Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 8/22/23: DeSantis Debate Plan, Vivek Accuses Newsmax Of Pay To Play, Wall Street Real Estate, BRICS Plan For Dedollarization, Screen Time Impact On Kids, Mr Beast Solves World Peace, Author On Corporate Tyranny

Episode Date: August 22, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss Biden arriving in Hawaii after the Maui fires, DeSantis reveals debate strategy, Vivek accuses Newsmax of pay to play, vulture capitalists scoop up commercial real estate, China pushes BRICS to supplant US dollar, study shows screen time damaging young kids, Mr Beast world olympics video sparks controversy, and Sohrab Ahmari joins to discuss his new book on corporate tyrannical power.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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Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. It is a big week because Wednesday, that would be tomorrow, first GOP primary debate sans Trump, but still will be interesting. And there was a memo that came out for Ron DeSantis that is just a fascinating look at like consultant brain and how all of these people are approaching

this event. So we'll dig into that. We also have some updates from President Biden's trip to Hawaii, perhaps not getting the welcome that he expected there. We've also got some news out of China in terms of both their continuing economic struggles and also their plans to team up with the other BRIC nations and some other nations around the world to serve as a counter to the G7. So we'll get into all of that. Some new research on the impact of screen time on babies and on childhood development. This is one you definitely want to pay attention to. And finally, and very importantly, Mr. Beast has either started World War III or perhaps created world peace. So we will dig into it. Just sort of accidentally, he did that. I'm also excited to talk to Saurabh Amari

this morning about his new book, Tyranny, which is a hard look at corporate power and what we can do to check it, something we are obviously very interested in here. So that should be a good discussion as well. That's right. We're really excited. Today's a big day, guys. We are not going to have monologues in the show because we're filming a bunch of extra content, an entire debate special. That's actually going to drop for our premium subscribers. Everything you need to know about the debate, prepare, how to think about it, what to look for, include some predictions from Crystal and I about what's going to go down. So that drops today. For everybody else, it'll air tomorrow. We're not going to have a counterpoint show for everybody. Instead, we're going to have the great Emily Jashinsky here in the studio on Thursday. We're

all going to break down everything as early as humanly possible on Thursday as fast as we can. So I think we've got a lot of great content. Become a premium subscriber, breakingpoints.com if you're able. Of course, it costs money to shoot these extras and do all these other things. And you guys are the ones who enable all that. So we appreciate you and we love you. BreakingPoints.com if you are able. Yep. So if you want to get that debate special that we're recording today right after the main show early, make sure you subscribe and you will be the first to see that. There you go. All right, let's start with Hawaii. President Biden touched down late last night, our time, earlier in the day over there, Hawaii time time to not exactly the most welcome reception.

This is actually from Hawaiian local news and shouts out some of the signs and the slogans that greeted President Biden on the street. Let's take a listen. Over to my right, there are a bunch of people out here. They've been here for hours. A bunch of them are protesting. They have their makeshift signs, cardboard signs. A lot of them saying, as we've been talking about, that he's too late. Some of them feel that he should have been here much earlier. Other signs that say action speak louder than words. So hearing a lot from the people here, as well as Hawaiian flags. People standing out for hours on end just to make their thoughts felt to the president. And it's one of those where,

look, I can think back to Hurricane Maria, to Trump. He always had like smattering of protests, specifically with Maria, especially with Puerto Rico, where his response was scrutinized. But Glenn Greenwald put this out yesterday, and I just think it's so true. This is both a media story, and it is a story of the response. I think the response itself has been horrific. But on a media level, Crystal, this type of thing in Hurricane Katrina, they would have blared this from the rooftops. It would have shown it to everybody. As Glenn correctly pointed out, and I also referenced, President Bush was destroyed for that flyby over Katrina as people were literally drowning.

And he did that sympathetic look out of the window. I mean, President Trump also was scrutinized for Maria. Biden takes days, I mean, almost two weeks in order to visit the site of this disaster after barely opening his mouth about this. You have protesters and people on the ground. Let's keep this in mind. This is a Democratic state that voted two to one for President Biden. These aren't just, you know, like Republican trolls that are coming out and saying this.

I think they're rightfully outraged. And we're basically hearing this from local media. We're really not even seeing any pickup by the actual mainstream press. Very little bit of criticism in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, a few of those other places. But, you know, the talking heads, like they're basically giving him a pass on what is objectively a total disaster of a response here. I mean, to be clear, the media was right to take a very harsh lens to Bush's response to Katrina, which was, I mean, not only callous and horrific, but also just the response itself was completely catastrophic. They were correct to take a harsh lens to President Trump's response to Hurricane Maria. That was, you know, that was the right thing to do because there were true failures there

and also on the level of the optics of seeming like you actually care about these Americans who are suffering. He fell far short of the mark. But there has not been a similar level of scrutiny of Biden and certainly in terms of online. I mean, the amount of backlash to even a little bit of criticism of the president for, let's not forget, the first questions he got about this, he was sitting on the beach and he said, appeared to say no comment. Then he plans a vacation to Tahoe, which he, you know, was shamed into leaving briefly to go down and make this visit. And more critically, what we are hearing from the ground, from the people who are there living this nightmare, is that the response and recovery effort and the relief effort has been woefully inadequate. That deserves great scrutiny.

And so the fact that you have some Hawaiians there making their thoughts known, listen, this is why it's important that you go visit because human beings being what they are, to see that devastation firsthand, to actually see those signs and understand that people in a state that voted overwhelmingly for you are not impressed with what's going on, hopefully those things can make an impact. Just take a look at some of the images that he would have been seeing with his own eyes. Go ahead and put this up on the screen, guys.

This is what his motorcade was driving by there on the island. I mean, I just can't imagine this being my town, that devastation. I mean, those burned out cars, the buildings, just everything absolutely decimated. And keep in mind, guys, we still don't have a full body count. We still don't even know how many lives were lost here. The last number I saw is 111. They haven't finished going through this area to recover all of the human remains. There are still hundreds of people who are missing. Residents fear that the death toll is going to be much higher than where it is now. So you just can't understate the massive,

horrific impact of this tragedy. Crystal, there are 850 missing people still as we air this segment. Let's all be honest here about, you know, unless I hope they turn up, I hope everything works out. But it's been a long time since those fires. And if they haven't at this point, I know they found some children and all that. That was about, you know, what, several days ago. But this is a devastating disaster. I mean, on the ground, they are saying the local death toll estimate is somewhere in the 400s and likely going even higher. So this is one of the biggest tragedies, worst wildfires, as you've always said, what, over a century? Over a century. Over a century with all the technology that we've had. We've done multiple segments here scrutinizing the disaster response, the legal monopoly of the actual power utilities,

the lack of scrutiny there. President Biden offering these people some $700 one-time payment, which I'll never get over on the exact same day requesting $25 billion in extra assistance, of military assistance to the country of Ukraine, including humanitarian assistance, of military assistance to the country of Ukraine, including humanitarian assistance, probably even more so than what's been requested for Hawaii so far. It's just outrageous. And, you know, look, as you said, it's not just about why shouldn't he, it's not just the visit. It's that where is the whole of government approach? Where is the cabinet secretaries? Where is the energy and the action from the government here in the actual response? The residents on the ground are saying FEMA's not here. We don't know where they are.

The day afterwards, we're talking about here on the show, multiple people in Hawaii saying we're being blocked by the local government from delivering the supplies that are needed to Maui. So at every level, I think it's been a failure. And unfortunately, you know, only independent sources, the internet and all that will scrutinize what should be an entire news cycle about what a disaster this has been from the very beginning and a major failure of President Biden. Yeah. I mean, listen, I want to say I saw a Washington Post article that spoke to Hawaiians on the ground and, you know, heard out their criticism. That's pretty much all I've seen. That's insane. That's about it. Yeah. Compare that again to, you know, coverage of past tragedies under other presidents. And you see if the media has applied the critical lens

to this president that deserves to be based on what we've seen on the ground. All right, let's move on to the big political story of the week, which is the Republican debate, primary debate happening tomorrow night. As we mentioned before, we're gonna have special coverage for you premium subscribers that'll drop today. For everybody else that will drop tomorrow morning. So look forward to that. We did get news of exactly who the eight candidates are, because there was some dispute over who was in and who was out. My condolences to all of the Perry Johnson and Francis Suarez fans. Your guys did not make it onto the debate stage. But we wanted to take a look at this memo. This is fascinating

on a whole host of levels. So Ron DeSantis, most of his money is not actually in his campaign. It's in his super PAC. And so he's very dependent on his super PAC for polling and research and strategy and all of the mechanics of the campaign. But they can't directly coordinate. So instead what the super PAC has been doing is they will post these strategy memos online in places where they think only DeSantis and his team will really find them. But lo and behold, news media picked up on their debate strategy memo that they had posted online. And some of the details here are pretty amusing. So put this up on the screen. The overall plan here for DeSantis going to the debate, according to this super PAC strategy memo, is to defend Trump and, quote, hammer Ramaswamy, Vivek Ramaswamy. DeSantis allies

revealed debate strategy. Hundreds of pages of blunt advice, memos, and internal polling were posted online by the mean super PAC back in the Florida governor, offering an extraordinary glimpse into his operations, thinking they have since taken this memo down off of the internet. But presumably, Ron got the message before they pulled it. So let me give you some of the specifics from this memo. It's just a fascinating look into consultant brain and the type of advice that they would be. This isn't unique to Ron DeSantis. He's just the one who happened to have his memo caught by the news media. But this is the way that they approach this. They said, number one, attack Joe Biden and the media three to five times. Okay. Number two, state Governor Ron DeSantis' positive vision two to three times. Number three, hammer Vivek

Ramaswamy in a response. And they provide all sorts of, you know, oppo research on Vivek and especially they focus on some positions that he seems to have changed, some sort of more liberal sounding positions that he used to hold. Number four, defend Donald Trump in absentia in response to a Chris Christie attack. So they seem to think that, quote, taking a sledgehammer to Vivek Ramaswamy, calling him fake Vivek or Vivek the fake will be a good moment for him. We'll see if he actually trots out these lines now that they've been made public. They also think that it could benefit him to really go on the offense against Chris Christie, who will be likely vociferously going against Trump because that's, you know, part of what he has staked his campaign on as being one of the main anti-Trump voices. Also fascinating saga, I thought, was the kind of like

kid gloves way they want to go about talking about the former president, Trump. They suggest saying that Trump's time has passed, that Mr. DeSantis should be seen as, quote, carrying the torch for the movement he inspired. They provided him with an elaborate script with which to position himself in relation to Trump. He could say that Trump was a breath of fresh air, the first president to tell the elite where to shove it, then add that the former president was attacked all the time,

provoked attacks all the time, and it was nonstop. He could then argue that Trump, who has now, of course, been indicted, faces so many distractions that it's almost impossible for him to focus on moving the country forward and that this election is too important. We need someone that can fight for you instead of fighting for himself. And then the final detail here that I found rather entertaining is, of course, you know, they're aware that DeSantis has this like likability awkwardness issue. And so their suggestion here is I'm reading directly that he, quote, invoke a personal anecdote story about family kids, Casey showing emotion.

Oh, yeah. Thanks, consultants. Thank you you very much consultants that that definitely should do it. That gives you a good view into how braindead all these people are and how they try to manufacture personality. I made the joke before about, it's basically, you know, it's like the Don, the human suit zip up all the way. You pretend to be show emotion, show emotion, but got it. I will do that. You know, it's like you can't, you can't put authenticity in a memo. And that's really what it comes through. I took away from this much more like aside from the consultant one. It's clear who DeSantis sees as his main rival and that's Vivek. He is going guns blazing, I think against Vivek Ramaswamy. If I'm Ramaswamy, I'm going to be doing the exact same thing. I'm going to hit back as hard as possible. We can. These two are basically locked in a match for number two spot.

And in terms of favorability ratings in Ohio and elsewhere, we're going to get into just in a little bit about how they're actually technically is a very, very narrow lane for a single personal rival to Trump. And they both want to be that person. I think Chris Christie is going to be coming in guns blazing against DeSantis because he is the person who he really needs to knock off. Christie actually, interestingly enough, from the polling that I've seen so far, he's actually locked up the majority of the anti-Trump vote so far in New Hampshire

and in Iowa. So he needs to prove more of his bona fides there. And anybody who is actually going for DeSantis as an anti-Trump move, Christie wants to move them into that category. So I think DeSantis is going to be the main focal point on the stage. In terms of DeSantis going to try and blow off Christie, I'm already going to predict I think Christie is going to be coming after him on Ukraine and a few other of these issues. Also on Disney, Ramaswamy is going to be coming in, probably serve as the main Trump attack dog in terms of going after Christie, but also on DeSantis for being weak and for not stepping up enough on behalf of Trump. So look, I'll save all my main predictions here and more look at it as I think this is a major two-way, this is a two-way fight with a complete wildcard on the side. With like a surrounding melee. Yes. Asa Hutchinson, he's a nice guy. We interviewed

him here. I don't think he's going to have a big moment. Nikki Haley's going to try and have her moment. She's going to have a Kamala moment. Scripted, prepared attack. Kicking sideways against Vivek. Not against Trump, though. Isn't that funny? She'll kick to the left, but she'll never kick to the right. She'll kick DeSantis.

Tim Scott, he's a nice guy. I'm sure he'll have a couple of moments, but he's not an attack guy that's never really been. No, that's not his personality or his political brand. I don't think it would, I don't think it would go well with like what his political brand. Exactly. So in general, I think that this is, you know, to boil it down for just this segment, it is DeSantis is for Ramaswamy. They're going for the number two. We also had an interesting ABC news piece. Let's go and put this up there on the screen where they did kind of a deep dive into Vivek. They say, quote, how Vivek Ramaswamy sought podcast stardom prior to the White House run.

They quoted someone who said he's wanting to be famous. They revealed that he apparently was in a development deal with the Daily Wire actually for a podcast before he decided to run for president. And Daily Wire confirmed that part of it. They did confirm that. One of the interesting things that actually came out to me is that whenever you looked at the Ramaswamy rebuttal here, it was just like, he was like, oh, is your source a person who lives in a publicly funded mansion in Tallahassee, as in the DeSantis team? I can only say anecdotally online just from watching kind of the sparring of all the camps, the DeSantis folks have really stepped up their fire against Ramaswamy in recent days. They particularly focused in on a line here in this ABC piece about how Ramaswamy had told associates in the past that his candidacy could potentially nudge out Ron DeSantis.

They're like, oh, Vivek is trying to sabotage Ron DeSantis. No, I just think he thinks he's better at the job than DeSantis. I think he's more of a viable candidate. And to be honest, given his polling position right now, and especially given where DeSantis started, I don't know if he's necessarily wrong about that in terms of performance so far. I mean, I think in terms of political talent, Vivek is a more politically talented person. And you have to look, obviously, you guys know I have all kinds of policy disagreements with Vivek Ramaswamy, though I'm very grateful that he is willing to come here and mix it up with us and mix it up with a whole host of people. And I hope we can do that again. But, you know, this is a guy who basically came out of nowhere and is now

verging on being the leading alternative to Trump. Now, I mean, given that Trump is winning by like a landslide, maybe that's a low bar. But, you know, he is certainly giving DeSantis right now a run for his money. And DeSantis had the whole Fox News, Rupert Murdoch empire pulling for him at the beginning of this. He's had endless free media coverage. He has much higher name recognition. And that's the thing that DeSantis has to be really nervous about with Vivek is even though he has relatively still low name ID. Like there are a lot of Republicans who are just going to be getting introduced to him tonight at the debate. That means that Vivek has a lot of

room where he could potentially grow. Whereas Ron DeSantis is known by the Republican base at this point and, you know, broadly liked. It's not that they hate him, although his favorability rating has come down significantly since this campaign started. So it seems like Vivek potentially has a much higher ceiling and much more room to grow than Ron DeSantis does at this point. I'll just read you the piece of this article where they talk about how they word the is Vivek in here just to torpedo Ron DeSantis part. They say he pitched himself as a candidate who can make serious waves in the Republican primary when he was talking to some of his initial backers. When met with some skepticism, Ramaswamy argued his candidacy could also dissuade Florida Governor

Ron DeSantis from entering the race. That didn't happen, according to a source who was on the call. In the lead up to his announcement, Ramaswamy would tell several other conservative activists that he believed that if he ran, it could stop DeSantis from running or impact his viability as a candidate if he did enter the race, sources said. And look, I mean, in terms of his public posture, it's no secret he's been very defensive of Trump. You know, he'll go to the mat to defend Trump. He says he'll pardon him if he becomes president of the United States. And he's not at all reticent about attacking Ron DeSantis. When we interviewed him, he called DeSantis or seemed to call Ron DeSantis a super PAC puppet, which tends to be the language that he uses around him. So he hasn't pulled any punches there. I don't think anyone should be shocked

that Vivek Ramaswamy or any of these individuals who are running for president want to be famous. Like obviously all of them have sizable egos. Obviously all of them are comfortable or searching out some national spotlight. And so I don't think, you know, the fact that he was looking at a podcast or whatever, to me, none of that is particularly surprising. Who runs for office and who doesn't want to be famous? Let's all be famous. Of course.

Come on. And they're making, they're already doing all kinds of, yeah, Kisaru media appearances. He wrote a book, you know, to get himself into that lane, whatever. I interviewed the guy two years ago, way before, you know, whenever his first book came out. So it's one of those where,

that attack really annoys me because I'm like, what, DeSantis doesn't want to be famous? Come on. You know, it's like, let's all be honest. Let's put the next one up there on the screen. Vivek has been taking it on the chin recently because he gave an interview to The Atlantic

and he said, quote, I think it's legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents were on planes that hit the Twin Towers. Maybe the answer is zero. It probably is zero for all I know. He was interviewed actually last night on CNN's Caitlin Collins show, and they had a pretty vigorous debate about it. Oh, really?

Oh, yeah, yeah. It's actually worth watching, at least some of it. The reason why I just find this entire thing, everyone's like, I can't believe Vivek said that he distrusts the 9-11 commission. By the way, that was his first comment on the Alex Stein show over on Blaze TV. And I was like, this is so outrageous. And I'm like, well, hold on a second. Do you believe the entire 9-11 commission? Because I'm pretty sure we've done multiple segments here on this show about how the 9-11 commission at the very least dropped the ball and 100% did cover up the Saudi connections inside of the file. So I don't know who out there is standing for the 9-11 commission as the gold standard for everything that happened.

Well, then those people are nuts and they should do a little bit of research. Now, in terms of the specifics of what he said, in terms of the fact, I have not seen, I will just say kindly, outside of very small areas of the internet, of the actual allegation that there were, quote, federal agents on the plane. Now, if he changed that language to Saudi agents on the plane. Yes. Yeah. Now we're in business.

Let's have a conversation a little bit about this and whether the US government was aware of said Saudi agents and whether there was.S. government was aware of said Saudi agents and whether there was an entire, I mean, I recommend the book, always do. Lawrence writes a book about 9-11 and the lead up to all of that in terms of the drop ball, at the very least, bureaucratic incompetence about knowledge of these people inside of the country and the fact that these guys making approaches to these hijackers were almost 100% connected to the Saudi government. So I've been very annoyed by the discourse on this as of late, as if it's like some scandalized thing to question the actual 9-11 commission report on what

happened, especially considering we just had an interview here on this show about al-Bayoumi, the guy who made that contact with those hijackers and specifically his now revealed almost direct connection to the Saudi government at that time. Yeah. Well, I mean, the funny thing to me about his comments are it sort of feels like he knows they're OK, like sort of conspiracy thinking. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way, but it's kind of hot right now. You know, he knows that the 9-11 thing, he got some pushback before, this got him some media juice, whatever.

But he hasn't really like dug into the details of what the actual, you know, questions are about what might've been wrong in the 9-11 commission. So he's sort of like mixed up some of the January 6th allegations with like just general 9-11 conspiracy and comes out with this thing. It sort of feels like he feels like he should question 9-11, but he doesn't really know the details. So he's kind of throwing this against the wall.

That's my vibe from all of this. But Vivek is really having a moment right now. I mean, there's just no denying that. I think there's a lot of interest in him. I think he has room to grow. I suspect, based on our interactions and what I've seen of him in the media, I suspect he'll be well equipped to spar with whoever comes at him on the stage, whether it's Ron DeSantis or Chris Christie or anyone else. I expect there are going to be a lot of people who are Googling his name after the primary debate tonight who really hadn't dug into him as a candidate and didn't know that

he was an option that existed. Now, is that enough to supplant Trump as the number one? No, especially when you're not really willing to go at Trump whatsoever and you still have to have some sort of argument to move on from the guy that the Republican base overwhelmingly likes. Could I see him really, you know, supplanting Ron DeSantis as the number two and really positioning himself as the primary Trump alternative in case something happens that right now is unforeseen. Yeah, I could see that. I don't think that that is crazy at all. So anyway, that's some of what we'll be looking for at the debate.

At the same time, you know, this is another interesting story with regards to him. And I appreciate him coming out with this. I believe it, too, just for the record. OK, we'll get into the details. So put this up on the screen. Vivek is accusing Newsmax of basically telling him he needs to pay in order to get coverage on the network. Now, this is pretty wild because, listen, candidates aren't stupid. They probably all suspect that maybe they'll get more favorable coverage on any of these news networks or conservative outlets or whatever if they pay for advertising on those networks.

But according to Vivek, Chris Ruddy, who runs the network, just outright, like, bluntly told him if he wants better coverage, then he can pay for advertising. And part of why this is so believable is because you all may not even know there's this Republican businessman named Perry Johnson who is running for president. And apparently he pays for a lot of ads on Newsmax. And Newsmax has like gone all in for this guy in terms of his coverage. He's on their airwaves all the time. They're doing some like documentary series about his campaign. They have all of these like Perry Johnson puff pieces. Oh, and lo and behold, it just so happens that he's spending a lot of advertising dollars on the network. So that context, I think, makes the Ramaswamy claim here very believable. Oh, 150%. And in fact, as Ben Smith,

whose outlet Semaphore actually originally reported this, almost immediately after the allegation came out, there was a hit piece against Ramaswamy actually on the network. That's funny. Where they were like, oh, interesting. And they specifically were doing segments about Vivek Ramaswamy and when she said that he would cut aid to Israel. So I'll read directly what they say.

Quote, Vivek's comments put him in the same ballpark as those radical progressives who do not think that the state of Israel should exist. Those, by the way, are comments based on him saying that we shouldn't treat Israel special like everybody else. And by cutting aid, he means just normalizing it to everybody else. Apparently a radical idea.

Radical idea. Who is out there. And I will say, look, on that one in particular, I think that takes a hell of a lot of courage in a Republican debate. That's actual America first principle. If you're thinking about it ideologically consistently, something that I would support. I think it also is a direct signal to a lot of the donor class who's obsessed with Israel that he's like, no, I'm not going to be taking orders from you. I mean, this is one of those benefits of being independently wealthy. And it's a direct contrast with Ron DeSantis

because his constant attack against Ron is you are a donor-controlled actual machine. I mean, look, let's think about the main thing that DeSantis walked back. In the entire, all of his controversy, he didn't necessarily, he kind of walked away from Disney because he said, quote, I've moved on from that after he took a lot of heat for it. I think that was both ideological, but a lot of it was donor driven. But Ukraine to me was the big departure point. He said something marginally towards the restrictionist side of foreign policy whenever it came to his Ukraine comments, and then got flayed by the billionaires of the world,

and he walked it back. I mean, that was a real weak moment for him. Vivek, to his credit, has always been pretty consistent whenever it came to aid to Ukraine and about how this isn't in America's national interest, and pretty ideologically consistent on this issue. So if you look at that within that realm, the Israel comments now being the vector of attack on Newsmax, I just think it's ridiculous.

Also, not a surprise. Who's the only other candidate who criticized Vivek for just think it's ridiculous. Also, not a surprise. Who's the only other candidate who criticized Vivek for this? Nikki Haley. Shocker. Just an absolute shocker. Another donor creation. Donor creation and probably backed by more neocon billionaires than any other person in the race right now. So I think that it is almost 100% true. The Perry Johnson critique is so obvious considering how many ads a man has bought. The funniest thing is he claimed he'd qualify for the debate, and we've now learned he actually hasn't qualified for the debate. So he didn't even spend his money correctly, I guess.

Maybe he's got to keep doing it if he wants to rack it up. And to be clear, for the lawyers, Newsmax denies it. Chris Ruddy and them say it's absolutely not true. Everybody claims there's like a Chinese firewall and all that, but listen, it's business. When people are, when your revenue is based on advertising dollars, well, who pays you and who doesn't?

At the very least, it's probably going to impact you. And specifically Newsmax, their entire thing, they're not raking in the same level of cable carriage fees that Fox News and all those other media organizations are. They're probably even a hell of a lot more reliant on advertising dollars than any of their competitors. It only makes it even more believable in terms of this accusation. Well, and Ben Smith had previously profiled Chris Ruddy and said basically, like, this is the most shameless operator I have ever encountered in media. Which is saying something because Ben has encountered a lot of shameless operators during his time. So, you know, again, that's part of what makes it believable. And I just want to say about Newsmax, I mean,

they've positioned themselves for a right leaning or right wing audience as like the real truth tellers, you know, who are going to give it to you straight, et cetera. And I think you can just see in all of these allegations how sort of shameless they are and how all of their positioning, all of their so-called truth telling is really just about trying to make money off of, you know, a particular audience and serving them what they want to hear. To me, that's part of what really comes out here. And then the other piece is, again, it's not that the other networks probably don't do some of the same in a slightly more nuanced and deniable way, but the fact that it's just so blatant and brazen is really something. Going all in for Perry Johnson when he is buying so many ads on your network just makes it all pretty blatant and amazing.

The last thing I want to say about the debates, and again, we'll be doing a whole special on this, so we'll save some of our thoughts for there, but it's going to be interesting to me, Sagar, how much wokeness comes up because DeSantis really launched his campaign like Florida's where woke goes to die. And Vivek, what was the name it woke Inc

Was the name of his book that really catapulted him into like, you know conservative media, etc what started to get him the the Daily Wire deal potentially and A whole rash of polling has come out showing that yeah Republicans are like concerned about but this is far from their top issue It does not seem to have really landed even with the Republican base in terms of being an issue that falls people to the front. Vivek seems to be using that language less. DeSantis seems to be using that language less. So I'm interested to see how much that comes up on the debate stage and how much they've sort of internalized like, eh, this might not really be the thing in the Republican primary. I'm curious to see. Yeah, like I said, we'll save our thoughts for the special. Again,

you can sign up if you want to take a look at that. It's gonna be fun. It's gonna be all over our public channels tomorrow. Let's go to real estate. This is a really interesting look, one that we've, of course, been trying to keep an eye on. We referenced yesterday a whole segment about the economy and how a potential crash could come. But also, you can't underestimate the greedy heathens on Wall Street. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. Currently, Wall Street, while simultaneously facing a debt bomb in terms of commercial real estate, is now raising billions of dollars in funds to target, quote, assets with slumping values. So really what they're doing is that entire new hedge funds are popping up to try and acquire, quote, office buildings, apartments, and other

troubled commercial real estate asset on the cheap at a fraction of the price that the investors paid just a few years ago. Why this is noteworthy is that many people who are on the bad side of the trade, even banks like Goldman Sachs, who are holding a lot of commercial real estate debt, are now trying to capitalize on the fact that the debt might go bust to try and buy it and squeeze as much value out of this as possible. What they're saying is they quote several investment bankers and managers in the real estate funds. And what they're talking about is that they're trying to target the most troubled real estate market that they've seen in decades. The thing is, is that the original bad real estate crash happened in the housing sector in the personal realm.

This one being entirely commercial, they're now looking at it for vultures. One of the reasons why everyone should care about this is, note, I didn't just talk about office buildings. You know, boo-hoo in some cases for office buildings. Although, you know, there's some relative like mom and pop-ish type people who do run those. It's really office buildings. Although there's some relative mom and pop-ish type people who do run those. It's really apartment buildings. If a lot of these apartment buildings continue to get scooped up by these big hedge funds, they're going to try and squeeze even more of the value out of that as possible. It means they're going to lower services. They're going to jack up rents. They're

going to continue to make sure they use zoning regulation and all that to make sure that their premium remains high. So we should not be cheering distressed assets being purchased by a bunch of Wall Street funds and billionaires. Just because some people on Wall Street will lose some money on one side of the trade, other people are looking at this as a major, major opportunity to come in and buy. Yeah, no, that's a really good point. And it's something we've covered on this show. When permanent capital ends up being your landlord, oftentimes the results are completely disastrous. Many of these companies use algorithms to jack up rents the absolute maximum amount that they possibly can. So they're running software programs. And what they found

is that it's worth it to actually price people out of some of their apartments in order to extract the most rent out of the tenants that they do have that are able to afford it. So that's one piece of it is jacking up rents to astronomical rates. And when you have the same permanent capital institutions owning many of the apartment buildings in one town, then they basically get control over the market and they have market power to set what the going rate of rent is to start with. So that's number one. Number two, there's all kinds of reporting also about how they look to cut costs, of course, in every single way possible.

So if you've got a problem, if you've got mold growing, if you've got a plumbing issue, if you've got peeling paint, whatever it is, very unlikely that they're going to hop to and take care of the issue or do it in any sort of a really effective and sustainable way. So that's another piece of this. And then bigger picture in terms of the economy, we've been covering this commercial real estate potential debt bomb for a few months now. And the trend up to this point has been that the people who own these buildings have been holding out in terms of selling, hoping that things turn, hoping maybe interest rates come down and they can refinance, hoping that something will change so that they don't have to sell at what are rock bottom prices. And the early indications from this report is that

that phase seems to be ending. And now the phase of people being forced to sell at extremely low valuations is here. So that marks a real turning point in the market. They gave an example. An owner of a downtown San Francisco office tower unloaded the property for $41 million to a large developer, Presidio Bay. The seller, Clarion Partners, had purchased the property for $107 million in 2014. So back in 2014, this thing at market value is $107 million. They just sold it for 41. I mean, that just getting, granted, San Francisco is one of the hardest hit markets in the entire country in terms of vacancy rates, et cetera. But when you look at those kind of valuation crashes, it's a scary scenario in terms of what some of the downstream effects of that

could potentially be. Yeah, I agree. And, you know, it's if you put it together with some other things, there could be a potential benefit here as long as some of this gets converted to housing. I did want to give a rare shout out, I think, to Mayor Eric Adams, but a new program, which I am definitely supportive of. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen in New York City. Adams has now unveiled a proposal to convert vacant offices to housing through a city action in called the City of Yes plan. So basically, the plan that Adams has laid out is that they're going to take multiple neighborhoods, mostly in the Midtown area that are the most empty. They're going to fast track regulatory approval and keep out some of the housing problems that have plagued New York City,

rent control, all these other things that have kept the housing stock particularly low and not growing over the last couple of years, and immediately convert issue permits for construction, reorganization, and turn these places into housing. $24 billion currently being appropriated for affordable housing as part of the program. But I do think that there are a couple of things that we have to at least shout out. From what I have read, one of the biggest issues in converting office space into housing comes down to window space, lighting, and the inner areas of these buildings would basically have to be converted to more communal type areas where you wouldn't actually be able to use the majority of some of this real estate as housing. It's really the outer rings.

So the construction cost of conversion is a lot higher than people think. It's not just you can't just plop an office building and plop a bunch of apartment buildings aside and be like, yeah, go live in a box with no light in it. I mean, I'm sure New York City would love to sell that to you. But I think legally, they're not really- I think plumbing is an issue too, because in an office building, you might have one or two bathrooms on the whole floor or whatever. There's a lot that goes into it. That said, it's an innovative plan and I like it. I like at least the thinking of like, hey, let's do it.

We got one of the most expensive housing markets in the entire country. And one of the reasons why I think it's important is Manhattan has two paths. They can either go down this and actually make it a place to live. And I know a lot of people who are young and live, they love it there. Even now, continue, my own sister lives there. The issue though is it's exorbitantly expensive and continues to be so. Rent increased there, it's like 30, 40%.

And the only other avenue that they had in order to raise the tax revenue was to basically make it even more of a playground for the rich and just make it the ultimate party destination for people who wanna stay out until 4 a.m. or whatever. That was the Bloomberg model. That was the Bloomberg model. Was to like out until 4 a.m. or whatever. That was the Bloomberg model. That was the Bloomberg model.

To, like, intentionally make Manhattan a luxury good. And it worked, and they made a lot of money. But then a lot of those people with money moved to Florida during the pandemic. So now what? It turns out that these people are very fickle. Getting roots and actually turning it into more of a place that you can live, that's one of the original conceptions of New York. It's, like, the original, like, thing that people who grew up there really feel attached to. So I did want to shout out this plan because

I think it's, I think it's a good idea. Yeah. I mean, I lived there for a number of years and I loved it. I mean, once I, it took me a while to get used to the, the, just cause I'm from the country and it was like a whole overwhelming experience. But once I did, I really did love the energy of living in Manhattan. Um, so, you know, to, you know, to have any sort of attempt to keep the vitality, restore some of the vitality, make it a place that young people or families potentially could live, I think that's really good. I do want to say I think there's a lot of limitations here because all they're doing is they're changing some of the zoning regulations. I'll read you the specifics. They say they're going to make it so that buildings that were built as recently as 1990

could be converted to housing. Right now, I don't know why, only buildings built between before 1977 or 1961 are eligible, depending on where they are in the city. So you can see there's like a tangle of zoning regulations that make this difficult. And the city would also allow buildings to convert to housing anywhere in the city if the zoning regulations already allow for residential. So they're making some zoning changes here, but I think it's a very difficult thing for any city to really accomplish on their own without state or federal assistance. There were a number of

efforts. Also, I want to be clear, this still has to be approved by the city council. So this isn't even a done deal yet. And housing issues are always incredibly sticky. So we'll see whether it actually even passes. There were several plans put forward at the New York state level, pushed by Governor Kathy Hochul, that failed, that would have provided some financial incentives for developers to make these sort of expensive, costly conversions from office space to residential. So those failed. So there's no money involved here. And as you're pointing out, Sagar, the conversions are very expensive.

So we'll see if the math ends up working out for this to actually shift the balance here whatsoever when you don't have state or federal money backing up an attempted transition. My guess is it's probably not really going to be anywhere close to sufficient to induce developers to do what you want them to do, but it's an experiment. I appreciate that they're trying and we'll keep an eye and see if it works. Let's try it. If it fails, so be it. But right now it's a crisis and it's not working. So let's continue down that and I'll continue to try to at least give credit to people who are trying something innovative and interesting. Let's go to the next one here on China.

This is something that I know a lot of you were interested in. And the ongoing lead up to the BRICS summit in South Africa is actually an area of great interest. BRICS, for people who don't recall, was a phrase that was coined on Wall Street in 2007. It referred to Brazil, India, China, and South Africa as the BRICS nations that were going to continue to grow. Now, there's a lot going on, sorry, Russia as well, in that one of the ones, there's a lot going on in terms of those countries. It hasn't necessarily worked out in the same way. But one thing that does kind of unite

all of those powers is that they are relatively independent of the West. They have pretty good economic growth outside of Russia, I guess. Well, it depends, I guess, in terms of this quarter. And those nations are embracing the label as an alternative to the Western economic system, while some of them want to maintain ties to the West. Anyway, let's go and put this up there on the screen. China is currently urging the BRICS to become an explicit geopolitical rival to the G7. And the reason why this is interesting is it actually has opened up all sorts of tensions, even within the BRICS system themselves. One of the current debates is whether the BRICS summit should invite multiple other

nations into BRICS. They want to invite places like Argentina, other countries that are developing. And what China wants to do is use the BRICS as an alternative to the G7 as an explicit counterweight and saying, no, these are the emerging nations of the world. We're kind of uniting together in a non-Western aligned system.

We reject your economic sanctions. We reject your dominance of the global economic system. We're building something alternatively. The reason why it's interesting is that the split inside of BRICS is South Africa and India both have very different postures. South Africa is like, no, we're not anti-Western at all. Makes sense because they actually have a lot of trade

with the West. Also India, they don't wanna be a Chinese vassal. They don't necessarily even want an alternative to the G7. They're one of the largest economies on earth. They continue to have budding and good relations with the West. Their main goal is to pursue an independent foreign policy and economics, both of China and of the Western system. China explicitly is anti-Western.

Yeah. Russia, of course, is also anti-Western. So it's really like China and Russia, but then you have South Africa and India. There's a lot of beef in there about India doesn't necessarily want this to be a new G7. So the reason why I think it's just interesting is we always have to keep our eye on the emerging alternative systems to what's happening here. We can all agree that declining influence of the West is happening. To what extent and degree, who knows? I mean, on the one hand, you could look at the sanctions on Russia as a failure. I personally do because they haven't

actually achieved their main goal, which is stopping Russia from attacking Ukraine. But you could also see it as, look, you still had the anvil. You could come down. You could cut off this country virtually overnight. That is a lot of power. You know, you hobbled their ability to conduct trade. But of course, they've still been able to trade with countries like China and Russia. And how the BRICS decides to conceive of itself and move forward, especially in the context of a no longer exploding economic growth, China is going to be one of the defining issues of what multipolarity looks like in the future. And is it going to be a block? Is it going to be individual states? I come down on the individual states given the level of strife that's happening inside, but I'm curious what you thought of this. That's interesting. Yeah. And a question mark too about whether Brazil wants to be more in that

antagonistic side or more on that, like we just want to have, build in some more resilience basically and have options other than the West. So they're planning on potentially inviting other countries to join this emerging group. And there's also a lot of tension and a lot of discussions about, okay, well, what would that criteria be? Who would we include? What would the pathway to membership be? So a lot of big questions here. One of the pieces that I found really interesting as well is there's a lot of talk globally about de-dollarization, right, trying to move away from the U.S. currency as the world's reserve currency. They say that a common currency not on the agenda here, but they're going to have a broader push

towards de-dollarization. They could focus on seeking an agreement that BRICS members should increasingly settle trade between each other in their local currencies, officials familiar with discussions said. Right now, basically, dollars and T-bills are used to settle trade differences between countries all around the world. So what they're trying to move towards is we're not going to rely on that. Instead, we're going to use our own local currencies. And even without moving towards some sort of common currency, that in and of itself is really quite significant. So, look, to me, this is just the budding realization of a multipolar world that in many ways is already here. Even if China continues to struggle economically, their growth significantly reduced, even if they continue to struggle with this, you know, these debt loads that they have in terms of their real estate and in terms of infrastructure, even if it really does continue down this path.

When you combine this block together, this is a lot of economic might. This is a massive amount of GDP. And it is somewhat of a counterweight to the U.S. and somewhat of an alternative for people who don't want to have to effectively kowtow to whatever the U.S. wants. Yeah. And let's put this up there on the screen. This is a fantastic feature piece over at The Wall Street Journal. I encourage everybody's interest to go read it. It's called China's 40-Year Boom is Over, What Comes Next? And it's

basically a lot of speculation as to 40 years of booming economic growth has now definitively come to an end. The current IMF trajectory puts China's growth at below 4% in the coming years, quote, less than half of its tally for most of the past four decades. Current trends show that growth has slowed down from 3%, from 5% just in 2019, and will fall to just 2% in 2030, making it a fully developed economy. What does that actually look like? And what are people going to do? The thing is, I've said this before, one of the explicit deals the CCP made was, yeah, you're going to be surveilled wherever you go, and we're going to make you rich.

We're going to make you from poor to middle class. In many cases, upper middle class, and for the rich, you're going to go from marginal rich to some of the world's greatest billionaires and richest people on planet Earth. That was a great deal for a lot of people. What does it look like now? With the middle class, in particular in China, really chafing at some of the housing crisis going on, at the real estate booms and busts and kind of the wild economic stuff that's been wrought post COVID, it's an open question of what does the new social contract look like inside of China?

And that social contract also comes down to what does their foreign policy look like? Much of China's foreign policy over the last 40 years has been one entirely of economics. They basically economically took over the US and destroyed the industrial middle class by buying off our politicians and by being smart, by subsidizing their own industry. The trick only works once. They used it in Africa and elsewhere. they've got the debt. But really what I think it points to is the thesis that as economic growth and all that starts to slow down, and as the economic power that you've been able to wield just goes down, well, what do you turn to? You turn towards your hard assets and you turn towards your military.

So this is the thing about multipolarity is that you can actually see more conflict and all that in the system whenever states begin to decline in overall influence than whenever they're increasing with relative peace over the last 25 years or so. So the question though is, look, they could go the other way and they'd be like, we're all making a lot of money. Everyone here is becoming rich.

We could become like Japan. We'll slow down, but Japan is a first world nation. Yeah, they've got demographic problems. They've got all this. But last time I checked, it's one of the cleanest and nicest places literally on earth, according to everybody I know who's ever been there. They have a lot of different choices about which way that they want to go. Yeah. The problem is that Japan reached a level of per capita income before their big slowdown that China is nowhere close to it I mean if you look per capita China still hasn't even reached like middle income status

Even though you know They've done a tremendous amount to lift their own people out of poverty the much of the world growth and improvement and living standards is Located just in the nation of China, but they aren't at that level that Japan was at when their slowdown began So that's part of what makes this very difficult. I mean, I said this before, but just as a reminder, the way that this worked out with Chinese growth is, first they really build out their industrial manufacturing capacity,

basically took that as far as they could. Then they built out all of this infrastructure. And there are some anecdotes in here in the Wall Street Journal piece that are pretty wild. They just built a COVID-19 quarantine facility in one province that's nearly the size of three football fields, despite China having already ended its zero COVID policy months ago, long after the world has moved on from the pandemic and other localities are doing the same, about one fifth of apartments. So after infrastructure

was like overbuilt, then they moved on to, all right, we'll build out housing like crazy. About a fifth of apartments in urban China, 130 million units or so are unoccupied. So, you know, massively built out real estate created this huge debt bubble that Xi has really been trying to deflate, allowing Evergrande to effectively go bust, Country Garden also having issues, you know, the shadow banks having issues now as well. So that has sort of reached its end. And this is, like I said, it's very intentional. Go ahead and put the Bloomberg piece up on the screen. Because what they point to here is that she, unlike Biden, is trying to run the economy

here very hot, you know, with the infrastructure deal with the Inflation Reduction Act, trying to inject money, continuing to inject money into the economy, having some sort of budding industrial policy. Xi Jinping is letting China's economy flail. And the bet is here that they can engineer some sort of a somewhat soft landing in terms of the apartment real estate residential bubble. And they are investing a lot in Effectively renewable energy. I mean making a big bet on electric vehicles big bet on solar and wind power Big bet on the batteries that are critical to all of this I mean, they are really pushing forward to make that the new sector

But the question is is enough Is that enough to really provide jobs and middle class for all of the people who are getting college degrees and who are aspiring to be part of that middle class in a country with such a large population? The answer is probably no. What a lot of Western economists have been sort of urging the Chinese government, the direction to go in is to, you know, create a more consumer driven economy like we have here. So basically Chinese citizens tend to save a lot more than we do here. So it's like find ways to induce them to buy a bunch of consumer goods and crap and go into debt the way that we have here. And they're resistant to that idea, I think,

for a lot of good reasons. But it creates a bit of a conundrum in terms of how they'll be able to continue to build on a middle class, how they'll be able to maintain any sort of social, the social contract that they've had, and whether or not they're going to be able to continue even, you know, modest growth, let alone the really rapid growth that they have gotten used to over the past number of years. Yeah, there's a lot. I mean, anyway, it's going to be one of the most defining questions of how this plays out, what Xi Jinping decides to do. On the one hand, we put this up there on the screen from Bloomberg. What Bloomberg really showed is that Xi Jinping, as you were talking about, they've decided to run it cold.

They want to stop some of the apartment buildings from basically running their economy. Real estate is too overly penetrated whenever it comes to their overall GDP growth. And they're making a conscious decision and trying to do a full-blown, almost planned model of slowing things down and moving things into the future. So they're not freaking out as of yet. but as Peter Zion has talked about, they have a lot of structural problems behind them. Their demographic problem is worse than Japan right now in terms of the mismatch. Now they're decelerating dramatically in terms of growth. Can they keep a hold on the population?

And then what do they do abroad? How do they unite, keep the population united? These are big, big questions historically of which is going to have massive consequence for all of us. Absolutely. This is another one that could have massive consequences for all of us. New research into the impact of screen time on really young children, really on babies. Let's put this up on the screen. It's a new study, just came out. The headline here, screen time at age one year and communication and problem solving developmental delay

at two and four years. So they found that the more screen time that young babies, one years old, have, the more developmental delays that they experience from ages two to four years in communication and problem solving. So this is really significant. It backs up a number of other studies that have shown similar results in terms of longer screen time leading to some developmental delays. But one thing that I thought was interesting here, Sagar, is that they actually tried to separate out not all screen time is the same. And they found

that if you put your kids in front of things that are more educational, it really reduces the negative impact and in fact can actually improve some communication and problem solving and particular language skills in that critical age of two to four years. So I appreciated that they put that part in there because they sort of acknowledged like in the modern world, you are fighting a losing battle if you're trying to keep your kids away from screens. Like as a parent, I can tell you it is damn near impossible. So if you can focus on what's the quality of the content that my kids are engaging with, that my very young children in particular are engaging with, at least you have a fighting chance and can be armed with

some knowledge that's actually useful instead of just being like, I don't know what to do. I give up. This is impossible. That was my question though. What counts as educational? I know that there are like games and different iPad things and stuff that you can do, but also it seems very difficult just anecdotally watching my friends who do have kids, kids have, you know, their grubby little hands are always over your phone and they're always, it's like, if you don't watch them like a hawk, next thing you know, they're on TikTok. Like it's like every single time. And then the level of just being around young kids, trying to circumvent the parents, be like, hey, can I have your phone?

I'm like, why? And it's like, oh, they want to go on Instagram. And, you know, I'm like, okay, sure, whatever. I'll just give them the phone. Next thing you know, they've been on Instagram for the last, like, 35 minutes or on YouTube without parental locks. It does seem like this option takes a tremendous amount of just watching. You're like, you have to watch and be like, what are you doing? How can you curate this? And they're smart. They always are like

working around the system and their controls and what they're allowed to do and what they're not allowed to do. I know somebody who actually, I think they have a four-year-old and their kid has never used a phone or an iPad. And what's interesting is, and they are very concerted. So they, they like have a lot of books and toys. It's always a big thing if you have a babysitter because they're like, no phone, no iPad. It's like, this is how we do our things. But even though the kid has never used the phone, when they see their parents on phones, they always reach for it, even though they've never experienced it. Well, that's it.

That is crazy to me because I'm like, wow, they don't even know what's on the phone. They just know it's interesting. Yes. And they can see that the way the parents use their phones right there and they know it's an object of interest and that Kind of freaked me out because I'm like wow like they have a deep intuition that this is like the greatest Entertainment device ever made well I mean what kids are their little sponges and they're trying to figure out how to be in the world and what to do and How to operate and so when they see us really engaged in this or really engaged in this

or whatever, that's what they do. They, they mimic their parents and they mimic what's around them to try to figure out, you know, how to be in the world. And so, yeah, of course, when, and even if you and your household are like, I'm not going to be on my phone when I'm around my children, which good luck, um, you know, when you're out in the world, guess what? They're going to see every other adult and teenager and whatever out on their phone So that's why I feel like it is fighting a losing battle. There's also a part of me that You know, there's a balance between Limiting the screen time

trying to improve the quality of the screen time that they are inevitably going to get and, you know, doing the best that you can. But there's also, this is the world that we live in and they are going to need to navigate these devices. They are going to need to be digital natives in order to effectively operate in the world that we live in too. So that is a part of it as well. But, you know, I have three kids. One of them, my son, is the one who is, I mean, he is a junkie. Like, I really have to, he's the one. The two girls, I don't actually have an issue with. Ida, the youngest, she will want to watch. She really loves these, like, Ninja Kids videos because she's very into gymnastics. So she'll watch them for a while.

And then she's done. And then she wants to actually go out in the world and do her own, like, cartwheels and flips and whatever. My son, though, he will stay on there endlessly. And he has always been this way. Now, I will say when he was young, he was actually obsessed with these like letter and word apps. That was what he spent the bulk of his time on. And I do think because of that, he was like an early reader. And, you know, he was early to some of those skills that have really helped him in terms of his academics. So it wasn't all bad and all downside. But to your point, Sagar, you know, he likes chess.

So we'll watch these chess videos, which I'm fine with. But then the next thing I know, it's like, you know, the bottom of the barrel type of YouTube content. And it just devolves very quickly. And even if you're watching chess videos, it's relatively educational. Like, OK, watch them for an hour. Maybe that's fine. But he would watch them endlessly. So it's just a constant battle.

I appreciate that there's more research being done because I do think this is one of the central issues and central struggles of our time. It's like, what is this doing to kids' brains? What are some reasonable, like sustainable interventions that parents can deploy, tools parents can use, what sort of regulation needs to be put in place

because as you get older, we also see more and more research that, you know, anxiety in teenagers and suicide in teenagers and all of these horrible mental health outcomes really spiked around the time that smartphones became widespread and social media became such a central part of our lives and started to be really gamified with algorithms and like really pitched at keeping you sort of emotionally engaged and emotionally overwrought all

the time so to me this is one of the central issues that no one has great answers for and everybody's still struggling yeah and I think you know for people who are asking questions it's a high quality study it's several thousand children that they tracked. In terms of the developmental, the actual benchmarks and all the things, it seemed quite reasonable, what they were measuring. I think we probably do need a hell of a lot more research. It's also, it's one of those difficult, as you said, keeping it completely off is hard

also, but you have to have sustainable intervention. The people I feel for are people who are in a situation where clearly their children are actoring out and they're in public. So playing is the most classic example. What's the easiest thing to do? You shove an iPad in a kid's hand, but it's like five, six hours. Like, well, it's not necessarily the best thing. Now we're breaking routines and there's a lot of stuff going on. You're at dinner, you're in a restaurant. And I feel for a lot of these parents. I think it's probably one, it's incredibly difficult to navigate this. So yeah, I mean, thinking and looking at it anecdotally, this is one of the big questions for young parents. They all,

they don't know what to do and they're dealing with infants here. You know, they just, they really have no idea how should the phone, should we check the phones in front of our kids? How do we, you know, handle even in the car, even the car has screens. I've had some kids in my car, they're always playing around with these screens, man. Immediately. They're like, they know exactly what to do and they're going towards it. It's kind of stunning actually to watch just how quickly they can pick up on it and how they've watched videos on YouTube about how to navigate screens. Well, I've noticed with my kids, if they have too much screen time, so like we have rules in the house about there no screen time in the morning because if they have to screen time, like to start their day, they are like little junkies, like the reward system in the brain that they're getting from these videos or

games or whatever they're doing. It really is like the same biological response as if they were having some sort of mild drug in the morning and it makes them, their behavior deteriorates if they have too much screen time. I noticed really, really clearly. So, you know, even anecdotally, just day to day, you can tell it is having an impact on them. So, you know, we just try to put some reasonable limits in and do the best we can, because I do think in a lot of ways that it's like a losing uphill battle and it just helps to be armed with as much information as we possibly can be as we navigate this landscape.

Absolutely. Well said. All right, Mr. Beast. The block we've all been waiting for. This is the funniest thing. Our producers brought it to our attention. Mr. Beast, as he does, he produces, you know, videos, often ostentatious, big, you know, entertaining videos. He recently dropped a video where every country on Earth is competing for the gold in a Mr. Beast Olympics. Here's a little bit of a tease that he put out. I flew down one person from every country on earth and they have to compete in the most extreme version of the Olympics ever created. Last country standing wins this $215,000 gold medal. Go, go, go, go, go! Which country takes home the gold?

Now, the funny thing is, is that I doubt Mr. Beast and his team realized the geopolitical controversy they were weighing into whenever they decided to not only hold the Olympics, but also produce some maps. So one user actually did a great job of digging into this. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. This video has weighted into every geopolitical conflict all at once.

So this is the definitive take, I think, here. Mr. Beast, the most watched YouTuber. I think he's finally settled several disputes for us. Who's a country and who's not? So let's begin to go through. Let's put this up there on the screen. He does recognize Russia's annexation of Crimea, but does not recognize the four separatist republics that Putin recently adopted into Russia. Let's go to the next one. So that's one. He does recognize Palestine, but only in the West Bank as its country. Okay,

compromising. He's already brought us world peace. Let's go to the next one. He does not recognize Taiwan. Now you would think, oh my gosh, is Mr. Beast kowtowing to China? What exactly is going on here? It's pretty clear here.

He's not just sucking up to one particular ideology as we can see from the next one. Let's put this up there. He does recognize the Taliban government. Okay, let's move on now to my personal favorite. Mr. Beast does recognize the state of Georgia, the sovereign state of Georgia. However, he uses the flag of the U.S. state of Georgia by said country of Georgia. Interesting. And that pretty much brings us to an end. So, Crystal, what's your take here? I think Mr. Beast has just brought us world peace.

He's solved every major geopolitical conflict unwittingly and most likely due to one of his researchers. You probably didn't even think about this. Yeah, so I love it. I mean, except Hong Kong, but not Taiwan. Except Hong Kong, not Taiwan. You know what I was thinking about, though? Maybe he's a British supremacist. You know what I was thinking about, though?

In a sense, it was genius because Because it's clearly non-ideological. It's just random. It's just completely random. And if it was anything other than random, it would have actually been controversial. Yes, that's right. But since it's just like Hong Kong, sure. Taiwan, no. Palestine, okay.

But only in the West Bank. Only in the West Bank. Crimea, sure. You know, Luhansk, no. Just because it's like totally non-ideological and random, it actually is the perfect plan. Because if you did it in some sort of a concerted fashion, actually weighing these individual claims

and having some sort of a coherent foreign policy view, worldview that was applied to this, then it would be controversial. But since he didn't do that, it ends up just being funny. That's right. I also, I was looking for some controversy around the line of control on Pakistan and on India. Oh, that's a hot one. Could you tell? Could you discern? I couldn't tell. The maps are a little hard. The maps aren't, the screenshots and all those that we gathered weren't the best. I'm trying to think if there were any other shout outs. Oh yeah, here's one. Recognizing Western Sahara, but also recognizes

Morocco's claims on the de facto border, which is one that cuts against what both of those two want. So geography nerds got a lot they could say out of this, but I actually thought it was, it was almost like sweet in terms of its naivete and interest where, you know, it's the biggest, the biggest YouTuber in the world, but also clearly, you know, he's doing this for fun. He's doing it for a lark. And I actually appreciate that no major controversy has come of this. Like, remember when Vietnam banned the Barbie movie over its map?

Because they were like, oh, the Barbie movie's map didn't show the line of control, whatever, the nine dash line for the South China Sea. I'm like, it's a freaking cartoon map. Yeah. And it's one of those where, look, I'm the first guy. If they actually did kowtow to China

and all that, I would call it out. 100%. I've done a lot of stuff here. But it is so clear to me. It's like from Greta Gerwig and all this. They didn't think about it for a single second.

If you see this map, it was hilarious to me because this actually was a little bit of a controversy on the right. They were like, oh, what are they doing? I was ready. If you look at the map, it's totally like a kid drawing.

You can't even tell. There's things that don't exist and new things that do exist. I mean, it's just like completely absurd to imagine that this reflected anything approaching reality or was taking some sort of geopolitical stand. That was ridiculous. So, yeah, I think part of why this didn't end up being any sort of like a controversy thing is because it is so random because it is so just like scattershot. And in a lot of ways, because it's so sloppy, like taking the country of Georgia and giving it the

state of Georgia is probably just some producer. It was like tasked with Wikipedia or whatever, and trying to come up with Georgia flag. I know exactly what happened. I feel bad for them. Probably didn't even realize Georgia was a real country. Because it would be impossible. It would actually be impossible to go through this exercise and make everyone happy. A hundred percent. Like to, you know, really intentionally try to draw out what you think is right and just and accurate. Like there is no way you can make everybody happy. So just making it random was the best approach. It's funny because I'm thinking

about the real Olympics. Remember they have all those like unflagged countries where people do play and people march in the parade. Yeah. The garage is a real country. It's like,

it's always a massive kind of, Taiwan is always a big one. Palestine is always a big one. Mm-hmm. You know, in the past, like Swaziland and places like that. So anyway,

yeah, I think it's hilarious and I'm actually glad there was no deranged cycle of discourse around this. Let Mr. Beast be Mr. Beast. Yes. Let them just play around. Did you watch the actual video?

I haven't watched the full thing yet. I watched it. It's fun. I mean, it's exactly what you need to find. All the videos are great. My personal favorite was the one on, so I'm a travel junkie. I loved the plane video.

The one where he's like, here's what a thousand, a thousand dollar flight up to like a hundred thousand dollar flight. Oh, that is kind of cool. That plane video. The one where he's like, here's a $1,000 flight up to like a $100,000 flight. Oh, that is kind of cool. That was one of my favorite videos that he's ever done. Yeah. Well, I mean, this goes well with the block we just did on screen time. There you go.

Kids love this place. They love it. So my son is not a huge Mr. Beast fan. He'll watch the content, but he's not obsessed with it. But some of his friends are like the biggest Mr. Beast stans on the planet. If I said a word against Mr. Beast, they would be coming for me. Every kid I've ever met under 12 is like, I love Mr. Beast. They're always like, do you have Feastables?

I'm like, how do you even know about this? This is crazy. Yeah, true. Anyway, good job, Mr. Beast. Thank you for solving all the world's problems. That's right. We've got a great guest standing by, Saurabh Amari. Let's get to it.

Excited to be joined this morning by Saurabh Amari. He is founder and editor of Compact Magazine. He's also a contributing editor to the American Conservative, and most importantly for this morning, author of a new book called Tyranny, Inc. It's all about corporate power. The subhead here is how private power crushed American liberty and what to do about it.

Great to have you, Saurabh. Welcome. Good to see you. Good to see you both. Thanks for having me. Yeah, of course. So just tell us a little bit of why you decided to write this book at this moment and what the central thesis is. Sure. This book was actually conceived on election night 2020. It wasn't clear what the outcome was, but one thing was clear, and that was that President Trump and the Trumpian GOP had not only consolidated the working class gains that it had made among white working class people, but had begun to make inroads among working class people of

color. And so what I proposed to do at that time was to write a kind of manifesto for a new working class conservatism. But when I actually got down to writing the book, I realized that that would be putting the cart before the horse, because a lot of the issues that stand in the way of working class flourishing in this country have to do with what happens in the private economy, whereas a lot of the kind of populist energy since 2016 had gone toward, not entirely, but a lot of it toward kind of cultural populism. And so we did not have a working class agenda for the Republican Party, even though it did claim a working class base. So what this book does is to show those obstacles. And many of them, I have to say, have been put up by Republicans, by center-right lawmakers, Supreme Court justices, including ones appointed by President Trump, sadly,

despite his appeal to organize labor in 2015 and 16. So the core thesis of the book is that, contrary to what many American conservatives have come to believe over the past two generations, since the Reagan era, government is not the only source of coercion in our lives. And in fact, we are surrounded by coercion, meted out by the private sector in our lives as workers and consumers. And most of the book is just a kind of reportorial tour of what that looks like from the point of view of different ordinary Americans in different

walks of life. So I won't go into all of them, but typically, for example, the way in which scheduling and wage precarity sort of tightly constrain the lives of people in the lower ends of the labor market, especially retail and restaurant workers, so that they can't do elder care, they can't do childcare, there's no sense of certainty or regularity about their schedules, all the way to the abuse of commercial arbitration, these privatized corporate courts in the workplace

where this practice was never meant by Congress to enter the realm of the workplace where there's vast disparities in bargaining power between workers and employers. And then finally, the ravages mainly of private equity and hedge funds, the way in which they erode the real economy where we produce stuff, useful stuff, and basically sap companies out of all their energy and capital and into the asset ledgers of a relatively few financiers. I think it's really courageous, Kaurab. There's a lot of people who are affiliated with the right or whatever, who don't want to be honest about some of the major barriers to that. Why do you think that things got to this place where Trump was both a vehicle for a lot of working class energy in 2016, but also effectively allowed himself to

be co-opted by a lot of people around him? But then also what we've seen since has been a willingness to engage in cultural wars that definitely align with some working class people and with voters, but never really giving an inch on the economic front. How did we get here? I guess that's part of what you get into the book. Well, I have to introduce one caveat. On the question of free trade, Trump actually delivered, decoupling from China has now become a bipartisan conventional wisdom, which wasn't the case when he ran. Of course, you know, the typical organs of the right and the left even attacked him for that. That said, on every other front, you're right. You know, his Department

of Labor was basically stuffed with union busters. So why is that? One is just inertia of a party. Parties don't easily shift their agenda, even as their voting base might shift. Second one is the lack of Republican personnel who are willing to or even know the language of dealing with corporate power. You know, all of that, all of that reform energy and expertise on this front is actually on the center left. It's with people like Senator Warren and Senator Sanders, Sherrod Brown, Chris Murphy. You know, like the Republican doesn't have the personnel. But the biggest influence is not even like the sociopathic few billionaires.

And this is the hardest one to talk about, honestly, is the fact that the power base of the Republican Party, which is not the same as its voting base, but the power base of the party is what you would call small and regional capital. It's like the prior distributor, the chain of car dealerships in a particular region. And that figure is the most kind of resistant to reform. He might be himself in some ways a victim of the vicissitudes of the market system. He's resentful at larger capital, which is able to muster a governmental power and so forth. But his only answer is always tearing down the few constraints that remain to try to control the market system and make it a little fair. It's like, just leave me

alone. The self-made man at the rubber chicken dinner is a powerful figure in the Republican Party. Just a quick point, what might fix that is if the Republicans make enough good faith gestures toward organized labor so that the workers who are now voting for the Republican Party find an organized voice within the Republican coalition, rather than being basically people who vote one way, but a different get a different set of results. Yeah. For the reasons that you laid out, I'm just very skeptical that that's even possible. And, you know, I'll tell you, I was I was saying to you before we started the segment, like I was expecting to hate at least some portion of this book, but I really didn't. I mean, the book is basically like social democracy. I'm a social Democrat. This could have been a lot of this could have been written by like a Bernie Sanders.

And the typical, in my opinion, trick that people on the right do, I'm thinking of like Vivek Ramaswamy, I'm thinking of Ron DeSantis, is they'll use a lot of the language of a critique of corporate power. But then what it comes down to is like, and that's why we need to fire this one DEI consultant, or that's why we need to fight back against wokeness. I mean, I think the whole anti-woke discourse in a lot of ways has been very cleverly used to sort of posture like you have an anti-corporate critique, but not actually go after corporations in any sort of way that would like meaningfully curb their power. The classic example that we've talked about here a number of times is Marco Rubio penned this op-ed that was like, I'm in support of the Amazon workers trying to unionize in Bessemer in just this one limited example, not because I

have a critique of corporate power, but because I don't like the diversity initiatives of Amazon HR. So as one example of this. So how do you get out of that? And also, you know, do you have a critique of that sort of use of anti-corporate power language, but in ways that, you know, don't actually threaten any of the system as it exists now. So one quick point about Senator Rubio, I think he's actually one of the better ones. You know, he's exploring what it means to be pro-labor on the right. And so the rhetoric isn't always the way the labor left wants to hear it, but no other person. Sorry, just to push back. I don't really care about whether the rhetoric is the way the labor left wants to hear it, but no other person. Sorry, just to push back. I don't really care about whether the rhetoric is the way I want to hear it,

but like, I don't see him supporting the pro-act, you know, I don't see him walking the walk in terms of actually backing labor either. I would push all three of the sort of most committed economic politic, economic populists on the right in the Senate, Rubio, Hawley, J.D. Vance, all of whom I admire, I would push them and have pushed them to support the PRO Act. I would say, again, Rubio, for example, has done serious work with the help of figures around Oren Katz about the erosion of the real economy by finance. But setting that aside, I totally agree with you about the critique at large. You said you didn't find much to disagree with my book.

Likewise, I don't find much to disagree with you in what you just said. I've come to really despise this kind of fake populism, this weird class analysis in which precarious adjunct professors are the elite and Elon Musk is actually the subaltern proletarian hero. who may not share cultural views, but insofar as she wants like a decent wage and more workplace security and health security, you know, if you're pro-worker, you have to hear that out and listen to that and not just sort of image the typical worker as only like a self-employed roofer or at best a kind of burly teamster.

That's part of the working class. But the reality is the working class in the United States also includes, you know, Filipina ladies who work in hospitality. It includes precarious adjuncts and so on. So I hear you totally on that. And, you know, my favorite example is the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank is a symptom of this ongoing issue in American banking. I would argue going back to the Jacksonian era, where most developed countries have a few large banks that are almost regulated utilities, whereas the United States, since the Jacksonians, has had these small and regional banks, which can actually, in their

own weird way, can wreak havoc. So that's a complex and serious issue. What was the response of the right to that as a kind of populism? Oh, it was because it was a woke bank. I'm sorry, but the board of Silicon Valley Bank was dominated by white guys. What are you talking about? There was like one gay guy on there and they're like, oh, we found the wokeness. There we go. There's a kind of parallel version of this on what I call the lifestyle left, not to make too much of it, because there's plenty, like I said, plenty of good reforms on the left and center left.

But there is that kind of, corporations have also learned that if they sort of do the song and dance of- Oh, 100%. Of wokeness. So for example, at REI, the outdoor gear chain, there's been an ongoing immunization drive and infamously, their chief diversity officer did a podcast, which she began by saying, Hello, I'm so and so my pronouns are she and her. And oh, by the way,

I want to acknowledge that I'm coming to you from the traditional lands of the Ohlone people, please don't join a labor union. Right. Oh yeah, we covered that extensively here, Zoraf. Zoraf, I am curious though, and an uncomfortable question, so one that I think about all the time. What if a lot of the voters don't actually want this? What if the voters, what if the politicians are responding to the correct incentive, which is the voters want culture war? They actually like it. They really enjoy watching their politicians stick responding to the correct incentive, which is the voters want culture war?

They actually like it. They really enjoy watching their politicians stick it to the left. And in fact, specifically in a primary system, that's the thing that the people who really vote, they care about that, number one, and they care about it the most. I think there's a lot of polling that could argue otherwise. But voting results, you know, politicians, they're cynical people. They respond to incentives. Do you think I have it wrong? Do you think it's nuanced?

What do you think it is? I mean, I think cultural issues have their own inner integrity and not everything that's a cultural phenomenon can be reduced to class relations. I'm certainly a kind of vulgar Marxist. That said, the recent trends in Republican electoral politics, maybe Crystal can speak better about this when it comes to the Democrats, but on the Republican side, notice that the candidate who won in 2015 and 16 and sort of barreled his way past all these conventional Republicans was the one who said, I will protect your entitlements. He even contemplated a public option in health care in that debate with Ted Cruz, where he said, I'm not going to let people die on the streets, and questioned the party's free trade orthodoxies.

So to me, I mean, culturally, all those candidates up there were more or less just Republicans, even Trump pretending to be a cultural conservative in 2015-16, whether he was sincere or not. So all else being equal, the one that the base went for was the one who kind of hearkened back to the New Deal order and who tried in his own way to revive what I call the Eisenhower-Nixon tradition in the Republican Party, which made its peace with the New Deal, with entitlements, and even expanded the logic of the New Deal in different directions. Again, more recently, I have to say, I mean, if voters wanted anti-woke, Ron DeSantis should be doing a lot better in the Republican primaries. But he's not.

I mean, he ran on pure, I'm going to turn your populist grievances into cultural grievances. And it's disastrously bad as a gambit. I think that's really well put. How do you think about, though, the relationship between economics and culture? I mean, a lot of times, you know, it's kind of hard to draw a hard line of like, this is where the economic issue ends and this is where the cultural issue begins. But do you prioritize one over the other? Do you think culture is downstream by and large of, you know, class interests and material needs? How do you think about those things, Saurabh?

Okay, that's a complex question about which I've written a lot, and it's hard to summarize. But what I will say is you don't need to be a Marxist to recognize that how we structure our economy and our class structure has a bearing on how people feel they belong in the world and all their sort of cultural sensibilities and so forth. So you can turn back to Aristotle, who says that law and politics are architectonic with respect to everything else we do. They create everything else we do. They structure what we do. And when they, I mean, obviously in the classical tradition, and when you say law and politics, that meant economy as well. So I think there is a kind of dynamic relationship between the two. And what I found frustrating is a brand of social conservative lament that says, oh, people aren't getting married. Oh, family formation is collapsing. Oh, church attendance is down.

But never connects the sort of link between these phenomena, which I decry as well. I have my conservative sensibilities, and I think there's an ideal of human flourishing that I draw from the Christian faith I have and so on. But they never then connect that to our material conditions. Like, oh, if you're constantly harried because your firm does human resources scheduling using an algorithm to minimize the costs, their labor costs, but for you, life is a complete chaos as a result of that, you may not have time to spend with your kids. And your kids, in fact, studies show, University of California studies show that workers who are subjected to this kind of precarious scheduling, which is about a third of, at least a third of workers in the service industry, their children,

I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to explain this, their children have feelings of guilt, are more likely to act out in school. Why? Because mom and dad, or however the family formation may be, don't get to spend regular, systematic time. So there is this nexus, there is this sort of interplay of culture and material reality. And I think the conservative movement goes too far in the direction of everything is a matter of ideals. If we just tell people to get married and have children, they just will listen if we just say it the right way. Well, that hasn't worked. And I think I'd like to tip the direction of conservative thought a little bit more, or maybe a lot more in the direction of recognizing the centrality of economic imperatives.

So Saurabh, if you feel like a lot of the cultural outcomes that you would like to see in terms of family formations and human flourishing, if you feel like a lot of those cultural outcomes that you would like to see in terms of family formations and human flourishing. If you feel like a lot of those would be achieved by what is basically like Bernie Sanders style social democracy, why are you on the right? Well, two reasons. One is I think a lot of people on the left diagnose the material causes of our cultural crises, but then they end up ratifying the effects. So they say, oh, it's good that people are hyper individualistic now and the goal in life is ever greater self kind of maximization and realization

in the realm of family and so on. So I think for me, I get my picture of what the world should look like from my Catholic faith, from my kind of reading in the classical and Christian tradition in ways that are, I think, alien to people on the left. Yeah, I mean, that's the main reason. And I will say there are issues of fundamental conscience for me that make it very hard. And that has mainly with abortion and the liberty of the church or religious liberty, where I feel like if the left were willing to moderate just even a teeny bit, you can maybe begin to take steps in its direction. But as it is, I don't see that. And I think a lot of Americans don't see it either,

which supplies an opening to, you know, frankly, the kind of Ron DeSantis culturalist right. So then you would have to say then that that is your number one priority over the economics. It's more important to you to align. This is fine. I'm just trying to understand what your worldview is. It's more important to you to align with a party that agrees with you more on abortion than it is to align with, you know, an ideology that agrees with you more on social democracy, labor unions, and corporate power. I think the task is for people on both sides of the divide to recognize that we will continue to have cultural disagreements in this country about fundamental issues, but that those issues, insofar as they have common material roots, should be the subject of the kind of coalition

building that FDR did, right? I mean, large coalitional politics between urban Catholics, WASP, kind of downscale evangelical farmers, unions, and so on. Likewise, actually, the neoliberals built a coalition as well. It wasn't just a phenomenon of the left. In fact, famously, Margaret Thatcher, when she was asked, who was your greatest, or what was your greatest achievement? She said, Tony Blair. So if something is going to replace the neoliberal consensus, it has to be built in the middle. And what I'm trying to do is try to get my own side to see that. And I will say, like, there are lots of policy issues where I'm out there cheering the left. I'm almost doing like the clap emoji on Twitter, you know, like the Stop Wall Street Looting Act.

You know, I think there's been, honestly, left or right, which is, I should say, it's a Warren bill. There's been no greater, louder champion of that bill on either side of the aisle than myself. The PRO Act, you know, and more generally just reversing the way that American law has been used to depress union density in the private economy. I guess on all this stuff, we used to be able to do coalitional politics where we disagree on certain things, but we have common ground on other things. And I think those other things are quite fundamental and important.

So let's work together. I think it's a really, you're one of the most interesting people out there who's thinking about these things right now. I think the book is very important. We encourage everybody to go and buy it. We're gonna have a link down in the description. And we really thank you for your time, Saurabh.

Thank you. Yeah, great chatting with you. Thank you both. Good to see you, man. It's our pleasure. See you guys later dna test proves he is not the father now i'm taking the inheritance wait a minute john who's not the father well sam

luckily it's you're not the father week on the ok story time podcast so we'll find out soon this author writes my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. He's trying to give it to his irresponsible son, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. They could lose their family and millions of dollars? Yep. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children.

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