Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 8/9/23: Ohio Election Results, DeSantis Fires Campaign Manager, Biden Restores Pro-Union Rule, Americans Drain 401Ks, Montgomery Dock Brawl, And New Rules For Adult Film Sites

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss the Ohio election results, bettors favoring Vivek's chances over DeSantis, Biden restoring a major pro-union rule, Americans drain their savings, the Montgomery dock brawl, and adult film sites blocking access after new regulations.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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I'm Emily Drushinsky, joined by my co-host Ryan Grimm, who is once again giving us a little bit of a French dispatch. Ryan, it seems like you're enjoying the sun. I really am. It's pretty lovely over here. I recommend it to people. Well, in D.C., August is known as a very slow news month. That is increasingly not the case as the years go by, but especially not this year. We're going to start with the big news out of Ohio last night, where a referendum gives us some insight, first of all,

into how the issue of abortion is playing politically and to where the political fortunes of a major, major, major abortion amendment to the Constitution in the state of Ohio could stand going forward later this year. We're going to talk about a huge shakeup, very significant. Ron DeSantis has fired his campaign manager two months into his campaign. There's all kinds of stuff to talk about there. We're going to talk about Davis Bacon. I'm sure Ryan has all kinds of thoughts on that. We are going to talk about, we're going to do a little bit of an update on the economy and some really, I think, troubling numbers when it comes to personal debt and where that standing credit card debt and the

like, what that says about the future of the economy, the immediate future of the economy. We're going to dive into that Montgomery brawl on the riverfront down in Alabama. There's some stuff to break down there, and we'll have the video for you as well. And I'm going to talk about actually the political fortunes of Pornhub, which seem to be waning. Ryan has a big update for us, too, that'll be posted later because it's breaking news. But other than that, Ryan, anything to add here? Yeah, well, I mean, first of all, I'm looking forward to talking about the Battle of Montgomery. This is, watching those videos, it brought me back to the drunken mayhem of the kind of rock hall boat docking contest. If you've ever been to that on the Eastern Shore, you know how wild it can get.

Spending all day on the boat drinking can lead you to make some pretty bad decisions. And these, that group of white dudes made some decisions that managed to get the entire country united behind them. It's really glorious to see, you know, American unity, everybody agreeing that those guys got probably not everything that they deserve. We're going to talk about the legal repercussions for them as well. But as you guys remember from last week, we were talking about the biggest election that was going to happen over the next couple months was going to be in Ohio, you know where republicans had tried to use the sleepy august uh vacation time where everybody's out uh at the french riviera relaxing uh not back all of the people of ohio

and so they're not back in ohio uh to vote for uh to support abortion rights that was the thinking of republicans uh instead uh you had turnout like you j like i was gonna say like that you could never expect but we already saw it in kansas you know republicans went for the same thing in kansas thinking that in the summer they'd get a you know a sleepy off your election and their core supporters would be energized and come out and the Democrats and abortion rights supporters wouldn't. Instead, I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but the last I saw, it was something like you had fewer than two million people vote in the primary in 2022 that had U.S. senators, governors, you know, high level officials on the ballot. But this time you had almost double that.

Yeah, the turnout in 2022 was 7.9% statewide. They almost doubled that. It feels like maybe 80% increase over that. More than 2 million people pushing three, perhaps. Almost a million absentee votes and a resounding victory. And to be clear, it was not specifically on abortion rights. The question was, in November and going forward, should you need 60% to amend the Ohio Constitution?

There will be an abortion rights measure on the ballot in November that is polling at around 58% or 59%. And so this was understood to be a proxy for that coming referendum. And the latest numbers have it up about 57-43, you know, pretty landslide victory. You know, what did you make of the results last night? So this is sort of tentatively what we predicted last week. We said it's really hard to tell with some of these elections, especially a smaller referendum, because you actually never know where turnout's going to fall. When we're talking about elections with 7.9% turnout,

as was the case last year, you just don't know. The money was pretty evenly divided in this race, but it was overwhelmingly from out of state. Each group, so if you were, yes, yes was the conservative side, no was the liberal side. Yes was, I think it was like 14% versus 13% in Ohio, the contributions in total, according to some analyses, early analyses. And what's interesting about that, it was essentially the focus of both sides. Both sides were claiming that they were the bulwark against out ofof-state special interests that were trying to dramatically change Ohio. And actually, it was dueling out-of- stage special interests. And as we discussed last week, the conservatives in this case were in the

unusual position of wanting to change the Constitution instead of defending the status quo, as conservatives often do. They were actually trying to change the Constitution of the state of Ohio. And I'm not saying the motives were pure. I'm saying I think 60% is a reasonable threshold, more reasonable threshold than 50% to change a Constitution, although we probably disagree on that. But clearly, clearly the intention here was not about preserve or shoring up the Ohio constitution. Otherwise they could have had this vote any other time. It was very specifically tied to the abortion vote, which is also being, we have some video of this that we should run as we get into this here, but it was very specifically tied to the question of parents' rights. So it's

being broadened. And even the Washington Post has admitted sort of the language of the amendment that folks are voting on in November could be interpreted in a way that gets into what's taught in classrooms and what teachers are able to do and what doctors are able to do, et cetera. But that was another really interesting aspect of all of this. We can throw A1 up on the screen here. Yeah, so that's what Ryan said, 4357. Those are the latest numbers. Just a resounding, resounding victory for the no's. And then if we get to A1B, there's some more. Yeah, so this was Dave Wasserman, again, called it pretty early. People are always refreshing Dave Wasserman's Twitter feed on election nights. It didn't take long for this one to get called. I also want to

just highlight some of Dave Weigel's analysis. I'm looking at it here in front of me. Some states that, some counties where the referendum here actually was running way ahead of Biden. Some Trump counties where the referendum was successful. He's talking about Athens County, so this is the home to OU, as Dave points out, is a good example of how issue one went down. Biden won it 57-42. Last year, Tim Ryan won at 60-40 with most of the vote in. No one by 50 points, 75 to 25. And so echoes of Kansas are certainly playing in people's minds. In Ohio, a lot of this was

inspired by what happened in Michigan recently, and people saw that they passed with like 56%. So the Ohio folks said, let's get that threshold up to 60%. And before we get to how the debate over this played out, I'm curious what you think about what this means for 2024 and Sherrod Brown. Sherrod Brown, that kind of Democratic senator who is a holdover from when Democrats had real strength in the Rust Belt areas of the United States, and in particular, Ohio, he held on in 2018, which is a kind of a Democratic wave year. He's up again in 2024. And I've seen people speculating that, you know, if this portends anything, it's good for Sherrod Brown in the sense that it's getting people to

kind of, I guess, rethink their relationship with the Republican Party in Ohio, which has been utterly dominant for the last 10 plus years. But I'm curious if you think that it will translate. Well, the good news for Sherrod Brown is that there you know, there will still be, you know, incredible turnout in 2024 because of the abortion rights amendment that will be on the November ballot. So you'll have, just as Karl Rove put a ban on game ballot in 2004 on the Ohio ballot, Democrats will probably now benefit from having an abortion rights amendment. So their supporters are more likely to come out and then they'll likely vote for sure. Brown, how are Republicans talking about about Brown at this point on the on the list of people that they think they might be able to take out? Yeah, that's a really good point. I think that

is a big blow for the sort of Roe v. Ann analysis that you just added, because what we find time and again since Dobbs was decided by the court, is that it's not just that voters have a different opinion than people like me. Of course they do. It's not just that. It's that this is very, very animating. And so that's why the turnout numbers that you pointed to are essential. And that's why Republicans who were hoping to take down Sherrod Brown were just struck a blow last night, I think, as you're getting it here, because when you have an issue that it's not just that people agree with you, but it actually means they're going to be in a college town, as Weigel is pointing out, around Athens. When you have people that are flocking to the polls to the point where you're outrunning Biden by like 25 points

in the middle of August, that should tell you that you're going to have a real, real, real energy turnout problem. And again, especially in those college towns, if you're looking at states, Republicans in states like Wisconsin, certainly in states like Ohio, are increasingly worried about the concentration of liberal voters that is so, so heavy in those college towns that makes it difficult to take an otherwise red state and actually have a clean red state as they would see it. So that's a huge problem, I think, for any Republican efforts to tackle Sherrod Brown. The Susan B. Anthony list, which poured their pack, put a lot of money into supporting the

yes side, so the conservative side here. Their statement last night said, it's a sad day for Ohio and a warning for pro-life states across the nation. Millions of dollars in liberal dark money flooded Ohio to ensure they have a path to buy their extreme policies in a pro-life state. Tragically, some sat on the sideline while outsider liberal groups poured millions into Ohio. And they go on here and talk about parental rights and going on and on. The silence of the establishment and business community in Ohio left a vacuum too large to overcome. That's a really interesting point. They're blaming conservatives for sitting on the sideline of the issue.

And Ryan, to the point you just made about Sherrod Brown, this is a huge, huge issue for anti-abortion conservatives, again, like myself, who say, who look at this and sort of know that politically, this is not the most palatable, energizing, appealing position. And that's why you have business leaders sitting out. But at the same time, groups like Susan B. Anthony say, listen, if we just were able to muster the enthusiasm on this issue, it would be a lot closer. And the reason you can't muster the enthusiasm is because I would argue public opinion's not there. Yeah. And so what they've done instead is fascinating. So let's take a look at how the kind of yes side tried to get around the idea that this was about abortion rights. Because I

think to your point, they were like, they did the polling and they're like, if voters go into the ballot box and decide that this is a referendum on abortion rights, we're losing it. So let's see where we can move it. And they moved it over to trans rights. And so we'll play first Mike Pence, and then we can play one of the ads from the Yes campaign. So Mike Pence jumped in, former Indiana governor, close enough, right? Not the French Riviera. That's right.

Here's how he framed his message for why you should vote. Yes. Hi, this is Mike Pence reminding everyone in the Buckeye State to be sure and get out and vote this Tuesday for the Ohio Constitution Protection Amendment. You know, for years, left-wing interests have abused the constitutional amendment process in Ohio to get their extreme agenda into law. But the Ohio Constitution Protection Amendment will put an end to that. When it passes, you'll need 60 percent of the vote in order to amend the state constitution. Or you'll have to get signatures from more people in all 88 counties. Now, Democrats want to keep the threshold as low as possible so they can pass abortion on demand, so they can advance their extreme gender ideology

agenda and take away parents' rights in education. Don't let that happen, Ohio. Stop the radical left. Get out and vote for the Ohio Constitution Protection Amendment this Tuesday. Let's save Ohio. And after that, we'll save America in 2024. I thought he was going to do like a Howard Dean, like, whoo! There you go. And so, yeah, let's roll one of the ads. It's pretty typical of the Yes campaign, which picked up on some of those themes. Let's play that here. You promised you'd keep the bad guys away. Protect her. Now's your chance. Out-of-state special interests that put trans ideology in classrooms and encourage sex changes for kids

are hiding behind slick ads. Don't be fooled. You can keep this madness out of Ohio classrooms and protect your rights as a parent by voting yes on August 8th. Keep your promise to her. Vote yes on August 8th. Yeah, that's a very... So yeah, it just didn't work. Right. It didn't work at all. I mean, again, just important to emphasize, we're in early August, and that was 43 to 57 on the side of the left here. I mean, that is just a resounding failure of this argument, especially when the money was fairly evenly matched. And some of the analyses I've seen, we actually have this. I'll go to A2 first. The early voting, this is another thing that Republicans are really concerned about in states like Ohio. So if we put A2 up on

the screen, the early voting was really up, which is again, like Republicans are super concerned about ballot harvesting, early turnout, et cetera, et cetera. They seem to not have made much of an impact in this particular election that's sort of changing that and making that more favorable to conservative issues, conservative candidates. You can see the actual language here up on your screen. I want to read it. It says, the proposed amendment would require that any proposed amendment to the Constitution of the state of Ohio receives the approval of at least 60% of eligible voters voting on the proposed amendment. So much clearer, I would say, Ryan, than the Kansas referendum language. That was actually the subject of some-

I had no idea what that was, yeah. Right. And some people on the right blamed it and said, this was incredibly confusing. The wording here is why we lost, sort of blaming the referees. And there may have been some truth to that. It was genuinely very confusing, but I don't think you have that here. And then let's throw A3 up on the screen. This is the analysis. That's the early voting one, but A3 is the analysis of where the money was coming, the out-of-state money was coming from, which was some really interesting places Dickie line on the side of he's a from Illinois. He was on the side of

Yes, big conservative Supporter big conservative donor who funds a lot of this stuff gave four million of one of the biggest packs 4.8 million so four million of that basically the entire budget came from one conservative Illinois billionaire. And then on the other hand, the PAC for the no side was funded by a lot of people from Silicon Valley and DC. 85% of its money from one person, one vote came from out of state. So just a flavor of how both sides trying to cast this as they're the bulwark against out of state special interests. Once again, there was just a, this was a nationalized referendum.

Yeah. And I think if Democrats can convincingly tell the public that they will actually, you know, codify Roe v. Wade into law, if given a majority, I think that this could be a huge voter draw for them in 2024 for Sherrod Brown and for the rest of the party. We'll see if they can actually convince that and then turn the election into that referendum. That's what they've wanted to do. That's what they've tried to do in the past, run on the fear that would be overturned. That never really worked, but now they can actually promise to recodify it. So we'll see.

The Republican primary continues to be kind of boring in some interesting ways. It's like just Trump sitting up there at the top, despite one indictment after the other landing on top of his head. But then underneath him, you've got DeSantis really plummeting. What do we have going on now in the GOP primary? Yes. So yesterday it was announced that Ron DeSantis' campaign manager, who ran his last gubernatorial campaign that everyone sort of heralded as a massive success, and I think rightfully so, he increased his numbers from a razor thin margin when he defeated Andrew Gillum

to just a resounding level of support in a purple state for a very Republican governor, a very sort of unashamed, unabashed conservative governor who was seen as someone being innovative and novel with policy. She is two months into this campaign that had a lot of hype and a ton of money, and she's already out the door. So that was announced yesterday. And as the New York Times describes, they say for the third time in less than a month, DeSantis' campaign announced a major restructuring. She was under fire. Basically, she'd never run a presidential campaign. She'd never actually even worked on a presidential campaign. But she was also, as the New York Times goes on

to say, quote, widely seen as miscast in the campaign manager role, even by those who liked her. She'd come under fire in particular for building a campaign team so quickly that Mr. DeSantis was forced to lay off roughly 40% of his aides only two months into his candidacy. This is a mistake that a lot of really hyped campaigns make. People probably remember there have been a lot of comparisons with Ron DeSantis and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. There was a real problem in the Walker campaign is that they grew basically too quickly, had

to make big cuts and ended up kind of imploding because of that. But in this case, Ron DeSantis has now brought in somebody from his governor's office who also doesn't have presidential election campaign experience, but is seen as a loyalist, a confidant that matters a lot to Ron DeSantis. Obviously, the fact that he brought Janera Peck in, somebody who didn't have presidential experience to begin with, and then went with, again, someone as he's getting rid of someone with not a lot of experience, bringing someone in with not a lot of experience to clean up the mess that the other inexperienced person left. You can see there very

clearly. And now maybe this explains what we're seeing with B1. This is really interesting that already Vivek Ramaswamy has overtaken Ron DeSantis as better's second choice to win the Republican nomination. So that is from Mediaite. And it's really interesting. Betting odds, they say, which some say provide more accurate predictions than polls, have a new GOP candidate behind former President Donald Trump. According to election betting odds, that's a site run by John Stossel and Maxim Lott, they aggregate betting odds from oversee bookmakers and other prediction markets media. It says Trump is the runaway favorite, and the site calculates that he has a 70% chance to take the GOP nomination in 2024.

But trailing behind him at 9.6% is not DeSantis, but Vivek Ramaswamy, who leads DeSantis at 9.5%. So again, a very, very tiny margin. But Ryan, what do you make of all of this as you're watching sort of from the other side, maybe enjoying this schadenfreude a little bit on your end? Yeah, you know, there's a lot of people out there who are like Twitter isn't real life, but Vivek seems to be a little bit of a Twitter candidate and yet is having some huge success, you know, to be number two with all of these candidates, you know, against Ron DeSantis, who back what in the fall was, at least according to the people who were doing the gambling, ahead of Donald Trump in those numbers. He was literally the odds-on favorite at one point. So now to be behind Vivek, who

most people hadn't heard of, Ramaswamy, at that point. How serious do you think it is? Do you think that if it becomes head-to-head with Trump, like he becomes the kind of viable alternative that he just gets completely destroyed like an asteroid coming through the atmosphere? Or do you think that there's some there there that he has successfully been able to hold on to, you know, build support within kind of pro-Trump folks while also winning over the other smaller factions? That seems to be his real skill. Well, I was gonna say, I think that's exactly right because I think Vivek has handled the Trump question much better than Ron DeSantis has. And that's been from the right, a lot of people look at the DeSantis campaign and say, what is going on? They feel as though he's sort of in this tug of war, and this includes myself, between the sort of elite

GOP consultant class and some people who are like new right that he brought into the campaign. And when you're in that tug of war, it seems like the elite GOP consultant class has won out time and time and again on this, especially the question of Trump. And he just hasn't, it seems to people like he's really botched that, those answers about Trump questions, answers on Trump questions time and time and again, and that he is sort of undermining Trump's appeal rather than saying, I understand Trump's appeal, or conveying that he really understands Trump's appeal. He just is going to, he thinks he's right for this particular moment. There have been way more attacks on Trump, his character, et cetera, et cetera, than a lot of people on the right have

felt comfortable with because they don't think that's the way to win over that persuadable 37%, as the New York Times we talked about last week puts it, of people who are neither hardcore Trump or hardcore anti-Trump. The way to win over those 37 is not to just sort of be like straight Nikki Haley or straight Mike Pence, but to be sort of more of a middle ground. And Ryan, the thing I was going to turn back around to you is to say this reminds me so much of 2012, a potential for a 2012. Remember when you would get a surge in polling for Michelle Bachman, Herman Cain, and some of these sort of, what's the right word for it? Not fringe, but like long shot candidates, people who are not traditional, eccentric, or even people who are not traditional presidential candidates. So Michelle Bachman, a representative at the time,

and then Herman Cain, a businessman at the time. Maybe that was Pratchett. Yes, 999. What did he say? It was Becky, Becky, Becky, Stan, Stan. That's another Herman Cain classic. But they would have these sugar highs in polling because they had a really good answer to a question, a really good Fox hit. It gave a really good speech. And it was a carousel.

They would trade off. And I don't know if that's what's gonna happen with Vivek and Tim Scott and who's had some decent polling numbers. But if Trump is staying dominant up at the top, maybe you get a carousel of sugar highs from other candidates like 2012 and just ultimately nobody's able to overtake him.

Right. The difference between 2012 and today being that this time they're all competing just for second place, whereas that time you had Herman Cain actually surging to the very top for a little while. I'm curious for your take on what's going to happen with these Republican elites.

And one thing I love about the show is I really have no idea what the answer is to this question, but I remember back in 2016 when Bernie Sanders was challenging the Clinton machine, he couldn't hire anybody. Basically, nobody who wanted a job in democratic politics in the future would work against the Clintons. And that actually helped him a lot because then it ended up bringing in lots of people from outside of kind of Washington politics and gave him a kind of livelier campaign as a result. But watching the

DeSantis world people just go to all out war with the Trump world people, like I haven't followed it that closely, but it's just such a hot war. You just can't, you know, you can't avoid seeing it. And now that they seem to have been routed so badly, like, are there going to be consequences for them the same way there would have been consequences for the Democratic staffers who worked against the Clinton machine? Like, is or is the Republican kind of milieu so kind of muddy at this point that you can kind of move around different worlds without running into problems? What's your sense of how damaged some of these DeSantis operatives are? That's a really good question because Donald Trump is sort of notoriously fickle and so

are his loyalists on these issues and then sometimes not. So like for really high profile people, if you can, he's shown that you can get back on his good side if you sort of say the right things. But then for the lower profile people, they were, you know, during his administration, actually scanning people's Twitter feeds back like three years to see if they had ever liked something that was negative against Donald Trump when they were vetting people for jobs in his administration. So I think it's going to be a mixed bag. But it's a really interesting question for the also another reason, which is we talked about DeSantis's economic campaign last week that had some populist rhetoric in it.

And one thing I keep thinking about was the 2020 Democratic primary when you had just about every candidate, no matter how much of corporate shills they were, swearing off corporate PAC money. So obviously it was sort of a gesture. But Bernie really benefited because those elite Democratic consultants that were chirping in his ear were not coming from large dollar donors. They weren't conveying the messages that they were hearing from large dollar donors and that there are all kinds of DeSantis donors that have been talking to the press about how disappointed in his campaign they are. And in some ways, for instance, because he has been very conservative on the issue of abortion, because of what one billionaire said was concerning to him was, quote, book bans, which I would argue is a false narrative. But either way, they're criticizing him essentially

from the center or closer to the center left than from the right. And if you were relying more on small dollar donors in the way that Donald Trump has, in the way that Bernie Sanders has, and if you swear off corporate PAC money, you're really able, I think, to be free, not just from the consultants, but from the bosses of the consultants and the friends of the consultants who are constantly chirping in your ear and I think giving you bad advice and whether there will be consequences is a huge, like there are huge implications if there's a Republican in the White House going forward as to how that plays out. At the same time, Donald Trump had a horribly difficult time staffing his administration

because they were so picky in some cases. So I don't know if there's a learning curve, if there's a second administration on that. It's a good question. Well, the White House, meanwhile, is trying to do something actually decent for the working class. So let's give some credit where it's due and talk about that a little bit. If we can put up this great piece from Lee Harris over in The Prospect. People can go read that for all of the details. I think that's C1. She writes, President Joe Biden is set to restore a New Deal labor rule in what could be the most significant change to construction worker pay since the rule was gutted in the 1980s.

The Department of Labor is preparing to issue a final rule tomorrow on the Davis-Bacon Act, which sets a wage floor for construction workers on public works projects. Davis-Bacon is often known as a, quote, prevailing wage as it refers to the going rate for laborers in a given era. And so this is a New Deal era. This is FDR implemented law that says that, look, if the public is going to be financing this infrastructure project, then the public wants workers to be paid a fair wage. And there have then been fights

over the definition of fair, over the definition of prevailing. Ever since then, in the 1980s, at the height of the kind of neoliberal pushback against the New Deal era, they redefined what it meant to be a prevailing wage. You can get wonky with the details, but the details aren't what matters. The side of the construction companies wants the prevailing wage to be defined as something that's lower. The side of the unions and the side of the workers wants the prevailing wage to be calculated in a way that makes the wages higher. And so the White House is putting forward a rule that would make those wages higher.

Already, the alliance of construction companies is saying that they're going to sue immediately to try to stop this law. What do you make of the Biden administration's willingness to kind of run up against the construction companies here and try to pick this fight? Yeah, well, I was going to ask you, because Biden has a really mixed record on labor. On the one hand, his Department of Labor is taking steps like this. And on the other hand, he botches the railway negotiations and doesn't seem serious about some really big questions at places like Amazon or hasn't taken the steps that I think a lot of people would expect him to. So is this a sign that in this type of labor market where there has been this huge surge in organizing that you think going forward,

Biden has sort of decided he has to come down more firmly on the side of labor, or is it just, again, part of a mixed bag? Yeah, I think there's a push and pull going on inside the administration. The Democratic Party is not by any stretch monolithically in support of workers, but there is a strong union force

that gets behind the Democratic Party and pushes them on these issues. And you also have a lot of White House economic advisors today who came up kind of through labor-funded economic think tanks and have always been associated with kind of pro-worker policies. And so the economists who work for him now are just kind of fundamentally different than the economists like Larry Summers, who were hired during the Obama era. So in that sense, you do have more of a pro-labor bent. At least labor has a voice

in the room. Rahm Emanuel, for instance, when they were debating whether or not to kind of bail out Detroit, if you remember after the financial crisis, Rahm Emanuel said, F the UAW. That was his contribution in that meeting. Just screw him. Fortunately for Obama and for Detroit, they didn't take Rahm Emanuel's advice that time. And I actually think, side note, that that's why Obama did so well in the Midwest in 2012, because he got a lot of credit for bailing out Detroit, whereas Romney had published that kind of infamous op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that said, let Detroit go bankrupt. 2016, you didn't have that,

and so Hillary Clinton gets beaten in the Midwest. But that's sort of a side note, but not really, because it is kind of, I think, fundamental to how Democrats kind of see themselves. Biden keeps saying that he wants to be the most pro-labor, the most pro-union president in American history. That wouldn't be very hard at all. We basically haven't had one ever. So if you're even neutral on labor, that kind of makes you the best in American history. And I think a lot of his advisors who are pro-labor

can use that rhetoric to say, look, we need to do this. And there's so much money coming down the pipe now. Today is the one-year anniversary of the CHIPS Act. We've got, obviously, that big infrastructure bill. Inflation Reduction Act has enormous amounts of tax credits and public spending going toward infrastructure development. I think spending on factory development is something like doubled in the last couple of years. It's huge. Now, doubled from pretty low rate. But that means that there's a lot of room to force work, to force companies to pay more to workers. And so I think, you know, they're going to go for it.

But, you know, we'll see if it gets, you know, tied up in court the entire time. Yeah, and it certainly will. But it has landed with a thud, I think, on the right, which is also very interesting. I can imagine just about 10, 15 years ago, in fact, that I'm reading right here from a Kevin Brady Joint Economic Committee report on Davis Bacon that is just headlined highway robbery from 2011. had Republicans up in arms taking to the media and talking about the Biden administration's extremism and cozy relationship with labor, because labor was not seen in the same light back then that it is now, and especially on the right. This is something that Republicans consistently say. If you look at the conservative criticism of Davis Bacon, it's typically that it increases costs for companies.

And then Kevin Brady actually in this report said, I, it looks like a pretty weak argument too, by the way, as I'm looking back on it, that it does decrease employment. So by repealing Davis Bacon, um, and get rid of getting rid of prevailing wage, you increase jobs, which obviously if costs are decreased, which I'm sure that they, when that happens. I don't think anyone is going to dispute that the costs are going up when you have to pay people more. That's essentially the obvious math there. But when you have that, he's saying it actually decreases, and conservatives will say it decreases the level of people that are actually employed. But this is a really tight labor market. So I don't know how seriously that argument is going to be taken by people on the right, especially as their attitudes towards organized

labor are shifting. So I also found it pretty interesting that this got very little pickup, despite it being a fairly consequential decision from the Biden administration. It didn't really have people running to Twitter, running to people on the right, Republicans running to Twitter. But industry does fund some of those pro-business think tanks, and industry is pretty upset about this, as you can imagine, and that's where it will be tied up in court. So maybe that will be amplified in the future. But as of now, I just sort of found that interesting, and it will be interesting going forward as this issue, again, is very consequential, as you do have the pressure coming from industry

on think tanks, on special interest groups to fight this where Republican politicians will land. And you made a great point that these building trades members, these union members, those are mostly Trump voters at this point. Yes. And so in some ways it's good for workers

when they have both parties who are kind of now looking out for their interests. Because like you said in the past, Democrats would do this and Republicans would go to war against it. Now Democrats do it and Republicans are like, don't like this because all of our donors say it's not good, but all of our voters say it is good. So maybe we'll just step back and see it you know see how this plays out in the courts and and that's kind of the the what makes me nervous about this republican coalition is that they leave a lot of the dirty work to the courts and and whereas the republican politicians say you know hey i'm i'm for uh you know higher prevailing wages for folks. I remember I spoke to a bunch of building trades union leaders

back in 2019 at a conference, and I was asking them afterwards how their members were feeling about Trump in the upcoming election. Every single one of them, no matter what the building trade was specifically, they were like, oh, heavily Trump, like 60, 70, even upwards of 80% Trump.

They all had seen wage increases over the last couple of years, and a lot of them were crediting kind of Trump's rhetoric around wages and around the Fed and also around immigration, which I think is incorrect, but I understand, like, why they're, you know, they're seeing him, you know, hammer on about immigration, and they're seeing their wages go up. And they're like, oh, maybe this is going on here. But if Biden can't find the megaphone that Trump had and let people know that a reason they're getting increases in their wages is because of what Democrats are doing for them,

then they're not going to end up getting credit for that. So we'll see how that shakes out. But whoever gets credit, it's a good thing when workers are getting paid more for the work they're not going to end up getting credit for that. So we'll see how that shakes out. But whoever gets credit, it's a good thing when workers are getting paid more for the work they're doing. Well, and to your point about special interests versus politicians, a lot of those same people who are supporting Trump also probably ended up being Ron Johnson voters, ended up being J.D. Vance voters. So it does put a different, for different reasons, but it does put a different kind of pressure on the Republican Party versus the special interest apparatus. And one huge thing for the conservative movement to reckon with is how pro-industry, how pro-business

a lot of those judges are who have been installed on benches and celebrated by the conservative movement for being installed on benches because they had, you know, at the time were what seemed like the favorable sort of approach towards free markets, towards, for instance, abortion, whatever it is, and are now going to be inclined to rule in certain antitrust cases, tech cases, or different cases in ways that may not be favorable to those voters. Let's move on to another economic topic, which is the sort of troubling levels of personal debt that we're seeing. We can go ahead and throw D1 up on the screen. This is from CNN Business. More Americans are tapping their 401k accounts because of financial

distress, according to Bank of America data released Tuesday. So Americans, as the CNN headline says, are pulling money out of their 401k plans at an alarming rate. Here are the specifics. The number of people who made a hardship withdrawal during the second quarter surged from the first three months of the year to 15,950, which is an increase of 36% from the second quarter of 2022, according to Bank of America's analysis of clients' employee benefit programs, which are comprised of more than 4 million planned participants, an expert that CNN quotes calls that, quote, pretty troubling. You understand why people do that in the heat of the moment, but the opportunity costs on

that are really, really high over time. I would also point out numbers that show people's auto mortgages are going from debt to delinquency at a really surprising rate. That has spiked over the last quarter and just seems to keep going up. It's actually different than what we're seeing debt to delinquency on mortgages. But I think when you put this all together, you're looking at the picture of a lot of people having borrowed a good chunk of money in the last couple of years. And it's one thing if people are borrowing that money and like with the mortgage numbers are not, you know, then tipping into delinquency. But if they are, especially in something like auto loans, which is a lower level,

that is pretty concerning. I do agree, Ryan, that is a little troubling. It's very troubling. And to put it in perspective, in 2020, interest rates collapsed down for mortgages under 4%, and for a lot of people under 3%. And you saw record numbers of refinances. And so refinancing often does two things. You know, on the one hand, it lowers your payment that you have every month. And so that you have, you know, as long as your pay stays the same, you're taking a little bit more home every month after you've paid your mortgage. But a lot of people then take a little bit out also. Say like, the bank will tell you, hey, look, if you can add, you know, $25,000 to your principal over the next 30 years, it will give you the check for 25,000. And you're still paying less a month, because your interest rate was at, you know, 5%. Now it's at 2.75%. And millions of people around the country, you know, refinanced and took that money out.

Then you had the CARES Act in March 2020, which kicked, what, $600 checks to everybody. Then you had the, no, you had $1,200 checks, then $600 checks, then $1,400 checks. Ultimately, you had in January 2021, people getting a family forward got a $5,400 check if they had two dependents. That's an enormous amount of money to just land in your bank account. And the combination of, I think, all of those refinancings, plus all of those direct checks, plus the unemployment benefits, you're getting extra $600 a month. The amount of savings that people had had never been higher. Some of this article notes that the number of people who, I don't know if we have this one,

I think it might be our second element, the number of people who can afford a $400 hit is back down to about 62% at this point. In 2021, it was up. It's D3. Yeah, D3. It was 68% could swing a, you know, you want it to be 100%. Like you want everyone to be able to swing a $400 hit that they get.

But in 2020, 2021, that number was going up. So at least it's going in the right direction. That number is coming down now. And so we've exhausted the refinancing. We've done all the checks. And so now people are dipping into their 401ks. They're borrowing from their workers their 401ks uh they're borrowing from their workers i mean they're borrowing from uh their workplaces uh now you still you still

did see according to this reporting uh just as many people adding money adding more money to their 401ks and we're reducing the contributions to their 401ks. So it's not like everybody is in this situation. But I do think that there's a strain on the system that if it hits a shock, there just isn't the cushioning. And you're going to have an enormous number of people who need this music to keep playing before they're going to lose this game. So this is a really interesting point. Even if we just go back to that simple question of mortgages, mortgage delinquency versus auto delinquency, who's more likely to have a mortgage versus who's more likely to have an auto loan? If you have a mortgage, you're probably in a different socioeconomic strata on average than the average person with car loans. That would be my guess. And I think that speaks to

what you're talking about which is our economy Just going in two completely different directions. We see this with the stock market We saw it with the stock market during kovat and right now if we put a d2 up on the screen This is credit card debt. So this is CNN's credit card CNN's report on credit card debt They're saying 620 since 2019 household debt balances have increased by nearly $3 trillion, according to the New York Fed, from the first quarter of 2023. And a lot of that is coming from credit card debt. The first time on Tuesday, the New York Fed reported that U.S. households' credit card debt, quote, surpassed the $1 trillion mark for the first time ever. That's a $45 billion increase in credit card debt.

It's driving overall household debt to levels to $17.06 trillion at the end of the second quarter. And then you add on top of that that federal student loan payments are resuming in October. So if this is bad now, imagine how much worse it's going to get in October. And again, an expert CNN quote says there's only so much hard debt that people can handle before delinquencies really strike. Ultimately, you just have a lot of people who are doing OK now, but it wouldn't take a whole lot for them to find themselves in a pretty sticky situation financially, whether that is a medical emergency, job loss, or even just student loan payments restarting. And the student loan payment pause is another example of how it may feel like the pandemic

for us is in the rearview mirror. But economically, that pandemic era policy is very much still with us in the economy. And the pandemic era economy, you're seeing tightening, for instance, in media, in Hollywood, in those spaces from the pandemic. Again, we talk about a sugar high. There was a lot of that. There was a lot of growth. And right now, some of that, the Fed is really eager to say that it looks like we're going to have the soft landing. But indications like this that are sort of below the surface, beneath, you see the tip of the iceberg, and then it's the giant thing underneath the water. I think that is a lot more concerning than they will admit, Ryan, that then Janet Yellen or Jamie Dimon will admit.

Yeah, because car loan delinquencies are considered by economists and people with common sense to be a huge red siren blaring. Because if you think about it, as it becomes harder for you to pay your bills, the car is the main thing that you continue to make sure that you're paying because you need your car for everything. You need your car to get to work, most importantly.

And so if you don't have that, you're set back. And so studies show, and like I said, common sense shows that when people have to decide what to pay and what not to pay, they always want to pay that car loan off because they do not want that car repossessed. And so if they're not paying those loans and if delinquencies are rising, that means they've already exhausted all the other things that they can move around and couldn't pay for the time being.

And so once you're not paying your car loan, unless you've got two or three cars, then you're really facing significant trouble. If you have two or three cars, you're going to sell them and you're not going to let them get repossessed. So that's why people, economists really worry when they see car delinquencies starting to tick up.

Last question, Ryan, is if you were Janet Yellen, put yourself in Janet Yellen's shoes, Ryan, and you're looking at these numbers, how does that influence your decisions on interest rates? Well, I mean, I think, well, you mean the Fed chair, that she used to be the Fed chair. Or Jerome Powell. Yeah, yeah, she did a good job of, I think,

of keeping rates really low for a very long time. You know, I think Trump even could have kept her on and she would have kept doing it. He could steady replace her with Powell, who then kept rates really low. But I think if you're Powell, you do have to be, and I think if you're Yellen, because I think you do ask a good question,

because she is still responsible for the economy. She should be browbeating Powell to say, OK, enough. Like, good job. You squeezed Silicon Valley. You know, a bunch of those clowns lost their shirts, which they should have because they were just wasting money. Now we need to focus on making sure that people don't get hit with the kind of shock, especially given the fact that student loan payments are coming back in October, that it sends us into a tailspin. Like, do not overcorrect here.

So slow down and maybe if you need to ease, do something a little more targeted rather than just opening up the spigot and sending the money straight to Silicon Valley next time. Right. Yeah. And Yellen, to your point, Ryan, had a sort of different, I guess, approach than Jerome Powell. And if Yellen had been in a position rather than Jerome Powell, it might have been a different question.

But in terms of how Powell is seen in the administration, is treated by the administration, is directed by the administration, is treated by the administration, is directed by the administration. It's just, I'm very curious to see, because these indications have been lingering. But as they are sort of heightened, I mean, these are, to your point, like red sirens. These are like glaring, glaring problems that are demanding, I think, probably a little bit more honesty on behalf of the government. Yeah, and he wanted to see the number of job openings reduced. He wanted to see wages going down.

He was very clear and public about that. And you are seeing the number of jobs added to the economy rising at a lower rate. So he should just declare victory and stop trying to strangle the economy is what I would tell him. So before we started filming today, Ryan revealed some personal knowledge of boating brawls. And we're going to talk now about the one out of Montgomery, Alabama. I think probably the best thing to do is just start by playing some of these clips. Let's throw E1 up on the screen here. No, help that boy! No, help that boy! Oh That boy swimming his ass over there. God damn.

That boy for the hell that boy. Get up there, young boy. Get up there, young boy. Get up there, young boy. Hey, don't run. Don't run. Don't run. Don't run. Shit, they down.

What's up? I was talking a minute ago. Yeah. Woo. Woo. Woo. Woo. Woo. They dead.

Look at them. They dead. Woo. Beat that ass. Woo. Woo! They bad! Look out! They bad! Woo! Beat that ass! Woo! Oh, my God! Woo! That what you get!

It's a real spectator sport, and we can, I think it's pretty easy for everyone to understand why those videos have gone massively viral. As the Montgomery advertiser put it, they have captivated the attention of the nation. The latest news on this is that three men are facing charges. So we have a 48-year-old white male, Richard Roberts, who's facing two warrants for assault in the third degree. 23-year-old white male, Alan Todd, one warrant for assault in the third degree. And Zachary Shipman, a 25-year-old white male, facing one warrant for assault in the third degree. More context here, this is from Saturday evening, so last Saturday, when, as the Montgomery Advertiser puts it, Damien Pickett, the co-captain of the Harriet

2, asked the operators of a private boat that was docked in its space to move, getting only, quote, obscene gestures and, quote, taunting in response. Dozens of cell phone videos posted to social media were recorded by the passengers aboard the Harriet 2 riverboat, which was waiting to dock with 227 people on board for more than 40 minutes, as well as people on the shore. So after a long Saturday spent, you know, on the river drinking, having fun, it sounds like, Ryan, this escalated very quickly. Yeah.

And I think the ship is named after Harriet Tubman, which is pretty great. These guys, yes, they clearly were wasted. Sunburnt rednecks who just felt like because they had the numbers on one guy that they were just going to kind of, you know, show them how tough they were. And I don't know if we saw it in that footage, but the kid, a 16-year-old kid who was swimming over to the dock, just brings a tear to your eye.

It's just the most glorious symbol of solidarity that you can ever see. Like he sees that somebody needs help, he dives into the water. Those are the heroes that we need today. Masculine virtues. And there you go. In Phil Lewis's tweet there,

he mentioned that Reggie Gray, who is the man wielding the chair, you know, is being asked to contact police. I'm not defending, you know, wielding chairs at people, but I would advise Reggie Gray, he does not have to contact the police. You know, you're not required to turn yourself in if his name is even Reggie Gray. So it has been, and TikTok has really kind of gloriously covered this because you're getting just absolutely everybody's got their take that they're putting out there, and everybody seems to agree. And how could they not? Like these dudes bullied this one guy who was just doing his job, and then they got whooped.

And what more can you ask for? And the irony, of course, is that we've gone through this whole kind of controversy over that Jason Aldean song. And these dudes did try that in a small town, although my group is not that small. And, you know, they found out. What did you think? Yeah, well, the debate over what constitutes a small town has been actually really interesting too, because Montgomery is certainly probably seen by a lot of people who look at Atlanta as the antithesis, as its sort of opposite, rather than, maybe the 300 person town an hour outside of it or whatever. It's certainly seen as like different than Atlanta. And I'm sure it is to some extent,

but I think it's a really interesting point. The other thing I would say is just that there's a lot to think about in terms of how social media can condition us to, I think, make jump conclusions. So like, for instance, Nicole Hannah-Jones, who's at the New York Times, pretty powerful person. She tweeted, if you understand her ex, she said, if you understand the history of Montgomery, one of the most prolific slave trading cities in the U.S., turned brutally repressive apartheid regime after a majority black, but just got its first black mayor, it gives so much perspective to this video. I don't know about that. I feel like when stuff like this goes viral,

the incentives to sort of shoehorn it immediately into a broader sort of political narrative can be really dangerous and unnecessarily divisive. And actually, I say that as someone who doesn't rule out the fact that we may learn as this investigation goes on that there were racial implications or motivations. I don't rule that out at all. I think it's perfectly plausible, I think, to tweet that within a couple of days or even hours of it going viral and to turn something that was local and that we would typically all sort of deal with, litigate

literally on a local level before and then sort of rocket it into the political stratosphere. I never find that to be helpful. I think it's really unfortunate when people do that before we know whether this is actually tied to racial animus. And again, I don't rule out that that's possible. I just, I have seen some of that in this case, not just from Nikole Hannah-Jones, but from other spots. And it may be possible. I just, I don't like doing it before we know whether or not there's real evidence of that. Well, I mean, you do have the evidence of the clear racial lines. And, you know, so people who were watching, you know, from away from the fight

could see that that was a bunch of, you call them white, they were red. Absolutely. You could see there's a bunch of white people and the person getting beaten was a black person. You could very clearly see that. And I think certainly in Alabama, you understand it through that prism.

I think a mistake that Hannah Jones might be making in that analysis there is to suggest that, you know, that black people in the South, either in an organized fashion or spontaneously operating in self-defense is a new phenomenon. And in fact, there has been resistance to oppression, back to the very beginning of the oppression, not just when it comes to slave revolts, but then organized slave revolts, then escapes that kind of so panic the South that it caused them to overreact,

which ended up triggering the Civil War, the Fugitive Slave Act, et cetera. We can get into that. Then you have many of those freedmen then join the Union, fight back there. And you have people, you know, organizing militias, fighting against the Klan. And, you know, up through the Civil Rights Movement,

like you have always had Black Americans pushing back violently and nonviolently, but also violently. And that has been kind of suppressed in the history, but a lot of it was thoroughly justified and in self-defense, like you saw in this situation. So for her to kind of, you know, suggest that it's something new, I think almost as a disservice and a discredit to the prouder history of resistance. That's a great point. And maybe she wasn't suggesting that it was brand new, just saying, look at it through that prison. But I just want to be clear that that proud history is there. And that's a more, I think, precise way to put it, because obviously I know, you know, Nicole Hannah-Jones and other people reasonably would say the evidence is right in front of you. Like you see the racial breakdown. You have a city as

historically charged as Montgomery involved. I guess the point I was trying to make is that it's the question of whether there was this very specific if there was like an actual someone's used a racial slur or someone. Right. Like that question to me is something that is it's when you sort of apply that to a really specific local situation and elevate it on the national level. I think that's always unhelpful to getting justice served and to understanding the truth of what happened and the kind of rush to sort of put this into the national racial, I understand it. I understand why it happened. I guess I just think putting that into that context without litigating it, and I don't mean litigating in that sense, like going to the courts. I just mean before we have

information, this stuff goes viral on social media and you end up with a Covington Catholic situation that was also people were looking at a racial breakdown. And it led them to a conclusion that ended up with CNN settling for millions and millions of dollars because the snap picture, it doesn't always tell the full story, even though it goes viral on social media and it's a video and people feel like they know what happened. So that's, I guess that's all I meant to say. Right. And this one, we did get a bigger story, a fuller story. Lots, you know, everybody's got a phone at this point. But also, I think some of the, I think some of the racial undertones come through in just in an unspoken way in the sense that like, who do these guys think they are? And it's where you start to have

to give credit to terms like white privilege. It's like, dude, okay, you were out drinking on your boat all day. You've been sitting there for 40, 45 minutes on the dock with 100 plus people waiting to get off their ferry, waiting to get off this Harriet 2, and you just won't move. And then the co-captain comes and asks you to move, and you beat him up. That is a very privileged, who on earth do you think you are that you can do that? And very difficult to imagine the racial dynamics being different. That, you know, a boat of a handful of black guys who are holding up hundreds of people on a ferry, then beating up a white co-captain on the dock. It's very hard to see that because the kind of power structure and the power dynamics just don't allow you kind of to imagine that unfolding.

Although it's very difficult to imagine what on earth these dudes were thinking, that they would do this in front of a very large black crowd. Like there was a, I think, was it a college or a high school reunion party going on, several hundred people who were obviously not gonna stand for that. Or maybe they thought they would stand for

that, but they found out that they would not. Yeah, I think they probably want to blame the alcohol in this case, and I'm sure that that amplified tensions, especially at the end of Saturday. But the scenario you just laid out where you're the one causing problems, then you're the one that's beating people up. Uh, that's, that's, that's not just alcohol. That's you having some serious character problems and being inclined to act like a jerk no matter what. I've done a, yeah, I've done a lot of, uh, drinking and boating and I have, uh, never beaten anybody up for no reason or even for no reason, for no reason, but you have beaten people up. Or even for any reason really uh

in the in the boating situation yeah but yeah but yeah we were you know we were talking about the the rock hall boat talking contest i just realized that on my twitter profile if people want to see it the like the top image uh is from like a late 1990s uh docking, you could probably find me in that crowd somewhere. I haven't gone in years. I'm too old for that now. But nothing more fun than that. There you go. But no fighting.

Come on. No fighting. It takes all the fun away. So Emily, what's your point today? Well, now seven states have required pornography websites to have age verification, allowing users to access them within their states. So there's been heavy focus on Mississippi, Virginia. Those are two earlier this summer.

You can see that on the screen. This is a Gizmodo headline. How you can't access Pornhub in Mississippi or Virginia anymore. Why is that? Because their age verification laws, Pornhub felt they could not comply with. And so people who go there in those states see an explanation basically for why they're not operating in those states anymore. Louisiana was the first state to do this. So there's been a huge amount of focus on that. But as Politico magazine, which had a great story examining some of these bills, how they came to pass, and then what's been happening to Pornhub explains, now identical bills to that Louisiana one have passed in six other states, Arkansas, Montana, Mississippi, Utah, Virginia, and Texas.

So not just super deep red states. Montana is a Democratic senator. Obviously, Virginia, I would argue, is blue, even though it has a Republican governor right now. And, you know, others are pretty conservative there. But these are bills that are passing with pretty big margins, despite being fought bitterly by the pornography industry, which is a huge industry right now. The online pornography industry, absolutely massive, big, big business at this point. And they're being signed by, as Politico notes, Democratic, Republican governors. And this is a quote from the story. In just over a year, age verification laws have become perhaps the most bipartisan policy in the country. And they are creating havoc in a porn industry that many had considered all but impossible to actually regulate. I think that's really important. And Politico magazine goes on to explain why.

They say, quote, They are having real effects on how the massive online porn industry does business. Pornhub, the YouTube of pornography, gets more global users than Amazon or Netflix. In 2019, the last year Pornhub released its data, the site was visited 42 billion times or 115 million times each day. But according to Ethical Capital Partners, the private equity company that owns Pornhub, let's just look at Louisiana, they say their traffic has dropped 80%.

Their traffic has obviously dropped 100% in the states that it's simply not operating in anymore, including, I believe, Virginia and Mississippi. So that's incredibly big news across the board for millions of people's daily lives in those states and for a massive industry as well. It's also reverberated, this political magazine story was shared everywhere on the right yesterday, it's reverberated in Washington because of this idea

that online pornography was too big to fail, maybe is the best way to put it, that it was too hard to do anything. It would be like sort of trying to clean the beach, right? Trying to sweep up the beach with a broom and get that sand off the beach is sort of how people viewed online pornography. And the lesson is not just about online pornography for people in Washington, but it is that reasonable laws can have massive consequences, that some problems aren't too big for legislation. And maybe you disagree with these particular state laws, but it should be a lesson for all politicians that when you have a problem you consider serious, there are ways, even if it seems overwhelming and impossible, reasonable legislation that is not overly intrusive. So the porn industry in this case is their trade association. A lot of people probably know this is called the Free Speech Coalition. And I don't think it's unreasonable, of course, to say that there's free speech implications and regulation of pornography. But we have plenty of registration,

we have plenty of regulation around the Second Amendment. And I argue, of course, for minimal regulation around the First Amendment. But age verification laws are hardly an undue burden on the online pornography industry. This is very specifically tailored to online pornography and very specifically about age verification. And so if you want to peddle something that we are learning is as powerful as online pornography, there's mounting evidence. Of course, the Free Speech Coalition would dispute this evidence and say it's not conclusive, it's not serious, but there's evidence that this affects people's dopamine reactions in their brain, especially as they're younger. So they have minds that are still being formed in those stages of brain development that online pornography can be very addictive. It can create

issues or can lead to issues. It can influence issues like erectile dysfunction. There's some evidence suggesting that. There's some evidence suggesting it actually has harmful effects on your dopamine pathways. Your ability to experience sexual pleasure in a healthy way can be harmed by online pornography. And again, whether or not you agree with any of that, the big takeaway to a lot of people here in Washington is that on this sort of state level, you can take small measures that have huge consequences for hugely consequential issues to the point where those issues are feeling overwhelming to legislators in this new era. And that has big implications, I would also say, for AI. How much is that argument trotted out

that we really can't do anything when it comes to AI because it's already out of our hands? And that's probably a big argument people are making right now in states like Louisiana. It's like, okay, well, people aren't going to Pornhub. They're still finding their pornography somewhere. I'm sure there's truth to that. And I look forward to reading the evidence about whether or not that's happening, the degree to which, how it's happening and what's going on with that. But I still think it's incredibly important to look at how these laws can shape behavior, even if they're small and they're not massively intrusive. This isn't a, it would be hard to argue, even conservatives and especially conservatives

in this case, but even sort of pro-business conservatives look at this and say, well, yeah, that's not like the most intrusive step into the free market or the economy that you could possibly conceive of. And I would argue, again, this is important as Politico points out, we're looking at some Democratic governors signing this. Well, one of the activists started a push for this

by watching Billie Eilish on Howard Stern. When Billie Eilish said, quote, I used to watch a lot of porn, to be honest. I started watching porn when I was like 11. I think it really destroyed my brain, and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn. Quote, I think it really destroyed my brain.

Washington takes a long time to catch up often with younger people because Washington is disproportionately older, but as the rate of technological change increases, it makes it more and more important for Washington to understand technological change, the effect of technological change on younger and younger people who are using that technology much differently than your average senator or representative or governor or state legislature. And that is another hugely important issue of all of this. Do people understand in Washington, I mean, remember those famous clips of senators trying to understand

Facebook? We feel like they've caught up on Facebook now, which makes sense because it's all boomers anyway. But have they caught up on things like online pornography? No, because it's different. We look at the levels, we see the average age that people are exposed to online pornography, the average age of regular use starting of online pornography. When that's happening over the course of 10 years as your brain is developing, so from the ages of like 13 to let's say 23, whatever that is, this has never happened before in human history that people have access to this volume of pornography so easily and for such a long period of their developing lives. So I think it's absurd to dismiss these things out of hand. I'm sure some of the evidence on the anti-pornography side,

like it was in the 90s when people were fighting about this and you had Andrew Edsworken and all those folks saying, you know, we need to regulate this. The feminist position on this has to be anti-porn. I know some of those arguments were spurious, although we were talking about a very different kind of pornography back then than, again, the volume, the difficulty of regulating something like Pornhub's content for whether or not it involves things like trafficking, for whether or not it involves things that are violent and beyond the pale of what people should be able to make money off of and what people should be able to serve up to young children. This is a very, very different

time. Again, I'm sure some of these arguments are spurious. I'm not saying they're all made in good faith and they're all from people who really do believe in free speech, but there's an incredibly reasonable position here, which is that we don't know. We have some really, really negative signs of how this has affected developing brains, how this has affected people around the world. And we don't know simply the extent of how bad that is. There's plenty of evidence to suggest how bad it is.

And there are reasonable measures that can be taken on a small level that don't dramatically curb the First Amendment just because they're age laws and can have a hugely consequential effect and can be bipartisan and can be from both the left and the right, something that people agree on. So Ryan, this has been really interesting to see these seven states, some from different backgrounds, pass these laws. Have you noticed how this is, I know this is, it's always been a raging debate on the sort of feminist left between your Andrea Dworkins, your Camille Paulias, your people who are sort of the sex-positive feminism

that seemed to win out over the last 20 years, and then even people like Michelle Goldberg taking some steps back and saying, well, maybe we do need to rethink some of this. How is this landing on the left? Other than folks like Michelle Goldberg, who are, you know, I think admirably willing to kind of run up against the grain, you pretty much have hegemony for the kind of sex positive side, even if maybe there's some stirrings in the younger generation of saying that maybe the pendulum needs to swing back a little bit in the other direction. So you don't see much on the left. Although, you know, clearly there's not, it's not a high enough priority issue that some, that a blue state like Virginia couldn't pass this law that has Pornhub shutting down there.

So I think what you see kind of in the culture and on social media doesn't necessarily translate into the halls of power. I'm usually really skeptical of companies when they're claiming that regulation is going to destroy them, and so therefore, they have to leave the state. It's very often that these companies are just using their market power as political power and trying to bludgeon them into basically repealing the laws or to say to other states, look, if you do the same, then this is what's going to happen next. You know, a lot of this to me should be up to parents rather than up to Virginia. And, you know, kids shouldn't have devices that are capable of doing this.

So that's the one part where I'm sympathetic to the Pornhub argument. Their argument is that the controls should be on the device, that the device, you know, should have settings that only allow it to reach certain sites and porn sites should be, you know, by far the first that they don't get to. But there's lots of other stuff like most YouTube videos. Maybe they're not even ready for this show. This YouTube video, yeah. This YouTube video. That's right. But there's so much on there that kids just don't need until they're, you know, until they're much older. So, you know. My answer to that is definitely like, why not both? Because I agree with that completely. And a lot of the content, I think, is designed in a way that is intentionally addictive

and is having real effects. I mean, there are plenty of scientific studies on the neurology, the neurological effects of social media. And I think we will see a push towards regulation. That is, we have age laws for buying cigarettes. You have age laws for marijuana in some states. And even as generally a limited government person,

I'm fine with age laws for the consumption of cigarettes. Maybe seatbelts are a different question, but age laws in some cases are entirely reasonable. So the other thing I'm waiting for, Ryan, is the Pornhub argument then to be used by the sort of the small porn business and saying like, oh, it's very easy for Pornhub to do age verification in Louisiana. But us little guys, you know, maybe Pornhub flips at one point and is like, yes, age verification, because then we can shut down all of our little competitors who don't have the technological resources to do comprehensive age verification. Yeah, but these smaller competitors so fly by night that I would imagine

that they'll just pop up and continue. If you shut them down, they just pop up with a different URL. It's different than a social media company competing with Facebook or Twitter because

they need massive scale and network effects to be successful. These little tiny porn companies don't need that. They just need some way to get to these users who no longer have access to Pornhub in Louisiana or Virginia. Yeah, absolutely. Or Utah. I wasn't surprised to see that. No, Utah is the least surprising of the states included on that list. This actually does it for us, for the show, at the moment.

Because, again, as we mentioned at the top of the show, Ryan is going to be out with a breaking news report that we've teased a little bit. And I'll let Ryan take it from here because it's a pretty big breaking story. But we will be back later with a follow up to today's show because Ryan has a breaking story to share with everyone. We'll be right back. The one thing they can't stop you or take away from you is knowledge. So whatever I went through while I was down in prison for two years, through that process, learn. Learn from me. Check out this exclusive episode with Ja Rule on Rock Solid. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Rock Solid, and listen now.

I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHe radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts i'm clayton english i'm greg glad and this is season two of the war on drugs podcast

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