The Daily Beast Podcast - The One Thing That’ll Actually Get Steve Bannon To Testify

Episode Date: July 12, 2022

Things are going super over in the United Kingdom, jokes Molly Jong-Fast to British journalist Ian Dunt on this episode of The New Abnormal podcast. Dunt broke down the events that led to the U.K. Prime Minister’s resignation as well as whether or not he thinks Boris Johnson will still hold the title by the fall and the state of U.K. politics—and whether there’s a chance to actually reverse Brexit. Then, CNBC Fast Money contributor Dan Nathan explains why a recession might actually be a good thing, and that it’s what the federal government likely wants. “Sadly they need the economy almost to go in a recession for inflation to come down meaningfully,” he says. Plus! Molly and co-host Andy Levy shoot the shit about Elon Musk hurting Trump’s feelings, Biden’s dumb move to swing “left,” and the one thing that’ll actually maybe get Steve Bannon to testify in front of the Jan. 6 committee. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Zhang Fast, no relationship to Kim Jong-un. I'm a left-wing pundant and a writer at the Atlantic Invo. And I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart, conversations with the wisest and funniest and funniest people in science and media and politics that help make what's happening today clearer. Our world has been turned upside down, and on the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and how we'll hopefully get ourselves out of it. All right. We're back from vacation, and we have an amazing show today. We have two show favorites here, and first we're going to hear from Ian Dunn. But you, of course, know as a columnist at the I-Newspaper and host of, Oh God, What Now, and the Origin Story podcast, as well as the author of How to Be a Liberal, and he's going to talk to us all about what in the hell's been happening in England. Then we're going to talk to Dan Nathan, who's, of course, the co-host of On the Tape and OK Computer Podcasts, as well as a CNBC Fast Money contributor.

And he's going to tell us what to think about all the crazy kookiness with the economy. But first, let's have some fun. Andy. Molly. We were on vacation last week, team. And I am sorry. I blame everyone else but me for our vacation, where we vacationed. I actually was vacationing.

So was Andy and was Jesse. It was just trying to recover. Poor Jesse. We're back. While on vacation, we got rid of Boris Johnson. Bye-bye, Bojo. And we also made sure that Elon Mush will not be buying Twitter. So are you saying we should take more vacations?

I'm saying that it was a pretty effective vacation. And while we were on vacation, Elon Musk is not buying Twitter. He's trying to get out of it. He's saying, I mean, this is a sort of amazing thing, right? He said he was going to buy it, no due diligence, made an offer, started selling Tesla stock. Now he's saying too many bots, not going to buy it, hosting lots of memes, didn't have the liquid assets to be able to buy it. And I'm not, I don't understand why a group of investors would give him more money when he's so volatile already. Yeah, I mean, that's a fair question.

I guess the answer to that is maybe, I don't know, his companies do well stockwise. Yeah, but I don't know. The biggest problem here is that if he doesn't buy Twitter, like at some point he has to have one company to leave to each of his children. He needs a lot of companies. Also, while not buying Twitter, we learned that he, with an executive in his company, Neurilink, which managed to kill a lot of monkeys but do almost nothing else. She has beautiful blue eyes and looks like sort of the bizarre oh grimes. She has also bore him more children.

I say this is someone who has three. It's a lot of children. But your kids are all very calm and cause you no grief. Oh, certainly, never ever. But also more importantly, they know who their parents are, which in the case of Elon Musk, that's true, not as clear.

But he certainly is on this tirade of having as many children as possible and this obsession with the birth rate, which, again, is a very kind of far-right trope. So, you know, I don't think he buys Twitter. I do think Twitter gets to sue him. Maybe they get a billion dollars. Maybe they get more. Good for them.

No, absolutely. And, I mean, taking him to the, The Delaware Court of Chancery, you know, has given us a great name to talk about as someone who did not know that the Delaware Court of Chancery existed until Twitter put out a press release saying that's where they were going to sue Elon. I don't blame Twitter for saying, hey, you agreed to buy our company. You can't now back out on a whim. And as you said in the intro, Musk didn't do due diligence before he, you know, agreed. read to the terms of the deal. You know, he's now trying to make this all about, well, they won't tell me how many bots there are and, you know, what percentage of accounts are bots.

And now he memed the other day a thing that makes it look like, oh, well, Twitter taking him to court means that they're going to have to reveal the information that he wanted all along as if he had some master plan. And of course, speaking of bots, of course, his little army was like, yes, genius, yes, Yes, King, King, you did it. Musk himself is not dumb. I don't think you get to where he is by being dumb. I don't think he knows as much as he thinks he knows about a lot of things.

But the people who think he's playing 36-dimensional chess are dumb. Like we've had a lot of things in the last bunch of years that have been sort of good IQ tests for people as to whether they believe them or not. And, you know, we saw a lot of that with Trump. And we're seeing it with Musk now. and the people that think that, you know, this is some kind of master plan he has. Instead of, you know what, he really didn't want to buy Twitter in the first place, probably, but decided to jump on the quote-unquote free speech bandwagon. You know, so yeah, sue his ass.

If it costs him a billion dollars, he claims to be as rich as he is. A billion dollars shouldn't be that much to him. So go with God, buddy. I do not think that Elon Musk is playing. three-dimensional chess, who knows who's a bot and who's not. Sometimes I remember in my early days of tweeting, I used to think some of these people were bots and they actually just wore real living, breathing humans

with just absolutely appalling belief systems. But he does certainly have a kind of cult following, which I think is worth thinking about for a minute because there certainly is a predisposition on the right to go cult. But he lost someone in his right-wing, this weekend. Well, I was going to say, sometimes the cults end up competing. And, and, you know, some cultists don't like it when other people have cults. And I think one of the biggest, if not, I guess the biggest Republican cult leader, Donald Jonathan Trump, is not happy with Elon,

I understand, Molly. Yeah, why did he turn on Elon? Well, it's funny because he was, He was giving a speech in Alaska, his favorite place where he definitely is super happy to be. In the easy flight from Florida. Yeah. And it's sort of everything that Trump loves, rough terrain, in hospitable environment, just the things that he really, that really make him feel alive. In a speech in Anchorage called Musk a bullshit artist, what seems to have set him off was not the Twitter thing, even though that's what he was saying he was a bullshit artist about the fact that he's not. buying Twitter, and he said that Elon was never going to buy Twitter, basically.

But he's mad that a little bit ago, Musk voted for some Republican QAnon type and said it was the first time he'd ever voted Republican. And Trump in his speech said, I said, I didn't know that. He told me he voted for me. So that's what he's mad about, because, of course, he can only be mad about things that involve him. You know, he doesn't care if Musk buys Twitter or not. But so now we've got the reigning cult leader, Donald Trump, going after one of the challengers to the throne, much in the way that Trump has also gone after Ron DeSantis.

He is now going after Elon Musk, which is nothing but fun, honestly. So speaking of going after people that you perhaps maybe shouldn't this weekend, members of Biden administration, I don't even want to read the quote. the point is Kate Bedfeld said something to the effect of we are not doing this. You know, there are a few activists who complain about us. They're out of step with the rest of the Democratic Party. I would like to say that I just don't think this is the most effective way for the Biden administration. Like, why do they need to punch at all? Like Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, the Supreme Court, all of these bad guys.

are out there. They're actual bad guys, right? The Supreme Court overturning the EPA, overturning row, taking your rights away. I mean, why not stick to them? Who care? Like, it's so interesting to me because, like, the Biden administration has this opportunity. Just don't punch left. It won't help you. It doesn't serve. Like, you need these people. Why fight with them? I agree. They shouldn't. But, one, this is who they are. You know, they will tell you that that's how they got elected was by punching left and by being the, you know, they love to portray themselves as the adults in the room. You know, so like when campaigning Joe Biden says that he will have a great working relationship with the Republicans in the Senate, you know, that's apparently, that's the adult attitude, even if, hey, what do you know, it doesn't work out that way. But there's a New York Times Sienna College poll that shows that 64% of Democratic voters would like to have someone else be the Democratic nominee in 2024.

I don't know if they think that those 64% are all socialist activists. Is that what they think? I don't know. But I agree with you. It does seem silly. I don't think those people are, you know, I don't think 64% of Democrats are to the right of Biden. I don't think he, you know, is going to get those people to. love him by punching left.

But look, again, this is who they are. This is pretty much what every Democratic president turns into. They turn into someone who punches out their left. Go back as far as you want. I mean, Obama, Clinton, that's what they do. Let's just, like, do a thought experiment here. You never see a Republican president say, I'm going to punch right. You never see them.

you have literal Nazis in that party, Nazis, and they work real hard, or at least Trump has, to not alienate those people. They're Nazis. On this side, on the Democratic side, you have people who want health care, okay? Right. Maybe these are not the people you want to punch.

Like maybe the health care people, you might find them annoying, but maybe you have Nazis on the other side. Like real, true people, who want the extermination of the Jews, okay, among other things. Yes. So perhaps the Democratic base is not Joe Biden's biggest problem. I would like to say one other thing, which is I think that there's a feeling when you hear

from this administration that they are being mistreated. And I relate to that feeling. But let me tell you, you're the president. You work for the president. You're not being mistreated. Okay? You may feel put upon, but you're not being put upon. And I say this is someone who had grew up with a lot of privilege, not the president, obviously,

but sometimes you need to get out of your bubble to see how much you really have. A favorite thing to do is to yell at the media. Not that the media doesn't deserve constant yelling at because it does. But there is always this sort of feeling among, politicians that they always seem shocked and hurt to find out that the media is not their friend. First of all, the media is not supposed to be your friend, and it's embarrassing when the media is your friend. It's embarrassing for the media, anyway, when they're your friend. Again, as you said, you're the president of the United States, or you're someone who is working for the president of the

United States. You are the most powerful people in this country. Stop blaming everyone else for your fuck-ups. Stop blaming everyone else for your inability to get stuff done. And as you pointed out, let's put it gently, the people who are not overly pleased with the Biden administration are, as you said, there are people who want everyone to have health care. They're people who want women to have the right to control their own body. They're people who want the planet to not burn or be covered in water or have any other disaster movie outcome. Like you said, stop yelling at those people maybe start working with those people and understanding that there are a lot more people than you think they are. Again, 64% in this poll of Democrats, not 64% of voters, 64% of Democrats

want someone else to be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2024. 64%. I would just say one other thing, which is one of the things that Trump administration did extremely wow, much to society's detriment is work very hard with the far right. An activist like Pizza Jack, Jack Posobic and Mike Cernovich and

people of the very far pretty disturbing group and use those people to get out their message. So first of all, there's no democratic there's no liberal Jack Posobian. If there were, liberals would have a lot more power,

but they don't operate like that. But the Biden administration is also squandering a huge opportunity here. Yeah, but again, that's what they do. No party has ever hated its base the way the modern day Democratic Party does. The base to them is a nuisance. It's something to be put down. It's something to at best be paid lip service to maybe during a primary campaign, certainly not during a general election and certainly not while governing. It's the exact opposite of the way the Republicans operate, which is to coddle their base. And the, the, you know, the, The Democrats have always had this belief that their power comes from moderates and from disaffected Republicans.

That's who they think their constituents are. Yeah, which I don't think is true. No, I don't think it's true either. And I brought this up months ago or weeks ago. You know, this is the Clintonian. This is the triangulation thing. And it might have been true in the 90s. It's not true now.

It just isn't. They need to stop thinking it is. But it's just the Biden administration doesn't understand. They're playing by. 90s rules, basically. They don't understand that those rules are long dead. So a lot of exciting stuff happening, Andy. You're a friend in mine.

Steve Bannon, source for many, not for me, because none of those people talk to me, thank God. And I wouldn't have it any other way. Multiple shorted Steve Bannon has decided, after trying to claim non-existent executive privilege, he will now testify. God knows what he will say. Yeah, I'm going to start by saying,

I'm not 100% convinced he's going to testify. I mean, they shouldn't let him testify. They should do it as closed door because you know what he's going to do. He's Steve Vannan. To their credit, the J6 committee, who, again, in general, are a lot smarter than I think I gave them credit for

when this whole thing started. Yeah, they've really been good. You know why they're good? Because they're run by people who are mercenaries. Oh, you mean like Liz Cheney? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You know, Jamie Raskin, who's on the committee, was on Face the Nation, I think it was over the weekend.

And he said, yeah, we're up to hearing from Bannon. They're not going to treat him any different than any other witness. In other words, they're going to swear them in under oath for a deposition that will be videotaped. It's not going to be live on TV for Bannon to spout whatever nonsense he decides to spout if he doesn't just sit there and take the fifth the whole time. But of course, we know the only reason he's sort of doing this is because he's about to face a contempt trial for not responding to the subpoena by the January 6th committee. The only reason I think, well, okay, maybe he will actually testify is that if there's one thing these people are good at, it's saving their own asses. And, you know, if it's the one thing that could get him to testify would be like, well, shit, I may go to jail if I don't testify.

and that is literally the only reason he would ever do it. But I'll be curious. I don't know. I mean, because he has the capability to burn the whole thing down. I don't think he will either, which means he'll probably end up just doing the Michael Flynn thing and pleading the fifth over and over again. Ian Dunn is a columnist at the Eye newspaper,

host of Oh God What Now and the Origin Story podcast, and author of How to Be a Liberal. Ian is back on the new abnormal. He's my friend. I'm very mean to him on occasion. You're not really mean to me. You're simply mean about my country. And it's not on occasion.

It's basically all the time with alarming regularity. What did you do to Boris Johnson? And also, I have many questions. First of all, let's start with, has Boris Johnson really resigned or is he pretend resigning? No, he's really resigned where in his head there is a backup option that he thinks he might, be able to get away with. This is always how we operate. Just think, okay, buy a bit of time. I'm in a bit of bother here. If I can just sort of hang out for something else, maybe the Queen

will die. Maybe, you know, Russia will invade Slovenia. You know, maybe something will turn up that will cement my position. Your weird British system needs more explanation here. Start with the cat, Boris Johnson, the speech, let's go. Okay, he's in trouble over an affair of someone called Pinscher, who was a chief whip, these are the kind of disciplinary thugs within a parliamentary party who basically say to MPs, you're going to vote with the government. And if you don't, I've got these pictures of this affair that you had. You know, I've got this threat, this job that you're never going to get unless you do the job.

This is the minister of leveling up. No, this is the deputy chief whip. I know. The minister of leveling up is also. I just wanted to use that in. I'm glad that you enjoyed that job description. He is also a deeply malevolent and morally corrupted individual. in an entirely different way. Pinscher actually pinchered people. He had years of reportings of basically

sexual assault, of sort of grabbing people either in public or if they stayed over in his house. And Boris Johnson was told about these instances. He did nothing about it. And because he thought that he was quite good as a sort of parliamentary disciplinarian, he put him in what is after all a really quite authoritative position. You are the thug enforcement. unit for the prime minister. So he put him in that position. Turns out that if a guy does that all the time, he'll keep on doing it when you put him in a position of authority, kept on doing it, wrote a letter that read, I mean, you know, for the age of parliamentary letter writing, this was not it. It read like something that you would write in your first year of university.

I think the first line was something like, I'm very sorry about what I did last night. I got too drunk. He then leads. And Boris Johnson sends out his cabinet secretaries to TV studios to say, Boris Johnson knew nothing. He never heard any reports that this guy had done anything wrong. He's completely without blame. It then, with sort of grim inevitability, pursued that, in fact, he did know about what the guy had done before. He had directly had those complaints raised with him and decided to give him the job anyway.

Now, why should this matter, right? Like, this is, you know, as serious as it is, it's a drop in the ocean compared to the kind of stuff that Boris Johnson usually does. And we usually get through two or three scandals like that in a week with Boris Johnson. But it seems like it was just the straw that broke the camel's back. And I think importantly as well, there's been a lot of fine words in the sort of days afterwards. But what really took place was this, was that cabinet secretaries like Rishi Sunat, like Sajid, the health secretary and the chancellor, looked around them and thought, you know what,

I'm going to have to go on those TV studios. And I'm going to have to say this stuff. And then afterwards I'm going to look a right chunk because he's going to come out and say, well, actually, that's not true when I was lying the whole time. And it's going to affect my professional standing. And that moment, rather than any of their highfaluting gibberish about their moral standards and their commitment to public standards, that really is the key thing. So they quit these two senior positions. And as they quit, you just get this domino effect of junior ministerial positions.

I mean, literally, we're watching it on a ticker just go up every five minutes, another resignation, another resignation, until eventually Boris Johnson just couldn't hold on and he resigns. Okay. So now he has a wedding to plan. explain he does i mean that's the most important thing that he has to do and it looks like he was going to have that wedding at checkers which is your camp david so british p.m has a country house like camp david probably a little bit nicer called checkers yeah which incredibly we are not given access to who visits it an extraordinary it's just fucking unbelievable we don't get to know who visits it so we know you know newspaper editors go there all the time. I was having lunch with the newspaper editor.

He was, oh, no, I got invited there a couple of times, you know, when Brown was in. They go there. We don't know what they talk about. We don't know who they are. We don't know when they're there. We don't know on what basis. What we do know is that when they go there, it's all very relaxed. You know, it's all by the fire. Let's have some red wine. We're not really at work. And you'll pay for it. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It's provided by the British state. It's your tax dollars. No, I mean, if you were to put it this way, it sounds like a completely egregious break with any kind of fundamental democratic principle, but nevertheless, that's the way that it works. So now you have Boris trying to hold on till October so he can have this wedding.

Yes? There's no way he's going to make it. Like, it's game over for him. As we record, the 1922 committee, which is a sort of party within a party within the conservatives, are deciding what the leadership rules are and how quickly they're going to do it. And they want the new leadership election to be done very, very fast, namely, because they're sort of dimly aware that they've got this absolute sort of circus of dimwits and reactionaries and blithering fools

who are shouting off all kinds of deeply atrocious nonsense and that it's doing them damage with the public. So they probably want that to be done, I think probably by September, certainly by the start of October. So let's talk about that for another minute because what has happened in the UK is a little bit like what's happened in the US, which is we thought getting... getting rid of Trump would fix all our problems. Instead, getting rid of Trump has led to even more

problems. And that's what you're having in the UK. Yeah, but you see, I think there's a distinction here. And you're going to have to correct me if I'm not, if I'm not appraising Trump's level of support right. But what seems to me crucial is that Boris Johnson lost his support base. And Donald Trump did him. And everything that has followed, like I noticed some American accounts when this was happening, say, isn't it odd? Even though the Brits don't have a written constitution, they don't have all these checks and balances, their system seems to have held out

against Boris Johnson better than the American one did against Donald Trump. And that's an interesting point, right? Because what Boris Johnson was saying in the hours before he was thrown out was pure Trumpism. He was saying, I have a personal mandate, you can't get rid of me,

I'll call an early election, I'll deselect the parliamentary party. He was basically trying to turn it into sort of a kind of polite, button up T.M. Biscuits, Vicker, Jonsonian, Storming of the Capitol. That's really what he wanted. It didn't work, not because the British Constitution is so firm or because we're all such good people, really. It didn't work because he didn't have a support base. That's the crucial thing. He just didn't have a support base out there in the country. That's why the cabinet turned against him.

That's why he was unable to cling on. So I think the real distinction there isn't malevolence. It's not strategy. It's not even how torrid the policies themselves are. It's just the fact that Johnson lost his support base and Donald Trump didn't. But some of the stuff I'm hearing because I'm in Europe, so I'm reading a lot of British newspapers. I'm sorry. I forgive you. So like Liz Tuss, who seems really terrible,

came back, right, had to fly back from Malaysia to try. And there are other members of the Conservative Party, the Tories, who seem pretty bad. Like there's a guy who wants to cut taxes. And can you talk a little bit about, that, this sort of the plays for power? Yeah, they're atrocious. I mean, Liz Truss is Foreign Secretary.

To give you an impression, I'd advise anyone listening to this to just Google Liz Truss cheese. She did a speech on cheese, which is one of the most embarrassing spectacles I've ever seen a British politician engage in, in which she sort of acts annoyed by cheese exports and very happy about domestic industries. If you look at it, you will see a completely hollow shell of a human being trying to mimic what it thinks human behavior should look like. She is unbelievably bad, certainly in terms of politics,

but also presentationally and in terms of intellectual capacity. And she is quite literally one of the front runners in this race, which gives you an indication of the standards that we're currently operating towards. And across the board, you're seeing demands for tax cuts. Now, that makes no sense. You know, we're in the middle of an inflationary crisis. If you start just cutting taxes to the bone,

especially in an arms race like this, you're stimulating inflation, you're not getting rid of it. And anyway, there's no really, after all these years of austerity, there's no more public services you can cut. But nevertheless, the Tories are shouting by this. Why? I think it's because they're doing the thing that Labor usually does. And it's very satisfying as someone on the left to watch the right make the mistakes

that you usually associate with your own side. And that's that they're kind of retreating into their ideological comfort zone. They're scared. They're confused. It's chaotic. So what do they do? they'd go back to Thatcher. Thatcher is the happy place for these guys.

You know, it's fiscal hawkishness, tax cuts, some gibbering reactionary nonsense about, you know, sending people to Rwanda and anti-woka gender and we hate trans rights now. All of that kind of horrific stuff. Yes, there's a woman who's running who said that she had sort of been a little less disgusting and then now her platform is, what is a woman? Yes, she considered being less disgusting,

but it turns out that it can suit her. So that's Penny Mordant, who should be an impressive individual. She's charismatic. She looks no nonsense. The conservatives have a funny thing, I think especially funny for progressives, of whenever things get really weird, they turn to a woman, just for a bit of sort of like the firm hand of Nanny, you know, just to come and beat their bottoms a bit and sort everything out and clean up the bedroom.

And so you would have thought they would go for her. So far, she has been cocking it up. Like you would not believe. I mean, I genuinely used to think she was quite impressive. She put out a video yesterday. I can't even tell you how bad it is. It's sort of got this light patriotic song playing in the background. It looks like a sort of advert for fudge.

And then over the top of it, there's all the Brits where this fantastic country. She uses images of individuals who are expressly anti-Torian have demanded that she takes it off, whether they're people who've performed in the Olympics or actors or even opposition politicians. She has absolutely played this very, very badly indeed. And what you can see there, look, what you're looking at is this. The Tory party is currently deciding what it is. Is it a respectable centre-right conservative party, or is it this babbling populist,

Trumpist machine of grievance and victimhood? And that right there is what's about to be decided over the course of the summer, which path are they going to go down? The trouble is, to decide it, you have to appeal to the membership. And the membership during Brexit swerved massively to the right, a huge influx of what were until then Nigel Farage, you know, outside the Conservative Party, quite racist, very anti-immigration, very anti-Europe, all those guys came into the party. So it's on their terms that the new leader has decided.

And even ones who are fundamentally pretty sensible, like Penny Morden, like Tom Tugan, who's a former army guy on the backbenchers, are having to make themselves sound like lunatics, simply in order to get the position. Wow, that sounds great. Things sound like they're going really great over there. There's no way you can un-Brexit this mess now. No, not really. Look, for people like me that want to get back in,

the timescale that we're realistically looking at is not this election, which will be about 2024, 2025, but the election after that. That's the earliest you can do it. Right now, if you come out there and go, we need to go back into Europe. That just sounds like, oh, my God, we're going to go through that five years of hell

all over again. So people aren't really up for it. They recognize that it's been an economic self-harm. That's actually starting to really permeate. That's starting to become the received wisdom. But there isn't yet the appetite to actually try and change it. So what you have is the Labour Party under Kyr-Starma, fairly anodyne politician, but a pretty good guy overall, just very cautious and not particularly imaginative. You know, basically saying, look, we're not going to open that up. We'll tinker with a relationship, we'll improve it. I have to tell you, I don't really care. that he lacks that sort of enthusiasm. I think, honestly, what is required of the European relationship right now

is to just extract the poison. For the conservatives, Europe is the enemy. And every idea, even the idea of coming up with a set kind of charger for laptops on the USBC model that came up with Europe, it's clearly a good idea, even that they reject because it's European. It's as if something has a funny foreign accent, it must be bad by virtue of that fact. What is really required is for Labor to come in, replace that with at least a workman-like relationship.

And then you're on the journey that I think will take five to ten years of gradually bringing Britain back to the continent and trying to end this dreadful fever dream that we've been wrapped up in for the last half a decade. Will Europe even take you back? That's a good question. That's a really good question. They certainly won't do it unless they know that they won't be a political football. You know, if they think that you're just going to have five years of a Labor government and then they're, the Tories come back and they want to get us out again, then of course they're not going to do it because it's just not worth the effort. But Britain does provide things to Europe, which it needs. The first one is money. It's a net contributor. It was a net contributor to the budget, unlike, you know, most of the Eastern European countries, for instance. So that's important.

And there was a sort of a recognition when you speak to some sort of politicians, especially in the Netherlands, in Sweden, that you required Britain as a kind of skeptical partner in Europe. You know, the French and the Germans are usually very pro-Europe doing more. There was a sense that Britain was this kind of break on the more over-enthusiastic elements of European membership and that there'd be a desire for it to be back. But look, it's complex. It'll be difficult and it will take some convincing. It's not going to be as simple as just knocking on the door. What do you think happens now? It's really hard to predict.

We don't know who's going to win. If you had to put your money on someone winning the Tory leadership, you'd say it would be Rishi Sunak, who's the chancellor. I mean, utterly ineffectual. one, I mean, a really dreadful media performer and very, very naive in his whole assessment of what politics entails. But to his credit, on things like tax cuts, he's talking the language of objective truth. There was a period, of course, in British politics where merely being capable of speaking in terms of empiricism and rationality was not a boom. You know, it was just something you were assumed to have, but we're not in that era now. So he'll probably get it. He'll probably do quite badly. It's likely that Labor will become the largest

party at the next election, but probably won't win a majority. And then we'll see another five years of chaos, but with a completely different set of people in charge. Oh, well, that's fun. One last question. Prince Andrew. Why do you always go back to Prince Andrew? I swear to God.

How is your royal family doing? I'm not really in regular contact. I think they're sort of doing it. Okay. I mean, she's still alive. Right. Prince Charles still has seemingly quite clammy hands. but wears very nice suit.

And William and Harry still aren't talking to each other. So I think at the moment, the status quo has been preserved. If the queen does die, does that create some kind of constitutional issues or no? Technically, no.

That should all be quite run of the mill. But, I mean, we spoke last time about the kind of psychological impact that would have on the country. It will be a deeply traumatic national moment. And probably that will spasm out into politics in ways that we can't quite foresee at the moment. So it will be a political event. It won't just be this sort of separate

emotional space that it takes place in. It's just very hard for us to work out the manner in which that works. To give you an impression, the only monarch that my father, you know, who's in his mid-seventies, has ever known, is the queen. Right. And that's the only one that I've known. As a sense of national continuity, it's so deep-seated that the end of that is going to really have a pretty profound effect on people's minds. And when that type of thing happens, usually that has an effect on politics. But what it is, fuck knows.

Thank you, Ian. It's a pleasure. It's very nice talking to you. And I very much hope that the next time I talk to you, it's on similarly enthusiastic, wonderful ground rather than the usual horror that I have to have. Thank you. Dan Nathan is co-host of On the Tape

and the OK Computer Podcasts, as well as a CNBC fast money contributor. Welcome back to the new abnormal day. And Nathan. Yeah, just the adults talking here, Molly. I think I make that joke every time I come on. But you know, the good news is I never remember. Yeah, that was a great joke.

The economy, let's start with this. Good or bad, discuss. Really great question. So if you looked at that June jobs number that came out on Friday, it was pretty good. It was like 370,000 jobs added. And normally you'd look at something like that and say, okay, that's pretty good. And so last year in 2021, I think the average monthly job gains was above a half a million,

which was really good after, you know, that huge decline that we saw in 2020 during the recession and the pandemic. But here's the issue. The jobs gains are decelerating. But the fact that they're still really strong is kind of a problem, right? Wait, why is that a problem? Because they're trying to slow the economy right now. So right now, the economy is too hot, and unemployment is back at pre-pandemic or pre-pandemic levels, where we were at 40-year lows for unemployment, about 3.6% or so.

So what the Fed really wants to do to kind of curb inflation, which is also a huge issue, right, because American savings rates are coming down after the pandemic here. They were given a lot of money, right, to stay at home, not work, all that sort of stuff. And so the idea was, is that, okay, we're going to avoid a deployment. during this black hole of a pandemic. But now what we've seen is the price of goods and services of skyrocket, right? We all feel it, whether it be food or whether it be energy or whether it be rent, that sort of thing. And so the fact that the job market is so tight is making the Fed's job that much harder to bring down costs and prices. So it's kind of a catch-22, if you will.

Like generally, we don't root for kind of like weaker employment. Wow. I thought that the Fed needed to raise rates in order to make money more valuable. It's not just about that, right? So the U.S. dollar is surging right now, and that has a lot to do with the fact that the euro, which is the way you kind of measure the value of the dollar, maybe 50% of that is the euro. And we know that Europe is likely in a recession. We know that that kind of shooting war in Ukraine has caused lots of disruptions to supply chains, food, energy, all the all the like, right? So we're seeing their consumers really strapped. We're seeing a slowdown in what you call enterprise spending, business spending on that sort of thing at a time where prices are much higher here. So the dollar

has been surging. So it's really not really much about the dollar. We're going to hear a lot more about a strong dollar over the next couple of months. As you see U.S. corporations, okay, who sell a lot of their goods or services overseas, they're getting less for that, the more valuable the dollar is. And you're going to see that start to hurt their earnings. and when they see their earnings impacted and they see their margins impacted, they cut costs, right? And that's how you might see the jobs start being cut

and the unemployment rate going back up. And I know that seems like a very complicated issue here, but strong dollar, not great right now for U.S. corporations. It's not great for other parts of the world who are going to get hit hardest, disrupted supply chains, and, you know, basically surging prices of food and gas. So the global economy is in one of the weirdest spots it's been in in a very, very long time.

If you wanted to shut down inflation today, what would you do? The problem is, and I think you'll hear this a lot from economists and strategists as it relates to markets, is that they feel like the Federal Reserve had already made the mistake. There's nothing that can do to really fix it now. They're trying to battle something that they were late to acknowledge last year in 2021 about inflation. They were calling it transitory. so they basically kept their easy money policy in place and therefore overheating the economy. And it was overheating the jobs market.

It was overheating the housing market. It was overheating the stock market. It was overheating crypto. It was overheating Rolex watches. Anything that wasn't bolted down. And so now they're trying to raise rates and they're trying to do it rather aggressively. And they're seeing some success. They're seeing the price of crude oils come in, the price of a lot of industrial metals that

or input cost to a lot of goods and processes and that sort of thing have come down a bit. So, I mean, really right now is they need to kind of stay the course and they need to kind of come off of this really easy monetary policy. And therefore, you know, time is probably the one quotient that they can't really solve for. They don't really know how to figure that out because they're also trying to run off the Fed's balance sheet that got really big, absorbing all of these kind of economic pressures during the pandemic. So there's not one thing that they, can do. But sadly, they need the economy almost to go in a recession for inflation to come down meaningfully. Also gas prices. I mean, right? Gas has gone down a little bit. That's good. Is it? Or is it just

not enough to make any difference? Again, and I think it's a time thing, Molly. You had this huge surge in crude oil and then you saw price at the pump of gasoline go up and it has come down. And that's great. We're in the kind of height of the driving season. So I expect you'll see that. that to sort of moderate a little bit. But one of the things I'll just, you know, I think a lot of people should keep on their radar here is you saw what happened over the weekend in Sri Lanka and, you know, the president's out. People stormed the palace and what are they pissed off about? They're pissed off about high food and energy costs here. And so, you know, one of the things we talk about this, how it relates, you know, to us in the developed world, I think the first knock on effect

we're going to start to see this is in the developing world here. And they just don't have the ability to towards some of the stuff the way that the West does. And so it'll be really interesting to see how this plays out. But I expect, you know, food, inflation, and scarcity to be a huge issue. And, you know, definitely as we get into the fall in the winter in Europe, in the situation with Europe and Russia and their dependence on natural gas, that has the potential to be a really interesting hot button issue from a political standpoint. So as soon as we see these prices come down, it doesn't mean we're out of the woods yet because I think there are some geopolitical reverberations that we're likely to feel for at least quarters to come, maybe years to come.

So that's things like wheat? Correct. Correct. We and natural gas are two of the big ones that are most impacted right now when you're thinking about what's going on with the war in Ukraine. A lot of polling we see says the number one thing people want is they want a government to fix the economy. They think Republicans can fix the economy. Let's just pretend. Aren't Democrats doing just what Republicans would be doing. Yeah. I mean, except Trump might cut taxes, which would increase inflation. Yeah, I mean, listen, when you go back and you look at the last three or four market

crashes and major recessions, they happened under Republican presidents. I mean, Trump, obviously, where's the 2021? It's not his fault. I think the kind of way in which we dealt with it was clearly his fault by politicizing some of the major issues, it's namely mass and vaccines, that sort of thing. But then go back to, you know, kind of George Bush, right? We had the dot-com crash and the recession that followed. That was in the early 2000s before that.

You have to go back to Reagan. We had huge periods of inflation and we had a long recession in the early 80s. And then before that, you had under Richard Nixon in 73 and 74. So, you know, I'm probably missing a little bit. I know that Jimmy Carter was in there and there was some other fits and starts here. But some of the major bear markets over the last, you know, 50 years or so have happened under Republicans. So when you think about what's going on right now, I mean, my big issue is this, is that the Biden administration has done a very poor job winning the messaging front here.

They don't instill a sense of confidence that they have a handle on it. And I think that there's no, like, I would have already named like an inflation czar, you know, or something like that, right? And really somebody who's trustworthy and really feels like they're up to the challenge. There's just so many things that I think that they're kind of stepping on their own toes, you know what I mean, if you will. And there's not a whole heck of a lot that they can do between now and the midterms that's going to change that in any way, shape, or form.

war in my opinion. But it is a messaging question. And again, when it comes to a recession, it's very much self-fulfilling prophecy. So if you think there's going to be a recession, consumer spending can will you into a recession. Well, that's 100% end. I mean, when you think about what's going on right now, so we have the S&P 500, the major stock market down about 20% on the year. We have housing that's starting to roll over. So there's negative wealth effect that happens, right, through assets that people own. And then you start hearing about a recession, then you start feeling the pressures of inflation, whether it be at the pump or at the grocery store, that sort of thing. It makes you kind of

pull back in a way. And so, again, you hear this all the time from economists that, like you said, these are like self-fulfilling sort of things. At the end of the day, recessions are perfectly natural, you know, as you think about it, as they relate to an economic cycle. We need them, and one of the biggest criticisms about the U.S. Federal Reserve, and this is under any administration is that, you know, they kind of politicize the whole thing in leaving interest rates low and monetary policy, you know, kind of very easy makes the economy run a bit smoother. And as a politician, you like to see that, especially when you're, you know, kind of, you run the risk of kind of losing the House every two years or losing the White House every four years, that sort of

thing. So I do think it's interesting. If you go back to 2016 during the presidential race, I don't know if you recall at the time, you know, Donald Trump was. kind of, you know, kind of chastising the Fed saying they're keeping interest rates really low and monetary policy really easy to help Hillary Clinton. And as soon as he won, he basically started, did it about face and was basically browbeating the Fed to keep interest rates really low. So, you know, obviously it's a very political sort of situation. And he wanted to have interest rates low so that he could jack the market. So he could say the markets liked him because he didn't understand that the stock market wasn't the economy. Yeah, well, that's 100%

true. And you think about all those new highs that we saw in the S&P 500, the Dow Jones, you know, during 2017, 18, and even into 19, you know, he would tweet about them at the end of the day and say, you're welcome, you know, check your 401K. And at the end of the day, they were just using, I think, the wrong barometer for the health of the economy. The economy was overheating. You know, some of the major indicators that would suggest that a recession is in the offing, the yield curve inverted in 2019, and almost every major recession over the last 70 years was preceded by a yield curve inversion. And we had that in 2019. So whether we had this pandemic, which was obviously what a lot of market participants would call a Black Swan event, something that no one could foresee,

whether that happened or not, a recession was likely in the offing here and the kind of easy monetary policy for 2017. And even in the 18, the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, who Donald Trump did, did appoint to that job, started raising interest rates in 2018. And what happened, the stock market sold off 20% in a straight line. And the Fed did what a lot of economists or strategies called they blinked. And they got easy. They started job-boning the economy saying they're going to kind of wait and see and they're going to keep monetary policy easier than they had just thought six months earlier.

Crypto turned out not to be a hedge against inflation. Yeah, I think that was one of the pillars of the bulk case since crypto, Bitcoin in particular. was introduced, you know, in the wake of the financial crisis in 2009 and 10. It was thought to be, okay, if central banks, the world over are going to devalue their currency, let's create something that will not be impacted by that from a currency standpoint that is censorship for resistance. You know, like, these were all these kind of high-minded concepts. And so it was just kind of interesting that, you know, in the throes of the pandemic in 2020, I mean, Bitcoin went down at 3,500 in the period in which they started, you know, getting really easy with fiscal and

monetary policy, you saw this huge surge because people were crowding into a scarce digital asset, whether they knew had value or not, and, you know, had these tremendous highs. It got as high as, I think, 69,000 last year. Well, here we are. We're either side of 20,000 at a time where inflation pressures are the highest they've been in 40 years, and inflation expectations remain very high for the next five years or so, and Bitcoin is not working, right? And so Bitcoin evangelists will tell you, well, it's still up a lot from, you know, two years ago, that sort of thing. So I don't know. I think that that kind of bullcase for crypto has not borne out. I think that periods like this, they're either going to kind of be the thing that is the death knell for it, or, you know,

the people that are behind it are going to figure out a better mouse trap. And you might see a different crypto that has a different mechanism that may kind of prove to be a better inflation hedge. But at the end of the day, I don't think Bitcoin did the thing that a lot of people hoped it would have done in a period like this, especially when you think of just kind of geopolitical issues that we have here and also, you know, just the kind of domestic issues that we have with our Federal Reserve and their want to continue to devalue our currency. Elon Mush. Does he get out of this?

Yeah. I mean, listen, you know, like you and I talked about this now. I know, but when we started talking about this, everyone said he was going to buy it, but me. And who else said he wasn't going to buy it? You and I. On your podcast. I think the last time I was on your podcast, I said it was a big Fugazi. He's not buying it.

I never thought he was going to buy it, you know? And so, listen, he wanted to buy it in the name of free speech. He got behind Donald Trump. He got behind Ron DeSantis. He got behind Myra Flores. He got behind this big alt-right turn. And he's pissed off that Donald Trump was put – it's a bunch of bullshit. I mean, all of it was a bunch of bullshit.

I think this was, like, him on his way to becoming a hundred million Twitter follower kind of person. He's probably one of the top five right now, I'm sure. So, hot take, Matt Greenfield, my long-suffering spouse, believes – and again, he is not a market prognosticator. He wonders – this is his question. It's a question. if part of this was that Elon wanted to sell Tesla stock without tanking it, is that possible or now? Yeah, I mean, I think it's distinctly possible. I think if you go back to November of last year, you know, he tweeted out, hey, should I sell stock to pay taxes at the time he was catching a lot of heat?

He literally top ticked it to the all-time high. Then this year, he's on the record for saying that the economy was likely to face a very tough spot when you think of some of the most economically sensitive areas, it would be autos, right? And when you think about, you know, global electric vehicles or like single digits percent of market share and his, you know, is, you know, probably somewhere two-thirds of that or something like that. And he knows the disruption of supply chains. And I think he probably knew that he doesn't have a lot of cash. He's tied up with SpaceX stock. He's tied up with Tesla stock. He's taking lots of loans out against it. So if the stock comes in, he could have margin calls, right, against these big loans that the big banks make him.

So a lot of people, and I'm in that camp, think it was a big ruse as an excuse for him to sell a bunch of his stock, and the stock is down, you know, 40-some percent. I think it topped out at 1270, and here we are today. It's trading in about $700. You can do the math on that. And so he's raised, you know, $8 billion. He paid a lot of taxes last year on the stock that he sold then, and he's got a $1 billion breakup fee.

And by the way, he bought a 9% percent. stake in Twitter in January and February this year. I think his average is probably somewhere where the stock is trading right now, but I'll just say this about Twitter stock. Twitter stock is down only 21% of the year. Snap is down more than 50%. Facebook down more than 50%. So if you think, if he's out and he sells his stock and he just, let's say, gives Twitter a billion dollars, Twitter's going much lower. And that's a, you know, I guess it was going to go lower one way or another, his bid had just kind of propped up the stock, if you will. But the whole thing is a big charade. I think it'll be a really important footnote in this guy's kind of, you know, when the history

books are written on him, I think that we're going to look at 2021, you know, all the pushing of like doge coin, this phony crypto and all this other crap. And, you know, and we're going to look at what he did with Twitter. And we're going to look how he just punches down and how he's just a real bully and his alt-right turn. And we're like, that was the year that Elon Musk topped out. Do you think of him as like a Elizabeth Holmes, or do you think of him as like a sort of quibby? No, I don't think he's Elizabeth Holmes, and I don't think he's a fraud. I think he's the sort of guy who's kind of purport himself to be a rocket scientist or somebody who can kind of figure out how life can exist on another planet.

And the way he talks about this in the press and he does it in such short little bites and everything like that. So I think he's more of like a Barnum and Bailey. I know that's something that people have used, or Barnum, I guess, not Bailey. That would be the circus. But it is a bit of a circus, too. And so I just think he's a guy who's kind of figured out how to create cult followings on certain, you know, the electrification of the automobile. Pretty noble cause, if you think about it, right? But the company has a $700 billion market cap. It had over a trillion dollars at its highs. And that was basically the entire auto market globally for a company that had 5% market share. It didn't make any sense. And so what has he done? He's created a cult following

among people who just want to follow him into these sorts of things. And so to me, I'll tell you, my 25 years of the markets, there's been plenty of cult stocks and there's been plenty of cult leaders like him. Every single one of them blows up, every single one. And I'm not saying he's a scam, But I'm just saying that ultimately the stock is likely to correct much further, you know what I mean, like that it already has. And I think the aura of him is likely to take some big body blows. And I do think the last thing standing for him right now is that you have all these people in Silicon Valley who just revere him in a way. They think he can do absolutely no wrong. And so I just kind of feel like, you know, that ship is about to sail because ultimately the competition as it relates for Tesla has never been better.

And if some of these big OEMs who know how to kind of build and ship millions and millions of cars a year, really get their act together here, you know, Tesla's going to have a lot of competition. And then the flip side of it, SpaceX is great. I mean, did he invent rockets? No. Did he invent the idea of like going to Mars? No. Did he invent electric vehicles?

No. This whole neuralink thing trying to put chips in people's heads and everything. Yeah, that's a no-go. Yeah, but I would not want him to put his head in my, put a chip in my head. No, but so I guess the point is, is that, you know what, he goes for these very high-minded sort of things. He sounds smarter than the average person. He's created a cult following. And so until it pops, you know what I mean? Like, he's going to continue to have this. I just think that every step of the way, in my opinion, he loses a bit of credibility. And I don't believe that, you know, here's a guy, like even the great Steve Jobs, right, who did found Apple.

You know, that stock, you know, was in the shitter, you know, in the late 90s. You know, they kicked them out. You know what I mean? So ultimately, I think there's going to be. I mean, so ultimately, I think there's to come a day and you can timestamp this, as we say in our business in the next few years, that he is going to be kicked out of Tesla. And the stock is not going to be the high-flying instrument. It has been in the stock market for, you know, for a period of time. Thank you so much. This is so interesting. I really appreciate having you, Dan. That's always my pleasure, Molly. I'll talk to you really soon. Oh, thank you. Andy, Andy Levy. Molly, Molly Jong-Fast. Our one segment.

Who is the person who makes your blood boil? I would have to say that it's not my blood that this guy is making boil. It is the people of the great state of Texas. And I am, of course, talking about their delightful governor, Abbott, I believe his name is Governor Abbott. And the reason he gets my fuck that guy for today is, while Governor Abbott is, while Governor Abbott is busy trying to get rid of brown skin people and get neighbors to report on whether someone across the street may or may not have had an abortion. The Texas power grid is, for a change, not up to snuff. And there's a big heat wave in Texas right now. The ERCOT, the power

company there, the grid operator, is telling people to reduce their power use. Not to be confused with Epcot. Not to be confused with Epcot, which is the world of tomorrow. This is the world of yesterday. This is Texas, the world of yesterday, yes, where we want to go back to people not being able to have abortions or be gay or use birth control or have air conditioning. It's the middle of the summer. They want air conditioning. This is why I said earlier, eagle-eared listeners may have caught this. I said, it's not my blood that's boiling.

It's the people of Texas whose blood is boiling because there's a heat wave, Molly, you see, and they can't use their air conditioning. Very clever. So their blood is boiling. I'm going to just keep hammering this into the ground until people understand me and recognize me for the genius that I am. But anyway, this is why Governor Abbott gets my fuck that guy. Maybe leave trans people alone. Maybe leave gay people alone. Maybe keep your hands off women's bodies and fix your fucking power grid.

Jerk. You're a jerk. Good. That's good. Yeah. Well, I hope you can yell at him someday in the future. Do you maybe perhaps when he's eating at a Mortons of Chicago steakhouse? No, we're not allowed to do that.

We're not allowed to do that. Do you want to know who my fuck that guy is? I do want to know who your fuck that guy is. So the AG of Louisiana said the people who disagree with Louisiana's abortion ban, they can move to another state. I picked this guy because there are a lot of states with a lot of people who are quite poor and who cannot afford to pick up and move when their legislature becomes insane to win a Republican primary. I think that it's really important as we liberals who live, a lot of us live in blue states,

realize that there are a lot of really good people in these states who did not vote for these people, but will lose rights nonetheless. and who cannot afford to move, who cannot afford to leave their jobs. And so I think that it's, you know, really important that we don't abandon those people in the South just because their elected officials are terrible. So for that, I give this Louisiana AG a hearty, fuck you.

Amen to that. And yeah, and thank you for saying that the whole thing about how we need to stop blaming all the residents of a state or trying to punish all the residents of a state for the actions. I mean, I just, I see this, I see this way too often on Twitter and other places where, you know, these sort of richer, privileged liberal types will say something exactly to that effect. Like, you know, don't do anything in the state of Louisiana. Let them succeed. Let them do.

It's like, come on. Like, you have to understand how the world works and what you're saying to a whole bunch of people who basically have no voice. and who have been prevented from having a voice, like consciously prevented from having a voice by the governments that are supposed to be serving them. Amen to you, Molly, and fuck you to the Louisiana A.G. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast.

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