Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Best of Week 4/9: PA Senate, Food Prices, Shanghai Lockdown, NATO Expansion, Musk vs Twitter, Inflation Data, & More!

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

Krystal and Saagar cover Trump's endorsement of Dr. Oz, food prices surging, Shanghai lockdown, NATO expansion, Elon's Twitter moves, inflation numbers, and Gen Z misery. To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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upcoming presidential election so we can provide unparalleled coverage of what is sure to be one of the most pivotal moments in American history. So what are you waiting for? Go to BreakingPoints.com to help us out. President Trump is endorsing Dr. Oz in the Pennsylvania Senate race. Let's put this up there on the screen. I've got to read you this statement. It is truly something. Classic. Okay. Endorsement of Dr. Oz from President Donald Trump. This is all about winning elections in order to stop the radical left maniacs from destroying our country. The great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has a tremendous opportunity to save America by electing the brilliant and well-known Dr. Mehmet Oz for the United States Senate. I have known Dr. Oz for many years.

He has lived through with us through the screen, has always made popular, respected, and smart. He even said I was in extraordinary health, which made me like him even more, although he also said I should lose a couple of pounds. He is a graduate of Harvard University. He earned a joint MD-MBA from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Wharton School of Finance. He has authored 350 books. He continues, Dr. Oz is pro-life, strong on crime, the border of the election. He also passionately believes in high quality education, protecting parent involvement. Perhaps more importantly, I believe Dr. Mehmet Oz will be the one to win the general election.

Women in particular are drawn to Dr. Oz for his advice and counsel. I have seen this many times over the years. That was my favorite part. They know him, believe in him, trust him. Likewise, he will do well in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, where other candidates will not be accepted. He knows his job is to serve every single Pennsylvanian. He is smart, tough, and will never let you down. Therefore, he has my complete and total endorsement.

Good luck, Dr. Oz. Our country needs you. So. Low key, I think he might be a little bit right about the women thing. Oh, he's 100%.

This is like an Oprah-aligned figure. This is like daytime TV. So I do think he might be The day Oz announced, you can go and check the record, I said, I think he's gonna win. Specifically because of announced, you can go and check the record, I said, I think he's going to win.

Specifically because of his appeal to people who are nonpolitical, celebrity. Yeah, he's got an ormy appeal. Exactly. I mean, yeah, that's a hard thing to deal with. But, so this has caused full-scale meltdown in the MAGA universe. And it's especially hilarious to me, given all of the characters who are involved. So the other rival against Dr. Oz was David McCormick. He actually was leading Oz in the polls up to this. Let's put this up there on the screen. Now, David McCormick, up until,

I don't know, six months ago, was the CEO and head of the largest hedge fund in the world, Bridgewater Capital, which was run by, oh, right, globalist-in-chief and China apologist Ray Dalio. He himself is reportedly worth at least up to a billion dollars. At the very least, he's got hundreds of millions in his pockets. This guy is a Wall Street ghoul through and through, a huge proponent of ESG, of investing in China, the worst of globalism incarnate is David McCormick. But, and this is why MAGA is melting down, his wife happens to be Dina Powell. Now, you guys might not know who that is, but she was on the National Security Council in the Trump administration up until 2017 while she was on

a leave of absence from Goldman Sachs, of where she currently works right now. She's back at Goldman. Don't worry. She's doing just fine. And at the time, Trump loved her. She's an Egyptian Coptic Christian. She did a lot of the ISIS stuff. She made a lot of friends in the White House. So a lot of her former friends in the White House are now working for David McCormick, including Stephen Miller, Hope Hicks, a huge number of people from the Trump campaign and the Trump White House. Pays big bucks. And so they have conferred upon David McCormick the MAGA status. So they feel very stabbed in the back or stabbed in the front by Trump endorsing Dr. Oz. What I think is hilarious about this whole thing is everybody's like, oh, Dr. Oz is a huge liberal because he

interviewed Michelle Obama once on his show, or Dr. Oz was pro-choice before he was pro-life. Yeah, so was Trump, okay? Like, yeah, save your fake crocodile tears. And the alternative, Crystal, is that they are claiming that the true MAGA warrior is a freaking hedge fund executive who is, I could not conjure a more Davos-like, ghoulish figure than David McCormick. And just to give you a sense of how cynical he is in that piece that we just had up in the New York Times, they say, McCormick's married to Dina Powell, Goldman Sachs. Couple has been warning their friends that McCormick plans to play up Trump-like views on the campaign trail, what they described as simply the cost of running in a Republican primary right now, according to two business associates of his from Wall Street who asked not to be named discussing

private conversations. So they're going around to their Wall Street polite society people and basically being like, we don't really mean any of this stuff. But you know these rubes in the Republican primary. Like, we got to play up all this sort of xenophobia and all of – so just disregard what he's saying here. It gets worse, Crystal, which is that Dina Powell and her husband in their meeting with Trump – this is according to people who were inside the room. You take it for what you will. it's from the New York Times. They say that they pulled out a picture of Oz wearing a turban where he was in Turkey

and a funeral procession wearing traditional Islamic garb and they're like, this guy can't win in Pennsylvania. So they're willing to try and use Oz's Muslim identity. I mean, look, Dr. Oz is not like a practicing Muslim.

He's a secular Muslim. Not only is it actually worse than being racist, it just shows complete contempt for the electorate that you think that you could just, like, put that picture up there and that a bunch of, you know, Pennsylvania rednecks would be like, oh, hell no. Right, I'm not voting for this guy. Exactly.

I'm so glad you said that. I mean, here's another one that I found pretty interesting about David McCormick. In a 2018 op-ed in the Washington Post, he backed Democratic congressional candidate Amy McGrath, who was literally the worst candidate who ever ran for office in Kentucky and ultimately lost and was backed big time by the Democratic establishment over Charles Booker, who is a much more compelling and dynamic candidate. So anyway, this is, but now, now, this is the new makeover. In an interview with the Fox News host Mark Levin, McCormick said he was running against, quote, the weakness and wokeness that you see across the country. I wonder how long you workshopped that. He noted he'd been driving a Ford F-150 pickup across Pennsylvania to meet voters. And though his father was actually a university president,

he made sure to mention the family farm, which he now owns. These people are so freaking fake. It is incredible. I mean, Trump also, I don't know why anyone was surprised that he endorsed the TV dude, has some similarities to him, frankly. I don't know why anyone has known him for 30 years. Ultimately shocked by that. But yeah, I mean, this Republican primary. So the Trump had actually endorsed a different candidate. Remember this Sean Parnell? Ultimately, his wife had in court filings that came out that he was

accused of domestic violence. He drops out of the race. That was the original Trump endorsement. And so that left the race really pretty wide open. The last polling I saw had a massive number of voters who were undecided and who said that, you know, 61% of those voters said they're more likely to vote for a candidate if Trump ultimately endorses them. So while we've been giving you some instances where the Trump endorsement hasn't really worked out, Georgia being sort of the key one here, this is one where since it was already close, I would think that this helps push Oz to the front of the Republican primary. Right. But at the same time, Oz is not necessarily doing well in head to head polls against John Fetterman. Yeah, which is interesting. So Fetterman has, you know, his lieutenant governor has a big profile in the state and a big lead right now on the Democratic side. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. This is from the Philadelphia

Inquirer. They say John Fetterman has a big lead in the Pennsylvania Senate primary on the Democratic side. Will attacks matter with six weeks to go? He is facing, the big contender against him is this sort of like corporatist, blue dog Democrat, Conor Lamb. He's a member of Congress right now. And Lamb went up, a Super PAC affiliated with Conor Lamb, went up with this big ad trashing Fetterman, saying he's like a socialist and he won't be able to win in the fall. Same old playbook that they run against anyone who's even like moderately to the left whatsoever. But at this point, Fetterman has such a lead in the primary. The last poll that I saw had him at 33 percent in the Democratic primary, followed by Conor Lamb with 10 percent. So a big gap there. There are still a lot of undecided voters. But if you dig into those undecided voters, very few of them are actually leaning

towards Lamb. So it looks like it's Fetterman's race to lose. The D.C. establishment is actually lining up behind this guy and trying to tell Conor Lamb to chill out so they don't damage him for the fall. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. D.C. Dems get on a frontrunner Fetterman's way in Pennsylvania. In his previous runs, they were sort of oppositional towards him because he does come from more of the Bernie wing of the party, backs Medicare for all and those sorts of things. But now because he has such a formidable lead, party leaders on Tuesday, they say, heard private concerns about a pro-Lamb super PAC after the group slammed Fetterman as a self-described Democratic socialist, a claim that led to the ad being pulled from one TV station. That's how

dishonest it was. Senator Warren raised the ad during a Democratic caucus meeting on Tuesday. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Gary Peters said they were, quote, addressing the issue. And Elizabeth Warren also said publicly, I saw the PAC ad that is currently running in Pennsylvania. It is wrong. It is disgusting. And if Conor Lamb wants to stand up as a Democrat, then he needs to disavow that ad today. So an unusual instance of the Democratic establishment backing someone who is at least purportedly on the left.

Although I saw a bunch of headlines this morning about the way that he's like, you know, prostrating himself to make sure he's like, I'm super pro-Israel and I'm not going to rock the boat. So he's trying to shore up that support. Listen, in terms of the prospects in the fall, I think it's going to be very difficult for a Democrat to win in Pennsylvania this year. I mean, it's a true swing state. Biden barely won it, as we all know, is very close. And the landscape is just really difficult. So even though right now the polls might say in a head-to-head matchup, Fetterman versus Oz, that he's got an edge, I think it's pretty tough sledding. And it pains me to say that because, you know, some of what Fetterman's done in some of his policy positions, et cetera, I really like and really appreciate. But I just think the landscape doesn't really matter that much about these two individual candidates. It's just a very tough landscape for Democrats. Yeah, I think that's right.

I mean, look, at the end of the day, it's a terrible landscape. Fetterman, he's probably a powerful candidate. He has obviously won statewide. At the same time, the guy doesn't seem to make a sentence without the words LGBTQ. So good luck, especially in this environment. I think that against Oz, especially somebody who's, Oz is not a right-wing culture warrior. He's somebody who can really lean into the COVID, the COVID talking points of terms. There was a great Wall Street Journal piece, maybe we'll cover it tomorrow, called The Long COVID Effect on Politics, which is basically suburban people who were fed up around school closures and around restrictions and are remembering it even now, months later. Obviously, inflation is going to be a top one as well.

Put it all together, it's a terrible national environment. But the MAGA fight part of this is just the most funny one. And don't worry, I'm sure David McCormick is going to burn a ton of his millions and billions of dollars still trying to win this primary. So it is not over. Yeah, well, listen, like I said, I think Fetterman is, as far as Democratic candidates, I think it's a pretty strong candidate. I mean, I think that's what the polling shows. People in Pennsylvania like him. I think he projects a lot of strength.

I think, you know, he was a mayor of a small town that was decimated by globalization and by NAFTA. And so, you know, he has a lot of credibility. And frankly, just his persona is, you know, he has a lot of credibility and frankly, just his persona is, you know, really quite compelling and quite unusual. You know, this is a guy who shows up to every event in like basketball shorts and like shorts and really comes across as like that every man. I just don't know that candidates matter that much when you have a national landscape. I hate to say it, but when you have a national landscape that is as bad for Democrats as it is right now, the particular characteristics or policy positions of either Dr. Oz or John Fetterman are probably going to matter a lot less

than the fact that Joe Biden's approval rating really super sucks and people are paying a lot of money at the gas pump. I think that's the reality of the situation. Yeah, we covered it. One of the segments we did on rising, which I'll always remember, was the decline in candidate quality from overall election analysis since 2010. It just doesn't matter that much. Like you said, it's almost all national conditions.

Not great. All right, this other piece is something we've been tracking closely and is extremely scary and disturbing and has vast consequences. So let's go ahead and put this next one up on the screen. So global food prices hit their highest recorded levels ever last month. Of course, this is driven up significantly by the war. Let me just read

you a little bit of this article. They say the Food and Agriculture Organization announced on Friday that its food price index, which tracks monthly changes in the international prices of a basket of commonly traded food commodities, averaged 159.3 points in March. That's up 12.6% just from February. So it jumped up almost 13% in just one month. February had already seen the highest level since the organization began tracking in 1990. And get this, it's more than a third higher than it was just a year ago. So this basket of sort of common food commodities, I'm sure things like wheat, for example, has spiked by a third. Prices have gone up in just one year. The FAO went on to say that the war spread shocks through markets for staple grains and vegetable oils.

Of course, guys, this is something we've been tracking here. Russia and Ukraine collectively accounted for about 30 percent of global wheat exports and 20 percent of maize exports over the last three years. And then you add on top of that, as if that wasn't all bad enough, we've had some impacts both here and around the world in terms of climate change that has also made the harvest less than what it should be. China said this was like their worst harvest on record, which also puts stress on the food system. You know, countries in that region really depend on Ukraine in particular and on Russia, both for wheat and for maize and some other, and sunflower oil and some other critical sort of staples there, and also for some of the components that go into fertilizer, which means that you're not just talking about a now problem in terms of food prices and poor countries in particular being unable to, you know, people being unable to afford to feed themselves and their children. You're also talking about significant lagging effects where the next harvest is also going

to be impacted because farmers can't get the fertilizer that they need in order to grow crops. I don't have to tell you that, you know, you would be hard-pressed to find a better indicator of when and where and how revolutions start than the price of wheat and the price of bread. This is a like multi-thousands of years historical trend. And of course, it's just going to cause mass suffering. I do want to be clear, there is enough wheat, there is enough food to feed the world,

but the price is the issue. It's going to be out of reach for millions and millions and millions of people. Yeah, I think that the real problem here is that if you look throughout history, and this is actually what I was thinking, part of the reason that the czars and the Russians and the Soviet Union were always so obsessed with controlling Ukraine is it was known as the breadbasket of Europe. It's the largest country in all of continental Europe. They have very fertile soil and they have for years produced an immense amount of the world's wheat. Now, since they've become an independent country, they export a ton of wheat to the rest of the world. As you were pointing to with India, one of the reasons that this has always been so concerning and almost immediately they were pointing to on the show was, yeah, food inflation here is bad. It's way worse in developing countries, Africa and in India and elsewhere, where they are, number one, already

more food insecure, to use a politically correct term, but also much more dependent on imports and have much more fluctuating commodity food markets. So there's a lot of different disruptions that can happen within the food markets that make life there very difficult. Now, we're going to get to this in Shanghai, but people should consider that not everybody lives the way that you and I live, or that Americans live. A lot of people here eat frozen food. Now, I don't think frozen food is good for you, but in terms of storage and all of that, it's very convenient. Part of the reason why, and we'll talk about this more in Shanghai, that Shanghai is such a complete disaster is because Chinese mostly eat fresh food. So they need food from the markets every

two or three days. That's a massive logistical challenge for the government. Same in terms of the flour and other things. This is more of an Indian problem, but people there don't think of grocery store shopping in the way that a lot of people here in the West do. They're not going to Costco, loading up the SUV. For once a week. For like three months of frozen pizzas or whatever. And so food inflation hits harder on the wallet. And also the supply chain disruption has a much more immediate effect

on the food systems in third world countries than it does in the first world, and specifically the West and the United States, just because of the difference in our food pattern. So this is a disaster. It really is. And as you said, I mean, what's the number one constant throughout all of civilization? No food, no bread? There's a problem. You can look at the Mayans. You can look at the Sumerians. French Revolution. French Revolution. It's like, I don't even have to go that far back. Arab Spring.

Like a couple hundred years within the last two decades. These are big, big problems that have longstanding 40th, 50th order effects on society. And, of course, you already have some countries where there was already mass famine. I mean, Afghanistan, thanks to our government's policies. Yemen, also partly thanks to our government's policies. Yemen, also partly thanks to our government policies. So already before this war, you had a dire situation with regards to wheat and overall food prices, with the UN agency responsible for sort of distributing aid saying that they were more stretched before the war than they had ever been in history. So with these kind of price spikes, 13% in a single month, it really spells a lot of heartache,

death, pain, and disaster, and something we're definitely going to keep our eye on. Yeah. Okay, let's go ahead and move on to Shanghai. This is something I've been watching with a lot of interest. The city of Shanghai right now is in a dystopian, nightmarish lockdown.

And it all really began in the last couple of days as food deliveries began to run out within the city. The first sign that things were not great over there was this leaked video taken from a balcony in Shanghai. We verified the translation. For those who are just listening, a drone is passing over the city, asking residents to go back into their balconies, saying, quote, please comply with COVID restrictions, control your soul's desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing. Let's take a listen. Yeah, I mean, that's as control your soul's desire for freedom, Crystal. It's only gotten worse since that video came out. That was five days ago. As I was explaining earlier in the show, Chinese people do not eat the same level of processed and frozen food. So that requires

consistent visits to the market and food deliveries in order to feed them. That is a massive logistical challenge. When current Shanghai city lockdown regulations say you cannot even leave your apartment door, you used to be able to at least leave within the building to go pick up deliveries. Now, these deliveries are a total nightmare. They're either coordinated by the government. About three or four orders that people are placing per day are just being canceled because of the inability to deliver. The other one is requiring a whole bunch of black market trading. Some people have access to groceries in this part of the city. They're selling them to other people in this part of the city. It's a total disaster. People are

putting empty fridges out on their balconies as a symbol of protest against the government. And there's a lot of people who are running out of food. All of this is because Shanghai is totally committed to a COVID zero policy, which is that they are going to lock the city down as long as it takes in order to have zero COVID. Here's the thing. The Chinese government has put himself in a real bind, as I've explained here before. Number one, their elderly population is not even close to as vaccinated as ours. Now, the reason why is because a lot of them thought that zero COVID was going to work because with previous strains, both Delta and the original COVID, you know, lockdown as China did, it actually did kind of work. But Omicron is so

transmissible that they now have 25,000, I think, admitted cases of COVID, which means you have tens and tens of thousands, if not millions of more. This current lockdown policy just not going to work. So they have an elderly population, which is not as vaccinated. Their general population, also not nearly as vaccinated. Sinopharm and Sinovac, the vaccine that they've created, is also not particularly effective against even original COVID, let alone Omicron. So they're in a real catch-22. They can either do lockdown, an ineffective one, or they've condemned a lot of their elderly population to death by emphasizing zero COVID instead of vaccination. So you put all that together, they're obviously in a tough spot. But the population is suffering to a degree that is really difficult to comprehend.

And we are seeing extraordinary scenes out of the city of Shanghai. We're about to show you a clip of residents, millions of people, sitting on their city balconies who are screaming and singing for freedom from their balconies. This is going to be in Shanghainese, so we're only going to play a couple of seconds for those who are just listening. But just to give you a taste, this is what it sounds like in the city at night. The guy who's speaking there is basically saying, because I don't think people can hold out much longer, he says that there's tragedy. So there's some videos that are surfacing out of China this morning, Crystal, of the Chinese military, which is being deployed in the streets of Shanghai. Now, you put that all together, and this is a real dangerous situation. I don't think the Chinese government is going to back down. They've never backed down in the past.

People should remember, we probably have a better idea of what's happening in Shanghai than people in Beijing and in the rest of the country, just because of the Chinese government's ability in order to crack down. In the Beijing equivalent of Times Square or whatever, there were signs this morning saying, don't believe everything you see on social media, and do not share viral videos. So these are all being put out to the population.

That's decent advice, though. Actually, pretty good. But the most dystopian one that I've seen yet is this policy. Let's put this up there on the screen. Health officials in Shanghai are defending the policy of separating babies and young children from their parents if they test positive for COVID-19. So they are literally taking children who are testing positive for COVID and receiving treatment in a public health center. They even say this. This is a direct quote. If the child is younger than seven, those children will receive treatment in the public health center.

For older children, we will just mainly isolate them in centralized quarantine places. Some of the reports out of those quarantine places are nightmarish. Not enough food, bad sleeping conditions, toilets, all of that. So this is a total – I mean it is difficult to comprehend the level of dystopian disaster. We're talking about people who are kneeling in the street as people come by and check their ID passes, who are swabbing them constantly. I mean, this is the full stuff of nightmares of authoritarian lockdown. Yeah. And I think the reason why it matters is obviously out of empathy for the people who are suffering there and are scared and the children who are

being taken from their parents against their will and all of that. But I also think at the beginning of COVID, when China really cracked down and they like quickly erected these hospitals and they, you know, forced everybody to stay in their homes and they were very, very sort of stringent in what they were doing as best we could tell from here, there was almost like an envy of their ability to take those sorts of super aggressive authoritarian actions. Yeah, that's right. And there was a kind of weird horseshoe between people like right wing people who are kind of like authoritarian, curious and left wing, super pro lockdown folks that were kind of jealous of what was being done in China ultimately. And I think now we see the ugly face of that and the fact that they only focused on what is a completely unrealistic and frankly anti-scientific policy of zero COVID that has not worked in one place in the entire world, rather than focusing on vaccination and making sure that

especially vulnerable elderly populations, of which China has a large proportion, making sure that they were protected, you know, with the highly effective vaccines that we now have, that has led to just an unfolding disaster of catastrophic consequences. And, you know, now it's, as you said, it's too late. Because even if they shifted now, okay, well, let's just go out and get everybody vaccinated. That takes a lot of time. And so in the meantime, you're going to have a lot of severe illness and a lot of death among an elderly population that is dramatically under-vaccinated. Yeah. I mean, I'll repeat it again. Only half of Chinese aged 80 and older are fully vaccinated against COVID. Half. And that's with Sinovacs. Listen, we haven't done

the greatest job in the world on vaccination here because of our own government's policy and a deep strain of anti-vax sentiment within the country. But our elderly population is almost 100%. At least one shot, almost 100%. So on that metric, and that was the key age group, we have done much, much, much better. And those are the people who are going to die. Let's be honest. Those people have a way, way higher chance of actually dying from COVID. And listen to this. Of the 264 million Chinese age over 60, 52 are yet to be fully, 52 million are yet to be fully vaccinated. That's one-sixth of the population. Yeah, you're not going to snap your fingers and get that done. It's impossible. Think about it. It takes a month in order to do two doses. What are you going to do? Omicron is

going to outpace this thing. It's going to burn through the entire country. And look, we have rural hospital problems, but not even close to the level of China. So they're about to get flooded. They are going fully on the lockdown. Here's an update actually from an American guy who lives in Shanghai. Let's put this up there on the screen. He says, day 22 of my Shanghai lockdown. As we feared yesterday, we have new restrictions. Before, we were allowed to leave our building, but not our community, to get deliveries. No more. Now we are not allowed out of our apartment door. He references how he has to don a full hazmat suit in order to go down and get some deliveries. He's a volunteer who's allowed to basically go door to door. But he points it out again,

which is that his situation is bad, and many of his neighbors and others because of groceries and their inability in order to get food. I referenced this, but he says, for my family, we had three deliveries that were booked to deliver today, two group purchases of meat and seafood and one individual purchase of soap and shampoo. All three were canceled. We eventually were able to get a delivery from a friend in another part of the city who had better access to groceries. There are reports out there of black market level prices for food, which means that the poor people who live in Shanghai are screwed as usual, and they're not able to eat and going to have to have subpar nutrition for themselves and for their kids. Who knows how long

this thing is going to last. I mean, the Chinese government, they don't back down. There's no way. This level of social strife, you know, everybody here would fold no matter what. But over there, they're going to call in the military. They are going to enforce full compliance. And we saw this in very limited instances actually in Wuhan. Sometimes if people in the building had COVID, they would just seal off the building. And if some people in there died, it was like, well, you know, so be it. There were a lot of reports of that. And this is what full communist collectivism really looks like whenever it comes to enforcement. It's such a sad situation. There are 30 million people living in Shanghai. This is what full authoritarianism looks like, you know,

backed by any ideology. And yeah, again, I think there was a lot of sort of triumphalism both coming from China, but also from Western observers looking at what they were able to do and say, I wish we had that. No, you don't. No, you don't. Listen, I mean, we've got a long way to go to have a real true democracy here, but at least the say of the people means something. Oh, yeah. And I will take that and all of the strife and the messiness that that entails on a daily basis over drones circling overhead, chastising you for your sole wanting freedom. Let's jump right in with the latest with regards to Ukraine and Russia. And this is actually a really big deal.

Let's go ahead and throw this first tear sheet up on the screen. It looks like Finland and Sweden may join NATO as soon as this summer. This is really an extraordinary turn for both of these countries, Finland in particular. And this is the way Washington officials are spinning this. They say Russia has made a massive strategic blunder as Finland and Sweden look poised to join NATO as early as the summer. Washington is banking on the move that will stretch Russia's military and enlarge the Western alliance from 30 to 32 members as a direct consequence of President Putin's invasion of

Ukraine. You know, one thing that is pretty remarkable here to their point about, you know, if Russia's concern was NATO enlargement, this has really tremendously backfired because support for joining NATO in Finland in particular has skyrocketed over the past month. There was not even close to majority support with that population previously, and now it's up about 62% in March. This obviously is significant because it would increase the land border between NATO territory and Russia. It would more than double from around currently 754 miles to nearly 1600 miles. It would also, this is from FP, it would also extend NATO's northern flank across the full length of the border, very strategic area where Russia's navy is, a sizable

chunk of it, is based. And by the way, there doesn't seem to be any objections from NATO members at this point to the idea of further enlarging the alliance. NATO members seem universally ready to welcome Sweden and Finland with open arms. They're saying effectively that, you know, they'd be kind of a package deal, even though obviously those countries would kind of determine their own fate individually. But the idea is that they both bring a lot to bear, and obviously they're sort of, you know, aligned, and so it makes sense to bring them in together. But obviously this comes with, you know, extraordinary risks. We've already seen the way that NATO expansion has exacerbated tensions with

Russia. And while Putin is responsible for his own actions and his invasion into Ukraine was nowhere near justified, it was a predictable response to previous expansions of NATO. Russia is already being very clear that they find this to be an untenable situation. Let's put this BBC tear sheet up on the screen. Ukraine war, Russia warns Sweden and Finland against NATO membership. And we also put this map on the side that shows you the countries that have joined NATO just since 1997, 14 of them. You can see there Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and on and on. And so this would add another two to that mix. Here's specifically what Russia is saying. They've said, everything is about mutual deterring and should one side, and we consider NATO to be

one side, be more powerful than the other, especially in terms of nuclear arms, then it will be considered a threat for the whole architecture of security and it will cause us to take additional measures. That is from Dmitry Peskov. Putin's spokesman said that to Sky News on Friday. So it looks like this is almost a fate accomplished. It looks like there is very little resistance. It looks like the populations of these countries have become firmly in favor of joining NATO. I understand from their perspective why they would want to do it. I do not understand from our perspective why we want to continue to escalate and ratchet up tensions with Russia. Yeah, and I think that, look, it's difficult to do this without sanding callous. However, we should consider the context through which this entire conflict erupted.

And NATO expansion was a key part of the impetus that drove Putin's paranoid mindset and led him to the unjustified invasion. Not blaming the United States, but we're also not saying that the U.S. did not have any role whatsoever in setting the table through which this specific conflict erupted from, which then begs the question, given what we know now about Russian behavior and about NATO expansion, is expanding NATO really still a good idea? Look, Finland and Sweden, if you're them, I get it. Both have actually been invaded by Russia in the past. Both have a long history of tension and defending their sovereignty and exchanging borders and all of that. However, they do not get to decide. The Swedish people do not get to decide whether the United States is going to launch a nuclear weapon on their behalf. The

Finnish people do not get to decide that. The American people should get to decide that. And we are missing the exact debate that we lacked in 2008. Let's put this up there on the screen. And this is important because this debate mirrors what it is today. Fiona Hill, who is herself a Russiagator, actually says that she warned George W. Bush in the Oval Office in 2008 that offering Ukraine NATO membership would be seen as a provocation by Putin. Then Vice President Dick Cheney responded by asking her if she hated freedom. As Mehdi Hasan says, sounds like familiar rhetoric to some of us today. Do I wish invasion upon the Swedish people or the Finnish people? No, I've been to Finland. Finland is an awesome place. Terrible food, just have to say it. But

you put that out there and and what we see is that that doesn't mean that as Americans, we should be risking nuclear war on the Finnish people's behalf. It can sound callous. You can stand with somebody and also not want to sacrifice perhaps 100 million of your own citizens on behalf of them. This is the cold language of real politics, which is necessary in terms of strategic balancing. And I think your point about how so many of these actions have been taken with little to no debate is a really important one, and one that we keep trying to emphasize here, how quickly and how far and how fast the United States has gone in the escalations with Russia with very little

public discussion or debate. It's just, you know, it's completely off the table. And then all of a sudden it's a done deal. And it feels very much like, I mean, this is being announced as like, it's already done. When to your point, there should be a real debate and discussion over the wisdom of this move, which also was not done before offering Ukraine and Georgia NATO membership back in that era. It is worth, I think, reading the New York Times article with the specifics of this anecdote from Fiona Hill because it is so classic. They say, in the Oval Office, Hill recallss describing a scene that has not been previously reported. She told Bush and Vice President Cheney that offering a membership pass to Ukraine and Georgia could be problematic. While Bush's appetite for promoting the spread of democracy had not been dampened by the Iraq war, President Putin of Russia viewed NATO with suspicion and was vehemently opposed to neighboring countries joining its ranks. He would regard it as a provocation, which was one reason the U.S.'s key NATO allies opposed the idea. Cheney took umbrage at Hill's assessment. Quote, so you're telling me you're opposed to freedom and democracy, she says he snapped. According to Hill,

he then abruptly gathered his materials and walked out of the Oval Office. He's just yanking your chain, she remembers Bush telling her. Go on with what you were saying. But the president seemed confident he could win over the other NATO leaders, saying, I like it when diplomacy is tough. Ignoring the advice of Hill and the U.S. intelligence community, Bush announced in Bucharest that NATO should welcome Georgia and Ukraine into the membership action plan. So those are the mistakes of the past. That again, it does not justify Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine. But there's a difference between justification and saying that our actions created a predictable conflict here. And that's exactly what we're facing. Now, one thing that people are pointing out is, look,

Ukraine used to be part of the Soviet Union. Finland and Sweden weren't. So there may be a little bit less of, you know, maybe a little less sort of agitating to Putin in his vision of Russia's greatness and what their sphere of influence should ultimately be. But you're talking about a sizable increase in the land border that they are telling you up front they will consider to be a sort of provocation. So this should be, I mean, this should be a huge debate. People should think very carefully about the consequences of this. And instead, it's just being presented by the press as like, this is something that's happening and who could possibly object? Look, at the risk of sounding like one of those boomers, our founders foresaw this and warned about the risk of foreign entanglements abroad. John Quincy Adams, we do not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. We also established under JQA the

Monroe Doctrine, under which we would focus on our interests in the Western Hemisphere and to keep the European powers out, which is what an entire century of our foreign policy was oriented around. So then we should understand how other countries can also have their own version of that and can want strategic breathing room in their geographical area. That does not mean that I think it's okay for people to be subjugated, but it also doesn't mean that we should downplay the risks. And I just keep coming back to George Kennan, the father of U.S. containment policy in the Cold War, a person who understood Russia probably better than any American for or since, wrote this in 1996. Let's put this up there on the screen, please, which is this.

Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western, militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion, to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy, to restore the atmosphere of the Cold War to East-West relations, to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking. Last but not least, it might make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to secure the Russian Duma's ratification of the START II Treaty and to achieve further reductions of nuclear weaponry." Basically, every sentence in that came true. Every single sentence. And I am just begging people, let's have the debate that we did not have when we expanded NATO into the Baltic states. Let's have the debate that we did not have in 2008 when NATO made an official policy pronouncement that Georgia and Ukraine will be a part of NATO. There's an excellent op-ed in the New York Times today

called Putin's War in Ukraine is Watershed, Time for America to Get Real. His name is Dr. Charles Kupchan. He's an international affairs professor at Georgetown. He's a realist. And what you actually can point to in Dr. Kupchan's op-ed is that the invitation of NATO membership to Saakashvili in Georgia in 2008, invited an action on his behalf that he thought the West was a lot more with him than he originally thought. So he launched operations in South Ossetia. That is what then prompted the Putin, and I'm not justifying it, incursion into Georgia and the takeover of that area. And then Saakashvili was shocked when the West didn't actually have his back. So the point is, is that these gray area

pronouncements about who is going to be in NATO and not can actually increase uncertainty and risk and give people the wrong opinion on all sides. Same thing in terms of Finland and Sweden. It would require a two-thirds vote in the United States Senate in order to ratify that as a treaty. Previously, these things have sailed through. North Macedonia. Do you remember ever deciding whether you wanted to send your kids to go abroad and die for North Macedonia? I don't remember having that discussion. And that happened in the last couple of years. This is exactly the debate we have to have right now over Finland, over Sweden. We had extraordinarily huge debates in our history, going back to the League of Nations and Lodges, you know, Lodges reservations to Wilson's 14 points. This became a national policy

through which we tried to understand what treaty obligations will the United States have? What does it mean for American boys and blood? And we lost that in the post-Cold War era. Yeah, we have lost that. And I think that's a part of a larger trend that we've talked about here a number of times with regards to the Federal Reserve and any number of other critical U.S. domestic and foreign policy decisions, which is that there's been this anti-populist pushback that has said, this is all too complicated for you all to understand. So don't worry about it. Let the experts handle it. The one with the PhDs in foreign affairs and the relevant experience, let them make the decisions

and you all just trust us, just trust us. Well, no, this is what a democracy is all about, is citizens engaging and informing themselves and actually having input on what are incredibly consequential decisions. As you put it, even putting Russia aside, are you prepared to extend those treaty obligations to two more countries that say, if those countries are attacked, we will be at war, period, end of story?

Are you ready to do that? I mean, at the very least, we should be having a conversation about what that means. And that goes back to my frustration with the press coverage of this war, which has not been serious-minded at all, which has not helped to inform the American people about the potential consequences and backlash of some of these extraordinary decisions that are being made in a very short period of time with very little, very few dissenting voices. So this is another one that is being presented as a done deal, but it is not. So make sure that if you have an opinion on this, you are making that opinion heard loud and clear.

Elon Musk and Twitter. What a whirlwind of things that have happened here. So we brought you previously the news that Elon Musk had bought about a 9.7% stake in Twitter, which makes him officially the largest shareholder of that company. That spawned all sorts of takes because Elon has much more of a free speech view and wants to change the product. So then Twitter announced that after discussion with Elon, the CEO said that Elon Musk would be joining the board of directors. Now, why that's important is because Elon, if he joined the board of directors, would be subject to fiduciary responsibilities as a member of the board, meaning that he could not take actions publicly, which could possibly impact the stock price, which would open up shareholder lawsuits. But number two, and this was underreported, was that as part of his shareholder agreement with the board of directors, what he said is that he would not acquire more than a 14.9% stake in the company, meaning that he would not increase his ownership stake, which could then lead to the grounds for a hostile takeover.

That was the ground that was set until yesterday morning when Parag Agarwal made a shock announcement. He's the CEO of Twitter. Let's put this up there on the screen. He says, Elon has decided not to join our board. Now, here's the note that he sent to his team, and I'm going to read a lot of this. Elon Musk has decided not to join our board. Here's I can share what happened. The board and I had many discussions about Elon joining the board with Elon directly.

We were excited to collaborate and clear about the risks. We also believed having Elon as a fiduciary of the company where he, like all board members, has to act in the best interest of the company and our shareholders was the best path forward. The board offered him a seat. We announced on Tuesday, Elon will be appointed the board contingent

on a background check and formal acceptance. Elon's appointment to the board was to become officially effective on 4-9. But Elon shared that same morning he will no longer be joining the board. I believe this is for the best. We have and will always value input from our shareholders, whether they are on the board or not. Elon is our biggest shareholder. We will remain open to his input. There will be distractions ahead, but our goals and priorities remain unchanged. The decisions we make, how we execute is in our hands, no one else's. Let's tune out the noise

and stay focused on the work and what we're building. All eyes on that last paragraph. There will be distractions ahead. Sounds ominous. There is a particular little hint as to what happened. Let's put this up there on the screen, which is Elon actually deleted a lot of his tweets, which were critical of the Twitter product, but a very conspicuous like, which said this in response. Let me break this down for you. Elon became largest shareholder for free speech. Elon was told to play nice and not to speak freely. And Musk actually liked that tweet. Now, the reason that this matters, Crystal, let's go ahead and put the CNBC piece up on the screen, is that Elon is no longer bound now by the agreement that he made with the board not to take up to a pursue a hostile takeover of the company where he could acquire as much of a share as he wanted within the company and then cobble together other pieces with large shareholders or possibly even retail shareholders and force changes both at the CEO board level but also in terms of governance at the company itself.

So this could have an extraordinary impact on Twitter, the company. Now, the real question obviously everyone's asking is, why should I care? Well, because Twitter, yes, by only having 300 million daily active users, is disproportionately impactful on the elites of news, of politics, sports, pretty much everything. And so with that disproportionate impact, their content policy, how the company is run and more, has a huge impact on the way that you receive information from basically all aspects of your entire life. Yeah, I mean, just to be, you know, give you one really specific example, is Trump going to be on Twitter during the next campaign, right?

I mean, just that decision alone is extraordinarily consequential. And it's not just the possibility that Elon could execute a hostile takeover here. It's also that if he was sitting on the board, he would have a fid obligation. So it wouldn't have to go so far as a hostile takeover. You can understand. So I can understand why, you know, the CEO, the board members, the other major shareholders, I can understand why they're nervous about this. Because ultimately, regardless of how you feel about, you know, Elon's ideology versus Parag Agrawal, this is also about control. And it's about power. And it's about who actually is directing the future of this platform, which is extraordinarily significant and central to our ability to communicate and the way elites process information in this country. So I understand why they're kind of freaked out, but there's a lot of reporting of like employees freaking out, which makes a little bit less sense to me.

I mean, I guess ultimately it's also, you know, they're probably more comfortable with Parag's interpretation of, you know, his basic rejection of the First Amendment and free speech. So they are nervous about what this will ultimately mean for them. I mean, you guys know my overall view is, you know, I feel about Elon the way I feel about every billionaire. They are acting in their own self-interest. He has used Twitter in ways that has been sanctioned by the SEC. Even in this deal, let's go ahead and put the next element up on the screen. So he waited to file his disclosures with the SEC 11 days. So he was 11 days late

in publicly declaring that he had amassed a large stake in Twitter. So once you acquire a certain amount, you're supposed to immediately publicly disclose that. So he was 11 days late in doing that. While he was doing that, he continued to acquire Twitter stock at that low price. Then, once after belatedly, his stake is disclosed. Of course, the Twitter stock price went through the roof, and he personally benefited to the tune of $159 million. $156, sorry. So here's the Washington Post. Elon Musk delayed filing a form and made $156 million. I mean, this is securities fraud, whether it was intentional or incidental. He ends up, as billionaires always do, on top. Even if the SEC ends up fining him for this, he made $156 million.

The fine is liable to be a couple of hundred thousand at the most. So he makes a massive profit here. And this harkens back to other ways he has used Twitter to his own benefit. Back in 2018, he had to enter into a consent decree with the Securities Exchange Commission for allegedly misleading investors when he tweeted he'd gathered enough funding to take Tesla private, must paid a $20 million fine, and agreed to step down as chairman and vet his tweets with lawyers. Last month, he asked the SEC to scrap that agreement. He also has pushed the rules by polling his Twitter followers on whether he should sell a 10% stake in Tesla. The Wall Street Journal also reported in February the SEC was investigating a stock sale by Musk's brother a day before that tweet. All of this is to say that he may be genuinely committed to free speech, but also keep in mind that his free speech on Twitter is something that he has used in order to profit him directly. My overall view here is that with all of these tech companies, these tech giants,

and the problems that they have created for discourse in the public square, the answer is not going to be to sort of like libertarian entrepreneur our way out of it. There's going to have to be government regulation because we cannot depend on the whims of which billionaire happens to be at the helm for when all of our public discourse ultimately depends on these platforms. So if he wants to get involved in being part of that broader solution and not just sort of screwing around with Twitter here, that would be something I would be much more interested in. Yeah, and part of the issue too is assembling a hostile takeover like coalition would just be very difficult. I went ahead and pulled who the other top investors are in the company.

It's Vanguard, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, and State Street Corp. Cool. Good luck convincing them in order to join a coalition so that you can enforce more free speech policy. All of those people benefit from not having more free speech on the platform. The other issue here, which is kind of interesting, is that Twitter's governance structure is actually set up such that Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin and – I'm forgetting his name. It's Larry Page – all have mega controlling voting power in the company. Right.

Meaning that even though they don't own the vast majority of shares, they set it up as like a class A and a class B structure where class B shares have ten times the voting power of a class A share, which means that they'll always remain in total control of what they can do. Twitter does not have that because they don't have a single founder. They had a founding team, and they've had a real mess of a governance structure. So they're actually much more rife for hostile takeovers, but it also makes it so that all these investors can throw their weight around. So there could be a big fight here, is more what I'm saying. Elon is not the de facto winner by any means. There's also, I mean, there's also a real possibility that he's basically just trolling. I mean, oh yeah, definitely. You know, I mean, that's certainly a possibility here is he's just being sort of a shit disturber and trolling and throwing his

billionaire weight around because, I mean, listen, this is a guy who's got a lot of other stuff going on. Is he really, like, if you were going to actually do the hostile takeover and then, you know, influence them in this way or that way and sort of take control of the helm, that takes a lot of time and a lot of focus. And he's certainly got the money to do it, but does he have the personal bandwidth or desire to make that a core part of what he's up to? I think that's a big open question. He's building two other companies. The vast majority of his attention should be on Tesla and SpaceX. I'd frankly prefer it that way.

But, you know, it's interesting nonetheless. I am enjoying the Twitter employees freaking out. We have some breaking news right now this morning, which is we got the very latest in terms of inflation numbers. And I'm reading now from Heather Long, Washington Post economics reporter on what those numbers are. She says U.S. inflation hit 8.5 percent in March. That is the highest level since the end of 1981. It was a great year. That was the year I was born in. High gas prices accounted for half the March inflation spike. Gas prices peaked on March 11th. Rising food and rent prices also hurt. Wages were up 5.6% in the past year. And if you can do basic math, you can see that that does not even come close

to keeping up with inflation. So we were prepped for this rather dire report that shows an extraordinary continued increase in inflation. It's really not too much of a surprise, given that on top of all of the issues we're already having with supply chain shocks and all the red corporate greed and all the rest, that you add on top of that now a war, which is causing increased gas prices, further increased food prices. We covered yesterday that

world food prices have shot up to a historic high. And, you know, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that we're having these horrific inflation numbers coming out this month. Jen Psaki actually sort CPI headline inflation to be extraordinarily elevated due to Putin's price hike. And we expect a large difference between core and headline inflation reflecting the global disruptions in energy and food markets. So core inflation doesn't include energy and food prices. Headline inflation does. And of course, we know that core inflation, energy, the impact of energy, of course, on oil prices, gas prices, we expect that to continue to reflect what we've seen the increases be over the course of this invasion. And just as an example, since President Putin's military buildup accelerated in January, average gas prices are up more than 80 cents.

Most of the increase occurred in the month of March. And at times, gas prices were more than a dollar above pre-invasion level. So that roughly 25% increase in gas prices will drive tomorrow's inflation reading. And certainly, it's not a surprise to us, but we certainly think it will be reflected. The Putin price hike thing really annoys the crap out of me. It's so cringe. It's so cringe to start with. And second of all, we're not stupid.

I mean, we remember that inflation started long before Russia's war in Ukraine. Is it making the situation worse? Yes. But God, have some basic respect for the American people and level with them about what is actually going on here. One more piece of data that is significant about the inflation report, and this is from Neil Irwin, who's chief economic correspondent at Axios. He says the most worrying thing is that services, excluding energy services, are also up 0.6 percent, and that has accelerated that price increase each of the last three months. So he says even

if durable goods and energy prices stabilize, that suggests real broadening of underlying inflation. So just to break that down a little bit, what has been driving inflation previously was not services because, you know, people were locked down from COVID. And so they were using their money to buy things, goods, and that was part of what was driving up the prices. So the thought was, okay, well, once things sort of level out and we get these supply chain issues worked out, we can kind of stabilize again and inflation will go back down. But when you see services, those prices also start starting to increase. That indicates you have a broader problem than just the supply chain issues. So all of this adds up to a very worrying situation. And it also means

the Fed is going to be under more pressure to hike interest rates more quickly and to rid themselves, get assets off of their balance sheet more quickly, which also has a massive tightening effect. We talked to you last week about how their comments, even from the most dovish members of the Feds, essentially say they're going to be doing both of those things at a rapid pace. We found out the minutes from the last meeting when they hiked interest rates a quarter of a percent that there were a number of members who wanted to go further than that. So that's the other question is with the fed looking at this information, it makes it more likely that they tighten quicker. And that makes it more likely that they tip us into recession. Yeah. And just to give you guys an idea, inflation is actually accelerating because inflation in February was up by 0.8%.

In March, it was up 1.2% just in a single month. And if you think about how that compounds from October, it was 0.9, then 0.7, then 0.6, then 0.6, then 0.8, now 1.2. As it continues to escalate, you can just see the compounding effect of food price, gas price, now service price. Everything is going up. The food inflation is actually up 8.8%. That's the largest 12-month increase since the period of May 1981. And combine that, obviously, with gas prices, and it's a total disaster.

I mean, people are just getting continually hammered in such a destructive way when you consider that most Americans spend the vast majority of their income on housing, food, and gas. And when you have all three of those go up, 5.6 measly increase in wages, not going to do a single thing. So look, we have big problems in this country right now. I mean, even on the gas

price, part of the issue, and again, I know it's unpopular to talk about it, but crude oil prices have actually gone down. And yet your gas price has not really gone down that much. The average price is still $4 a gallon. You know why? Gas stations actually make the most profits when oil prices fall. So a lot of people are keeping their gas prices high. Now look, am I going to sit here and demonize some guy who's a convenience store owner or whatever? He's probably been hammered all throughout COVID, got wrecked, needs a profit. I get it. But I'm saying that on a broader structural level, we have a big problem here because the increase in these services inflation too, I mean, I'm sure you've

seen this too, Crystal. I've been hearing from people, if you want to get your house fixed or something like that, good luck, 40%, 50% increase. They could charge whatever they want. Cars, obviously the same thing. The amount of power that some of these people have and are using in order to increase price even more so than inflation makes it so that people are in a really, really tough bind right now because they're just not making more money, but everything costs more. And that just, I mean, that really hurts a lot of people's household balance sheets. And it really affects quality of life. I mean, look, if there's a recession, you should remember that people die. People kill themselves during recessions. People die out of lack of health care and, you know,

inability in order to afford certain types of medicine. They don't buy as nutritious food. Mental health suffers dramatically. Alcohol and drug use goes up. It's not a joke. You know, it's really not. Yeah. And part of the reason why the landscape is so distressing right now is because effectively the only economic tools we have at our disposal are the Fed, because Congress is so broken and unable to respond to literally anything. So you have to rely on the Fed to get inflation under control, which is obviously a massive issue for working people trying to make ends meet every single month. I mean, it is by far the number one concern for voters going to the polls and just for ordinary families trying to survive. And the Fed's instruments are very

blunt. And the Fed's instruments take a while for you to see the impact. So that means it's very easy for them to overshoot the mark. They're trying to bring in the economy for what they call a soft landing, meaning that you slowly tighten things up, tighten things up, and hopefully it sort of gets inflation under control without triggering that recession. especially when during COVID, they went even further than they had gone during the financial crash of 2008. They acquired through quantitative easing an extraordinary amount. It's like 33% of GDP of assets on their balance sheet. And so it's not just a question of how quickly they raise interest rates. And a report like this will certainly push them towards hiking them a lot more quickly. But when you also are unwinding that balance sheet at a more escalated pace, that also has the equivalent effect of even further hiking interest rates. So that's why you're seeing more and more economists warning that we're heading towards recession. You're seeing more and more people who we don't necessarily love, but who are definitely

invested in the future of the economy. People like Jamie Dimon and others looking at this and saying, you know, this is a very tough landscape. You've had massive asset price inflation, and it's a dangerous situation right now. It really truly is. This inflation report, it's going to hurt. Food prices being so high. Gas prices continuing to be so high. Wage is not even close to keeping pace. And then you have this pushing the Fed towards more dramatic action, which could very well tip the country into recession. So it really is truly a pretty dire landscape. And we got a much better picture of it with this inflation report this

morning. Yeah, I feel really bad for a lot of working people out there. This is an interesting study, an interesting report from a great friend of the show, Derek Thompson, who always has thoughtful pieces about sort of cultural trends in society. Let's go ahead and put this piece up there on the screen. Why American teens are so sad. Four forces are propelling the rising rates of depression among young people. I'm just going to go through this piece a little bit. So first of all, on the numbers, you know, there, some people have a kind of a potential fallacy that the reason it looks like teenagers are sadder than previous generations is because they're more comfortable talking about their feelings. And so teenagers have always been moody.

It's just this generation is more comfortable actually sharing that and talking about it with pollsters, for example. But there is some hard data to suggest that that is not the case. So Derek points out from 2009 to 2021, the share of American high school students who say they feel persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness rose from 26% to 44%. That is the highest level that's ever recorded. And it's matched with increases in rates of people having to go to the hospital for suicide attempts or having to seek counseling for suicide attempts. And so there is hard data to match what is being self-reported by teenagers. This is also not equal among groups. So the chart up there showed some of the different demographic groups within teen populations and the way that they are feeling.

So you have very high rates, nearly half of LGBTQ teens who say they have contemplated suicide during the pandemic. That compares with 14% of their heterosexual peers. But even if you look at every single demographic group, whether it's by race, whether it's by other identity factors, you see sadness being self-reported going up and up and up. So Derek looks into this and he posits four overlapping reasons why this might be the case. And I think these are pretty interesting. So number one, he points to social media. And he has some data here to back this up. In particular, there's a new study from Cambridge University where researchers looked at 84,000 people of all ages and found social media was strongly associated with worse mental health during certain sensitive life periods, including for girls ages 11 to 13.

This is backed by other research. It's actually backed by the leaked Instagram, Facebook studies about the way Instagram made young girls feel worse about themselves. And I like the way he explained it. He compared it to something like alcohol, which can be social lubricant and, you know, actually be beneficial in certain situations, but for a minority of users presents a real significant problem that's detrimental to their health and overall well-being. The second factor, so social media is number one. The second factor he points to, which is again related, is sociality. So compared with their counterparts in the 2000s,

today's teens are less likely to go out with their friends, less likely to get their driver's license, and less likely to play youth sports. These are all trends, by the way, that predate COVID. But obviously, COVID lockdowns exacerbated both the, you know, over-dependence on social media and the lack of in real life interactions with friends, peers, playing sports and all of those things. And so what he talks about is, you know, social media isn't necessarily a problem if it's being like, instead of watching TV, you're on your phone or on your device. It does start to become more of an issue if it's replacing

real-life interactions that, you know, are associated with positive health and mental well-being outcomes. So, again, things like playing sports or, you know, hanging out with your friends in real life. The third piece that he talks about here is just bad news. The fact that there seems to be an endless spiral of sort of existentially bad news and, of course, news media, which is invested in playing that up at every turn, whether it's, you know, right now, looming threat of recession, and you've got a war, and you've got the climate crisis, and you've got Trump looming on the horizon, and political divisions, and all of these things, that that can certainly stress parents and stress

kids. And by the way, stressed parents often contribute to stressed kids, that that can certainly stress parents and stress kids. And by the way, stress parents often contribute to stress kids. And that's the last factor that he talks about here, which is parenting. Parents are very, especially upper class parents, very concerned about their kids being able to go to the good school and get the good job and make sure that they end up on the happy side of the class divide. And that stress is being transmitted to kids in the form of, you know, all sorts of expectations and pressure and tutoring and clubs and practices and all of this sort of stuff. And that also, you know, the amount of time that parents spend chaperoning their kids around and taking them to all the various things that

they think they have to do in order to achieve a basic sort of stable life that has all increased over the years. So just to recap, social media, sociality, bad news, and parenting, those are the four things that he's sort of pointing to here, many of which were exacerbated by the pandemic. Yeah, this is really upsetting, obviously, given what's happening. You got these teenagers, they're the future, and how you feel in your teen years is very informative for how you're going to feel for the rest of your life. I never thought I would say this, but look, some of these bad behaviors for teenagers are down. It says, per Derek, lots of self-reported behaviors are moving in a positive direction. The 1990s, drinking and driving is down 50%. School fights are down 50%.

Sex before 13 is down 70%. School bullying is down. All of those are good things, but it's indicative of people not taking more risky behaviors. And while it can be good on the extremes in behaviors like this, it does indicate that people are being more lonely. People are taking less risk and that that is manifesting, yes, in some of these good ways, but that these less risky inclinations and wanting to engage in this type of more sociological behavior is obviously way, way down. And there's a lot of reasons for that. Social media, obviously, the COVID lockdowns pushed things in the wrong direction. And when

you look at all those indicators, what Derek points to is that while all of it, what he's saying is that teens are not behaving badly. In fact, they're not really behaving in any way whatsoever. They're becoming a lot more lonely. And by being lonely, they're not engaging in more social activity, which is then increasing suicide. Social media obviously is a proxy for social interaction, but it's not real. It's not got the same level of connection. And so by indulging these things and also with the rise of the parenting and the helicopter parent with that, it's made it so that a lot of people are not experiencing life in the same way. This can sound like a boomer talking point. Like I get that. But I think that there is obviously a certain level of truth to growing up with a phone. Your youth and life is just going to be significantly different from those of us who were not raised with the iPhone. Yes, that's very true.

I mean, there's a couple things to say about this. First of all, the way Derek paints it I think is really helpful, which he says basically in a lot of ways kids are being sort of kept kids longer and sheltered more, both by anxious parents and by the realities of more social media interaction versus real life experimental action in the real world. And so in that way, they're being kept kids longer. And yet, because of their being exposed to any manner of things on the internet, in other ways, they're becoming more adult quicker. Yeah. other ways they're becoming more adult quicker. And those two tensions are creating a lot of stress. So that's one thing. And then, you know, I think the other thing is with regards to social media, like I see this in my own life. When I look less at what people are saying about me online,

my mental health certainly improves. And in theory, I'm a grown up with better, you know, coping skills to deal with those sorts of things than, you know, a young girl or young boy who's just sort of like going through puberty and coming of age. And also, I don't have, you know, if somebody says something mean to me online, like I'm never going to meet that person. I don't have to see that person ever in my life. Imagine you have that kind of, like, nasty or backbiting or petty or whatever kind of comment directed at you on social media, and then you have to show up and see that person in real life at your high school every day. That sucks. That would stress me out. That definitely would contribute to, you know, an anxiety-producing situation.

So I think it's really important that we dig into these trends because, look, obviously, a healthy society, we've always aspired to it's going to be better for the next generation. They're going to do better than their parents. That's kind of the definition of, like, societal progress. And there's just one more metric where that seems to not be the case, where we no longer have this expectation that our kids are going to live a better life than we did. And that's a profound indictment of the values and policy choices of our country. I think that's right. Cable news is ripping us apart, dividing the country, making it impossible to function as a society, and making it impossible to know just what is true and what is false.

But the good news is they are failing and they know it. That is why we're building something new. A new mainstream. A healthier one. Something more trustworthy. Something that we are going to need in one of the most pivotal times in American history. We are building up here for the midterms for the upcoming presidential election. But we need your help.

So if you can help us out by becoming a premium member today at BreakingPoints.com, we're trying to change America for the better and the entire world. So what are you waiting for, guys? Go to BreakingPoints.com and sign up and help us build a new mainstream. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process.

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