Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Stories of Week 8/21: GOP In Disarray, Trump Affidavit, Fauci Out, Student Debt, Midterms, & More!

Episode Date: August 26, 2022

Krystal and Saagar talk about the GOP in disarray, Putin ally assassinated, Trump-FBI affidavit, Fauci retiring, student debt cancellation, midterm forecast, & movies!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/Tickets: https://www.ticketmaster.com/event/0E005CD6DBFF6D47  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Cable news is ripping us apart, dividing the nation, making it impossible to function as a society and to know what is true and what is false. The good news is that they're failing and they know it. That is why we're building something new. Be part of creating a new, better, healthier, and more trustworthy mainstream by becoming a Breaking Points premium member today at BreakingPoints.com. Your hard-earned money is going to help us build for the midterms and the 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.

Good morning, everybody. Happy Monday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. A lot of interesting stuff going on in the world. Some GOP in disarray. A lot of finger-pointing already about potential underperformance in the midterms. This is pretty interesting. McConnell's involved. Trump's involved. Tucker's involved. Hannity's involved. So we'll break all of that down for you. We also have some brand new polling from NBC News that is pretty interesting, very complex. I mean, you really could see this election in any number of ways. There are some numbers that are terrible for Democrats. There

are some numbers that are not good for Republicans. So it's all very, very much less predictable than I expected it to be just a couple of months ago. Also, a car bomb killing a Kremlin ally in Moscow. A lot of questions about who is responsible, what it means, very dangerous situation ultimately that has the potential for escalation, putting domestic political pressure on Putin to do even more and be even more aggressive in this war. So we'll break all of that down for you.

A lot of questions remain there. Also the very latest in terms of the Trump Mar-a-Lago raid, the judge actually said, and this surprised me, you know, the Department of Justice said we don't want the affidavit that justified the search. We don't want that to be is a public interest in knowing what is in this document. The judge has taken kind of a middle ground and said, hey, I think we should release it, but let's let the DOJ put in what they think should be redacted from this. So we'll break all of that down. And also, guys, I know you are heartbroken this morning. The Brian Stelter Show Reliable Sources has officially come to an end. We're going to get through this together, guys. We'll bring you his final stirring commentary from his final show. It's a solemn occasion. Yeah, indeed.

Indeed, solemn occasion this morning. But before we get to any of that, live show. Live show. Only a couple tickets left. Let's go and put it up there on the screen. September 16th, Atlanta. We are coming. Crystal, myself, many other friends of the show.

It's going to be an awesome time. Go ahead and buy those. We want to officially sell this thing out, folks. Let's go ahead and do it. Like I said, only a few remaining. Go ahead and nab them. And send us an email if there are any issues. As a reminder to the Lifetime members, if you had gone ahead and bought tickets, just forward your receipt as well to the customer service line, and those will be refunded closer to the day of the show. Looking forward to it. I genuinely cannot wait. You know it is getting close because I have actually gotten my babysitting logistics for my three kids secured. This is serious stuff. Ready to go.

So all of the obstacles have been cleared. It is happening, and it is happening in less than a month. All right. Let's get to the Republicans in disarray storyline here at the top. So Mitch McConnell, go ahead and put this NBC terror sheet up on the screen, really caused a bit of a stir with some comments that he made to the Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce. He says Republicans might not win Senate control, citing candidate quality. Specifically, here were his comments, Auger. He says,

I think there's probably a greater likelihood the House flips than the Senate. Senate races are just different. Candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome. Now, when you are the once and potentially future majority leader, Mitch McConnell, on the Republican side, and you are outright admitting this far from election day that you think the Senate might not flip. I mean, that in and of itself is quite noteworthy. Oh, it's huge. And it's very much seen as shots fired at Trump because it's a lot of his chosen candidates who are really underperforming here. Let's go ahead and put the 538 numbers up on the screen. And, you know, guys, this can change. The polls have been very wrong. They have consistently

underestimated Republicans. So I really want you to keep all of that in mind as we're evaluating this data. But as of right now, Democrats are favored by 63 percent to 37 percent to win control of the Senate. They are feeling so bullish that there are some who are starting to whisper maybe we'll not just keep control of the Senate. Maybe we will actually pick up a few seats and pick up a little bit of ground. Now, the candidates who are kind of widely seen as underperforming are, we've talked about all of them here, Herschel Walker, Dr. Oz, certainly, those two are top of the list. Also, J.D. Vance in Ohio, who is by quite a lot of polls, including their own Republican internals, down to Tim Ryan right now, Blake Masters out in

Arizona. All four of these seats should have been basically layups for Republicans with the overall political landscape that we're facing. And not only are they struggling in some of these seats, they are just outright losing. And it's pretty hard to deny. The last piece that I'll put up here before getting your reaction, Sagar, is part of the problem. And, you know, that reveals a lot about flagging Republican sort of enthusiasm and momentum. The fundraising numbers for these Republicans almost across the board is pretty dismal. Let's go and put this up on the screen. Huge disparities. I know it's a little bit hard to see, but I'll read you some of the numbers here between the Democratic candidates

and what they have cash on hand and the Republican candidates. So as a couple of examples down in Georgia, you have Raphael Warnock with $22 million in the bank versus Herschel Walker, who's actually in better shape than most of the other Republicans with $6.8 million, but still a massive disparity there. You've got Mark Kelly out in Arizona with $25 million cash on hand versus Blake Masters only has one and a half million. And this one is really quite stunning. Tim Ryan pulling in 3.6 million. That's his cash on hand status. That's what he has in the bank. J.D. Vance, less than a million dollars, only $600,000 in his bank account at the end of last quarter. And this is consistent, something we've been tracking,

you know, sort of at every level. The grassroots fundraising has dried up. There are a lot of questions about how the National Republican Senatorial Committee has been spending their money. They blew through a whole lot of cash and now are having to pull ads down in key battleground states. They're having to spend money in places like Ohio that they really didn't think they were going to have to spend money on in order to win. And so there are a lot of structural issues here that are kind of cropping up for the Republicans. Absolutely. And I just think, though, it's always important to present the caveats. I mean, Susan Collins was down, what, 10 right before Election Day. Tom Tillis was supposed to be a dead man walking in North Carolina. There were a couple of other Senate seats. I mean, even if you go back to 2018, if you'll recall, Marsha Blackburn was supposedly,

you know, in a tight race. Remember also, even Jamie Harrison, they said, is like, oh, within two or three points. I mean, he lost by 17 points. So anyway, that's the caveat. Also, you know, I was talking with some people who work in these circles. Their counter to this is that the Democrats are awash in post-Dobbs cash and in a way may actually be blowing their wad a little bit too early. Part of the problem is that because right now it's in August, they have all this cash, they have the media spots available, is that the Republicans, again, this is the counter. So I am not saying this is necessarily the case. They're like, look, we're not going to spend our money in the summer.

We're going to try and spend our money all the way come up to election day. But that's obviously cope when they just don't have as much money. Well, they don't have the money. Right. It'd be one thing if, yeah, Democrats had raised a bunch of money and they spent it all. But Republicans are in the very bad position of, yeah, Democrats have been in a lot of these races outspending them and defining them on the airwaves. I mean, think about Fetterman and Oz, how Fetterman jumped right to, Oz isn't even on the air. And yet, you know, they're behind in terms of fundraising. So they're in a position where they need to make up the gap with a flood of post-Labor

Day advertising. And as of right now, you know, they are very much behind. That's one indication of how dire the cash situation has gotten for some of these Republicans. Blake Masters, who's the Senate nominee in Arizona, aforementioned, who was backed by Trump. And Trump really kind of cleared the field for him and put him in position to win. He also had a lot of support from Peter Thiel financially. Used to work for him. In the primary, used to work for him. And not clear that Thiel is going to come in for him or J.D. Vance, who was his other big candidate in the general election. So that's kind of a big question mark.

But Masters, in order to win the primary, he went all in on like trashing Mitch McConnell, which I'm cool with saying he would not support him for leadership that he was going to vote for. He said Tom Cotton or I don't remember somebody else, Josh Hawley or something like that. Now that he is struggling in terms of cash and behind in cash on hand by like $24 million to Mark Kelly. Now he's changing his tune. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. He says he's hopeful the GOP leader is going to offer financial support.

He says, I think he'll come in and spend. Arizona's going to be competitive. It's going to be a close race. I hope he does come in. And Sagar, he says, we'll find a way to work together. He goes on to make his pitch. I mean, this is just shamelessly begging for cash here. I think I'm a much better candidate than Mitch McConnell gives me credit for, he says.

Let me just say, this has not gone unnoticed in Washington. And has been passed around quite a bit in certain circles. And made its way to me. And I was like, hey, you know, it's actually a good story. I've got to give it to him. So there's a lot of gloating and some closed doors here in DC saying like, oh yeah, everybody trashes him till they need the money. Here's what people forget. Not only the NRSC, which is run by Rick Scott, but the Senate Leadership Fund, which is directly controlled by Mitch McConnell and his

super PAC is tens to hundreds of millions of dollars potentially. And look, Masters is fighting for his life. He's already down probably, see, this is the hard part to parse, which is that the Vance poll, I just honestly don't believe it. I'm like, look, I think he's gonna win. I think he'll probably win by like four. He should have won by 10,

but he'll probably still pull it out. The problem for him is that they're having to spend money there. Exactly. So the problem for them is they're gonna have to spend money, but I just don't see it. Oz, I still think it's like 55-45.

I don't think it should be. I'm talking to Fetterman's direction. It's still a little bit too close, but I have confidence he might be able to pull it across the finish line. But it will be incredibly tight. Masters is legitimately, I think, in trouble because Mark Kelly, not only in terms of candidate quality, but the guy is not a nationally defined Democrat in the way that Sinema or any of the other people who are kind of up are in the same way for the media. Mark Kelly did his very first Sunday interview as a senator this weekend. The guy has no profile. And I was actually doing some reading over the weekend.

Almost all the interviews he gives are like to the Arizona Central or the Phoenix newspaper or something. And all he talks about is like water access issues for ranchers. He's actually quite a localist politician. Doesn't play up his, you know, machinations behind the scenes. Yes, votes with Biden, but very rarely seen with Biden. These are all things that I think define, you know, a popular politician. On top of, look, he's got a good bio, right? Married to Gabby Giffords, very popular in the state.

There's a lot of sympathy, not only for her, and he's a hero astronaut. So it's like you put those couple things together, this is a tough guy. And, you know, Masters shot himself in the state. There's a lot of sympathy not only for her and he's a hero astronaut. So it's like you put those couple things together, this is a tough guy. And you know, Masters shot himself in the foot. Two different cases. Number one was the Griswold thing that he put on his

birth control contraception case and he's not going to vote for any Supreme Court justice that doesn't commit to overturning that. He put it on his website in the primary. There's no reason to do that, right?

Except, I mean, there literally is no reason. And second, saying he wants to privatize Social Security. So you put the abortion contraception thing on one end, which is getting bombarded with. Yeah. On the air. And then if I was Mark Kelly, I know I would just run that privatizing Social Security clip all day long. And he is. And he is. That's what's on it already. Of course he is.

And that's what if we'll recall the way this this is always funny because cinema now that we remember her, the way that she beat Martha McSally is Obamacare. It was all Martha McSally voted to take away Obamacare. And Martha McSally is on record saying that vote is almost definitively what sunk her. Wow. In the state of Arizona. Yeah, in her post interviews, even though she was like appointed and then she ran, she lost again, which is pathetic. She was also, didn't we interview her? We might have.

I think we interviewed her and she was like the most wooden, just terrible candidate. She has a nice story. That you can possibly imagine. Yeah. I mean, you know, they're,

listen, as I keep saying, the Republican, it should be a slam dunk for a lot of these candidates. I mean, they shouldn't have to spend money in Ohio and they're spending a lot. So the NRSC is spending $28 million, I think, in Ohio. It's a

huge number that they're having to spend in Ohio to try to get J.D. Vance across the finish line. And I agree with you. It's Ohio. I don't think Tim Ryan's going to win. But you shouldn't be having to put down cash in that state. That should have been an absolute layup. So you now have a lot of Republican consultants and Senate hopefuls who are like, what the hell happened to all your money, too, at the national level? Let's go and put this up on the screen. This is also kind of hilarious. It's a ripoff. GOP spending under fire as Senate hopefuls seek rescue.

You have all these people who are calling for an audit of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. They say they're getting, you know, the Senate hopefuls are getting crushed on the airwaves across the country while their national campaign fund is pulling ads and running low on cash, leading some campaign advisors to ask where all the money went and demand an audit of the committee's finances. Corny Republican strategist involved in the discussions. The NRSC's retreat came after months of touting record fundraising, topping $173 million so far this election cycle. But the committee has burned through nearly all of it,

with their cash on hand dwindling to $28 million by the end of June. So this is another, you know, we saw this in the Trump campaign, too. Remember, they had that massive war chest. And we were heading into that election like, geez, the Democrats are going to be swamped by this amount of money that he's been able to raise. And then, I don't know, Brad Parscale, and I don't know who else got their hands in the cookie jar. But that money was gone. And towards the end, the Trump campaign was having to pull ads in like, you know, key, I think even Wisconsin and other key battleground states because they just literally didn't have the money. And there's echoes of that here. They had plenty of money in the bank, $173 million so far. And now where is it? It's gone. As you come down the stretch

and Republican online donations have flagged, so they're raising money at a slower clip, and they've had to pull their ad buys in some of these critical areas. So again, I don't know that these things are going to be determinative and especially in a sort of national environment where a lot of what's going to happen here is going to be based on the national wins, how people feel about the country, how people feel about Joe Biden, potentially if Trump were to announce how they feel about Trump. All these other factors, certainly Dobbs plays into all of this, but it is an indication of number one, like total disorganization, foolish decision-making, and then the terrible candidates who have ended up in

some of these races. Yeah, it is funny too, because of course the establishment wing wants to blame, you know, Trump for all of this, But hey, Rick Scott is the one running the NRSC. And by the way, I don't know if people know this. Rick Scott is worth like $100 million because the way that he even came to office was he was like CEO of some healthcare company, which eventually was investigated, I think, for fraud. But anyway, he made quite a bit of money there. And what his pitch was when he was running for governor and later senator, he's like, I'm a businessman. I understand how the free market works, all of that. And yet what they're quoting is that national Republican consultant who says if they were a corporation, the CEO

would be fired and investigated. It's like, well, I guess, you know, given Scott's track record, kind of makes sense. The way this money has been burned, there needs to be an audit or investigation because we're not going to take the Senate now. And this money has been squandered. Wow. I mean, blaming it all on money, I think, is obviously co-of-candidate quality is going to have an immense amount to do with it. That being said, they should not have spent $150 million. I mean, where did it go? Nothing. I mean, to have all their candidates basically losing. And if I think back to the Democratic point that I made earlier about how Dems have all this money

came in after Dobbs through ActBlue and this big, and this like the national fundraising infrastructure. And the whole point was they were blowing their money early. Well, then the Republicans blew it even earlier if they had 150. So where is this money happening? I mean, I think that is actually the, I mean, it's a gigantic scandal, not a real one as in, I'm not going to cry for, you know, like, uh, I'm not going to cry for big money donors who gave their money away and it was pissed away. But these things are given to a certain political end, and we don't see a hell of a lot of that. So I think that is a major one.

Fascinating and interesting move happening over in Moscow. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. Daria Dugina, she's the daughter of Alexander Dugin, a Putin ally, was killed in a car bomb on a highway outside of Moscow. So Dugina, the daughter of Alexander Dugin, who I've spoken about, actually did an entire monologue about him after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you know, people describe him as an ultra-nationalist, but I think the better way is a true Russian czar revanchist, somebody who genuinely believes in the primacy of the Russian nation, of the Russian people, of restoring essentially the Russian empire. This has a little to do with the Soviet Union and more like the hundreds of years of Russian history that preceded him. As I said, if you're

interested, you can go back and watch that monologue. I quoted some of the things that he talks about in the way that Putin allies can see the world. To be clear, Putin and his circle have always kind of held him at an arm's length and kind of seen him as a kind of crazy figure, which, you know, he almost looks like Rasputin. So, makes sense. Anyway, his daughter was killed in a Toyota Land Cruiser driving just 20 miles west outside of Moscow. Now, reportedly, Dugin himself was actually supposed to be in the car. And so he was very likely the target of this assassination attempt. Now, in terms of the assassination attempt, and then obviously she was killed as well, a major murder investigation has now been launched by the

Russian police. And this is where things, of course, become interesting because it can create political pressure from all different sides. Immediately, the Ukrainians and Ukrainian officials were like, we didn't have anything to do with this. Yes, we hate Dugin. This was not us. You know, don't try and do this. So they're trying to distance themselves, obviously, from the attack. At the same time, they are now opening investigations

and pointing fingers in many different directions, Crystal, which you have some of the details on, which is interesting. But like the major point is, is that to have an assassination of such a high profile Putin ally, ultra-nationalist in the city, there's a variety of options. It could be legitimate Russian opposition. It could be, you know, a targeted killing by the Russian state allies or whatever in order to put pressure on Putin in order to ramp things up and have a revenge campaign. It could be a domestic operation. You should put none of these things past both the Kremlin and their opponents. Could be the Ukrainians.

I mean, it really is. It also could be the Ukrainians. Who knows? Or Ukrainian-affiliated people. I mean, who the hell knows what's going on here? Right. So before we get into, you know, what the FSB is saying, and there was another dude who actually claimed credit that you should be very skeptical of, before I get into all of that, I think the really important thing to understand is that, you know, this is quite extraordinary. Whoever is behind it, it really does sort of scramble the domestic political landscape for Putin and could

potentially put more pressure on him. Because remember, as much as Putin is like, you know, an asshole and a hardliner and all of that, people don't realize there are much more hardline elements who want him to go even further, who want him to, you know, outright declare war, which he hasn't done with his population, even though it's very clear to, you know, anyone who's looking that this is a war, who wants a more general sort of like draft to have a larger scale mobilization and to really justify like a maximalist, maximalist approach to Ukraine. There's a lot of chest thumping this morning about we got to hit the Ukrainian like official government buildings and we got to go after their intelligence services and those sorts of things. So whoever is responsible for it, it looks like that is the likely domestic political outcome in

Russia is potentially strengthening the hand of the hardliners who say we should be going further. Now, the other possibility is that it goes in the other direction and it freaks people out about like, oh, geez, we thought that this whole Ukraine situation could just stay in Ukraine and wasn't really going to affect our daily lives here in Moscow. And now we're freaked down about this and we want to wind this whole war and military occupation back. So that's sort of the domestic political landscape. So the FSB says that they have solved the murder, Sager. And you'll never guess who they say was behind it. They're blaming the Ukrainians. They say it was a Ukrainian woman named Natalia Vovk.

I don't know how you say this. Rented a flat in Dugina's building, trailed her, planted the car bomb, and escaped to Estonia as Max Sidon, who's the Moscow bureau chief at the Financial Times, writes a lot of odd details in this claim by the FSB. The woman who they're blaming for the murder apparently carried out this professionalized car bombing with her 12-year-old daughter in tow. And she allegedly followed Dugina in a Mini Cooper with Kazakh, Ukrainian, and Donetsk People's Republic plates and then also fled through Estonia.

So you're like, you know, Putin, they all hate Estonia through Estonia so you're like you know and they Putin they all hate like Estonia right now too so you're like it's the Ukrainians and also screw Estonia it's all very convenient for their narrative there was another dude who was like a Kremlin critic who was expelled from the Duma who claimed responsibility for it and said he was part of this like secret Republican partisan army underground resistance to the Kremlin. There's reason to be very skeptical of those claims as well, including the fact that this guy has apparently made up bullshit claims in the past and gotten caught for it. Number one, number two, he put up some website that was like,

if you're also interested in domestic political terror, like message me here. I don't think, yeah, can you imagine submitting some like internet form of like, I would like to be a domestic political terrorist. I'm sure this isn't going to get swept up by intelligence. So be skeptical. That's very hard to say like who ultimately is behind this. But everybody is sort of picking their favorite villain here and spinning the story to their own ends. But I think the bottom line is it creates a lot of volatility and could potentially lead to, you know, pressure for an escalation. Yeah. So and like who benefits from that, right? There's a lot of people who benefit from these things. It's not past the Russian state in order to do so. I mean, it probably wouldn't put it past some Ukrainian sympathizer or some rogue operation or whatever

to do so. Who knows how exactly these things go. Rogue also in terms of the Russian sense. So I think undeniably, it creates a new set of conditions which both sides, of course, have to react to. Zelensky is actually warning that a major Russian offensive could be coming in preparation for Ukrainian Independence Day, which is sometime soon, and that this could be a prelude to blaming them in order to launch maybe more of a full-scale type operation. So that's certainly possible. Putin apparently has been setting his sights on the city of Odessa as that's a strategic port in which a lot of the grain leaves from. Perhaps capturing that would be much more of a major victory. Perhaps this is a prelude to that. I mean, perhaps he was just killed. You killed. Somebody was targeting Dugin for some other reason. Again, though, nobody knows. I will

say car bombings are not that rare in Russia. Political opponents of Putin and many other people have died in them in the past, but of course, his opponents also know that. So the point is, is that what this does is create a major flashpoint in domestic Russian politics. It's been covered there on state television and, you know, hardliner assets who were allied with Dugin are going to be pressuring Putin regardless, even though they already were in the lead up to this. And also it's going to bolster, you know, how the Ukrainians are going to respond to whatever is going on. So that's the reason why this one particular murder is so important is that it unleashes all of these new conditions which people on the ground are going to have to react to to change the situation. I was talking to our is, you know,

in line with some of his thinking, et cetera. But that what this guy is really good is sort of like at marketing and branding himself, especially to Western journalists and the Western alt-right. So his influence as Putin's brain in all this has been kind of overstated in terms of the Western media. That being said, you know, he's someone that certainly like the hard ultra-nationalists in Russia see very much as an ally and they see this as, you know, as a really, really big deal. He also was saying in terms of the general Russian population, this isn't someone who is, Dugin is not actually a household name. Yes, yes, right.

To the extent that this was sort of like, you know, if it was a targeted killing to drive some kind of domestic political outcome, it would be targeted more at that elite circle of ultra-nationalists or, you know, Kremlin insiders because the general population is not like super, super knowledgeable about who Dugan is or like super sort of like caught up in whatever his philosophy is

and obsessed with him and his life. Very well said. As I said, the Putin people have kind of shoved him to a side. At a certain point, they got him fired from his job. They didn't actually like him kind of pitching himself and writing often in English for a very specific audience. So he's a complicated figure in his own right, and I'm sure this will only just bolster more of his calls for like the total

subjugation of Ukraine. But anyway, it's going to create some conditions on the ground. Okay, let's talk about Donald Trump. This has always been following affidavit saga, the warrants, the FBI. It almost feels like ancient history, even though it just started happening in the last two weeks. It's funny how that works, isn't it? But the latest in all of these wars, let's put this up there on the screen, which is that, as you alluded to earlier, the New York Times, many other news organizations, sued the FBI, the Department of Justice, and said,

hey, you need to release the affidavit which was used and sworn before a judge which justified the search warrant on Mar-a-Lago. Now, what we knew previously from the search warrant, which was released, were the specific crimes and laws that which the FBI and the Department of Justice alleged a criminal violation of which could be furthered and found evidence at Mar-a-Lago, which we know, based on reporting and all these other things, have to do not only with classified documents, but the, you know, mis misstorage or hanging on to things too long based upon months of negotiation and possible, you know, there's all sorts of

allegations as to what exactly the documents are and why Trump held on to them. But we seem to know that he held on to some documents in that under three separate statues of US law, the FBI raid happened. However, what we don't know is the actual probable cause and investigation and the past meetings with the Trump organization, the Trump lawyers that have occurred in the past. All of that is contained within the affidavit. Now, we know a little bit as to why the DOJ doesn't want to release it. They say it would reveal the identity of potential cooperating witnesses. Now, I don't know why they would say that unless they have a cooperating witness. We don't know who said cooperating witnesses, some sort of mole, some sort of rat or whatever

in either the Trump org, Secret Service, whatever. Somebody in the organization knows something. We also know that based on subpoenas of surveillance video and others, they claimed that even after the Trump people had said, yes, we are securing documents in this room, because they actually have surveillance video. Part of the search warrant was to get their hands on the video and also based on past testimony and more to confirm that there was like a violation of law and an agreement of things that had been said. So based on that, there has been an extraordinary public interest in this affidavit. What is in this affidavit? What was the probable cause? Well, the government's case that judge found enough to say to grant a warrant

for the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago. DOJ initially was like, no, we're not going to release it. Now, usually they get an extraordinary amount of deference. But what's actually cool is that the judge finally, actually in this case, said that the government should propose redactions to the affidavit to the judge based upon and what will be a prolonged process from here on out, because he thinks the extraordinary public interest is so important that he is going to possibly order a public version of this affidavit. Now, again, it will be heavily redacted. And having seen some of these, it is so annoying when you're reading through them and you just have whole pages, which are black. But you can't hide everything.

And my personal favorite is sometimes they forget to redact stuff that they were supposed to. And you learn a hell of a lot more from that. Not necessarily fair to the people who it's supposed to be redacted to. But listen, we're in the news business. I'm going to take everything. Yeah, we're in favor of as much disclosure as humanly possible. I think we should release the whole thing. Yeah, absolutely. That would definitely be in the best interest of us

in the news media. Yeah, I mean, I'm actually, I'm surprised. I thought this judge, given the government was making the case and that they, you know,

could say, point to confidential informants and an ongoing criminal investigation, all of these things, they basically like, listen, we can't let this information get out

to the public. So the fact that the judge is even taking kind of a, you know, a half measure here or a middle stance saying you can propose redactions, we'll put some of it down. And he does go on to say, like, I don't know how interesting by the time we get the redactions done, the public is going to ultimately find this. But that is better than nothing. So I think the expectation is that the redactions are proposed redactions supposed

to be submitted this week. So I don't know exactly when we might get access to some portion of this affidavit. But you're exactly right. I mean, the search warrant contains certain information about exactly what crimes they expect to find evidence of and that justifies the search. But the affidavit gives all the detail about what led them up to concluding that there were crimes being committed and that you would have evidence at this location. It also would, you know, very likely give up who it was that was informing on Trump or multiple people potentially who was informing on Trump. And all the reporting suggests that it's someone who is fairly close to him, close enough to know, like, very specifically what these documents were and where they could be located within Mar-a-Lago. In typical Trumpian fashion, this is interesting, and this is something you and I were sort

of talking about, debating, like, whether Trump wanted the affidavit to be released publicly on Truth Social, and we can put this up on the screen. He's calling for the release, pushing for the unredacted affidavits release, etc., etc. But while he's saying that publicly on Truth Social, his legal team did not push for this to be released at all. In fact, they say that his lawyers were conspicuously absent from the legal proceedings surrounding the unsealing process. At any time, Mr. Trump and his team could have filed papers asking Judge Reinhart to make the affidavit public, but he chose not to. So I think he finds it publicly beneficial to posture like he's got nothing to hide.

Of course, he wants this affidavit on in the public and it's going to expose the DOJ and the FBI's crimes, et cetera, et cetera. But in reality, is he in there with his team fighting for the release of the affidavit? No, he is not because, you know, he doesn't know exactly what's in here. And it's very possible that there are things in here that are actively damaging to him and a problem for him. Well, that's what you said, too, which is beyond him. It's like, look, this is the government's case. You know, the Trump people haven't even had a chance to respond.

Like maybe the government is lying. Maybe they use some informant. So it's not actually fair. And that's part of the reason why these things don't come out. Part of the reason why I think that in general, beyond a news interest that it all should come out, this is a public interest case. Deal with it. Yes, I understand that it's different and Trump is not above the law, but in terms of Donald Trump and his potential to actually pressure the system and whatever, that is all going to come from small d democratic means. And from his perspective, you should release anything possible. And look, I mean, to Trump's case, during Ukraine gate, even though the quote, perfect phone call was not good for him, he released it and

eventually convinced most people it was the, quote, perfect phone call, even if there was some stuff in there, which, you know, I'm not saying it was a criminal act, by the way, but just like, okay, well, you know, it's clearly pressuring him in a certain way. As I've always said, the most disgusting part to me of Zelensky's phone call with Trump, as he was like, oh, Mr. President,

we stay in Trump Tower. And I was like, oh, that is so gross. This was before he was Hero Zelensky. Yeah, before he was Winston Churchill. He was, you know, stroking Trump and be like, I loved your hotel. You have the best hotel, Trump Tower. That's where we all go. See, that I find, frankly, a lot more objectionable. It is really gross. Than whatever was happening with the military. But again, I just think that transparency probably only helps him, you know, prosecute this case. Everybody can always find picking and choosing of what convenient facts or whatever are there

for why he's, quote, exonerated, as he always would claim. So to his own public interest case, I think it's- Well, he could maybe, at least if the affidavit was revealed, he could maybe actually figure out what his defense is and lean in to pick a narrative, you know? Because they have just been throwing everything against the wall that they possibly could. It was planted, pick a narrative, you know, because they have just been throwing everything against the wall that they possibly can.

It was planted, it was confidential, it's, you know, actually I declassified this, so it's totally cool, and I take where, I mean, they've just gone, cycled through everything that they could possibly think of, so maybe if they knew a little bit more information, they could, like, construct one crazy narrative and sort of stick with it and keep pursuing that because

that's what they seem to be most successful at. Absolutely correct. Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. A whole lot of things breaking yesterday and even into yesterday evening.

So Dr. Fauci is officially announcing his retirement. I know. As head of the NIH after a very long tenure. So we won't break all of that down for you. And also a little trip down memory lane from the Fauci time during coronavirus. We also have primaries today, especially so in the state of New York and Florida, a lot going on, especially on the Democratic side in New York, including a very key bellwether congressional race. It's a special election. One of the candidates on the Democratic side really focusing on abortion. On the Republican

side, really focusing in on inflation. It's a swing seat. So interesting to see how that all shakes out. Big movement in the stock market yesterday. You know, the analysts are like, this is anticipation of the Fed's meeting and Jackson Hole and concerns about what Fed Chair Jerome Powell is going to say. So we will tell you about that. Also, new details about the assassination of that Russian intellectual, I guess you would call him, Dugan's daughter, and exactly what is going on there. And we have new details about the Trump-Mar-a-Lago raid, affidavit, new comments from the judge, new reporting that is coming out, new moves from the Trump team, all of that. But we want to start with Dr. Fauci.

That's right. Pretty big news that came out yesterday. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. Fauci doing two exclusive interviews with The New York Times and The Washington Post to announce officially he will be stepping down in December to pursue, quote, his next chapter. So this is the man who is advised, as they say, seven presidents and spent more than 50 years at the National Institute of Health, resigning at the NIAID, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He's 81 years old. The reason why this is a little bit strange is that Fauci had previously said, yeah, I am going to leave. But then he came out and he's like, no, no, no, but I'll stay on until 2024. And now he's like, no, but I am actually going to leave this time.

And it caught some people by surprise. We don't exactly know what the impetus for that was. Previously, he had committed to reining all the way through the end of President Biden's at least first term. Now, in it, he says, as he said, he's moving on to the next chapter as long as he's healthy, all of that. I think the reason why it is noteworthy is just, look, I mean, I think undoubtedly Fauci will be one of the most significant figures of our lifetime, really, whether we like it or not, in terms of impact on policy, initial pandemic response, and, I mean, in a lot of ways, responsible for some of the major dividing lines

that we had in American society, many of the cleavages and more that have hardened both sides into where they are. I think the scars of COVID are going to be felt for many, many years, as much as everybody wants to move on. And one of the things that, you know, we wanted to do, and we did the same with CDC, whenever the CDC announced like, hey, by the way, we actually did screw up, everyone's like, oh, yeah, you think? Really? Interesting. Amazing. It took you two years in order to figure that out. With Fauci, though, unfortunately, Crystal, he's basically just being hagiographically treated. We'll end this segment with an MSNBC on Rachel Maddow, where they're like, why does everybody hate you? What's so wrong with you? You didn't do anything wrong. The reaction to this, even in

The Times and elsewhere, is like, he's some sort of major American hero. And so we again did the same thing that we did with the CDC. Put the vaccine question aside, of which there are, of course, many debates continue to be had. Just the pure pandemic response from the beginning, the lies, the manipulation of the public, and perhaps one of the great scandals of all time, the cover-up of a very likely leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, of which he was directly connected to. Let's take a listen to all of a sudden go out, buy and hoard masks that are most appropriately used and necessary for the frontline healthcare workers who do need it for the clear and present danger that they find themselves in when they are taking care of people who are actually sick with coronavirus disease. We still don't know what the origin is, that if you look historically

and the way things rolled out, we all felt and still do actually, Willie, that it is more likely to be a natural jumping of species from an animal reservoir to a human. However, since we don't know that for sure, that you've got to keep an open mind. I have never lied before the Congress, and I do not retract that statement. This paper that you're referring to was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain of function. What was let me finish. You take an animal virus and you increase its transmissibility to humans.

You're saying that's not gain of function? Yeah, that is correct. And Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly. And I want to say that officially. You do not know what you are talking about. But if they get up

and really aim their bullets at Tony Fauci, well, people could recognize there's a person there. So it's easy to criticize, but they're really criticizing science because I represent science. That's dangerous to me. And of course, that last one, I think, will always be his legacy in my mind, which is that he basically aligned himself with the quote unquote, the definition of science. And unfortunately, he actually politicized what science is, which is really just a scientific method. I always point to this, and so do you. Let's put this up there, which is that the straight up acknowledgement by Dr. Anthony Fauci, more than a year ago now at this point, in which he had basically admitted that he was fudging the numbers as to what level of herd immunity

would be needed in order to, quote, go back to normal in order to try and manipulate public opinion. He said, well, when polls said only half of Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75. Then when new surveys said 60% would take it, I said, oh, I can nudge this up a bit. So I went to 80, 85. We need to have some humility here. We really don't know what the real number is. So just say that. Yeah, just be like, I don't know.

Don't be like, I told the American people what I thought they could handle at one time. Right. I do think that last thought we played of him talking about how, you know, they're really attacking science because that's what I represent. I am science. You know, it actually is very revealing because he did become this total lightning rod where Republicans wanted to make everything about him and he was evil incarnate and they're going to launch investigations and we're going to get into that. And Democrats wanted to worship him as a hero and they wanted to have their votive candles and all around DC, you would see these signs like in praise and worship of him. And in fact, I mean, any sort of like hero worship or demonization of one person in particular, one very fallible human being who,

as we document, made some very significant and very consequential mistakes, that is going to ultimately poison your public health response. It is ultimately going to make it very difficult to just assess the evidence as it is because people become too wrapped up in just defending whatever it is that this person is saying or doing or attacking whatever it is that this person is saying or doing. We see this in our politics all the time. It's just another reflection of the intense partisanship with which, you know, DC elites and some core of the Republican base and the sort of Democratic liberal base with which they view politics. Everything is filtered through the

lens of like, is this person a good person or an evil person? Then if they're on the good side, I'm going to just take whatever they say, no matter what it is, I'm going to justify it. I'm going to assume it's the truth. And if they're on the evil side, I'm going to do the polar opposite. He, during the coronavirus response, really became that sort of lightning rod figure. I mean, I will say like in terms of, you mentioned he was at the core of some of the politicization. I always have trouble saying that word. I mean, Donald Trump was by far the worst offender there when he was the president of the Unitedization, I always have trouble saying that word. I mean, Donald Trump was by far the worst offender there when he's the president of the United States and he's supposed to be at that time bringing people together and not, you know, going off on these crazy tangents as he did.

So let's lay a lot of blame at his feet. But the inability for liberals to recognize some of the very crucial failures of Fauci on masks, on herd immunity, on other things that we're talking about here, I think really hampered the response and was a sort of, it was an indication and at the center of how our coronavirus response became so partisan in a way that did not happen in other countries. Like it wasn't, it didn't have to go this way, I guess is what I'm trying to say. I completely agree. I mean, if you think back to the very beginning, there were a lot of, I mean, myself included, I was like, wow, you know, what often brings a great country together, which is in the middle of strife, is a major disaster, and everybody can unite.

And that lasted for like two weeks. And then, look, I mean, no denying what Trump did in terms of what we're going to, the churches are going to be full by Easter. That may continue to be one of the worst things that he did or likening it to just the flu in the very beginning, not taking much of the response seriously. However, and this is the other thing that you said, by the media playing actually into that dynamic and turning him essentially into a god for, let's say, millions of people. We never still, to this day, have an honest accounting of what happened at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Look, at this point,

we have got reams of evidence in the lab leak direction, and we've got some very, very scant, very biased studies that continue to come out that say, well, maybe it did come out of the Wuhan wet market, even though the Chinese government still does not stick to. And this is the key thing. Still, they do not even stick to the wet market theory. They're like, ah, it just kind of happened. By the way, let's all just move on. Let's not talk about that anymore. We could get into the details ad nauseum. But at a very basic level, they did implicate Dr. Anthony Fauci. And that's part of the reason why I have always looked at him as a real villain, because what he did was he was able to use his public position in order to cover up, again, one of the great scandals. And perhaps what's worse is that we have not done anything to

rectify that situation. All of the talk about let's ban gain-of-function research, let's have an actual discussion around when it's appropriate, when not, What are the guardrails, U.S. guidelines? None of that happened. Instead, we ended up, as Josh Rogin has often pointed out, we ended up actually okaying the tune of billions of dollars of new money in order to be spent on this. None of the public health figures who are involved in gain-of-function, who paved the way for all of this, quote, scientific collaboration with the Wuhan lab. None of those people have ever been held to account. Peter Daszak, I mean, these are liars, absolute liars that should be held to account. That hasn't come, unfortunately, Crystal. Yeah, no. And I mean, I will say in terms of the Republicans like chomping at the bit for

this investigation, which I totally support and I would love to in a like actually fact-finding type of way, which I'm not totally confident they'll be able to accomplish, but I would love to in a like actually fact finding type of way, which I'm not totally confident they'll be able to accomplish, but I would love to get to the bottom of it. But I do also have to say, like the only thing we really know about what Republicans will do if they take power is which investigations they're going to obsess over, you know, Hunter Biden and Tony Fauci. We know that's going to be the focus of their efforts. Have they told us a single thing about what they would actually do about inflation or tax policy or children or educate? No, not really. They're, you know, very clear on who they want to go after and who they want to sort of demonize and continue to dig into. Not so clear on their agenda for the American people. Be that as

it may, look, I 100% support getting to the bottom of what happened. I think Fauci was, this is one of the prime areas where he was extremely dishonest with the American people. He is implicated in some of the very early conversations in terms of trying to completely shut down any discussion and debate and inquiry into whether this was a possible plausible theory that caused the entire response and investigation to lose a lot of critical time and, you know, may ultimately lead to the fact that we never know definitively what exactly happened here because so much time was ultimately lost. Yeah, I think that's right. And look, Fauci going out with a bang, of course, on the Rachel. And this is what I love, too, which is that of all the places for his last cable news interview or or the very first at least, of the day after his announcement, where does he choose?

The Rachel Maddow program with Rachel Maddow himself, in which he says that we're dealing with the distortion of reality as to why anybody does not like him. Let's take a listen to that. What we're dealing with now is just a distortion of reality, Rachel. I mean, conspiracy theories, which don't make any sense at all, pushing back on sound public health measures, you know, making it look like trying to save lives is encroaching on people's freedom. He'll never learn.

I just think it's too perfect. Student Loan Debt Relief Program. We can give you all of those details and the political debates around it. Also, some very interesting results from the primary elections and the special elections that happened on Tuesday. Dan Marans and I broke that down yesterday, but there's even more that we're learning today that we're going to get into as well. Casually, while you weren't looking and while there was no debate, apparently we're sending another $3 billion to you, right? Yes. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's happening. We'll talk about it. Package number 15? 9,000.

Anyway, get into that. Liz Cheney's next plans, also some polling showing exactly which voters she would draw if she were to run as an independent or president. No big surprises there. And Matt Damon with some very interesting comments on the movie industry, which has sort of like broader cultural implications. Very interesting there. Max Alvarez is going to be here in the flesh on the show.

He's got a new book out, so can't wait to talk to him about that. Before we jump in, live show. We still have tickets? Live show. Very few tickets, unfortunately. Let's go ahead and put this up. Well, I guess fortunately. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen.

Very smattering few of tickets that are left there so link is going to be down in the description that's right go ahead and make your plans it's going to be fun somebody did email me asking me about accommodations

let me just say this I don't know a damn thing about accommodations we haven't even made our own accommodations haven't even made our own accommodations so tell us where we should stay

so if you have a recommendation for where the best place to stay in Atlanta and food recommendations, always like definitely send us send those in. I would love to see them. Yes, indeed. Okay, let's get to the big announcement yesterday from the President of the United States. Let's go ahead and throw the Twitter announcement up on the screen. So after much anticipation and many false starts took a year, he announced that he will be, this administration

will be forgiving $10,000 in student debt if you did not receive Pell Grants and your income is under $125,000. So it's means tested. $20,000 if you went to college on Pell Grants. I think that was the part that was really quite surprising to people that hadn't been reported or speculated before. And of course, Pell Grant recipients disproportionately sort of like working class and lower income. Jeff Stein has all the details here. He's really, you know, one of our friends over at The Washington Post. He's really been on top of reporting this out very effectively. Go ahead and put this up on the screen. He says, to summarize, $10,000 for most borrowers, $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients, only for under $125K individually, $250K jointly, aimed to cap undergrad loan payments at 5% monthly income. That's actually

really sweeping and significant change. Previously, that had been at 10%. That was a policy that was set by the Obama administration to try to make student loan payments more affordable. Grad loans, Parent PLUS, are eligible. And also, significantly, that student loan debt payment moratorium is going to be extended one final time until after the midterm elections. Some smart politics there. Those payments will restart on December 31st. I'm a little bit shocked that they were intelligent enough to make that move. But you know what?

They've been surprising me lately with a couple of actually intelligent moves. Let's go ahead and listen to how the president sold this yesterday. President, is this unfair to people who paid their student loans or chose not to take out loans? Is it fair to people who, in fact, do not own multi-billion dollar businesses, and if you want these guys to get them all, is that fair? What do you think? What about people who pay their loans? We'll provide real benefits for families without meaningful effect on inflation.

Let's be clear. I hear it all the time. How do we pay for it? We pay for it by what we've done. Last year, we cut the deficit by more than $350 billion. Let me give you a couple more of the numbers here, and then we can talk a bit about this. So the estimates are this will entirely wipe out the student debt balance of about 33% of loan holders. You have about 43 million people who will benefit in total, and it wipes out about half of the student loan debt of

more than 50% of loan holders. So listen, you guys know my position. I think it should all be canceled and college should be free. So it's not as far as I would go. But I have to say, I mean, in terms of the way Biden framed this and the way that he went about it, it was quite feisty and it was very not neoliberal. So there's the neoliberal flourishes here, the means testing and those sorts of things. But embracing outright debt cancellation truly is a sort of ideological, philosophical break from the Clinton, Obama-style neoliberalism that's dominated for decades. That is absolutely. So, I mean, I'm personally against this policy layout.

And as I've always said, I have absolutely no problem with debt cancellation, even in terms of the how you pay for it. Most of this is completely fake and has been absorbed by the college industrial complex of which I consider myself a major enemy of. For politically, you know, I'm honestly not sure. Ideologically, I think it's a good thing in order to make past that and to understand that, first of all, look, Joe Biden himself is one of the people and one of the reason why that we are even in this situation. You know, if we'll remember, student debt is one of the only debts that you can't act, that you can't discharge even upon death where they can garnish your family's wages thanks to Mr. Joe Biden, Senator Joe Biden from

the state of Delaware. But politically, honestly, I've been turning this over my head, Crystal. On the one hand, yes, there are college-educated liberals. Disproportionately, those people are, you know, going to be Democratic voters. On the other, you know, only 37% of the U.S. population went to college. Even amongst Gen Z, younger voters, it's like 40-ish in terms of how many people are going to graduate. In general, 25% of the people who enter a four-year college degree never do graduate. So the vast majority of the public did not go to college. And you know, this could piss a lot of people off. Now, I don't agree with the whole, how are you going to pay for it? But there's a stark headline that I did see, I think, in the Wall Street Journal. This is about

$2,000 per American taxpayer in terms of relief. Once again, I think student in the Wall Street Journal, this is about $2,000 per American taxpayer in terms of relief. Once again, I think student debt and the way that it is currently structured is immoral. I think the colleges are criminal. I think the entire debt system is insane. I think it drags down wages. College wage premium has gone down. It prevents people from getting married. It prevents people from buying a house. I completely accept and believe in every single one of those things. But I do question the political wisdom as it was in 2020, given where the economy is,

given also just the fact that at the end of the day, this is zero sum in a way. Like some people are getting a break and some people are not getting a break, especially when we have 20 year high of credit card debt. So, you know, if you're younger

and you have a lot of credit card debt and you didn't go to college, I don't know. I mean, if I had a time, to be clear, I also should put this on the table. I didn't have any student debt. God bless my parents who paid for my college. So, you know, you should always take that with a grain of salt, whatever I say. I didn't suffer the same emotional burden. I'm looking at it dispassionately and I could see it going both ways. I generally don't. I genuinely don't know. So I think one indication of how it is likely to go politically

is the fact that over on Fox News, they're freaking out about Joe Biden buying votes. I mean, the arguments. So let me take on the case sort of just like on a policy level for this, which I've laid out here before in the past about the sort of moral case for this. I mean, effectively, you had politicians from both parties that destroy the working class, send jobs overseas, bust unions, and make it very, very difficult to achieve any sort of middle class stability. Yes. Then what do they offer as a response to that? They say, go to college. This very individualistic bootstrap, if you want to get ahead, this is the path. And we're going to, you know, make these, help support this loan industry so that you can go and you can get a college education. And so pushing people in that direction has led to an entire generation, mostly millennials and

now Gen Z, that were overwhelmingly loaded up with debt. It has, you see the implications of this in terms of the stats we always look about, look at the very small percentage of wealth that millennials hold. It's like three percent of total wealth that millennials have versus boomers have 60 percent. The late dates of being able to get married, the inability to buy a home, a lot of that stems from this massive debt load that our leadership class told people to take on, that that was the right thing. And oftentimes you're making these decisions. I mean, I literally was applying to colleges when I was 16 years old and taking on this debt when I was 17 years old. You have no real frame of mind. Right. So these people are

like, you're an adult when you do this, et cetera. I mean, these are young people and they have been told by everybody that this was the path to take. So that's number one. I think morally the case is very sound and very just. And I don't think it's like a populist position to be like, young people deserve to be loaded up with mounds of debt for their entire life. And I know that's not your position whatsoever. I also don't buy this idea, even though I fully acknowledge that this is a very incomplete approach. And, you know, personally, again, I think that public university and community college and trade schools should be free. I think you should cancel all the debt and make college available universally to everyone. That way it is a universalist policy that benefits

everyone. But we have to act in the realm of the possible right now. And this is what Joe Biden can do with his executive power without having Congress to make those broader reforms. I also think there's a lot of bad faith in the people who are like trying to make this class-based argument, which I understand of like, OK, this is going to benefit people who went to college and it's not going to benefit this other group. But those same people are also not offering like a policy that would benefit everyone. They just want to do nothing, right? And they're used trying to weaponize this class division in order to be against this thing that would be good for, again, 43 million people would benefit. And 90% of those beneficiaries make under $75,000 a year. The last thing that I'll say here, sort of like a conservative argument for it. First of all, there are potential direct

economic benefits that would accrue to the nation as a whole. Annual home sales, one estimate was, would rise by $300,000. GDP could be lifted by around $100 billion. So it could be significant in terms of the overall economy. And then I thought this was really interesting, makes a lot of sense. There's a negative correlation between student debt and small business formation. So if you're also someone who, you know, believes in small business formation, believes in entrepreneurship, that debt that, didn't finish or got the four-year career and still had to go out and work at Starbucks or work in the Amazon warehouse. So I think there's a little bit of a caricaturish view of who student loan debt holders are. Yes, it's not everybody. And yes, the majority of Americans still do not

complete four-year college. But you have a large percentage of working and middle-class people who will benefit from this policy. And I don't think we should let the perfect be the enemy of the good. This is on the table. This is possible to achieve. And so that's why I ultimately support it. Yeah, I completely get that. And I understand. My problem with this is that I think this has probably killed it for a generation. And that from this point forward, I mean, I have a lot of this breakdown in my monologue, but you cancel 10K debt,

outstanding debt will return back to today's levels in four years. So every single person who is, so we're at 1.8 trillion. This is going to knock us down to approximately 1.25 trillion. We'll be back at 1.8 trillion in four years, which effectively means every single person who's currently in college right now in a four-year degree institution,

those people who are not going to be beneficiaries of this policy, after the last freshman today graduates, we're going to be right back where we started. So it's like, well, then what? That just argues for doing more. I mean- Yeah, but it's not going to happen. And then that's the issue, which is that I just genuinely believe this has killed it, politicized it, and made it so that we are not going to reform the college degree. And look, I mean, I think this is where we have to be honest. College administrators and college people in general are the base of the Democratic Party, like to its most core, the most reply guy people that exist online, especially graduate

institutions. And to destroy this behemoth, you have to effectively bankrupt a large percentage of the most reliable Democratic voters. I just don't think that's politically going to happen from a left case. It's just not possible. If it's not politically going to happen anyway, you may as well provide a little bit of relief to 43 million people in the meantime. And, you know, listen, I'm not a big believer in the Democratic Party, although I have to say that they have surprised me a few times now. They've surprised me now with the CHIPS Act, with the Inflation Reduction Act, and actually maybe their most

surprising gangster move was inserting into that Inflation Reduction Act while no one was looking this like, rebuked the Supreme Court. Yeah, it's very interesting. So, you know, the Supreme Court struck down the EPA's ability to regulate carbon. And they were like, you have to legislate this. And Democrats snuck that provision into the Inflation Reduction Act while Republicans weren't paying attention. So they have surprised me a couple times here. But, you know, at this point in the electoral landscape, and I'm actually talking about this a little bit in my monologue, it's not crazy to imagine the Democrats hold the House and pick up a couple seats in the Senate.

In which case, if you pick up, if you win the Pennsylvania seat versus us, and you win the Wisconsin seat versus Ron Johnson, which is probably the more difficult of the two, definitely the more difficult of the two, and you hold everything else. And right now the polls have them in that position. Then you don't have to worry about Manchin and Sinema. And then, you know, Biden has said before free community college was something that was really important to him that he actually cared about. Well, then that actually is back on the table. I also want to say that, you know, one of the other things that they do here that goes beyond the headline, okay, 10K or 20K if you're a Pell Grant recipient debt relief is the fact that they made it more affordable for everyone blanking across the board by limiting student debt payments to 5% of income. That is a more sweeping change.

They also have in here some things about trying like more transparency around costs and whatever. I think all of that is ultimately kind of. The colleges don't care. Kind of meaningless. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of like in the Trump administration, they did this hospital thing, hospital pricing transfer. It did absolutely nothing. So I don't have a lot of confidence in that. But it is a broader reform, this 5% income limit for people. And also making, and this actually could make a difference. There's a program in place right now

where if you're a public servant, you can have your debt discharged. I think it's 10 years. And the program theoretically exists, but is so mismanaged and disastrous that almost no one can make use of it. So actually making that useful would be a big difference. Let's go ahead and put up the cost estimates just so we can give you some of the details in terms of the numbers here. So one of the estimates found that this could cost $300 billion. They are, this is actually before they added in the $20,000 of forgiveness. So they're updating this to see one thing that, so on the one hand, it could be more than this. On the other hand, it's also important to keep in mind that a lot of this debt was never going to get paid off. A lot of borrowers, I think it's like one out of five borrowers was already in default. You have 90% of borrowers right now who say they are not prepared for student debt payments

to restart. So the reality of the situation is, especially with that Obama-era program that limits the amount that you have to pay in, a bulk of this debt was probably never going to be paid, ultimately. This is all fake. And that's why I also get frustrated about it. Listen, this is all BS. It's a lot like Social Security. If you're my age and you're patient with Social Security, good luck trying to collect when you're 65. I think we all know this is not going to happen. Probably going to take a haircut of like two-thirds.

This is also probably the exact same thing. So in terms of the collective future and the actual numbers, I don't disagree with you. I see people trying to make it like you're going to like directly pay for it right now. That's not how the government works. I'm always going to argue that type of idiocy. Politically though, not a terrible point for the Republicans to hammer home. So I really just think that it comes down to, and this is also, by the way, my problem with free community college. I don't think most of these people deserve jobs at these colleges. I think it's all fake.

I think they're full of it. I mean, I've been reading very interestingly in my monologue about the number of diversity, equity, and inclusion staffers. They're getting paid full salaries, all based on tuition bloat, which is funded by a lot of these student loans. I mean, I think the fact is,

is that you have to burn the system basically to the ground, all the way to 1992 era of when like this was actually affordable, accessible. That's when around 20 something percent of the U.S. population was going to college. I think that's frankly probably about right. Well, what what happened in part is that these colleges became like businesses. They are. Look at LSU. They have a lazy river going through their campus. I'm sorry. That's insane that the taxpayers are paying for this. Well, and that is the thing is like they became like businesses.

There was an effort starting in California with Reagan actually to really strip a lot of the state funding. So then they had to go out into the market and like attract and market towards students. And guess which students they want to attract. They want to attract wealthy students who can donate and who can, you know, like fill up their coffers. And so they created all of these. And there's administrative bloat, but it's also all these like luxury amenities, the lazy river. It's all this stuff. So, I mean, it's, you know, it comes, it ultimately, part of that is that the state took a step back from having a direct interest.

And so there was no incentive to keep costs under control. When California universities, which were, you know, and still are some of the best in the nation, when their funding was significantly stripped, then that totally changed the economic model and landscape. So I completely agree that's a problem. I just don't think that the fact that you're not solving every problem right now isn't a reason to do what we can do at this point in time and give people a little bit of relief. I hear what you're saying. Let's go ahead and go to this next piece about how they are justifying this in terms of the sort of legal I hear what They're saying the COVID pandemic is that emergency that justifies the use of this. It's called the Heroes Act of 2003. It fairly directly, it says it authorizes the secretary to, quote,

waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs if the secretary deems such waivers or modifications necessary to ensure at least one of several enumerated purposes, including that bars are not placed in a worse position financially because of a national emergency. There's also, you know, presidents, including Biden, including Trump, including Obama, for a long time have used this Education Act legal justification to give selective student loan debt relief, like the public servant program that I was talking about before, you know, service members. I think there was a provision from Biden this year, if memory serves correctly, specifically targeted disabled service members. So it's been

used in the past to grant debt relief, just not in quite as wide scale of a fashion. It's really weird that they chose to go with the HEROES Act because there's actually a provision under Obamacare, which is probably more legally justifiable and sound. So Obamacare had a federal student loan takeover as part of its actual pay for in terms of how they were going to make it go forward. And there are provisions within Obamacare that actually allow the president to go and to cancel debt, or at least to take and federalize the program in a much more direct manner. So I think it's incredibly odd that they went with COVID as the reason to do so. And actually,

from what I understand, this could phase a real problem at the Supreme Court if it goes up there. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. This isn't just from here. I've asked around in the legal community, and apparently this is pretty sound, which is that the Supreme Court may actually reject it because, and this can look at it under the same scrutiny of which we'll recall the CDC eviction moratorium. You remember that Kavanaugh was like, hey, CDC, you can't just use COVID as a reason in order to extend this. You need to go and enact this program through Congress. I'm going to allow this to go on for, I think it was like 60 days or something like that. Well, eventually what happened is the 60 days expired. Congress did not ultimately pass it

until the Supreme Court came through and actually struck it down. And there was some sort of detente that was reached. This actually could have the same problem. And I think that's also part of the problem with this, with the COVID justification, which is that at the same time, I mean, here's the thing, they're ending other programs, like Title 42 down at the border, saying, oh, well, actually, we're going to end this because the COVID pandemic is slowing down, but we're also going to declare a public health emergency and use it to cancel student debt. Look, I understand that people who are recipients of this policy don't care whatsoever. But I'm just saying, you know, we have found out the hard way in the past that using novel interpretations of the law, while it can be cool, does not necessarily stand up. And so this could very, very certainly go all the way up to the Supreme Court. I just, I think

it's really strange that they went this way and not with the Obamacare. Obamacare gives them a much more direct statute in order to do this. They probably did it because this is a faster way and less administrative in order to go about it. Oh, really? But here's the thing. I mean, from what I understand, they've been looking at this for a year. So, like, why didn't you just use the better legal just— I mean, I had really sort of given up on— Biden promised this very directly on the campaign.

Yes. I think he just said it to Bernie Sanders as well. He repeatedly, you know, talked about at least—he say, at least $10,000 in student debt relief. And so I think that's how ultimately progressives were able to sort of shame him into really taking action here because obviously he was a little bit like this isn't a neoliberal kind of thing to do. Like direct debt relief, looking at something and saying, okay, the problem is people have too much debt. We're just going to cancel some of that debt is a very not neoliberal thing to do. The typical neoliberal approach would be like, let's have a tax credit. Let's have an incentive. Let's have a program. So in that way, even though, again,

I would like to see more, it is a real sign, again, of a sort of break with the neoliberal order, which is remarkable given that Biden was not just like a participant in, of a sort of break with the neoliberal order, which is remarkable given that Biden was not just like a participant in, but a real architect of that neoliberal order throughout his career and also, you know, certainly during the Obama administration. But in terms of the legal justification, I'm going to let other people who are more versed in this do the deep analysis. All I can say is that presidents have routinely used the authority that they have to grant student loan debt relief. Yes, it has not been this broad and this sweeping, but most of the analysis that I've read says that this is on relatively firm legal footing. Then again, it's not like the Supreme Court really is like

honestly parsing through the law and precedent and whatever. They're trying to come up with a justification for whatever they ideologically want to do. So I don't want to bet on that. But I'm very much in favor ultimately of the president doing things that are good and popular. And if they get challenged in court and the court wants to say we're going to take this away, then okay, we'll go down that road. But so ultimately we'll go down that road. But so ultimately, we'll see what happens here. The last thing that I wanted to note that I thought was interesting in terms of the sort of bigger conversation, Ryan Cooper had a good piece that said, let's go ahead and put this up on the

screen, this last article, Joe Biden's student debt forgiveness is a good start, which is kind of how I think about it too. He points out, and this is crazy, and this goes to the stupidity of the neoliberal approach to doing things. The federal government already spends about 15% more on all of its various indirect higher education subsidies than the sum total of all tuition at public colleges and universities. So the money is already there. So it's just a way of saying, like, the way we're doing this right now, writ large, is really stupid. It's really not cost effective. And there is definitely a lot more to be done. I think also before we move on, we should probably address the inflation debate on this. Oh, yes. Yeah, actually, that's important. Because, yeah, this is one of, I think this is one of the more salient critiques of taking this move right now. You know, Larry Summers and Jason Furman, former Obama economists, are very aggressively saying, like, this is going to be inflationary. This is the wrong thing to do at the wrong time. The thing that, so there's two problems I have with that analysis. Number one,

people are already not paying their student loans. Payments. It's been inflationary since we paused it in March of 2020. So it's like, I mean, we're not really changing the baseline right now. People are still not going to be making those payments until December 31st. But I also, you know, and we've talked about this a lot, I really object to this idea that, number one, inflation is primarily driven by the fact that people got a little more money in their pocket. I don't deny that that had an impact. But the bigger problem is the energy prices skyrocketing. The bigger problem is the supply chains. The bigger problem is corporate price gouging.

And so I really object to this almost like sociopathic idea that is ascendant among elite economists and among the Fed. That the only way we can deal with the inflation issue is basically by crushing the working class and forcing a recession and making them feel a lot of pain. Yeah. I mean, so here's the thing. It's actually a terrible way in order to boost the economy. We wanted to boost the economy. As we said, frankly, it's a deflationary move if you make people start paying their payments back in the future. So in a way, we've already had the inflationary move by pausing student debt really, or student payments for the last two years. It's complicated. More what I would say is I generally have no idea. I mean, will it actually impact consumer spending? There's not

really a whole lot of evidence either way that by pausing it, that we did boost consumer spending, and that by taking it away and then restarting payments, that we won't ultimately see a wash. So I think it's probably 50-50. We'd be better off doing a hell of a lot more in the oil markets if you really wanted to. If you want to solve inflation, we should. Or, hey, listen, you could end certain sanctions on Russia. That actually would probably have way more. Or we could pressure the crown prince in order to, I don't know if people know this,

but only a couple of days ago, the crown prince in Saudi Arabia said that they were going to cut oil production despite promises to Biden. That is going to have like 10x more of an impact than a lot of this will. In general, I think it will be a wash. That being said, politically, I have no idea. I mean I do think a lot of people are going to get pissed off by this. And I don't think we should underrate the boomers. I mean there's a lot of boomer people who, look, I don't agree with their analysis.

I guess I understand where they're coming from. They're like, well, when I was in college, I had a janitor's job and swept my way through. Listen, I mean, college costs has ballooned since then. It's just simply not the case. But a lot of these people just don't want to hear the truth, which is that colleges probably have exploded by 2,000 to 2,500% in terms of costs since they were there, but they're just not going to accept that. And so they are going to be angry. So politically, I could see them, you know, in the same way that a lot of Republican messaging around consumer spending and checks being the major cause of inflation. I could see this kind of falling within that trap, but it's all a political wash. I don't know.

But checks ultimately were massive political benefits for parties that gave them out, right? And you have a lot of people beyond the $43 million who will directly benefit. You have a lot of people who will sort of benefit indirectly who maybe are helping with those payments or who are the boyfriend or the girlfriend or the husband or wife of the student loan debt holder or the parents or grandparents who are, you know, have had to kick in at times to help their kids to be able to shoulder this burden. So to me, I think nobody knows for sure how the politics of this will play out, but I'm a lot more confident that material politics ultimately are a good thing, that the people who benefit from them are much more likely to then come out and vote, have a reason to vote, have a reason

to feel loyalty to that party. And it's hard for me to imagine people being like single issue voters being pissed off that someone else got a benefit that they didn't directly benefit from. But it's obviously multifaceted. Yeah, no idea. For sure. So let's talk about the midterms. Nice segue there. So we had some very interesting results this week in the primaries and also very interesting results in terms of this New York special election that we have been looking forward to for quite a while now, because this district in upstate New York is as sort of evenly divided and swingy of a district as it possibly could be. This is a district that went by a point

and a half to Biden. It's been represented by Democrats. It's been represented by Republicans. Upstate New York is also one of the areas where Democrats were getting shellacked as like, you know, canary in the coal mine for previous midterm disasters. So everybody's watching this really closely. And you had two candidates who were both pretty strong, both established politicians in the area that represented significant parts of the district. And the Republican in particular, Mark Molinaro, was seen as a very good candidate. He's more of a moderate Republican. He's tried to sort of like have a moderate stance on abortion and other issues. He represents and has for a long time one of the more significant areas in the district. So it was expected, and he did, he would outperform in that county. But ultimately, the Democrat really defied

the polling here and ended up pulling off a clear victory. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. Pat Ryan, this Business Insider piece, says he wrote a wave of fire, anger, and indignation over abortion and guns to secure a major special election victory for Democrats in New York. When I checked the margin last night, it was right around two points that Pat Ryan had won by. They're still counting some of the late absentee ballots, but it looks like he outperformed by a little bit how Biden did in the district, which is, you know, quite encouraging for Democrats. So let's put this next piece up on the screen in terms of kind of putting the pieces together of all of these recent special elections. This is from Dave Wasserman. So in every single post-Dobbs special election, so not primary,

special elections, the Democrats have overperformed and the Republicans have underperformed. The trend is also very similar across these districts in terms of the more liberal parts of the districts are just really showing up in droves, sort of like white college educated voters, very animated, very much showing up to vote in ways that oftentimes, and this is also interesting, the polls are not predicting. So, again, in this district, you had polls up to election day that had the Republican up by as much as eight points. And so, you know, the fact that Democrats are outperforming the polls is also unusual. Usually it's the Republicans that do that. So, um, Sogert is seen as like a very interesting indicator of where things are. Yeah. You sent this piece this morning from the New York Times. We don't have it made because it literally just came out this morning, but it's very interesting. So on average, Republicans carried the four completed districts by 3.7 percentage points compared with Trump's

7.7 edge in the same districts. The results are not just worse, they're actually straightforwardly poor. Republicans need to fare better than Donald Trump, who lost the national vote by 4.5 points to retake the House. So they're underperforming by three. They actually need to overperform significantly. They need to overperform to retake the House, let alone contemplate winning the Senate. So look, still a couple months to election day. We don't know. I think we could say definitively at this time that Democratic enthusiasm is much higher than it was in the past. And also, I think that it does seem that there is a very activated constituency, which showed up big time in 2018

and in 2020, let's put this up there on the screen, which is that Florida turnout was actually higher last night in the Democratic primary than in the blue wave of 2018, you had 1.5 million votes in the 2022 primary compared to 1.52 versus 1.51. So the fact that it even comes close to what we know was a major Dem wave in 2018, in terms of turnout, right, that means that this is significant. We should also say, though, what else happened in 2018? Well, Marsha Blackburn and a bunch of Republicans also did win their Senate seat. So it's not like it was a massive, you know, it's not the massive wave that people made it and Republicans did still keep control of the Senate. So it's still possible. One of the interesting things in blue states was that it was like purple areas went more blue, but red states became more red. So it's possible that this could

actually flip things a little bit more in that way. I know that doesn't necessarily make sense, but if you think about it, it kind of does. That's actually, that's what they're seeing in these districts is in the rural areas, the Republicans are outperforming the Trump margins, but turnout is lower. Right. And it's in those more liberal parts of the district where people are showing up in droves and handing these large margins to Democrats. So, look, I mean, and that is the, we'll get to this, that is sort of what the Republicans are banking on is maybe these special elections aren't representative of what the electorate will look like in November. But I saw Josh Barrow and his sub stack was making

an interesting point that it's not just that Democrats are super motivated by dobs and abortion. It's also that some of the new Republican coalition is kind of turned off by the GOP extremism. This isn't the issue that they signed up to be a part of in the Republican Party. Donald Trump, even though, you know, he's the person who put these people on the court that effectuated this outcome, he really downplayed the more sort of religiosity component in his campaign in 2016 and attracted people into the coalition who maybe previously had been turned off by this, you know, hardcore evangelical messaging. And so now that that's back at the center of the party, you have some Republicans who are like, eh, I'm not feeling these people as much as I was maybe like six months ago. Some of us may have said that and we're laughed out of the room.

Some of us have been, yes, you've been making that point for a minute now. Maybe four years, whatever. It's okay. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen, which only highlights this point even more, which is that new Pew Research polling actually shows the economy remains the top midterm issue, but shows that abortion has ranked from 60% violent crime, 56% abortion. More so even than energy policy. Personally, I think that's kind of crazy. But listen, voters are who they are. So to have a 13% jump and to have that also come at the very same time of overperformance, that's obviously going to have a major impact at the ballot box.

And this always comes to the more maddening parts of midterms. Midterms, yes, are a referendum on the national mood and all that. But in general, it really is like whose base is more going to turn out? You know, a lot of people don't vote in the midterms. That's true. What is the midterm performance? Maybe like on a bad year, 50%. On a good year, like 75%.

But it never even comes close. I don't even think it's close. It might not even be 75%. I think 50% is more like in the good year. Right. Yeah. So that's what I'm saying. So a lot of people just don't vote. Most of them are old. So if you can get people who are younger, people who are more like fence-sitting type liberals and fence-sitting Republicans to not go, fence-sitting liberals to go, then you can actually significantly change the results. It really is all a function of do I care enough in order to go, then you can actually significantly change the results. It really is

all a function of, do I care enough in order to go and do something? And to circle back to our student loan conversation, that's part of why I think this will be good for Democrats, because one of the most demotivated parts of the base, and also one of the parts of the base that's the hardest to turn out, is young people who will disproportionately benefit from this and are overwhelmingly supportive of the move. So that's part of why I feel like in midterms, when it's a turnout game, when it's just about like firing up your people, it probably will be a benefit to them, but ultimately we'll see. Now, the flip side here and the cautionary note, which I mentioned before, this is from Dave Wasserman. Let's put this up on the screen. Democrat successes in these specials have been

fueled by high engagement in college-heavy enclaves like Lincoln, Nebraska, Rochester, Minnesota, Ulster County, New York, and Ithaca, New York. Pocket's not all that representative of the larger fall electorate. So that's what Republicans are kind of hanging on to at this point, that, you know, these special elections, they're not really representative. You're going to have, and it is true, in a special election, you're going to get even smaller turnout than you ultimately will in the midterm elections. So we're going to have more of our people show up and it's going to be a different landscape. They're holding on to that and they're holding on to, you know, the macro metrics.

The fact that, and these are, you know, these are hard trends to overcome. The fact that you have an unpopular president and it basically has never happened before that you have a president. In fact, I think it literally has never happened before that you have a president who's mired at 40% approval rating and their party picks him around. It's literally never happened before. So it's not like that's a small thing to take a look at. Is it enough, you know, the Dobbs decision and these other factors to sort of overcome the long thrust of history? Hard to say. And then, of course, you continue to look at the economic numbers, the fact that, you know, so many people feel we're in a recession. So many people say inflation is their number one issue and they trust Republicans more on the issue. The fact

that you have 74 percent of the country saying that we're on the wrong track. Normally, you would look at those metrics and say it's a wrap, like there's nothing Democrats can do. And yet it seems like in poll after poll, the generic ballot now tied with Democrats actually having a tiny bit of an edge in terms of the generic ballot, in terms of these special elections, in terms of abortion shooting up as an issue, you have these indicators that it is going to be a much more closely fought battle than it looked like it was going to be pre-TOBS. So I found this clip from a YouTube show that I hadn't heard about before

where they basically interview celebrities. In this particular one, they were eating hot wings with Matt Damon. It's called, what, Feast? Yeah, it's like First and Feast. Okay. And so it's brilliant. They have 11 million subscribers,

so they're doing something right over there. Kind of cool, actually. But what's interesting is this clip. It actually went viral on Twitter. But I really think it is amazing. And I've been thinking a lot about the movie business lately. just seems so stagnant and not able to create movies, which we used to think of as like art, as, you know, not major blockbuster, but the types that could either become cult hits

or, you know, just really take chances. So here's what he had to say. So I think a scenario lots of viewers can relate to is sitting on the couch on a Friday night, going through the streaming services, cycling through the movies and thinking to themselves, they're not making movies for me anymore. As somebody who's been intimately involved in movie making for 30 years, what are the macro Hollywood conditions behind that sentiment? Well, so what happened was the DVD was a huge part of our business, of our revenue stream and technology has just made that obsolete and so the movies that

that we used to make you could afford to not make all of your money when it played in the theater because you knew you had the dvd coming behind the release and six months later you'd get all you know a whole nother chunk It would be like reopening the movie almost. And when that went away, that changed the type of movies that we could make. I did this movie behind the candelabra. And I talked to the studio executive who explained it was a $25 million movie. I would have to put that much into print and advertising, right? To market it, what we call P&A. So I'd have to put that in P&A. So now I'm in $50 million. I have to split everything I get with the exhibitor, the people who own the movie theaters.

So I would have to make $100 million before I got into profit. And the idea of making $100 million on a story about this love affair between these two people, yeah, I love everyone in the movie, but that's suddenly a massive gamble in a way that it wasn't in the 1990s when they were making all those kind of movies,

the kind of movies that I loved and the kind of movies that were my bread and butter. Perfect explanation, I thought. It was really interesting. And it made me really sad because Damon just made one of my favorite movies in a long time, which was The Last Duel, and flopped, flopped massively. Really was uh yeah it was a great movie it was directed by ridley scott i think it was oh my god it's it's so cool so basically it's a movie

about the last you know major duel fought in france that was like sanctioned and it's told so i don't want to ruin it but basically uh matt damon has a wife his wife is raped by another character who's in the movie and she maintains like she was like, I was raped. And he's like, no, she's lying. It was consensual. Anyway, what leads to is a combat duel between the two men, but the movie is told from the perspectives of all three and it's set in medieval France. So it's really long. It's a genuine like character drama. It's really long. It's a genuine character drama. It's amazing performances. But the problem was is that they spent like $100-something million on this movie, and it didn't make any of its money back. It made like $30 or $40 million. And I listened to a couple interviews with Damon and with Ridley Scott, and they're like, yeah, we tried.

We tried to make this great movie, but at the end of the day, it's probably just not going to happen. And from this point forward, that type of a major gamble of – it had all the ingredients. It had Matt Damon. It had the guy from Star Wars. I'm forgetting his name. Anyway, from Girls, Star Wars, et cetera. Adam Driver. That's his name.

It had Adam Driver. Ridley Scott, one of the greatest directors in all of Hollywood, had a massive budget, like $100 million marketing, flopped right on its face. It's a character drama. And at the end of the day, you have this amazing, fascinating, timepiece movie. It'll probably just... Oh, and Ben Affleck also co-wrote it and starred in the movie. It will never be made again, a movie

like that. Instead, they'll make Fast and Furious 24. Yeah, Fast and Furious 24. So they just go back to the well of what they know... Born 5 is the next time we'll probably see him. Right. Yeah, true. I do like those movies. I love those movies too.

Listen, I love them. But I like seeing Matt Damon as a medieval French warrior. Jacques, you know, Jacques Legree. But yeah, it's much easier and safer to go with like this sort of cut and paste recipe of what you know works. And what also is sort of like generic enough that you can sell it to a global audience. China. And you've covered here a lot of times the influence that the Chinese market has on Hollywood now. And so you have this business model that just doesn't make sense anymore for taking those risks on anything, any movie with

any sort of a sizable budget. I wonder, though, what do you think about, there was a lot of excitement around the sort of innovation within the streaming series, you know, Game of Thrones and these sort of like big budget direct-to-streaming ventures. What do you think of that piece of it? Yeah, it's complicated. I mean, if you think about it, Scorsese's direct-to-Netflix film was a massive flop. I don't even remember what it was called, which basically tells you everything. It had Robert De Niro and it had Joe Pesci.

It was like three hours. It was like Scorsese unplugged. Didn't work that well. To be honest, the major Netflix straight releases have basically been like big-budget action movies, which are fine. You had that movie with The Rock. You had the latest one right now with Ryan Gosling.

They did well, certainly, but they're not great movies. I've seen some good movies on Netflix and elsewhere, but it does seem that they're much more invested in taking a murder, which you could tell the story of in two hours, and then stretching it over 12 in order to make sure that part one, part two. I'm like, do I really need seven parts on this one zero? Yeah.

Maybe just one. It's okay. I mean, I also think, what's the one I liked? White Lotus? Yeah, White Lotus. Well, White Lotus on HBO. That was an amazing movie. Yeah.

Amazing series. But again, that was a miniseries. That's also HBO, which has always been in boutique, kind of highbrow content. And so they have kind of a business model, though, that works. Yes. And they've had it since the 1990s. And is that basically because it's subscription? Because it was subscription.

It wasn't cable. It never went mass market. So they had Sopranos, which was their first big hit. And they kind of invented TV drama kind of as it exists today. Then they had The Wire. They have a formula there which works. Almost everything they make is subscription. Because that's the part of the ecosystem that, to to me seems much better than when I was growing up

and, you know, watching, as much as I love, like, Full House and Saved by the Bell. Like, and I do. I love Bob Saget. And I do. But yeah, they, you know, these, like, very rich, like, cinema level, highly produced, highly written with, you know, incredible stars,

like, all of that sort of stuff. That is the new, that sort of stuff. That is the new, that is very different. Nothing wrong with that. And a lot better than when I was growing up. But I also think there's more going on here than just a business model shift because you see it across different facets of our culture. Oh, definitely. You see it in music as well. you see it in music as well.

You see it in business as well. How many times have we talked about, like, you know, all these social media companies that are supposedly, like, the bleeding edge of innovation, whatever. They're all just, like, copying TikTok. You know, the level of actual innovation. Because, I mean, again, that does come back to a business issue because companies, tech companies or any other company,

they're not really rewarded for innovation and taking risks. They're rewarded for giving dividends and doing stock buybacks. And so that's what they're incentivized to do. And they use that rather than like creating new products or investing in their workforce or investing in their equipment and certainly investing in innovation. Instead, they just sort of like keep eating the seed corn. To your point, just came out news yesterday. Blackstone is looking to purchase Pink Floyd's entire album for $500 million. Because people, a lot of old people, don't listen to new music anymore. They're just like, oh, let me fire up a Pink Floyd.

Listen, Pink Floyd is fine. Don't come after me. But, I mean, you know. As someone who listens to a lot of hip-hop and rap from when I was in high school and college, I can't really talk. It'd be nice to just listen to some new music every once in a while. I mean, I think the fact is, is that a lot of the movie stars and some of the best movies that were made would just never get made today. So, Matt Damon made his bones on Good Will Hunting. Good Will Hunting was a massive hit.

It was a cultural sensation. No way it gets made today. Yeah. Silence of the Lambs, you know, based on a book, you have these breakout performances like Jodie Foster as an adult and Hannibal Lecter, you know, the guy wins the Oscar after spending only like

11 minutes on the screen. This stuff is gone. It's just not good. Every once in a while, a good one squeaks through. Actually, Damon was in that movie Stillwater, which was awesome. So, like, I'm not saying it can't happen. There can be still good. I didn't really like that movie. Really? Oh, I loved it. I thought it was cool. I thought it was a little, I don't know, character. Sure. Well, there you go,

right? Which is, even then, like, the true, like, awesome risk-taking movies that they used to make in the studio system is just gone. And based on everything that I've read, it is probably just not going to come back for a really long time, if ever.

And I think that's sad. I think that people growing up today, you know, are basically, you get highbrow content on HBO and then Netflix and everything else is like, is it cake? Or Formula One season five? Fine.

I'm just saying, you know, I want a little bit more. Didn't you? I watched, my daughter made me watch that movie, the old, or not that movie, the show Ultimatum. Oh, I didn't watch that one. I watched Love daughter made me watch that movie not that movie the show Ultimatum I didn't watch that one I watched Love is Blind of which by the way Nick Thompson shout out

great fan of the show by the way after the altar season 2 is coming out so we'll catch up with the Love is Blind couples looking forward to that very much so I'm a victim just as much as I am this is an iHeart podcast