Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 7/24/23: Vivek Ties w/ DeSantis In Republican Shakeup, Elon Rebrands Twitter to "X", Biden Terrified Of Cornel West Bid, Congress Blasts UFO Coverup, Krystal Reviews Barbie, Bezos Loses 100 Million At WAPO

Episode Date: July 24, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss Vivek tie-ing DeSantis in Republican Primary Shakeup, a Deleted Pro-DeSantis vid with Nazi symbols, Elon rebrands Twitter in global banking play, Biden terrified of Cornel West Bid, Congress blasts UFO coverup as they claim things "not from this world", a Map reveals Red states obsessed with Barbie, Krystal looks into Barbie's Late Stage Girl Boss Mess, and Saagar looks into how Jeff Bezos is losing 100 million at WAPO.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Good morning, everybody. Happy Monday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. We have some big polls on the GOP side of the presidential nominating contest showing kind of a remade race. So we will tell you about that. And these are state-specific polls. So very interesting. We also this morning have a brand new Twitter. It's actually no longer Twitter. It is now X. The rebranding has begun. We'll tell you everything that means and also some new numbers about how Threads is doing, the major Twitter competitor. Some interesting reporting within the White House about a freakout over Cornel West's campaign with the Green Party. So I'll break that down for you. Sagar's going to give you a UFO update, some big happenings here in D.C. this week. We also got to talk about that blockbuster movie weekend. Both movies, Oppenheimer and Barbie, pulling in huge numbers. I'm going to do my own review of the Barbie movie

as I did have to wear pink, you know, for the occasion. Get into the whole spirit of it, even though I actually despised the entire movie. No, Chris, you can't give it away. It's funny because you actually liked it and I hated it, which is the polar opposite of what I thought. So anyway, I'll give you all of my analysis of that. But we wanted to start with some breaking news this morning on what is happening in Russia. Yeah, let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. We've got a little bit of the damage from what happened. Just 4 a.m. local time in Moscow.

There has been a suspected Ukrainian drone attack actually on the city in the central business district. And, Crystal, that suspected drone attack right now allegedly also came with simultaneous strikes inside of Crimea. The images that we have up here show some damage to an office building on the top two floors. This is directly inside the city. And also it fell on an area which is both near the Capitol Center, quote, shattered shop windows, damaged the roof of a house just 200 meters away from the towering Riverside Defense Ministry building. I'm going to go ahead and guess that the Defense Ministry was the suspected target there. But just the latest in a series of these drone attacks we've seen by the Ukrainian,

very likely the Ukrainians, on the city of Moscow. I did find it funny, if we'll all recall, the original drone attack that was on the Kremlin flag, there was a furious, you know, denial, like, ah, it can't be Ukraine. Why would Ukraine do this? There's so many reasons why. And then, you know, as always happens, the CIA leaks to the New York Times two weeks later and they're like, CIA confirms the Ukrainian military was behind said drone attacks. And apparently Biden and the White House was like, hey, maybe cut it out. But don't forget of the news that we brought everybody, actually, I believe in our last show, which was on Thursday, about the top Ukrainian military commander saying, who are you, the United States, to tell us

what we can and can't do and who we can and can't strike? I guess, to be fair, many of these drones actually are manufactured in Ukraine, so part of their theory here is like, well, it's not U.S.-provided aid, so we can do whatever we want. But nonetheless, you know, it's always significant. Anytime anything is hitting the capital of Russia, and I mean, don't forget, you know, that hasn't happened in literally decades on the European continent. It still is an extraordinary event, but they are

at war. So we can only expect these things to happen as the conflict continues. Yeah, I suppose. So Russia is saying that they destroyed two attack drones. There were several buildings that appear to have been damaged, though some of the damage occurring in one of the sort of ritziest sections of Moscow. So striking here at the heart of some of the wealthy elite in Moscow. I'm sure the thinking on the Ukrainian side, of course, they have said nothing. Russia is attributing blame to them.

I mean, that seems certainly like logical explanation, but just to give you the Ukrainian side of things, they haven't said anything yet. I'm sure the thinking here, Sagar, is to sort of damage public morale among the Russian people in Moscow, potentially among elites, because this isn't significant enough damage to really impact the defense ministry or anything. No one was actually injured in these attacks, just like the attack on the Kremlin didn't cause significant damage

and was thwarted fairly easily by Russian authorities there. But what we've seen throughout history is that attacks directly on civilian residential areas, just as we've seen with Russia attacking residential civilian areas in Ukraine, it has the opposite of the intended effect. If the intended effect is to weaken morale, oftentimes it has led to the exact opposite where people's morale is strengthened. They become more committed to the cause, more hawkish, et cetera. This comes at a time when Russia appears to be prepping some more aggressive domestic strategies and potentially another draft coming, sort of floating that as a trial balloon among the domestic population. And also, of course, comes at a time when even

mainstream Western outlets are admitting that the Ukrainian counteroffensive is not going particularly well and it's looking very much like a stalemate. Yeah, I think that this is actually better understood in the context of that. We're going to do a big thing tomorrow on the state of the counteroffensive, how many Western media outlets at this point are all admitting this has been effectively a failure so far, so far, always the big caveat, but that, you know, the that Ukraine is losing significant amounts of people for every inch of territory that it's trying to get back, that overall their weapons, their inability to do combined arms means that we've effectively deteriorated into a World War I-style trench conflict, which is going to, of course, benefit the Russians, which have taken 20% of the territory,

have hardened the defenses. They have the industrial industrial might whereas Ukraine its own industrial ability to manufacture especially the weapons that they really say that they need in order to Pour into the conflict is basically doesn't exist and the West is basically saying look, you know in terms of the tap Like we've got what Congress is appropriated, but that's basically it So what do you do when you're in that situation? You try and inflict maximum damage on the enemy as possible and to terrorize the enemy and to try and just sue for peace. That falls into striking in areas when you're pinned down in one place, you want to try and attack from somewhere else to try and take the pressure off and to change the strategic situation. So it actually makes the likelihood of

escalation even higher, like in Crimea or on Moscow or anywhere else, because if they were seeing battlefield victory there, then they wouldn't have as much incentive to try and push it somewhere else. Yeah, I mean, you have both Ukraine and Russia in different ways with their backs up against the wall, and desperate actors can take desperate measures. So it is a dangerous situation. No one should delude themselves about that, and we'll continue to follow the situation. Make sure we bring you all of the latest. We'll probably cover Ukraine more in depth tomorrow because there are a few stories that are out there that are worth getting into. But we wanted to turn to presidential politics. And by the way, guys, here at Breaking Points, going to be a big week in terms of presidential politics. We have two GOP contenders booked for

interviews tomorrow. Won't say their names because you never know when people can get a little squishy or their schedule changes or whatever, and they back out. But as of now, two big interviews tomorrow. So stay tuned for that. And just quick shout out to our premium subscribers who've made all of this possible. I know you guys have really been reacting very positively to the interviews we're doing on the Democratic side, on the Republican side. So if you can become a premium member and help us continue that project, we really appreciate it. Breakingpoints.com. All right, let's get to the news in terms of what is happening on the Republican side. Some big state level polls coming out from Fox Business, and they show sort of a changed state of this race. So from the beginning, it has been Donald Trump, number one, Ron DeSantis, number two. That number two slot is

no longer so clear. Put this up on the screen. This is the poll from Iowa. Again, this is a Fox Business poll. You got Trump with a very solid lead there in Iowa. This is the state that, you know, his would-be contenders really have to take away from him right now. He sits at 46 percent, so almost at a majority. DeSantis still holding on to that number two slot at 16 percent, but just barely. Tim Scott there nipping at his heels at 11 percent. You've also got Nikki Haley, 5 percent, Pence, 4 percent, Doug Burgum, 3 percent, Chris Christie, 3 percent, and Asa Hutchinson, who we had the opportunity to interview last week at 1 percent. So Iowa looking like DeSantis is falling there and struggling even to maintain the number two position. Let's take a look at South Carolina. Next slide up on the screen. So Trump, again,

up, even though you've got two top contenders who are from the state of South Carolina. Trump at 48%, again, very close to a majority. Number two slot, Nikki Haley, not Ron DeSantis. Haley at 14 percent, Ron DeSantis right there at 13 percent. That is, you know, statistically tied given the margin of error. You've got Tim Scott at 10 percent. And then you drop down to Pence, 4 percent, Vivek Ramaswamy, 3 percent, Chris Christie, 2, Asa Hutchinson, 1. So a lot going on there. Let's go and put this next piece up on the screen. Some of the numbers that were inside of this poll saga, I think, are as interesting as the top line numbers and give some indication of why Ron DeSantis is falling off. vote for a candidate who shares your views or can defeat Biden. And 72% said it was extremely important that their candidate can defeat Biden. And a lower number, 62%, said that it was important that they share their views. So electability concerns, sort of key there. You also had a

question of, okay, so then who do you think is most likely to defeat Joe Biden? Donald Trump running away with it on the electability question. 51 percent saying he is most likely to defeat Joe Biden. Ron DeSantis down at 17 percent. The Nikki Haley at seven and Tim Scott at six. There were also some numbers. Let's put this next one up on the screen, about what is most important to voters in the state. Big majority, 51%. So large proportion there. So it's economic

issues. Then you drop down to 12% foreign policy, 12% immigration issues, 12% social issues, and 7% populist issues, which I'm not even sure what that really means. You can maybe throw that in the bucket with the economic issues, in my opinion, but I don't know how people would interpret that. But I think the reason Socrates are so significant is because DeSantis made a big bet on cultural issues, thinking that that was really the key to winning over the Republican base. He made a big bet on his critique of Donald Trump being that Trump was a squish and he wasn't hard right enough. So DeSantis has moved to the right of Trump on basically every significant issue. And in doing so, he has damaged himself in the key areas that voters actually most care

about, which is number one, who can defeat Joe Biden. That was what they liked about DeSantis apparently to start with was like, oh, you're doing great in Florida. Florida voters are voting for you overwhelmingly as a state that used to be a swing state. Well, by moving hard right, he's damaged himself on the electability front. And by focusing in so much on cultural issues, the exclusion of almost anything else, he's also damaged himself in terms of making an economic case to voters, which is apparently what voters are most interested in. This poll busts a hell of a lot of myths. Number one is that we've consistently talked about electability. So electability is just as important, I think, to Republican voters, but they are not going to view it in nearly the same terms as you or I might, as the mainstream media, and especially as a Democrat

would in terms of whether they were going to vote. Remember, in the minds of especially the GOP primary base, for them, Trump already did beat Joe Biden. He just had the election robbed from him. So according to their analysis. So, of course, you can beat him again. So that's number one. Two, I mean, the more that I look at it, they may not be wrong. I mean, let's be honest.

Like, Trump is the person who is willing to walk as far away from Roe versus Wade as humanly possible, which was one of the main deciding events of the 2022 midterms. Trump is the person who is attacking other people in the Republican field for wanting to cut Social Security or Medicare, or at the very least, opening the door to that. Trump is the one who has tried to walk away from militarism rhetorically as much as possible in the race. These are very popular issues, or at the very least, they are completely untapped amongst the electorate, meaning that they will be able to get at least some support. And then finally, you know,

on immigration, social, and populist issues, I have always believed that on the social, immigration in particular, there's no out-Trumping Trump. It's absolutely impossible considering they effectively reinvented the entire debate amongst the GOP. But on social issues too, if you are one of these like people who is completely pro-life, then, you know, you are within the minority whenever it comes to the, I'm talking about like no exceptions or no, like any limits or whatever in terms of weeks. These people, they were never a majority part of the caucus anyways. So for them to be off of Trump,

it doesn't really affect him. Like what he needs to do is to get, you know, what he clearly has in both of these states, which is either an outright majority or like pretty close to a very strong plurality on all three of those top issues. And you very easily get to a coalition of 51 percent and possibly, you know, I mean, you don't even really need 51 if you're him. He won the original 2016 primary with some 35 percent of that time around. On the electability piece, this is one poll. So always,

you know, keep it in mind. But I'm looking at a Michigan general election poll that has Biden and Trump basically tied within the margin of error. Biden at 45, Trump at 43. But Biden wiping the floor with DeSantis, 44 for Biden and 31 for DeSantis. Now, I do think that's an outlier. Most of the polls that we've seen that have the like trial runs, you know, what would it be? Head to head matchups, Biden versus Trump or Biden versus DeSantis. They show them pretty close, both of them in the hunt. And it basically a jump ball, regardless of which one becomes the nominee. But the really clear case that DeSantis wanted to be able to make, you know, the look at the scoreboard case that he wanted to make, clearly that is not panning out for him. And I want to

say I was wrong about this, too, because I didn't actually think that electability was that important to the Republican base. I thought they wanted what they wanted. And, you know, I still think there's an element of that. They like Trump stylistically. Trump is entertaining. He's charismatic. He's a fighter. You know, he is hated by all the right people. And that's there's certainly an element of that that really rings with that that really is compelling for the GOP base. But, you know, this poll has some decent evidence that electability is important to them, that DeSantis could have been in a better position if he had leaned into a different set of issues, the issues that actually made him a more moderate and popular governor of Florida before he, you

know, really started leaning in hard to the culture war stuff. Prosecuting more of a Ted Cruz case against Trump, whereas there's a different DeSantis, certainly that could exist here. And then just to underscore, we have this poll. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. It actually shows Vivek Ramaswamy tying Ron DeSantis for the number two slot here in the GOP primary. Trump, though, still at 48%, have a 36% commanding lead both on Ramaswamy and DeSantis, but DeSantis actually tied. This is from Kaplan Strategies with 800 likely voters. I mean, look, you could take this with whatever grain of salt you want. I really think that you should not take it as gospel. But overall, we see a slide for DeSantis. How far? We don't know.

Let's be fair to the man, though. Let's try and think about it. So in this poll, like you were talking about, the head-to-head poll, okay, the electorate hasn't gotten a chance to know him. You know, he hasn't even won a single election yet. He still could very much change. Things are fluid in terms of opinion. Everybody knows how they feel about Trump. Nobody knows yet as much how they feel about Ron DeSantis.

He hasn't gotten the proper media. I'm just, look, I'm just playing the devil's advocate. He's somebody who, you know, if he wins a couple of states here and there, people's opinions will change. People had, you know, Obama, nobody knew who he was until he won Iowa. So it's not like, you know, we're not still a long way away. And should we really take that with the, should we really look at that as the gospel that some people are casting it as? What I think I would say to steel man that argument is your whole case is that you are the

only one who can beat Biden, pointing to previous general election polls that showed that doing so. So why here in this critical state are you running so far behind him? I think that's a critical one. Yeah. I mean, I appreciate you trying to steel man the case, but also I've seen the numbers. It's not that people don't know who Ron DeSantis is in the Republican primary base. He actually has very high like name recognition and Fox News, which is the main conservative outlet and massive viewership, et cetera, has been doing everything they can until very recently, at least to prop him up. We're going to move into some more details about what's going on with the DeSantis campaign and maybe some of the pitfalls that they've fallen into. But I do think it's worth noting who appears to be coming up in some of these polls. I mean, number one, I do think Vivek Ramaswamy is having a moment. This isn't the, I don't know if he's tied for second place as this national poll shows,

but he is definitely rising in the polls. I think that's been pretty consistent now across a number of state and national polls. Is he second? Is he third? Is he fourth? This is a guy who was kind of unknown prior to this election. He's never held elected office. And he clearly has generated a lot of especially online enthusiasm for his campaign. And I've noted this before, but I do think it's noteworthy that the person who seems to have the most sort of energy and momentum right now is probably the person who has hugged Trump the most tightly. So that's noteworthy. The other one is Tim Scott, who I think as donors are getting some question marks about Ron DeSantis and whether he's really the guy and Fox News is

sort of moving off of DeSantis. Tim Scott is the alternative that they seem to be turning towards. And, you know, he's in terms of his sort of personal presentation. Obviously, my politics and his very different. But he has this very, you know, very likable presentation and, you know, has it has managed to avoid some of the pitfalls that the other campaigns haven't. So anyway, he seems to be the other one who is coming up in the polls. Let's turn now to some more specifics about the DeSantis campaign. So we brought you before, you know, his team had shared, his war room had shared this like meme-ridden online anti-gay video that he got a lot of pushback about. Now we have another staffer that retweeted a video that emerged online. And we'll get to that question of emerged online, which listen, I want to put a lot of caveats on this, but this was not Ron DeSantis. It was one campaign staffer,

et cetera, et cetera. But go ahead and start running the video. It's got a lot of the same vibes as the other video that got a lot of pushback, except the cherry on top of this one is this imagery right here, which is just blatant Nazi imagery. This is a Nazi symbol that, by the way, we're gonna get totally dinged on YouTube, so this video RIP.

But anyway, you might see this on some of the patches in the Azov battalion, for example. Seriously, that's where I've seen it most recently. No, you're right. And so the fact that you have a staffer who, you know, is so enmeshed in these online worlds that the best thing you could say about it is he just sort of like accidentally retweets some Nazi imagery, I think is indicative of the issue that not only DeSantis, but apparently the team that he's cultivated is just way too online, way too deep down these rabbit holes.

And this creates yet another, you know, distraction and issue for Ron DeSantis. Yeah. And look, let's explain, I think, why we're even focusing on said video. It's not like we just randomly plucked it. Guys, can we go and put A8 there up on the screen, you know, in that video that you referenced that was attacking Trump and saying that DeSantis himself was like the most like anti-drag queen candidate, I guess, that exists. The DeSantis aide had originally produced that video that we were discussing internally, passing it off to an outside supporter to then post it first

to make it appear as if it was generated independently. And remember, there was a lot of speculation about that video, which was shared by the DeSantis War Room account and which received quite a bit of scrutiny, I guess we could say nicely. That video, it turns out, was actually produced in-house and then farmed out to someone else. So then, of course, we have to raise the question of any time we see some of these videos, which are then RT'd by campaign staffers made to almost make happen or fake organically, did that come from inside of the campaign if they're literally cutting some of these things in-house? Part of the reason why we're having some speculation around this, and I do think it fits very neatly, Crystal, with the point that you were making around the voters he specifically is targeting to try to win over from

Trump are exactly the type of people who don't want to be near anything like this. Yeah. You know, it's just he completely, I think, misread the reasons for his victory in Florida. I think that there is a lot of online energy around anti-trans bills and legislation and issues and whatever in the online right. But, you know, when you look at the polling of the broader Republican base, they're still like, you know what? I'm concerned about the economy and I want you to be able to beat Joe Biden. So the things that actually made him successful in Florida was some of the areas where he was actually a little bit heterodox, like raising teacher salaries, for example, and where he appeared and where he made the right bet, too, by the way, on COVID and that fed into an economic argument. Now, you can't just like rest on your laurels on that, though, forever. You have to have an affirmative, forward looking economic vision at a time when everybody is really more or less moved on from COVID.

So I think he really misread his election victory. I think a lot of Republicans misread his victory and also the victory of Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, which again was read as an endorsement of, hey, let's lean into anti-CRT, let's lean into anti-trans, when that was a time when schools were still shut in a lot of places in Virginia. And Glenn Youngkin was the guy that was like, I'm going to get your kids back to school and make sure that they are able to stay there, which was a huge material impact on Virginia parents' lives. So to me, the midterm results and the fact that Republicans leaned so heavily into those issues and came up with, you know, really historically poor results, given the hand that they were dealt, was a repudiation of going so hard into those issues. As a thing on the side, the way DeSantis played it in Florida was like, this is about parental choice. That was relatively popular. Again, I had all kinds

of disagreements, but framing it in that more moderate way, that actually landed. When you're actually leaning into like, no, no, no, I'm virulently anti-trans, then you're talking about a more niche concern that is not at the core of certainly a general election, but even within the Republican Party. I am not ready to say that, well, first of all, I'm not going to call it anti-trans. I think it's very different framing. He says it himself. I mean, he's bragging about it in these ads. He's saying he's the most anti-trans governor and more so than Donald Trump.

What he's bragging about is trying to ban puberty blockers and castrating little kids, which I think is an important issue. But I am also going to say that that issue set is not as important amongst the eyes of the electorate as abortion. And I think that was the main reason why that didn't think. If you float them together, abortion, I think, is going to win every time. I've said it here a million times, apparently, the political calculus around that. But I'm not yet ready to say that on its face, it's not popular. I do still think, though, that economic issues are going to remain vastly more important. And so if I were DeSantis, that's what I would focus on as well. This also gets to, let's go ahead and put A7, please, up there on the screen. So here we have

exactly what you were pointing to, Crystal. DeSantis' campaign hemorrhaging support with this type of GOP voter. The large survey from Quinnipiac found that the drop in support for DeSantis for the largest one went from 51% amongst college-educated white Republicans to 29% with them now, which is a 22-point decline. And the problem with these people, exactly, is that, look, they, you know, even on the economy, these people are probably more likely, especially if they're still Republican to be very, uh, like more like small business, Mitt Romney type conservatives. They don't want to appear like they don't want to be controversial. And so for DeSantis, like when you're going to lean into this, like for him, it's going to be about, it's like casting them. They don't want to feel embarrassed when they're at the country club.

They don't want to feel embarrassed when they're in the, you know, when they have a DeSantis sticker on their, on their, their like vehicle parked in a mixed city where 50% people vote Republican and 50% vote Democrat, or when they pull up to the private school. I think that there's something about that though, which is so difficult for the average GOP politician, because these issue sets are so popular amongst the intelligentsia, amongst some parts of the base, but also repellent to a lot of the white suburbanite voters who did end up voting for Joe Biden.

This is actually a perfect reason why a lot of them voted for Biden in the first place because they're like, yeah, I don't want to feel controversial, I think, with Trump. For DeSantis, I think it's an impossible bargain when you're going to lean into these issue sets as we were talking about. And I do think there is an alternative world where he does things differently

and focuses more on COVID reopening and all that. But I do think it is far too soon to say, oh, this is the reason that he's losing specifically or that these issues, quote unquote, aren't popular on their face. Things are multifaceted and things rank in importance, but that doesn't mean that some people don't agree with some of the underlying policy as well. Look, the Republican base agrees with him. It's just a question of what are they voting on and what do they care about? And I think we've got pretty significant evidence judging by the fact that he can't go a single fricking sentence without saying the word woke, that this is not the core concern for the GOP base, because if it was, he would be rising in the polls instead of crashing and burning.

And the fact that he, you know, his most solid group of support was among white college-educated Republicans who, you know, probably tend to be more moderate on these type of issues, has left him vulnerable to, you know, bleeding even like the core base of his support. And the white working class of the Republican Party are firmly in the Donald Trump camp. It reminds me a bit of the dynamic, the, you know, wine track, beer track dynamic from the Democratic primary last time around, where the most fickle group of voters in the Democratic Party was, you know, the white college educated in this in that context, liberals. They were shopping around.

They liked Kamala for a minute. They like Beto for a minute. They liked Pete for a minute. They liked Amy Klobuchar. They were kind of, you know, they were week by week. They would switch their loyalties. And ultimately, they really mostly came home to the guy that they thought would be able to beat Donald Trump, and that was Joe Biden. So, you know, this is a group of voters who is potentially more fickle than non-college educated voters. And he's leaning into the exact wrong issue set in terms of keeping their loyalty. So, you know, I mean, just to give another example, the latest thing that he's under fire for is his board of education, putting out these standards that emphasize how

slaves personally benefited from the training that they received. And he doubled down and tripled down on that. So to your point about like the embarrassment factor saga, like they don't want to have to defend this guy, you know, of comments and that kind of focus within his campaign and within his governance. So even among the people who were the most core part of his support, and it's not just in that one poll, the piece that we put up on the screen, multiple polls that have found him just collapsing among what used to be his strongest demographic, I think it's a good indication of what has gone awry for him. Yeah. And it's, I don't know. I get very annoyed by these, you know, everyone wants to point out like the curricula problems and anti-CRT stuff, but apparently discussing what's actually in CRT education. Oh, I think we've had quite a discussion about it. In terms of the scrutiny,

no, like in terms of the scrutiny. This has been a major focus of discussion. No, no, no, no. I actually don't think so at all. I think many Republicans, I mean, we're online enough and you interact with enough right-wingers that you could have an intelligent discussion. There's a whole central conversation in the Virginia election. I mean, there's a whole slate of school board candidates that's been run across the country that's like obsessed with this stuff. All the like book banning in Florida and Texas. So we're talking about on a local level and on people who are like in terms of engaged in the fight, I'm talking about like mainstream media analysis. And in terms of that, it's like, oh, everybody can point to a single sentence about what's going on at CRT and everybody knows exactly what we're discussing. I do think DeSantis miffed his answer,

by the way, on this. Although even in the underlying curriculum, some of it was true. A lot of it was wrong. I will say that. But at the same time, you know, in terms of the scrutiny that does come on this stuff, it's like I always see it, you know, whenever it's the anti CRT. But whenever it's actual CRT and we're like ranking children by skin color and all that, then people call it a media ecosystem. I agree with you on the right. But I don't think highlighting those issues. And here's the other thing is, you know, I think if you are developing a curriculum that intentionally downplays the harms of slavery, I think that's a legitimate topic of discussion personally. Well, I mean, I don't think he downplayed slavery. I think it was we're

talking about a single sentence in a textbook by the Florida Board of Education. This is not the only instance where there's an effort to be like, yeah, I mean, slavery is bad, but everyone around the world was doing it. And by the way, did you know there were some white people enslaved? And let's talk about the white indentured servants. And, you know, let me go ahead and double down on the idea that slaves personally benefit. So I think it's a legitimate critique. And even if you don't agree that this is a legitimate critique, you have to know that the media is of course going to seize on a line in the curriculum that's like slaves actually had a pretty good. So don't worry about it, guys. It was all fine. Of course, you're going to get asked questions about that. And of course, when you're plummeting in the polls

and you're worried about shoring up white college educated support, it's maybe not the fight you want to lean into. I agree with that completely, actually. In terms of him for I've always said you could lean into the reopening of Florida, net migration, you could talk about cost of living. You should also, part of the problem though is that cost of living is going up right now. But I would focus also in terms of the price of education, the University of Florida system,

and to say like Florida is a place that people are coming to because it's a dream and there's currently a nightmare going on in the rest. I would focus on that and I would hammer that home because I believe that, and we talked about this ad nauseum, I think even all these cultural fights, we can fight here all day long about it, but this is not going to determine the course of your life. What's going to determine the course of your life is your mortgage rate, where you can actually be able to raise your kids and your kids be able to go get an education if you want to and do better than you in life. And I do think that

if he were to talk much more about that issue set, he would do a lot better. Electability apparently matters more than I expected in economic issues. You know, just sing the praises of the Florida economy all day, day and night. That was the best path for him. But, you know, in all fairness, even if he did that, do I think he would be winning right now? No, I do not. Yeah, I, we've beat this to death at this point, but electability to the Republican base is subjectively important, but not objectively important. Like objectively it's outrageous to think that Trump is, you know, the most electable candidate or the very least doesn't have serious electability problems. Yeah. I think we all have electability problems. Well, I mean, with Trump there, at least like he's won before. Yeah, true. And to your point, I saw is 68 percent or something of Republicans think that he won the last election,

too, and it was stolen from him. So they feel like he's a two time winner. So why wouldn't he be able to pull it off again? And politics is an amazing profession, isn't it? In 2024. OK, let's go ahead to the next part here about Twitter. And, well, I guess formerly known as Twitter, Elon Musk overnight has decided to change the name of the company to X. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen, debuting a brand new logo, which you will now find in the top left of your Twitter. Also, Crystal, I guess we're going to have to start remaking these graphics because it currently says Twitter up there at the top. Or maybe we'll just stick to it because I don't think this one is going to catch on. Let's see how long it lasts. So the official rebrand for those who are watching, you can see right there in front of you, you got the Twitter logo there on the right for the old one from the early 2000s. And we've got

X there on the left. So for the uninitiated, for those who don't know, let's put Elon's announcement up there on the screen. Here's what he said about X. X.com now points to Twitter.com. The interim X logo goes live today. So this actually doesn't come out of nowhere. There's some interesting history behind X.com. X.com was actually the second company that Elon ever was the head of. And it eventually became known as PayPal because it was in the same building as the PayPal office with Peter Thiel. There's like a legendary like x.com and PayPal organization that happened

because they got to know each other. They were both working on online payments. X was always the vision of Elon at that time in the 1990s going into the dot-com bubble. The idea was that you should be able not only to seamlessly financially transact on the internet, but you should have almost like a one-stop shop for everything in terms of how you conduct

your day-to-day life. It's actually interesting to consider this, but he was far ahead of his time because x.com, as it was envisioned in the 90s, is a lot like WeChat in China is today. And WeChat is effectively like an ecosystem where you have your payments, it has your social media,

it has almost your entire digital online persona. Now, there's a reason that China has it structured that way. And it's because it's like, well, we can turn it on and we can turn it off at any point. So I'm not saying it isn't scary, but of course it's very convenient to the consumer. And he kind of dreamed it up at that time. It didn't end up working out for a variety of reasons. A lot of it having to do with bank regulations and also just the way our internet evolved versus theirs. I'm giving a very

charitable read of this, just so everybody knows. I'm talking about the original vision. As to how it will be executed, well, Twitter or X's CEO, let's put this up there on the screen, put out a statement hours after Elon announced this, saying, quote, X is the future of unlimited interactivity centered in audio, video, messaging, payments, and banking, creating a global marketplace for ideas, good services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways they were just beginning to imagine. For years, fans and critics have pushed Twitter to dream bigger, to innovate faster, and to fulfill our greatest potential. X will do that and more. We have started to see X take shape over the last eight months. Over our rapid feature launches, I'm sure you can call it that, there is absolutely no limit for transformation. X will be the platform that can deliver

everything. Elon and I are looking forward to working with our teams and every single one of our partners to bring X to the world. So what do you think, Crystal? What do you think about the future of the X.com? Raise your hand out there if you are ready to trust your banking to Elon Musk, given what we've seen on the platform, the more regular crashes and bugs and glitches, the fact that they couldn't handle just like an audio only launch for Ron DeSantis. And you're putting out these like grand ideas about replacing half of the global financial system. OK, color me skeptical on that one. The funny thing is that, you know, I was reading through the list of like the features and the changes and whatever, and most of them are pretty small ball.

They're little tweaks around the edges of this or that functionality. And then it's like, I'm going to change this a little bit. We're going to not call them followers anymore. We're going to implement this creator payment system, which that could be quite significant. And then it's like, and we're going to take over half of the global financial system. It's like, okay, sure. Sure. You are in terms of the branding itself. I mean, listen, maybe I'm just being a stick in the mud. Cause I get attached to something I'm used to the Twitter bird. It's an iconic brand. It's very recognizable. This is super generic, weird. I just don't really understand

the point of it. I think you gave up what was an iconic branding and imagery and all of that on sort of a scattershot basis and slapped this thing on it. And I don't think it looks particularly good in my opinion. What I would say is the problem I find is that this almost seems a bit desperate. So did anyone see the term AI in there? I'm like, oh, interesting. So there's a joke right now like in the venture capital world, like all somebody has to do is just put AI at the beginning of their startup and their valuation goes up by like $100 million. So I am like, okay, well, hold on a second. My issue with, you know, trying to think so grand in this way is, dude, you got to focus on core competencies first.

Like, are you profitable? Yes or no? Are you on a road to profitability delivering a core service? Yes or no? Does the product work? I mean, the answer to that question is actually no on the consistency basis. Is the product good even when it does work? Well, you know, I can't be the only guy whose feed is flooded with terrible ads.

I hate the For You page. Love following. I don't know. We'll see. I mean, in terms of whether I am, you know, in the minority here or not. The other question, you know, whenever it comes to this is, are we actually going, like, ditching this iconic brand in favor of what? Like, can we realistically have a path towards that product? At the same time, look, this is Elon's modus operandi. He talked a massive game on Tesla for years. Everybody bet against him and said, you're going to lose, you're going to fail,

you're going to all this. Production is never going to happen. He always ended up pulling it out. But part of the reason why I do think this is fundamentally different is Elon was solving a series of engineering problems at the end of the day, engineering, financial, and economies at scale in the Tesla system. This is about social media, which is about what consumers like, their user patterns. It's not the same like when somebody goes to you and says, there's no way we can produce 1,000 cars or 100,000 cars. The engineering problem set that you have to solve there has to deal with, let's get some more material. Let's all work much harder. Well, what's a creative way to get there? Regulatory and all that. Social media is just totally different

in terms of rolling stuff out. So, you know, when we're talking here about banking, it's like, okay, did you even talk to any of the banks, you know, before you launched this product? Are they going to enter with your system? What about Apple? The vast majority of Twitter users are on an iPhone or on Android. Are they going to take a cut of said product? Are they going to allow you through? You know, the App Store has very onerous regulations whenever it comes to all this stuff. So that's more my thing.

I'm like, yeah, did you really think about the vision and the core competency before you're doing it? Or is this a ploy possible, I think, to actually raise money by putting AI in there and putting some sort of moonshot thing on top of the company to try and keep a higher valuation and raise money at that yeah that's a smart point i mean to me in my opinion the most what i'm most hoping for is that this is just like a flight of fancy with nothing real behind it and not any sort of play that is going to real

really work out because to me and i was thought this with Facebook, now Meta, also another terrible rebranding, making some similar noises, is the idea of handing these oligarch tech billionaires even more control over our daily lives. Now we're going to marry what we're allowed to say in the public square with also what transactions we're allowed to engage in, that's terrifying. So I actively hope that this direction is, you know, just a sort of a whim that's going to come to absolutely nothing because the alternative that it actually somehow magically works out and Elon Musk takes over half of the global financial system is completely terrifying. Right. Let's go and put this up there also on the screen. Threads, which lived a very short life, appears to be plummeting after an explosive start. Quote, there's been a nearly 70% decline in the number of daily active users

since the July 7th peak, spoiling their explosive launch just two weeks ago after signing up 100 million or so people. This is gonna be a big question of like, were they gonna be able to keep engagement on the platform actually high? The answer going to be a big question of were they going to be able to keep engagement on the platform actually high? The answer appears to be no right now. I got to say, I think Threads had some promise, but part of the problem is they did not have the ability to post from desktop. Many of the features that they were built into the core of the Twitter platform

didn't exist there. So in terms of being able to switch over seamlessly, it didn't really exist. I knew some very prolific Twitter posters who were trying to do everything on threads, and because they were limited to mobile, it was definitely, it just didn't work. It also didn't have a good enough load time if you were actually trying to use it for news.

And then, in terms of the algorithm, this was always a big question of friends and family. Are you people actually going to want to have their people who follow them on Instagram actually see what they want to post on Twitter or, you know, on a Twitter alternative? I think that was also a big question. So I don't know. I think ultimately, you know, the question or the really what we're learning from both of these things is, so these companies evolve to what they are for a reason. They have core competencies.

Branching out of those core competencies can be done, but it's also extraordinarily difficult, like we were just talking about with X.com. And you made a great point, too, about centralization. The entire reason that the U.S. doesn't have a WeChat-like system is because we had an open, fair-ish and competitive system in the 1990s. As in, everything evolved separately. So you didn't have the ability to combine. The reason China has a different system is they banned all of that in the 90s. And then they saw that with

the development of the smartphone, that centralization is actually a good thing. And so they just combined everything into a single app. Whereas ours ported over from an original web system onto the phone, which is why you have a different ecosystem. And while that can be annoying, not having everything seamlessly integrated, it also makes it so that there's no one centralized point of control and of power.

So I actually hope, like you do, that it never exists here in the US. Because it didn't for the very reason that we originally had a very free and competitive ecosystem on the web that eventually poured it over onto the smartphone. Yeah, I think those are all good points. I mean, on the threads, in part, they're a victim of their initial success in the blockbuster numbers that they did. So when you drop off 70%, it's still a lot of people who are using the platform.

There's still 13 million daily active users. But, you know, I do sort of agree with you that it's just it's not even that they did anything wrong. It's just hard to persuade people to move off the thing that they're comfy with and they've built a following and a network and whatever on. And so if there isn't an immediate payoff with that or if there isn't sufficient immediate pain on the platform that they're on, it's just difficult. These things are sticky. It's not the same as the era when you used to have MySpace and Facebook was able to come in and kill them. That was still very nascent. It was still early adopters who were on that platform. There's just more sort of like churn in that

atmosphere. Now people are kind of locked into, if they're a Facebook person, they're on Facebook. If you're a Twitter person, you're there on Twitter. You've built up a whole thing there. And even, you know, for myself, like I signed up for threads, I took a look at it and I lurked a little bit to see what the general vibe was. That's all I've done. Even though I sort of hate Twitter at this point, I really don't even post there anymore. But even for me, it's not like I'm super invested in making threads work as some, you know, Twitter competitor alternative. And I have issues with the fact that there is no just straight timeline feed. It's all algorithmically generated. I have an issue with that. I mean, there's a whole censorship regime over there that I have a problem with too. So it wasn't even totally clear to me.

And they made it clear also that they didn't even want politics on their platforms. I was like, all right, well, I guess I'm not really welcome here either. So I think it's going to be difficult to supplant Twitter as the, you know, micro blogging platform, even though I suspect threads will hang out there. They've, you know, got the corporate backing. They've got the Instagram tie-in. There may be some specific communities that develop over there that make sense with the connectivity between those two platforms. I could see it's sort of working, but as an actual Twitter killer, I have grown increasingly skeptical. Look, here's the other thing. You never know. I mean, Instagram stories wasn't an overnight success versus Snapchat. It took years for them to battle it out. At the same time,

you know, Facebook has a long history of also just nuking products overnight, like if they think that it's not going to work. So they have two options. They can nuke it. I don't think that they will just from a pride perspective. And because, you know, maybe they see some user like actual using on the platform enough that there's nascent that they can build on yeah they could add a lot more features and they could make it more useful it's one of those where don't forget you know with twitter i mean sure me and you crystal how long did it take for you to really start engaging and tweeting like i don't think it was instantaneous you know for me running for congress i sort of had to

i'm not a good example i mean for me like you know i drift and i was like you know, and this is when I had like I had no job even in politics. I would send like one tweet a month. That was like normal. And then, you know, eventually you start getting into it's only until I became a jerk, like an actual employed journalist. I started tweeting almost every single day. So that's one of those where, you know, now it's it does seem like I've been doing it forever. But at the time, whenever I signed up and I didn't work in or it didn't have an actual job in politics, it was a little bit different. So when I think about how a normal person might engage with the platform, you and I are much more like super users or use it more for professional purposes, which is not what the vast majority of people do on social media sites.

Yeah, that's true. Never know. Maybe. We'll hold on some possibility for threats there. All right. Let's talk about a new White House free count about a Green Party candidate, Cornel West, who is running for president. He's been mixing it up in a bunch of interviews. He's been one for a long time, which I always respect about him. He will go and talk to anyone. And he's not, and he doesn't change who he is, by the way. When he goes and talks to Sean Hannity on Fox News, he was recently on there mixing it up with Sean Hannity about Trump's

father's checkered past. Let's take a listen to that. Well, you know, brother, Trump's his own father's has been tied to the Klan. Trump's language about black people. Hold on a second. I've never heard his father. Professor, I've never heard that allegation. Never once. Of Trump. Now, I know Joe Biden said he didn't want our schools to be integrated and be racial jungles. No, my brother, you got the delivery. We won't go into all of that now. But I'm not going to say the son has to take responsibility of the father. Oh, no. We have empirical evidence of that in terms of not just how he treated black people in Queens,

but also the fact that he took him to Klan rallies. But this is in the history. But we're not talking about his father. God bless his soul. We're talking about Trump himself. Look, for example, at Brother Yusuf Salam. You know, Yusuf Salam was one of the Central Park young brothers who was taken to jail. I was blessed to support him.

I live in Harlem. He's now my councilman. What did Brother Trump say about Brother Yusef? Death penalty, not even a fair trial. I want a fair trial for Trump. I want a fair trial for Trump. Did he want a fair trial for that black brother? No. Cornell West, Dr. West does not pull any punches and, you know, is who he is regardless of where he finds himself, what platform he finds himself on. And the fact that he has such a large public profile and a dedicated following has sort of apparently started to sink into the White House that this could be a problem for them. So let's put this up on the screen from the Atlantic. You've got Mark Leibovich here with the Inside the White

House Free Count. He's got some quotes here from David Axelrod, who, of course, former top Obama guy, who says, too little attention is being paid to this. Axelrod recently gave voice to the gathering Democratic freakout when he tweeted out some basic historical parallels. Quote, in 2016, the Green Party played an outsized role in tipping the election to Donald Trump.

Now with Cornel West as their likely nominee, they could easily do it again. Now, of course, on the Jill Stein piece, it's just unbelievable number of excuses they find for their own failures. Once again, Democratic Party can never fail, can only be failed. It's the fault of those damn voters who just didn't do what they were supposed to do. And we will never, ever forgive them. But they point out in this piece that, you know, Cornel West is kind of, in a sense, leaning into some of the anxiety here because Jill Stein is actually his campaign manager. So what? Which, yeah, absolutely.

You know, the write-up here is you can understand the sensitivities given the history. Democrats still recoil at the name Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee in 2016, blah, blah, blah, pointing out that the amount of votes that she got in key battlegrounds, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania wound up exceeding the margins by which Hillary Clinton lost in those states. Now, I've always thought that this way of thinking about the election and this cope over their own failures and the fact that Hillary Clinton barely even campaigned in those states and probably would have made things worse if she did campaign in those states. That's always left out of the analysis. It's always James Comey, Russia, Jill Stein, et cetera. However, I do have to say, because of who Dr. West is and because of the fact that Joe Biden has left himself so vulnerable,

especially among young people, with the many failed campaign promises that he made, you know, I do think that they have a real problem on their hands with Dr. Cornel West in the race and with the fact that, you know, right now it's already a jump ball with Donald Trump. You know what I don't understand, too? You know, I forgot about this discourse. Jill Stein got 1.4 million votes. Gary Johnson got 4.5 million. Yeah. So if anybody thinks Gary, I mean, it's Gary Johnson's fault. Or is it that you didn't convince enough people to vote for you? And a lot of these libertarian types, presumably they were voting for Gary Johnson because they couldn't stand the idea of voting for a Republican,

but they wanted to vote for somebody more aligned with their actual votes. I mean, okay, then you should have made a case that you were the most credible anti-Trump candidate, but you didn't do that. So you didn't win. I mean, at the same time, you know, in terms of the White House problem, I mean, I think they're right, which is, look, Cornel West is a very well-known person, specifically, Crystal, amongst younger leftists. And if those are the type of people who you are the most disgusted with Joe Biden, there's a reason he's trying to, you know, hammer home student loan as much as he can right now is to try and shore up support amongst them because most of them have the lowest approval rating of Joe Biden than any other Democratic group.

Yeah, you do have a problem, but don't blame Cornel West for that. That's your damn fault, you know, for not governing in the right way. You know, I think I think this is such an interesting conversation because, you know, I'm not a big third party person just because of the nature of the U.S. political system. And so if you actually want to have a shot at really winning the presidency, I think you have a better chance. It's also very difficult, but a better chance of taking over one of the two major parties just because of structural first pass, opposed no rank choice voting, et cetera, et cetera. However, the theory of the case from people who are really into, you know, third parties and they're done with the Democratic Party and they're, you know, very much planning on voting for Cornel West is that you have to have a credible threat of

withholding your vote from the Democratic Party in order to push them on issues. Now, again, I think that that is actually disproven by the Jill Stein example, because even though it's kind of absurd, the argument that they make, they really think that Jill Stein is the reason that they lost. It did not cause them to feel pressure from their left and cause them to move left. Instead, it caused them to further crush dissent and, you know, make sure that all of the leftist Democrats that were in Congress were like, you know, got in line and they use whatever tools and tactics they had to sort of crush any sort of vibrant left in the country. So it didn't work out. But that's the theory of the case is you have to have a credible threat that it is going to be politically impactful to Joe Biden and the

Democrats to run a third party candidate. And so in a sense, the only way that theory works out is if you do have a chance to be a spoiler. You know, that's the that's the whole concept of how power would be wielded in this situation is that there has to be an idea that if you don't deliver on these priorities for the left activist base that is most inclined to vote towards Cornel West, that if you don't satisfy their demands, then you are going to lose the election. So in a way, I actually think that if that's your theory of the case, that's your theory of how power works, then you should, in a sense, be leaning into the idea that, yeah, you could be a spoiler. If Joe Biden doesn't deliver for these groups, then people are going to vote for Cornel West,

and you may well lose the election to Donald Trump. And if you are one of those people who is really in the third-party camp, that you're okay with that being the ultimate outcome because Democrats have so failed to deliver on the basic core promises that they're supposed to stand for. Yeah, I am also deeply, usually skeptical of third parties in terms of achieving anything, unless they were able to actually receive a real critical mass.

It can be done. I mean, look, we had Ross Perot. He won a decent percentage of the vote. He actually did hijack political discourse, and in a good way, in my opinion, back in 1992. But it's been a long time since 92. And also, he had tremendous political, he had tremendous wealth at his disposal, number one. Two, it was a pretty unique moment. And then

also though, since then, we saw Trump be able to come in, destroy the entire Republican establishment and actually win the nomination and take over the party. So the case of what you're talking about already has a very modern precedent. Third parties who are able to succeed historically, this has been a very long time, happen whenever there is an irreconcilable difference in the actual coalition. And currently, I don't see that in the Democratic coalition.

I don't think there's anything irreconcilable, specifically given that we are becoming a party of effectively older black voters, some Hispanics, and then white college educated. And not even white college educated, college educated voters who predominantly culturally dominate. That actually means that the party is becoming even more coherent really than ever before. That's true. In terms of its base. In my opinion, it's actually the Republicans that have a much deeper split.

So they're aligned on cultural issues, but economic issues, there is an irreconcilable difference, in my view, between the working class voters and then the small business kind of constituency and the multi-billionaire Republicans. Trump is able to paper that over somewhat rhetorically, but eventually I do think it will come to a head.

So I actually see more third party potential for a Republican party or at least some sort of split there than I do over in the Democrats. Like if Trump was able to somehow manage to lose the nomination and run a third party, you could see how you would get a significant chunk of the Republican If they rigged it against him, I think he would still win. I think he would win 40 something, 50 something percent of the people who voted in the Republican primary. Yeah, that's a really interesting point. I mean, the last thing I'll say about this is, you know, I got a quote from AOC here when she endorsed Joe Biden, which I think is just so disgraceful. But she pays homage to Dr. West. She says he has an

incredible history in this country. What he gives voice to is incredibly important. But she goes on to say the U.S. has a winner-take-all system. Whether we like it or not, we have to live with that reality, live with Joe Biden, in other words, because the alternative is far worse, is the close to that peace. And, you know, I just find it so sad, the response from Joe Biden and the Democrats, including AOC, to a challenge from their left like Cornel West, because their response isn't, let me try to deliver more for this group. Let me try to persuade them. Let me try to win them over. What are the areas where we may have fallen short? Because at the beginning of the Joe Biden presidency, he had very high approval ratings

with young voters. And it was this latter half of the administration when things have really fallen off a cliff as it has become manifestly clear the number of campaign promises that he's not going to fulfill that were important to this group of voters. No, no. It's never cause for any self-reflection. It's always just like how do we smear and dismiss and shame, as the podcast bro, the pod say bros actively said, and shame these voters into falling in line? That is always their go-to reaction. And, you know, we see it very much here in the case of Dr. West. Right. All right. Well, that's, I think it's an interesting, you know, thing and it's not going away. And luckily, you know, Cornel West has ballot access to the Green Party. So he made

a really smart choice by switching from People's to Green and makes him much more of a credible threat. All right, let's move on. UFO makes him much more of a credible threat. All right, let's move on. UFO, this is a big week for the UFO phenomenon. There's going to be some major hearings in Congress. And before we get to the witnesses of who will be appearing before the House Oversight Committee, there was an extraordinary press conference, actually, a bipartisan one. Jared Moskowitz, Anna Paulina Luna, and Tim Burchett, Republicans and a Democrat here, revealing some of their frustration with the intelligence community about the lack of disclosure, some of the things they hope to get through with the hearings, and also really displaying how fed up they are with some of the lies and obfuscations that have been made to them by the Pentagon. Here's what they had to say. Next Wednesday, July 26th at 10 a.m., the House Oversight Committee will hold a hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena, UAPs. I prefer to call them UFOs. Last year, the House

Intelligence Committee held a hearing on UAPs. They brought in some Pentagon bureaucrats who only had two answers to the questions they were asked. I don't know where that's classified. This hearing is going to be different. We're going to have witnesses who can speak frankly to the public about their experiences. We've had a heck of a lot of pushback about this hearing. We've had members of Congress who fought us. We've had members of the intelligence community and also the Pentagon, even NASA, backed out on us. There are a lot of people who don't want this to come to light. I've even tried to introduce an amendment to the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill, and all that would do

would require the Federal Aviation Administration to report UAP sightings by commercial pilots to Congress. I was told the intelligence community shut it down. This is ridiculous, folks. They do exist or they don't exist. They keep telling us they don't exist, but they block every opportunity for us to get ahold of the information to prove that they do exist. So you can see there, he's pretty pissed off. He actually gave an interview to local TV in Knoxville, where he expounded on some of these views and on some, even more of the obfuscation that's happening behind the scenes. Let's take a listen to what he said. Just to be clear, are you saying what you have seen,

do you think it's something, you know, international technology we haven't seen? Or do you believe that you have seen videos of extraterrestrial life forms and UFOs? I'm 100% convinced that it's not any of our allies or any of our enemies' aircraft,

that it did not come from this world. Either it's from our skunk works, which means it was something they recovered and they reversed engineered, or it is something extraterrestrial. There you go, Crystal. Now look, let's be fair. Tim Burchett is a longtime UFO guy.

He knows he's very well-informed. He knows the whole history of Roswell. So, you know, if anybody, I'm actually glad to see him on the committee. He's one of the first people to actually push it. But, you know, look, Annapolita, these people, I'm presuming, you know, she's a former, like, TPSA activist. I mean, they are getting into this, I think, because they genuinely do find cover-ups. You know, she's talked also about problems that they've had in Florida, trying to have some disclosure requirements. Matt Gaetz is now talking about it as well.

Like I said, Jared Moskowitz was there behind Tim Burchett, you know, clearly also pushing. We've talked about Andre Carson, who, by the way, I mistakenly said he's from New York, he's from Indiana. Andre Carson has also talked a little bit about pushing for disclosure. So like in all of these cases, we're seeing Congress get fed up with the official narrative that is being told. Not all of them are believers like Tim Burchett, but many of them actually are willing to hear more. And that's why I think this hearing is so important. So let's put these witness lists up there on the screen. I actually think this is the perfect witness list. We have here Ryan Graves, who's been on the show, the executive director for Americans for Safe Aerospace. He's a former U.S. Navy pilot who has reported multiple

sightings and been pushing a lot of disclosure within the community. And then a man who I owe a great debt to, even though I've never even met him, Commander David Fravor. I did not really care about UFOs until I listened to Commander David Fravor and his testimony about the Tic Tac incident, his personal encounter with the Tic Tac object, and also with all of the corresponding evidence that he brings to the table, the corresponding, like his co-pilot, the people who served with him in the squadron, the level of reporting. He was the first person I ever saw of a genuinely serious U.S. Navy background. I mean, this is a man who, and he often said this too. He's like, look, I was, I didn't go into this looking for UFOs. He's like, I was training for war in the Gulf. Wow.

When we were off the coast in the middle of this. And one of the reasons why I didn't think even more about it or take it as seriously at the time was we were at war. I literally had to, I was the commander of a squadron heading into an active war zone. So I am a person, you know, with Ryan Graves and with Commander Fravor, these people were put in charge of other pilots. They were put in charge of hundreds of millions of dollars of aircraft equipment. Presumably, like if these people are totally, completely nuts, somebody would have flagged it or found it or they would have acted out in some other way. They are completely normal. They're completely like studious and professional and, you know, in every aspect of their lives except on this one we want to say that what they're saying is completely insane. And then finally is Dave Grush, who of course is the former national NRO officer representative on the UAP task force inside of the Pentagon, otherwise known as the whistleblower, who has made extraordinary

allegations from that there have been murders that have been committed to cover up the UFO phenomenon. I mean, I have to laugh when I hear that, but I mean, he says this with a straight face. They say that his allegations are serious, they're credible, that they bear investigation. Right now, so far, we've only gotten that Newsmax interview with him. He's been very quiet, you know, otherwise in terms of the people that he's spoken to. And here, he's going to be testifying under oath. That's serious business. So look, to the Pentagon and to all of them, if he's a liar, he should be asked about all of us in a row. If he's a liar, throw him in jail then.

But if you don't, that tells us a lot too about what he's going to testify to. That's an interesting point. I think part of what is happening here with an increasing number of members of Congress becoming increasingly strident in their demands and really pushing for transparency, it's partly genuine interest. It's partly that they feel stonewalled, and it's frustrating to them and to their ego because they feel like, okay, you have to answer to us. And so the fact that we're not getting straight answers here, it really rubs them the wrong way. So I think that's part of why you're getting this increasing push. The other thing I'm curious about, Sagar, is we've seen, for example, with the allegations from Dave Gresh, we saw that there was a real reluctance,

there was a total blackout in the mainstream press of being willing to actually report out those allegations. And so some people who had done reporting to the New York Times previously on UFOs, they actually had to take it to a different outlet because the Times turned them down, Politico turned them down, Washington Post turned them down. And these were not like weird, wacko fringe reporters. These are mainstream journalists who reported this out and, you know, actually were able to bring these allegations forward, but not in any of the

mainstream papers. So do you think that having this kind of congressional testimony and inquiry kind of forces the hand of the mainstream press to cover it at all? I would hope so. I don't know. I have very little faith in these institutions. I mean, we're talking about freaking Leslie Keen here. She literally wrote the 2017 New York Times article with Ralph L. McDowell that blew open everything on this topic and revealed it to the world in terms of these videos. I mean, if they are, if the Times is willing to ignore somebody that they previously trusted and, you know, worked on their behalf for decades, well, I think they can ignore a lot. At the same time, a man under oath making these claims, you cannot ignore it, in my opinion. And at the very least,

here's the good news. Even if they do, enough people in Congress are fed up about what's going on here that they are still demanding questions. So we've got this hearing. We've got the Schumer Amendment that is happening inside the U.S. Senate on the topic. You put those two things together and you force legal disclosure or at least alleged legal disclosure in the NDAA combined with this. And maybe we'll eventually get to the truth. But you asked me this last time, do you think this will actually work? I honestly don't know. JFK, we still don't know who killed JFK. It's been over 60 years since that happened. Also, it's not like being legally

required to provide oversight has ever stopped the FBI, the CIA, or the Pentagon from breaking the law before. Usually, it doesn't take a Grush-level guy. It takes somebody with direct knowledge, with the actual files. Remember with Grush, he says that he's seen evidence of this through highly classified programs and all that. He hasn't actually seen Kraft or any of these other things with his own eyes. So who are those people? Where are they? Do they exist? Let's get them before Congress. They don't have to be public. They can even be private. Whatever. We'll take it.

As long as somebody tells us a little bit about it afterwards. But Congress. What has Grush said about why he decided to come forward? He says they were lying. He said that Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the program, the Arrow program, basically lied before Congress and he felt compelled to come forward and say something, which is the best reason to be a whistleblower. Yeah. So you could imagine a situation where, you know, people who have actually seen Kraft or have additional evidence, if such a thing exists, where they feel so outraged by the lies that they see told or by the stonewalling that potentially that causes more whistleblowers to come forward would be the ideal scenario. That would be the ideal scenario,

whether it will happen, whether those people exist, whether they're alive, like, I mean, who knows? You know, these things are all compartmentalized in such a way. I think the most extraordinary allegation from Leslie Keen, actually, is that billions, tens of billions of dollars have been spent on crash retrieval programs and are part of a black budget and account for some accounting problems that the Pentagon has.

That's why they can't pass the audit? I mean, I don't know if it's going to be 80% of the budget or whatever, but it may be more than you actually know. So as I always say, Transformers is real. All right, let's go to the movies section. Barbenheimer, or is it Barbieheimer? I forget exactly. I think it's Barbenheimer.

Barbenheimer? Griffin, come in my ear and tell me what it is. I think it's Barbenheimer. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen while I'm awaiting. it's Barbenheimer. Barbenheimer? Griffin, come in my ear and tell me what it is. I think it's Barbenheimer. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen while I'm awaiting. It is Barbenheimer. Okay, all right. So the weekend box office, the two, Barbie and Oppenheimer, combining for their fourth highest domestic weekend of all time. And the best summer weekend on record.

The first big smash since April of 2019, led by Avengers Endgame. So this is a full return to pre-pandemic movie levels. It's an extraordinary blockbuster in terms of the combination for the two for Warner Brothers Studios. And this actually does show you that event movies, that strategy around them can still work. And the reason I love it is neither of these are a damn franchise, Crystal. Neither of these are a sequel. They're both original scripts. And no matter what you think of them,

I know you didn't like the Barbie movie. I did see both. I pulled off the vaunted double feature. I saw Oppenheimer in the morning, Barbie at night. The ability to compel big audiences, big cultural moments on original scripts with studded casts is something that a lot of people have been waiting for a long time.

You know, originally we thought Top Gun was a savior of the movies. And I still think Tom Cruise did a tremendous service, you know, to people. But at the same time, like Maverick is a number two movie. Avatar, sequel, both big event movies. All the Marvel ones that have come out in the last two years are garbage, in my opinion, especially Ant-Man.

But these original scripts, one is a freaking three-hour biopic. You know, the other is, you know, connects to some cultural touchstone in terms of Barbie, like something which is a household name, but still the ability to compel people to the theater, this is something people have been waiting to see for a long time.

A return to like an actual original script, studded cast, the bet that marketing and making it a cultural touchstone and all that actually can work. I think it's a big deal for the movies. I'm really happy to see it. I do too.

In fact, it's so rare now that there's any one cultural tentpole, touchstone thing that's happening. It was kind of extraordinary to see. I was actually, I was traveling with my mom in St. Louis when we saw Barbie, and when we came back, the hotel front desk, they wanted to talk to us about the drive.

Everybody wanted to talk to us about what we had seen and which one of the movies we'd seen and what we thought about it and whether they were going to go see it or not and it's just been a long time since there was like a sort of unifying monocultural moment so that was extraordinary to see I think your point about the fact that these weren't just like tired retreads of Fast and Furious 85 or whatever that they actually took a little bit of risk here. I think especially with Oppenheimer. I mean, Barbie is such a known brand and known quantity,

and Barbie core aesthetic is having a moment and all of that stuff, that to me that one is less of a risk. But Oppenheimer, you know, this weighty, lengthy, historical piece, that's quite a significant risk. And it's the type of risk that you just don't see movie studios taking all that often. At the same time, it's also a bit of a last hurrah, at least for a while, because as you know, actors and writers are out on strike indefinitely. It appears from what we can tell from the outside. And I don't know if you guys checked down our interviews with Ron Perlman and Susan Sarandon and also another woman, Michelle Hurd, who is

on the negotiating committee. It appears that the negotiations are not going well and that they're not anywhere close to coming to terms. And the actors at least feel like there is a whole lot at stake in these negotiations. So put this up on the screen from The New York Times. I mean, it may be quite a while before we have, you know, another sort of big blockbuster weekend like this. They say Barbenheimer is a huge Hollywood moment. Maybe the last for a while big launch of Barbie and Oppenheimer should have been a celebratory moment. But an industry on pause has darkened the mood. And this really comes down to, you know, a lot of what we were talking about in the sort of tech section of the show that the business model has so changed

and the stakes for actors and writers are so high in terms of being able to make sure that they are able to participate in the future success, even to a small degree going forward that you could see this strike dragging out for quite some time. Oh yeah, I mean, that's always the caveat that we have to give.

It's also, there's some interesting stuff that's kind of happening behind the scenes. I saw that many Hollywood stars are very concerned that their brand is gonna take a dump on the Q score. Q score is like their, what is it, like the way that people feel about you in terms of, anyway, like advertisers, stuff like that. They're the ones who predominantly,

so they are all thinking about ways to become TikTok influencers. And they're going to lean very heavily into like Instagram content and YouTube content and all that to keep themselves culturally relevant. And still in the public eye. So things very much, I think, are going to move towards the whole creator sphere. But it's also going to be difficult for them because they can't violate the SAG guidelines in terms of promoting old work and stuff like that. We also found, Crystal, this map, if people want to take a look in terms of the cultural difference between who liked Barbie or not. Can we put this up there on the screen, please? So this shows an electoral map on the left showing Democrats and Republicans that are like basically like hard red states,

hard blue states, along with the favorability rating of is Oppenheimer trending or is Barbie trending in the states of the U.S.? And I don't know, Crystal, what do you make of this? I mean, OK. In terms of, and let's explain for the people who are watching. Oh, so first of all, just a caveat that we like pulled these off of Reddit and have not verified them ourselves. That's right. But figured it was like low stakes enough for us to talk over without actually going in and state by state checking that this was accurate. However, you cannot help but notice a stunning similarity between the electoral map, the red

states were Barbie states overwhelmingly. I mean, the way it matches up is actually pretty stunning. The blue states that went for Joe Biden in 2020 were much more likely to be Oppenheimer states. And then the other thing that is crazy is there are a few states, so Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which of course are all key swing states, were like perfectly split between Barbie and Oppenheimer. Now there are a few outliers. So Wyoming, not a swing state, but also was evenly divided. Nebraska, not really a swing state. And Georgia, even though it was a Biden state this time around, it was also a Barbie state. So it's not like it lines up a hundred percent, but I do think it's pretty, uh, pretty funny, pretty

remarkable. And, you know, I guess I feel like Oppenheimer probably appeals to more like NPR type crowd. Exactly about to say, let's start, let's start. Well, although I feel like the college educated white lib also probably loved Barbie more than anyone else. But, you know, in the audience that I was in, in this like working class black neighborhood in St. Louis, Missouri, people didn't come to Barbie for the like, you know, some sort of like radical feminist message. They brought their little girls in Barbie merch because their little girls love Barbie. And so I and they hated the movie, by the way, they were like appalled and about to revolt by the end of this movie, because I don't think it was what they expected. They thought this was going to be, you know, a fun kids movie. It was wildly inappropriate because I'll save my commentary for my monologue. But to me, that's more of like Barbie is the widespread mainstream cultural touchstone product.

And so – and Oppenheimer is the historical think piece. So, yeah, I think it's more of an NPR crowd that goes to Oppenheimer. And so it would make some sense to me that it's like the more liberal states that are into it. I was thinking that. I was thinking it's possible. I also was wondering whenever it comes to the R rating on Oppenheimer, I'm like, well, maybe then, you know, the more child, the less children that you have, or like, you know, the more childless, then you'd probably be more likely to see Oppenheimer first, like me. Or,

you know, if you do have kids, like if you're going to go see one movie, then your kids are going to be like, no, we're going to go see the Barbie movie. I saw a lot of people, like parents, who were like, want to see Oppenheimer, but, you know, got these three to contend with. It was like three children. Don't take your three kids to Barbie either, by the way. Yes, well, we'll let that PSA go out there. So I think that might be one explanation. I mean, who knows?

There's a lot that's going on here. I just think it's fun that we all have something that we can discuss. It's been a long time, you know, since, I'm trying to think. And especially even if you look at the data that was in this box office Time this box office Pro piece. Yeah that we were looking at so for example The previous big weekends that happened were Avengers endgame Star Wars The Force Awakens and Avengers Infinity War So we've got you know franchises in every single one of basically all Disney products In terms of Barbie is actually the number five July opening of all time. Number one was the 2019

The Lion King. Terrible reboot. I'm just gonna say that. Oh, really? I haven't even seen it. It's the live action one. It's awful. I like the live action Aladdin.

I don't like live action Disney. It just feels cheap to me. I'm like, give me a freaking original script. 2011 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. 2012 The Dark Knight Rises.

And then 2008, The Dark Knight. So two Christopher Nolan properties. Number five below there. Also, in terms of the all-time list, other ones that previously had done well were Catching Fire, Rogue One. Man, Rogue One was a great movie, as much as I don't like some of these big reboots.

And then also The Hunger Games and Captain Marvel. So whenever we start to look at it within that context, clearly these are doing very well. The other fascinating thing here is that Barbie's audience was 65% female compared to most other big openings. Very rare. Even Beauty and the Beast and Little Mermaid,

or sorry, Little Mermaid had 68%, but Beauty and the Beast only was able to draw 60. And for Captain Marvel and for Wonder Woman, even so-called like female-centric films, those were almost 50-50 in terms of female and male. Yeah. Interesting. Very interesting. Griffin messages, and he follows the LA Hollywood stuff closer than certainly I do, that studios are going to fill in the gap during the strike with terrible shelved movies. So things they already made, but we're like, eh, we can't put this out to the public. They're going to be like,

I guess we're going to pull it off the shelf and put it out to the public after all because we got nothing else. And they're going to buy more indie films. So that's how they'll kind of fill in the gaps. That'll be interesting to see. I love great indie films. I do want to say,

Kyle had a different theory of the electoral map, which is because there's been a real conservative backlash against Barbie, you know, Ben Shapiro. Is that real, though? See, that's the thing. Is that actually real? I don't really buy it either in terms of just, like,

normie people and what they're searching for and what movies they're going to see. I don't buy it either. But that was his instant reaction is like, oh, maybe they're searching for Barbie because they hate Barbie. I don't think so. Maybe.

Just wanted to throw it out there. I checked Shapiro's review. It's got 1.1 million views. I mean, that's good for a YouTube video, but that's not like everybody on the best team. Everybody hates it. Right, yeah, I don't think so. Crystal, what are you taking a look at?

All right, folks, let's talk Barbie. Now, the first thing you should know is I was really cheering for this movie, for real. I like the Barbie core aesthetic. It was fun to see this whole big cultural moment around it, which isn't really a thing that happens very often anymore. And just before I went in, I saw Ben Shapiro whining on Twitter about how his producers made him see it, and it was so woke and terrible, blah, blah, blah.

So, of course, I really wanted him to be completely wrong. But as it dragged on, an interminable two hours of dated, predictable contrivances, the verdict became undeniable. The Barbie movie is atrocious. Look, I am all for creative content with a good political message. White Lotus, loved it. Squid Game, loved it. I'm all for a kids-oriented movie that has jokes that go over the kids' heads. Legos movies, for example. Genuinely funny, some real political undertones. Or the Lorax, which is more overtly political, but still succeeds as a great kids' movie. My kids can sing every line from Let It Grow,

and therefore, for better or worse, so can I. This movie was not funny or entertaining or family-friendly. I breathed a sigh of relief that I was out of town so I did not make the mistake of bringing my six-year-old and having to explain jokes about penises and gynecological exams. It was mildly horrifying to sit alongside little girls in their Barbie merch as they suffered through vulgar humor and a plot that was completely impenetrable for the kids while still managing to be thoroughly predictable for all of the grown-ups. No star actor or immaculate set design was going to rescue this mess. Alright, so here's the basic plot, and it is basic as hell. It's roughly as follows. Barbie lives in a girl power utopia of Barbie land with all the various iterations of Barbie and alongside her erstwhile superfluous male Ken. Then she starts to lose her Barbiness, suffering thoughts of death, losing her trademark high-heel-ready arched feet,

developing a patch of cellulite on one thigh. So she is told she must travel to the real world in order to fix this, where she is shocked by the patriarchy, but Ken? He is enamored with it. He makes Barbie Land a patriarchy where dudes do the most stereotypical activities imaginable, and women run around in Playboy bunny outfits. Barbie then returns alongside her new sassy human companions, a put-upon mom and an angsty tween. The three of them overthrow Ken and resubjugate him, but Barbie decides all of this Barbie-dom perfection is no longer for her. She's going to become a real girl, embrace the complicated reality of the real world, and presumably climb

the corporate ladder. Late-stage girlboss stuff. Sheryl Sandberg would be so proud. Now the whole thing is way too preachy to be enjoyable or even to really be very effective as propaganda. It's sort of like AI wrote a screenplay based on 2010's white feminism. Not to mention the radicalism level is firmly set on safe for the army of brands that are raking in money off of this crap. It's a dumb person's idea of a smart movie, a liberal's idea of a revolutionary message. One might ask why Mattel would choose to associate with a movie that was basically made by someone who clearly hates their product. The answer is obvious in the film, because it never strays beyond the surface-level, consumer-friendly critique.

Basically, yes, we realized Barbie's body and ethos was unobtainable, but we fixed it now, so you can go out, buy our products for your little girls, and it's basically like you're fighting the patriarchy. There is one throwaway line from the angsty tween about Barbie promoting consumerism, but you can't really take it seriously, given the context that the whole movie rollout is a hyper-capitalist wet dream. According to Hollywood Reporter,

Barbie's attracted more than 100 promotional partners worth tens of millions of dollars to Mattel, from custom pink Crocs to a Prada clothing line to hair dryers and everything in between, merchants and brands rushed to cash in on Barbie mania while companies including Progressive Insurance and General Motors used Barbie in custom TV and digital advertisements per Hollywood Reporter. Warner Brothers Discovery CEO David Zasloff promoted Barbie across his various properties, including an HGTV Barbie design competition, low-key sounds more interesting to me than the movie, a Food Network Barbie bake-off, and Barbie promotion graphics generously sprinkled across 15 different networks.

Turns out the patriarchy Barbie insists she's subverting is getting wildly rich off her dated girl power platitudes and merchandise. The real moral of the Barbie movie for me is that you can make a dog shit movie and still make a fortune with the right marketing strategy, quite the opposite of go woke and go broke, I suppose. In the resolution to the film, Barbie rejects her iconic ultra femme look for a sensible blazer and pale pink Birkenstocks, signaling to all the young girls and women out there that to be an evolved, complex woman, you should take off some of the sparkle, hide your curves, limit the glam, modest is hottest, ladies. An odd fit for a moment when young girls are joyfully embracing and reclaiming the Barbie aesthetic,

not out of repression, but actually out of power. As my 15-year-old informed me, Y2K bimbo is in. And why shouldn't it be? In the year of our Lord 2023, we got deeper issues than whether or not Barbie's tits are out, okay? And more fundamental issues than the diversity ratios on corporate boards while they are systematically busting unions, screwing workers, and buying off politicians. And speaking of that, a far more profound and revolutionary message is being sent to studios like Warner Brothers by the actors and writers who are out on strike right now,

demanding a small sliver of the vast wealth created by their work. So here's my advice for what it's worth. If you really want to mess with the patriarchy, take your Barbie ticket money and popcorn cash and send it to a strike fund instead. Sagar, there was no part of this that I really enjoyed. By the end, I just wanted it to be over.

I'm realizing I really think that this is also a difference in audience because I was telling you, I watched it with a bunch of very raucous, drunk gays here in Washington, D.C. And they were loving the movie. They were feeling the Kennergy. They were feeling the Kennergy. A lot of the women who were in the audience are exactly the type who love, like, Lehman Fett. So I was just like, hey, you know, it's almost you get caught up in the crowd. You're like, yeah, you know, everyone's loving the jokes.

Like they love the core message of it. So I guess I just didn't look even as political. I was like, yeah, generic center left movie is going to be generic center left. I enjoyed a lot of the Ken humor. I thought it was funny. Like Ken, the patriarchy, and like I don't want to issue too many spoilers. So if you haven't seen it, I recommend you. I mean, I already did the whole plot of my thing.

Fair enough. Spoiled already. But just like some of the jokes, like the Ken dance-off or what else am I thinking of? Like the Mount Rushmore filled with horses. There were like intermittent laughs and all those things. I thought it was light, and I didn't find that it was plotting. I didn't think it was. Well, maybe because I saw Oppenheimer that morning, so anything can be short.

That could be. It could be short. So I don't know. I saw it, and I was i was like huh that was humorous i wasn't like i love this movie the greatest movie i've ever seen i was like it was kind of fun but i'm telling you my audience was obsessed with this movie like would not stop that is so funny because i'm telling you there was about to be a revolt among the like working class black audience that brought their little girls there and i I'm talking, there were teeny tiny kids.

There were, you know, little girls of all ages. I could 100% see that. And also a mom. So I would have, I think, because I wouldn't have paid close attention. It's PG-13 is the rating. I wouldn't have paid close attention. I would have been like,

that's probably fine, you know, and Ida likes dolls, so I'll bring her, you know. And thank God I didn't because seriously, early on, there's this scene with the Kens where they're joking about beaching each other off. And I was so shocked by having that in what is ostensibly like this kid's movie with all these little girls sitting around me that I just refused to believe that they actually intended that joke to be what I thought it was. And then there's all these jokes about like genitals and gynecology. I'm like, what?

And it's not like any of the funny stuff would land with the kids. It wasn't really that funny for the grownups and they're relentlessly beating you over the head with this like patriarchy discourse that, you know, felt like Gamergate all over again or something. Like that was the level of messaging. It just, for me, it was a no. I could totally see that. Yeah, especially for kids. I i didn't consider that but if there are a lot of kids going

to this yeah i don't think yeah the lady next to me right after it was over she turned to me and she was like that ain't no kids movie and that was oh yeah yeah and and towards the end of the movie i mean people were talking they were like there was like a murmur of discontent for probably the last like 20 to 30 minutes of the movie did not land. All right, so how are we looking at? Well, on Thursday, I did a monologue about the stunning admission by Disney CEO Bob Iger that linear TV itself is dead. It's the most stark admission yet

by someone at the very top of the industry on the state of the TV business. In retrospect, I think it will be a big event preceding mass layoffs, declining ratings, and a decade or more of chaos in the industry. The parallel that I use of how TV would fall is what happened to newspapers, where almost all of them mostly died, save for the three majors, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. But lo and behold, just a few days later, some news emerged on one of those papers showing that even amongst the majors,

there is trouble, and worse, that even our so-called genius oligarchs can't do very much about it. New figures out of the Washington Post show that Jeff Bezos, under his leadership, the paper has yet to turn a profit. And this year alone is set to lose some stunning $100 million in just one year. To understand how extraordinary that it is, consider this. In 2013, Bezos purchased the paper for $250 million. A decade later, after pouring hundreds of millions into the paper's infrastructure, a renovated building, new staff, and more, he's still losing nearly 40% of his original purchase price in a single year. What is going on at this company? It's a simple and pathetic answer.

During the Trump years, they were actually doing okay. They peaked at nearly 3 million digital subscribers to the paper. They turned out resistance fantasy after resistance fantasy. And if you think I'm joking about that, the true nadir of the Washington Post happened after the Mueller report was released as a PDF,

and they released it as a literal, annotated fan fiction version book, which became a number one New York Times bestseller. Today, you can also purchase, aside that, the January 6th report, similarly annotated, by so-called esteemed reporters. So yeah, it's a real wonder why they lost half a million subscribers after the boogeyman left office,

but what I find delicious about this is a few things. Number one, obviously I like to see the mainstream media fail, but number two, is the myth-busting over the so-called genius of Bezos outside of Amazon. I believe that Bezos revolutionized e-commerce. He's one of the great businessmen of our time, but I can't help but also enjoy Bezos quitting Amazon to be revealed as just your average 60-year-old rich dude going through a midlife crisis, humiliating himself with his new fiance, tweeting about the best hangover foods, and then the most storied rich guy trade of them all, thinking that you're

actually special and different because you did so well in one area that you can do it in another. It's worth going back a decade and seeing just how big of a game that Bezos talked when he bought the Post. He promised, quote, a new golden era of the paper. His big idea was not to run a newspaper, but to turn the Washington Post into a software company. He invested massively into a new building that I've actually seen. It feels like Google whenever you're in it. And he hired all these new engineers to start crashing on turning the company into software. The idea was that to truly make a lot of money, you had to build a new backend system that publishers could use to actually operate their websites. On paper, sounds like a good idea.

But a few years after, it didn't sound so special. It didn't work at all. Widespread adoption didn't happen. Five years later, they think they might just sell the business off. And in a sign of just how unoriginal the idea is, Vox Media, which raised tens of millions of dollars to pursue the exact same thing, just gave up on it a few days ago and just said, screw it, we're going off our own backend system because the money is just not there. Basically, WordPress won,

despite billions of dollars being thrown at replacing it. Why? Because it's cheap, because it was already in existence, and because at the end of the day, the Washington Post Company and Vox were not trying to solve real problems that people had. The biggest problem facing newspapers is not that they don't have a good enough website, or that it isn't easy enough to publish a story. It's that people don't

trust them at a mass scale. And instead of trying to build that trust back under Bezos' leadership, he went in the opposite direction. He leaned into the worst resistance tendencies under Trump. He allowed the paper to descend into a trash heap that tolerated people like Felicia Sonmez blasting her own bosses as somehow sexist, or hiring the New York Times scraps with people like Taylor Loren so she could dox people for a living.

All of his genius tech plays failed because you can't tech your way out of bad content. Ask anyone who makes content for a living. You can gussy up things with editing and graphics and all that that you want. But if the core thing is bad, no one will care. In fact, I can't believe I'm saying this, but Bezos could learn a thing or two from the New York Times. And as much as I don't like the New York Times, you can't help but admire their business.

They solved the trust problem. How? By monetizing the parts of their brand that weren't affected by it. According to the Times' own numbers, a huge part of their growth, pros Trump, has nothing to do with politics. It's subscriptions to the cooking section and the crossword app, along with sports subscribers to the most recent purchase of The Athletic. The company saw growth in its ownership of the Wirecutter as well. That's a consumer goods recommendation outlet. Notice, what's not driving growth?

They're at all politics. The Times simply became a lifestyle brand for upper class liberals, and it's doing very well at it. Ironically, it wasn't a visionary entrepreneur who came up with that strategy, but a hundred year old family business that appears to have absolutely creamed him in it. So what can we learn from all of this? It's that all the money in the world, all the reputation, you can't buy

your way out of losing trust. And just because you're awesome at one thing doesn't mean you're going to be all that awesome at another. And that in this business, it is not about money. It's about reputation, integrity, trust in the long run, and the ability to actually turn it into a business in the long run. So that's the thing, Crystal. Fascinating. Bezos. Yeah, I mean, the software plays the most prediction. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, guys, thank you so much for watching. We are going to have two big interviews tomorrow that will be available exclusively to our premium subscribers first. So if you want to go ahead and sign up, not only to help us get candidates to come into the studio and for big interviews like that, but also to be able to

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