it actual researchers who deal with this stuff are saying hey you got to check this out and make sure maybe you think there's a low probability but you have to make sure because we're talking about

serious long-term issues for the residents of this town who need to know whether it is safe for them to continue to live there or not and of of course, you know, if this is declared a public health emergency, if it's declared basically, you know, this town is now toxic to live in, that's obviously going to have major implications for the government, for Norfolk Southern. And so that's why they have tried to tamp down on all of this, but we are certainly going to keep our eye on it. Absolutely. All right, guys. So we officially have one Democrat in the race. Remember, Joe Biden hasn't officially announced yet, although most people think that he's going to run.

But bestselling author Marianne Williamson, who ran last time around as well, she announced she is officially running for president, seeking the Democratic nomination in a speech at Union Station over the weekend. Let's take a listen to a little bit of that. This system is intrinsically corrupt. We can see it in the broken windows. We can see it in the shattered factories. We can see it in the addiction, addled brokenness of our fellow citizens. We can see it in the despair. We can see it in the addiction. We can see it in the anxiety. We can see it in the depression. And people in this town, if they will not care enough to fix, to solve the problems that produces all that despair, half the people in this city don't even notice it.

They are so buffered from the ravages of human suffering. They don't even mention the word poor. They don't even mention the word poverty, much less address its deeper causes. So some people in this city just don't even seem to care. Some people in this city, with some very brave exceptions, apparently don't have the spine or the moral courage to fix it. Ladies and gentlemen, let me in there. I will. So Democrats, fresh off the heels of lots of grandiose rhetoric about how much they care about democracy,

how committed they are to the people having a voice. How's that going? How are they responding to this? Obviously, with complete contempt and dismissal. Let's go and put this up on the screen from the Hill. The headline here is Democrats brush off Marianne Williamson's 2024 primary challenge. And there are some incredibly smug and condescending quotes here. Matt Bennett, co-founder of the centrist think tank Third Way, he said, I hope and expect they will completely

ignore it. She is not a credible candidate in any respect. She certainly isn't going to be challenging to win the nomination. If that's the only primary challenge he faces, Joe Biden can rest very easy until the general election. An aide to Congressman Don Beyer said on Twitter, high AP in response to an AP article calling her a major Democrat. Marianne Williamson is not a major Democrat. Thank you for your attention in this matter. And listen, whatever you think of Marianne and her chances here, number one, again, she is actually unopposed at this moment.

She is the only Democrat who is in the race. Number two, it's up to the voters to decide. Democrats have already effectively rigged the primary for Joe Biden by putting South Carolina first. They're saying they don't even want to do any debates. So all of their rhetoric about how much they care about democracy, I mean, they're obviously total hypocrites when it comes to them maintaining their own grip on power. And I would also say your guy here is going to be closer to 90 than he is to 80 by the end of his term. You have a majority of Democrats and an overwhelming majority of the

country who are like, please don't run. So save me your like smug commentary about how solid he is in terms of his standing vis-a-vis the American people. Not just that. I mean, look, Marianne was able to get to the debate stage as a Democratic candidate at a time when senators like Cory Booker and many others were not able to. This is a person who was able to raise the requisite number of funds and to actually hit the requisite 2% in polling to get there. Trump, I mean, right now Biden is actually acting weaker than Trump. Trump is actually willing to have these Republican candidate debates. We have GOP primary debates, which are already being negotiated with the major cable news networks,

where we would anticipate a Nikki Haley, a Vivek Ramaswamy, or any of these people, if they do qualify, to head up against him. So why don't you put yourself up in the same way? Jimmy Carter actually famously won his challenge while he was president in the debate stage against Ted Kennedy. And, you know, the Carter campaign says that he was worse off for it. I'm not so sure because it actually got him in some fighting spirit when he was able to go up against Reagan. Now, obviously, he lost. To me, Carter didn't need any help losing. He lost all on his own.

He lost right on all his own. It's a good point. And I'm just generally of the opinion. Do you remember the first debate between Obama and Mitt mitt romney where obama lost it was terrible and one of the reasons that came forward is obama was in a bubble for four years he had not debated anybody whereas when he was the actual candidate into he had did like 17 18 primary debates in 2008 that made him sharp and ready to take on mccain so even a challenge where you presume that the candidate is going to win anyways, it's actually very good for them, by and large,

to actually go through some competitive process. This is what we were talking about earlier with Ron DeSantis and how he's doing himself a disservice by keeping himself away from any potentially adversarial media and being very careful and very cautious about the interviews that he takes on because you need practice. You really need practice in order to be able to effectively compete in an election. I mean, and Biden didn't really get any last time around because of covid that

essentially rescued him and he could kind of hide in the basement for most of the general election. He does very limited and very, you know, cautious media appearances as well. So, yeah, he could use that blade sharpened, no doubt about it, if that's even possible at this point. And if they were not, you know, if they really felt secure about their position vis-a-vis Joe Biden, then they wouldn't be worried about Marianne Williamson. You know, like, look, she didn't she she dropped down before the vote, you know, after Iowa last time around. Yeah, she made it to the debate stage, but she wasn't a huge factor like this is fine. We're not worried about it. The fact that you've had this incredibly fragile response to her, I think is really interesting.

And they have a big problem on their hands in New Hampshire in particular. are pissed about the rewriting of the primary calendar because you have effectively stripped all of the sort of power and relevance of, you know, that entire state and especially of the party faithful within the state of New Hampshire, who have openly come out, including a sitting member of Democratic member of Congress and said, we want primary challengers to Biden. We welcome primary challengers to Biden. We think he's going to have a problem in this state. Wasn't just these quotes in the Hill, though, of course, MSNBC handling Marianne in a very similar way. Let's take a listen to their coverage of her announcement. I don't consider Marianne Williamson to be much of a threat. She's a spiritual visor and a 2020-ran who may not even make the debate stage,

let's be honest. I think the best way to handle her is not to address her at all, because I don't think many people consider her to be a major Democrat. And age is a concern for some, for Biden, but she's 70 years old. So she doesn't exactly represent a new generation of leadership either. And she has no platform to speak of other than some nebulous department of peace. And so she's not a threat to Biden. Okay. Number one, you don't get to decide whether she's a major Democrat. The idea is the people get to decide and then, you know, we'll have their verdict. Number two, the part that actually really pissed me off was her saying she doesn't have a platform because that is just factually that's just completely, utterly false.

She has a platform. Whether you like her platform or not, you can look at it. You can disagree with it. But she's been very clear and very specific about what she stands for. Well, also, 70 is a hell of a lot different from 82. OK, I mean, like on a scale. But 70 is actually younger than every single other person. All of Democratic leadership. Well, and not to mention. I'm not defending it. I'm just saying. Listen. Yeah.

Watch Marianne's speech. Yeah. No teleprompter, no notes. And it was it was electric. People in the room were clearly really loving it and really enthusiastic about it. They do not. So they've already said they aren't going to have a debate. We'll see if they're able to hold to that, if there's enough public pressure to force it.

But they don't want that comparison because all elderly people are not the same. Right. Trump. I can't stand the man. He still clearly got it and he still got a lot of energy. It boggles the mind given how unhealthy his lifestyle is, his weight, his age, all of the rest. But, you know, not everybody is created equal. People obviously go through, you know, life transitions and phases and sundowning at different points in

time. And so I just will hold that out for you. Lastly, Marianne had an interview with ABC News over the weekend where she got asked some questions about exactly these topics. Let's take a listen to how she responded. This is a democracy. This is not about what I think is wrong. Obviously, I believe the American people should be offered an agenda for genuine fundamental economic reform, and it should be the voters who decide. It should not be the DNC that decides. It should be the voters who decide. That is what a democracy is. Do you expect that Biden will debate you? He certainly should debate me. It's called democracy and I'm running as well.

And what about this notion of taking New Hampshire out of its position as first? You're going to New Hampshire. I can tell you that New Hampshire are not happy about that. So will you be competing in the New Hampshire primary? Absolutely. This is a democracy. This is the thing. The DNC should not be rigging this system. They don't even pretend anymore. They're not even covert about their their swaying the the primary season. I think a lot of it comes down to what she said, which is it's up to the voters to decide. And, yeah, the New Hampshire point, I think, is very important. As you said, people are really pissed off in New Hampshire that they got dinged. At the same time, though, I can't help but just say, like, they have rigged the primary so well and good for Biden. I just don't know if it's possible.

But listen, the reason they have gone to such extraordinary lengths is because they can read the polls. They see that there is a majority of Democrats who are like, we would really like some other options. Marion's the only option that has stepped up.

So it's very likely to be a one-on-one race here. New Hampshire is kind of welcoming her in with open arms. It's not the first primary anymore, but it is an early state. And so they have to be worried about appearing vulnerable at the very least, even if they aren't worried about him ultimately winning the nomination. And again, he's not even in the race

yet. So. Right. We'll see when it when he actually gets in. We'll see what happens, as Trump used to famously say. All right. Let's move on. Russell Brand. He's here in the U.S. fresh off the Joe Rogan podcast, stops by the Bill Maher studio. An extraordinary confrontation with John Heileman, a famous game-change fame in a confrontation over whether cable news, MSNBC, is just as bad as Fox News. Very smug response from Heileman. A lot of good points that Russell brings up. Let's take a listen. John, I've not known you long, but I love you already.

But I have to say that it's disingenuous to claim that the biases that are exhibited on Fox News are any different from the biases exhibited on MSNBC. It's difficult to suggest that these corporations operate as anything other than mouthpieces for their affiliate owners in BlackRock and Vanguard. I've been on that MSNBC, mate. It was propagandist nutcrackery on there.

I went on a show called Morning Joe. It was absurd the way they carried on. Good morning, Joe. Yeah, I don't know what it was. It wasn't morning. There was no one called Joe there. No one could concentrate. They didn't understand the basic tenets of journalism. No one was willing to stick up for genuine American heroes like Edward Snowden.

No one was willing to talk about Julian Assange and what he suffered trying to bring real journalism to the American people. I'd like to hear a specific example, a provable specific example of an MSNBC correspondent or anchor being on television saying something they knew was false and were saying behind the scenes to people, this is, I'm about to go out,

we know that the election wasn't stolen, or something equivalent, but I will go out on television and say the opposite. It's not about bias, it's a false accusation because you don't actually know anything about any of these organizations you're talking about. Even at MSNBC once, big fucking deal. My darling, it was more...

Big fucking deal. You've been on MSNBC once. Big fucking deal. My darling, it was- Big fucking deal. You've been on MSNBC once. You know what I actually found insane about Heilemann's response here is, and actually even the way that we treat Heilemann today. I don't know if people know this. Heilemann started a media company. It was called The Recount, and it was a massive failure. Outside of a Twitter account where they literally clip what's going on, they raised like $30 million. They tried to start their own show, all of that. And it failed so precipitously that people barely even wrote about how much of a joke it all was. Russell Brand, you can like him or not. He has a very successful show on Rumble. He has a very successful YouTube show. Many of the numbers that he gets, he talked about this on Rogan, are far more than anybody on cable. And it's because he's willing to discuss and talk

about issues of exactly where the cable news system fails and you can also see the smugness in the way that heilemann is confronted with the idea he's like oh well we never went on and intentionally said something that we know not to be true we have how many times we need to play the russiagate coverage from msnbc shall we play once again the donald trump was a kgb asset from 1987 clip how many maddow clips do you guys want about russian attacks on energy all bullshit complete bullshit they will never grapple with that i almost wish that russell hadn't brought up not just the ivermectin thing because that was more cnn than it was msnbc yeah although maddow did get in a little bit with the retweet i think russiagate is where you have them dead to rights dead to rights had the same thought and i i don't know right whether the hosts at msnbc really believe this stuff i

think it's possible that they did or deluded themselves into thinking that this was a real possibility but it really doesn't matter whether they technically like really believed it or not they clearly were engaged in the same thing that Fox News was engaging with in Stop the Steal. They saw what their viewers wanted to hear. And so night after night after night, they spun elaborate tales of Russian. It was a Russian spy novel extraordinaire. Of course, people wanted to watch it. It was action packed. It was unbelievable.

You had cliffhangers, all the rest. They knew what their audience wanted to hear. They cared about ratings. And that's the bottom line here. Look, could you quibble and say, I think the one thing that you could say is a little bit different about Fox News versus MSNBC is that Fox News was explicitly set up to be an organ of the Republican Party effectively and to boost Republican conservative candidates. MSNBC was just a money play, just a business venture. They stumbled into liberalism and went from there. But the bottom line for both at this point is the bottom line. They need to make money.

They need to justify their existence. They need to feed their audiences that they've cultivated and lied to exactly what they continue to want to hear. And so on that basic level, it's silly to quibble over which one is worse. But ultimately, they're both cancerous. They're both infotainment. They're both terrible for the American people. And they will both willingly lie to their audiences when it serves their financial needs. Yeah. And I think it gets to exactly what we were talking about in the Fox News block, where they have contempt. MSNBC just has as much contempt. They're willing to put outrageous lies on their primetime networks just because they knew that that's what their audience wanted to hear deceive them all the way up until the day

of the muller report and then continue to spin well with the after the muller report that's maybe the most important point yeah because maybe you could persuade yourself like oh they really believed this stuff yeah no i don't need to okay well now we know that there was no there there did they go back and here's where we got it wrong? Here's how that's what you would do if you made an honest mistake and you had respect for your audience and like some self-respect for your supposed credentials as a journalist or an analyst. No, they didn't do any of that. If you live in the MSNBC bubble, none of what they were spinning was ever disproven. It was all just, oh, Mueller failed or whatever. They have all

kinds of cope rationalizations for why it never actually, the P-tape never actually came out. And that shows a high level of contempt for their audience, same as was revealed in those Fox News text messages. Absolutely correct. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Way back in 2017, before we had any idea that a pandemic would upend the world, killing millions and reordering both work and play, Jeff Bezos announced a little contest. Amazon, he said, was building a second headquarters, which he dubbed HQ2, in classic sleek tech jargon. This wasn't to be just any old office park. HQ2, he said, was building a second headquarters, which he dubbed HQ2 in classic sleek tech jargon.

This wasn't to be just any old office park. HQ2, he said, would be a full equal to their Seattle headquarters, maybe even larger. The temptation proved irresistible to cities and states alike. After all, Bezos was dangling a promised 50,000 jobs and billions of dollars in investment. Such a massive infusion, it could jolt a struggling city to life. It could surge a mid-tier city into the world class, could help a superstar city push out even more of its working class residents in favor of the coveted affluent creative class that our politicians seem to almost uniformly prefer. And so in a nationwide contest of public humiliation,

locations across the country competed to debase themselves in offering the largest grab bag of taxpayer-funded goodies to a company that is already among the richest and most powerful in the entire world. It was kind of a municipal squid game where cities desperate for the vitality that had been robbed them by free trade market fundamentalism competed in a race to the bottom in order to delight the overlords at Amazon, the beneficiaries of that very free trade market fundamentalism. The whole situation was already a pathetic commentary on the corporate capture of our entire nation. Rather than corporations being shaped by government to serve the needs of the people, government was falling all over itself to bend to the rapacious desires of our largest corporations. According to TechCrunch, the city of Stonecrest, Georgia, offered to rename the town

and make Jeff Bezos its permanent mayor, should the company select it as the site for the new office HQ2. Birmingham, Alabama plastered fake Amazon boxes across the city and created a marketing campaign called Bring A to B to woo the quote everything store. Albany, New York's take was apparently so pathos inducing that it was actually eviscerated and mocked by The Onion. But the whole contest was a complete sham from the very beginning. After inducing all these cities to spend time and resources putting together these humiliating gimmicks and billions in tax incentives and bending the knee to their lord and savior, Jeff Bezos, Amazon didn't pick one city, but two. New York City and Northern Virginia. And they happened to be the two cities where Bezos already had second homes and which were already major hubs of tech,

media, and government power, revealing that the whole thing was always a farce and the results preordained. While these two cities did offer grotesquely large tax incentives, they actually paled in comparison to the giveaways that were offered by a lot of other locales. In the end, every single participant was completely played, including the media that, of course, eagerly did Amazon's PR work for them. It wasn't a contest. It was a scam designed to extract the largest possible goodie package from the places which Amazon was always going to go to all along. Now, the New York City locale in Queens was immediately controversial when residents and progressive politicians found out just how much then-Governor Cuomo had promised

to Amazon in tax incentives. They were apoplectic. After all, New York had reportedly given about a billion dollars more in incentives than Virginia had, all so that they could price out longtime residents and further strain an already crumbling infrastructure system. After a local uproar, Amazon backed out. But there was a lot of exuberance in Northern Virginia, where local leaders and developers, construction companies, they all started planning for this big new influx of office workers ready to shop and dine and to live. Which brings us to the final cruel twist in this sordid tale. Bloomberg got the scoop here. Amazon pauses construction on second headquarters in Virginia as it cuts jobs.

So after all that, the sham contest, the press around the sham contest, the buildup, expectation locally, they are all but pulling the plug, halting construction on the largest portion of this project. Now, we've been covering the post-pandemic tech sessions here, so you probably know that like a lot of other tech companies, Amazon radically overestimated their staffing needs for post-pandemic realities. They recently announced layoffs impacting some 18,000 workers. And the entire world of corporate office space has been turned upside down by remote and hybrid work. The whole concept of an HQ2 to anchor a company in a new city has kind of been rendered obsolete by a pandemic that scattered white-collar workers across the country in search of more affordable housing and a better quality of life. For a region that had seen an anticipatory boom,

this was really a harsh blow, a reneging on the promises that were made and also at great expense. Of course, Amazon stock surged on the news that they were pulling the plug. As always, it's heads Amazon wins and tails everyone loses. Now, you might be tempted to think, well, the pandemic did change everything. Who could have known? What choice do they have, et cetera? But I will remind you, this is far from the first time when politicians gave away the store to huge corporations, got big promises, and ended up with nothing but big disappointment. There was the Foxconn debacle in Wisconsin, where the company promised 13,000 jobs in exchange for $3 billion in incentives. President Trump called it the eighth wonder where the company promised 13,000 jobs in exchange for $3 billion in

incentives. President Trump called it the eighth wonder of the world. Instead, the most optimistic estimates say now that the long-stalled project might create 1,500 jobs, and it has destroyed the credit of the surrounding region, which invested a billion dollars in infrastructure for this insulting outcome. Amid a lot of hype, Lordstown Motors got a deal on a Shutter GM plant in Ohio to build electric trucks. Well, they overstated their orders, and the first prototype that they put out caught fire when they actually took it out for a spin.

Now, you ready for this one? Foxconn is set to buy the factory, so good luck with that one, guys. A new Panasonic battery plant in Kansas promised an exchange for $829 million in incentives. That sounds pretty good on its face, but the deal required no commitments on jobs and no commitments on pay. Pretty glaring omission, leaving Kansans on the hook for a big payout, regardless of whether the company ever actually delivers on a single solitary job. So what should we take from all of this? Listen, I actually have no

problem with a national strategy of industrial policy that uses incentives to drive investment in key areas like microchips or EV batteries or to pursue other goals in our national interest. Goals which may include creation of good paying union jobs. But this state versus state, city versus city competition to give away the sweetest deals to the biggest companies? This is a loser's game for everyone but the giant multinationals who routinely break all of their promises and laugh all the way to the bank. The Onion, with typical trenchant satire, wrote this a while back about the Amazon HQ2 contest. Quote, you are all inside Amazon's second headquarters, Jeff Bezos announces to horrified Americans as massive dome envelops nation. We're proud to welcome all 325 million

new employees to the Amazon team, said Bezos. Now, please begin working, all of you, Bezos added, as a dark cloud of buzzing drones appeared on the horizon, pausing uniforms, orientation packets, and a pile of boxes to sort on the doorstep of every American home. This race to the bottom mode of desperately begging for jobs shows just how backwards our country has become, where we all expected to scramble to serve the interests of corporate overlords rather than organizing the economy to serve the interests of the people. Our politicians have allowed Amazon to treat us and our communities as playthings to pick up and throw away as it serves them. ASQ2 is just the latest scam. Sagar, I know you have a personal stake in this one. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue,

become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, the recent release of CDC study on youth risk behavior survey of American teenagers. It's ignited a firestorm in our political discourse. Teen girl depression is going up. No, wait. All youth depression is skyrocketing. Well, is it the smartphones?

Is it general social paranoia? You can basically pick your poison when it comes to these stakes. It won't surprise you what angle the mainstream media has gone with. You would think that the only story in any of these data is that teen girl depression has gone up. In fact, I could not find a single mainstream outlet that didn't lead with the CDC framing, exclusively about teen girls. More interesting writers, though, have dug into not only the teen girl data,

all of the data, and then come away with better conclusions that are more nuanced. So let's focus on the major takeaways that most of the media is ignoring right now. But it's very glaringly obvious. The ubiquity of smartphones amongst all teenagers and its solid entrenchment into their everyday lives. Blogger Noah Smith notes that teen girls' suicide, anxiety, self-poisoning, and major depressive episodes all began to skyrocket in 2011, and they hit escape velocity in 2013. What changed? As Noah notes, while those who don't want to blame the smartphone often point out,

it came out in 2007. Why did it take so long? But the actual mass adoption of smartphones amongst teenagers happened in, wait for it, 2011. Basically the exact same year that these symptoms began to take off. Now, we have had over a decade with the smartphone, and it's basically inseparable from teenage life at this point. We have all kinds of crazy data to back this up and what it's actually done. Face-to-face interaction between teenagers has plummeted all starting in 2010, right around the mass adoption of the smartphone. It continues to hit record lows with teenagers, but boys and girls reporting fewer friends than ever before. Social isolation with mimicked communication online is no substitute now for actual friendships, as we all found out the hard way during the

pandemic. Another illuminating chart from researcher Jean Twenge is even more clear-cut. Adolescents with depression of low well-being report many more hours on their smartphones, with the most depressed reporting some five to six hours a day of screen time. Now, is it the cause? Maybe, maybe not, but it's a good indication. Our friend Richard Hanania also did a systematic review of all of the data, not only from the U.S., but from around the world, and he came away with this quote. Overall, we find strong evidence of declines in teenage mental health over the last decade or so, based on government data with large sample sizes, not only in the U.S., but Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Sweden,

Norway, and the U.K. He adds, quote, overall, this makes an extremely strong case that the problem goes way beyond the United States or even English-speaking countries. But if you look a little closer, as Richard points out, there are very interesting anomalies to consider. In Hungary, the Netherlands, and South Korea, we don't see the corresponding rise in teenage mental health issues. Richard notes that these countries may not be as culturally similar to the United States, thus they may have something within them to resist the same pull that has brought nearly every other developed country down. But there's another take here, which is also important.

Is it really the phones? Or are we just freaking out? Because they're new. As venture capitalist Marc Andreessen observed, quote, we did not live in a calm, placid, rational, happy world before smartphones. People have been bananas forever. On most metrics, people were more bananas in the past than they are now. If anything, technology may be calming people down.

Instead, he posits the simplest explanation for whatever the hell that we're going through is some kind of secularized Great Awakening, where transformation, societal change is taking place. It's not unprecedented at all. In Western history, the last Great Awakening in U.S. history was only 50 years ago. The rise of militant evangelical Christianity, the decline of mainline Protestantism, the modern pro-life movement, much of a political orientation of the American South, is traced right back to that. But how does this compare? A possible explanation is that social trends like smartphones, atomization, combined with what can be best described as empty woke catastrophizing, is leading to its own great awakening, awokening, as we've referred to it in the past. Writer Matthew Iglesias actually dug into some of that data

and he found something that's actually astonishing. Focusing on teen girls completely misses the point. When you look at the comprehensive studies that control for gender and for political ideology, you get a different view. It's young liberals who are actually especially depressed with liberal teen boys outpacing conservative teen girls in depression.

So let's discuss why. One theory came from Jill Filipovich, who Iglesias highlights, writing, quote, I am increasingly convinced there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people coming from this reliance on the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are, quote, deeply problematic or even violent. She continues, quote, just about everything that researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life

are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt in a sense that the life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response. So it could be that victimization and politics itself is to blame. Smartphones aren't at all. Or maybe it's both.

Who really knows? What I do know is we have a big problem. As to the solution, it's anyone's guess. And the best thing is to look at the problem from all angles, as I've attempted here, instead of a myopic explanation, so that we can eventually try to do something about it. And in the meantime, you gotta take care of each other,

because it seems to be something that we are doing less and less of as a society. So I thought it was really interesting, you know, something I've focused here. And if you want to hear my reaction to Cyber's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. A lot of discussion here on Breaking Points about the balloon, about UFOs, and we've been trying to talk to the actual experts here. One of them is the former lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, Ryan Graves. So let's put this up there on the screen. He writes in Politico, quote, we have a real UFO problem and it's not balloons. And Ryan recounts some of his own interactions with anomalous

aircraft or objects, whatever you want to call them, that were up in the air. And he's been trying to draw attention to this increasingly on his own podcast and in the public. So we are very happy to have you on the show, sir. Thank you very much for joining us. It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me here. So Ryan, what did you want to accomplish whenever you were writing this article, whenever you started your podcast, trying to bring as much attention to the UAP phenomenon. You've been one of the most outspoken former pilots who's actually interacted with some of these things. Why are you choosing to do so?

Why do you want to be in the public eye? Oh, well, I'll push back and say I don't necessarily want to, but this was an issue that just wasn't getting the attention that it deserved. When I saw the 2017 New York Times article come out with the videos of various UAPs, I recognized those videos. I recognized them. I heard the voices on them. And I was like, hey, I was there for those. I also realized at that point that this was an issue that was still ongoing. I then reached back to my squadron mates who were still flying on the East Coast, and this was still an everyday aviation safety hazard for them. And I realized the proper mechanisms weren't being put in place to resolve this issue.

And it was just a matter of time until there was a midair. Ryan, can you, just for people who aren't familiar with you and the videos that you're referring to, can you just explain what you experienced and what you saw? Yeah, I'd be happy to. So I was a F-18 Foxtrot Super Hornet pilot, which means I was attached on the previous flight with the older radar. And so eventually we started flying close enough to these objects for them to be picked up on our optical forward-looking infrared camera system. And we started to gain visuals within the jet itself

on those systems of those videos that you see, such as the gimbal video and GoFast. Eventually, we saw these objects with our own eyeballs. And at that time, we didn't have an explanation for what they were. They just simply looked like a black cube inside of a clear sphere. These objects would be up there all day. They would be either maneuvering around 0.6 to 0.8 Mach, which is around at the high end, 350 knots. Or they would be completely maneuvering around 0.6 to 0.8 mach, which is around at the high end, 350 knots.

Or they would be completely stationary against the wind. When you're up there, it's like being in the ocean. Everything is moving. So when you have objects that are stationary against high winds for very long periods of time and then begin maneuvering, it's just something that we're not used to seeing. Right. And we were almost hitting these objects. We had them flying very close to our aircraft

that were requiring evasive maneuvering. Wow. Yeah, I mean, this is your testimony before Congress and just publicly has been so important for highlighting how frequent of an interaction that this is. And it's almost more stunning that, like you said, we haven't had an accident

or that we haven't had more pilots come forward. One of the things that you write about, Ryan, in the Politico article is that the president did not talk about UAPs that exhibit advanced performance capabilities. You say, where is the transparency and urgency from the administration and Congress to investigate highly advanced objects in restricted airspace that our military cannot explain? And you talk about a new organization that you are starting and an initiative to try and gather as much data as possible. You want to talk a little bit about that? Absolutely. And so that's a natural progression of the work that's been going on trying to bring attention to this. We've seen that one of the main movers of attention on this topic is on Capitol Hill with the senators and congresspeople that have been mandating action from the Department of Defense to investigate this topic. And within the aviation ecosystem, I'll say within the United States, it really does take an act of Congress to move

anything. And so I founded the Americans for Safe Aerospace, which is a very simple organization. We think that we should know what's above our heads, and those are going to likely fall into two different categories. They're either going to end up being some type of adversarial threat platform, and it's a national security issue. We have the systems to prosecute those targets, or if we don't know what they are, it's a matter for scientific curiosity. And I bet when we start narrowing down that bucket of anomalous objects, more security threats could fall out, but we'll continue to make that bucket smaller to try to figure out what these objects are. American for Safe Aerospace is going to be looking to push policy and legislative action to ensure that air crew and pilots, both military and commercial,

feel comfortable reporting this so that we can continue to expand the conversation. And Ryan, what did you make of these recent objects that were shot down? Obviously, one of them was a Chinese spy balloon. Don't really know what the other ones were. Maybe potentially one of them was just like a hobbyist's balloon. No debris has been recovered and they seem to have abandoned any attempts to recover whatever debris there was from these shoot downs. What did you make of all of that? Yeah, you know, it's a very confusing series of events, which is what led to me writing that political article back to the first question. There just seems to be a very

confusing narrative around these objects. First, you know, if we think of how this proceeded, there was a visual confirmation of an object, of a balloon that it appeared by civilians in the United States. That kind of ramped things up. And this is public knowledge. Now, we seem to have slowed down the speed gates on some of our sensors, or at least brought to attention based off of the sighting of that balloon,

what other slower speed objects could be in our airspace. However, the communication was very clear that the first quote unquote Chinese spy balloon was a Chinese spy balloon. And the other three objects are still unidentified objects at this point. What was communicated was that they appeared to be more or less drifting in the wind, which is not consistent with what we were seeing off the eastern seaboard. But I think, you know, whatever the object end up being, I think it just goes to prove the point that there are objects up there

that we're not aware of. Some of them are going to fall out and be adversarial programs. Some of them might be completely prosaic. And there are another category of them that we can't necessarily call prosaic due to the behaviors that they're exhibiting. And I wrote that article to ensure that that wasn't lost in the fray so that we didn't start assuming that everything unidentified in airspace ends up being a balloon. But to that point, for those hard skeptics that like to say, well, they're probably just balloons, I think now the American people see that that's actually a

pretty serious issue as well, both for national security and for aviation safety. And, you know, it goes all the way to the top. So we just can't be complacent with what's above our heads. And the ASA is going to push for action to ensure that's the case. Good. And one thing I want to get with you, Ryan, I hear this from the critics all the time, which is it's pilot error. These guys, you know, they have no idea what they're seeing up there. They're mistaking it for, you know, reflection or something like that. Can you talk about, you joined the Navy in 2009. Lay out for the audience, how much training, familiarity with your equipment, familiarity with normal objects in the sky that you encounter and your ability to determine what is anomalous and what is not while you were flying an aircraft you've probably

flown for thousands and thousands of hours. Certainly. So these aircraft, you know, I'll even not even refer to the F-18 as an aircraft. It's a weapon system designed to do very particular mission sets. And those mission sets are really based around two objectives. One is to be able to identify what's out there and be able to tell who's friendly and who's not. And also to identify the ones that we're not certain about, and work to identify whether they're friendly or not, and then to prosecute the targets that are not friendly.

And we prosecute those targets that are not friendly primarily by flying close enough to be within weapons range and also far enough away that we're not too much in their weapons range. So controlling the distance off the nose of our aircraft and knowing who's who is essentially the primary responsibilities of our job. Everything else is mechanics to prosecute those targets. We call that correlation while we're flying up there. So the suggestion, you know, and so all our tools go to your point. So our training is to learn how to use the incredible tools that we have in those weapon systems. And those weapon system tools include radar, electro-optical cameras, other

electronic warfare systems, and electrical tools for understanding electromagnetic spectrum around you. And we take that information and we share it. And that information gets pumped out and we get a combined image of what's in the area. And so when we say we see something out there, whether it be on our radar or our electrical optical systems or some other device, that information is being correlated across multiple sensors and all that technology that we have and that we've trained to use is telling us that it can't be identified. And not only can't be identified using the interesting mechanisms we have, but also it's not behaving in a way that we recognize. Yes.

So all these things are telling us they're wrong. And yet these are the things we most highly trained to do is to maintain the distance off our nose and to identify things. And those are unfortunately two of the largest arguments used to say we're incorrect. Very important. I'm not sure if that answers your question or not. Oh, it answers it very, very well. Ryan, congratulations on starting the new organization.

We'll have a link down there to the description to your new podcast as well so people can find out about it. And you're welcome back on the show anytime to discuss the topic. Really appreciate you joining us. Thanks for your time, Ryan. My pleasure. Thank you so much.

Thank you guys so much for watching. Really appreciate it. Fun developments here. Thank you for everybody who's been helping us out with the premium subscriptions. They really help out as we plan the future. Some big stuff that's coming down the pipeline I think that you guys will enjoy.

Crystal and I have been looking at mock-ups. Can't say yet of what. Some of them are a little creepy. We'll just say that. Anyway, we'll reveal some of that at the time and the place. Thank you all so much for those who supported us. We've got a great show for you tomorrow, CounterPoints on Wednesday, and then the show on Thursday.

So we'll see you all later. Love you guys. See you tomorrow. iHeartRadio Music Festival We'll be right back. Sharon, Fade, Chlorilla, Jelly Roll, Sean Fogarty, Lil Wayne, LL Cool J, Mariah Carey, Maroon 5, Sammy Hagar, Tate McRae, The Offspring, Tim McGraw. Tickets are on sale now at AXS.com. Get your tickets today. AXS.com. I know a lot of cops.

They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glott. And this is Season 2 of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. Last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war. This year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports. This kind of starts that a little bit, man. We met them at their homes.

We met them at their recording studios. Stories matter and it brings a face to it. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.