7/16/25: Inflation Rises Amid Trump Tariffs, Tucker Sounds Alarm On Home Ownership, Pentagon Contracts Grok, Ben Shapiro Superman Denialism

25:49Another thing that was quoted in this article that is just the numbers are unreal. They say that, yeah, here it is, the median price of a single family home hit record highs in 2024 and has only continue going up. In May, the median price was$427 ,800, which was up from$357 ,100 in 2021 when prices first started to climb. And there's another, what was the other one? It was the numbers here. Okay, here it is. A family would need to earn$126 ,000,$127 ,000 a year to afford monthly payments on an average home purchase in 2024. According to Harvard in 2021, that number was$79 ,000 a year. Holy moly.

26:45Wow. And I honestly think, Crystal, if you showed these numbers to people in Congress, you showed a chart to your average member of Congress, they would be shocked by it. And the numbers are shocking just because they're so sad. But to most people, especially just for like my age, who are like right in the middle of this, like early, mid 30s, late 20s, people are looking around like, yeah, of course. Like we know this, we're living it. Everyone we know is living it. Yeah. And I think I saw the average age of your first time home buyer now is what, 38 years old, 38. So almost 40 before you can even touch.

27:16I mean, that's crazy. And it's a crisis. Like it is genuine existential crisis. For some of the reasons that Tucker outlines there. And you know, that sense of like ownership in society, but also because this is just the way our economy is structured. Like this is the way that you build some sort of wealth and stability for yourself and establish yourself in a way where you can have a family and have kids if that's the thing you aspire to. And it is increasingly completely out of reach. I mean, Gen Z is basically like, forget about it. We're never going to be able to accomplish that. And so, you know, the reason why I sound the alarm that I did previously is because I think I would have, I think in a, you know, a few years ago or in the early days of the Trump administration, I would have agreed with your assessment that it's like just the fact of raising these issues is inherently a positive.

28:08And I think what Trump does very effectively actually is oftentimes pinpoint things that are genuine pain points for people. Yeah. Right. And speak to that anxiety and speak to that problem. But if you have only one side that really is telling a story about that and it ends up leading you into, you know, a situation that I find to be abhorrent and unacceptable with, you know, nationalizing Federal Guard and calling in Marines to, you know, do these militarized immigration raids and terrorized communities. and that's your only solution to the, you know, the housing crisis, I think it opens up a dangerous potential pathway if there is no corresponding rival political project on the other side.

28:54And so, you know, that's why I think it's really heartening to see the way that Zoran has been able to succeed against the odds and offering, you know, it's just New York City mayoral race. I shouldn't say just, but it's New York City mayoral race. We're not talking about the country, But he really did demonstrate how if you speak to these issues and you have agenda that has the possibility of even delivering in like a small ball kind of a way, there is a massive, huge response to it. So, you know, that's where Democrats have crashed in the rocks time and time again is they try to gloss over these problems.

29:28They try to pretend like they don't exist. They try to pretend like things are actually going really fine and well and all is well and good. They don't have a story about that makes sense to people about how we got to this place where you can't ever even dream of affording a home and you feel no stake in society and society sort of unraveling around you. They don't have a compelling story to offer. They don't have any villains in that story. And you are not going to defeat what, in my view, is a fascist movement on the right if you don't have an alternative political project that responds to the concerns that is that are being raised by Tucker there in that clip.

30:00I think the same thing of the right. And I think this was one of the really just, again, I'll say the word tragic. I think it's tragic that the right went with repeal and replace, repeal and replace, repeal and replace for a decade. And they didn't have a humane answer, which is why it didn't happen. They never came up with a plausible, doable, humane health care solution that actually everyone was comfortable implementing, which is why it never ended up happening. And people still live in abject precarity and fear and uncertainty in ways that makes family life difficult, in ways that just is deeply unjust.

30:42and because Republicans exploited politically the issue for so long and never actually were able to land on a solution, right? Like they talked about it. They were like Obamacare did spike premiums for some people. They did lose their doctor, all of that. Because they were exploiting that and kicking around the political football, they made hay out of it for a long time. A lot of people got elected. A lot of consultants got rich off of repeal and replace. And then they never came up. They never landed. And it's not because it's an easy thing to do. It's not because it's like, I agree, like it's hard.

31:18That's of course, this is a really difficult, like complicated policy question, but they never came up with any consensus. And part of that is because of special interests. Of course, part of that is because of special interests, but it's going to be the same thing again. And, you know, if you never come up, if you talk about how prices are too high, house, nobody can afford a house, college is too expensive, all of that. You never come up with a solution. You are just opening up the lane for a demagogue. I mean, it's the same thing, like over and over again, people are getting desperate. And that's really scary.

31:52And we can't, we're in no position to tell people they're wrong for being desperate, their right to be desperate. It's not wrong right now to feel desperate, because that's where the economy is. The Guardian points out one of the problems that people should be paying very close attention to when home ownership, first time home ownership is in your late 30s, is people will be retiring later because they have 30 year mortgages and people's equity gets tied up. And that's the reason that the American dream is the American dream is that owning a house is supposed to be like your nest egg. That's supposed to be bring like stability.

32:28And Tucker Carlson points out that having he says it this way. He says like having a lawn. It's you invest in your community, your immediate physical surroundings differently when you have a lawn. Hi, Salem. I imagine Salem is happy, Crystal, to have a house to Roman and not an apartment, I guess. So this is Salem. Salem would like to the economy. Yeah. Salem would like to not be in the house so much. He's constantly trying to escape, actually, in truth. He's a he's a wild boy. He loves a lawn. He loves a lawn just like Tucker. And so Dan Osborne. So I was going to say is a long winding tangent.

33:07But Dan Osborne posted part of Tucker's comments at the Turning Point Summit. And I got tweaked a little bit by a friend of mine on the right. It was like, you know, Dems want to retake the Senate and do all kinds of crazy stuff and blah, blah, blah. I was like, to be honest with you, we will all be better off. Even if you're a Republican, which I don't consider myself a Republican, like there's nothing worse than either political party in my take. But, and especially if you're conservative, like the Republican Party is especially disgusting and disappointing. But if you are a Republican, we are all better off with a strong Democratic Party.

33:48And I think actually the same thing is true, vice versa, where people feel like they're actually represented by the people in Congress, the people running for president, and don't have to keep settling for Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Hillary Clinton, because everyone, or some of these members of Congress, just insane. And Dan Osborne is absolutely right to, I think, echo those sentiments. But hopefully there are hopefully solutions follow. I think that's just where everyone, both of us included, are deeply pessimistic. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And I mean, Dan Osborne is a particularly hopeful example because he introduces additional competition to a state that otherwise isn't competitive.

34:31And so, you know, that's what makes him really interesting and creates a possibility. And something that Bernie has said there should be more of in red states where Democrats are just not remotely competitive anymore. At least then you have a real competition. Because, listen, all you free market believers out there, right, if there isn't any sort of like tension. Yeah, absolutely. He's going to be feeling pressure from this, you know, union leader populist. That's a good thing for everyone in my in my humble opinion, whether Dan Osborne is able to succeed or not. I think it's why Marco Rubio held on to a Senate seat.

35:05And with him, it wasn't cynical. And, you know, like just just like that's that's my take. But I've talked to the man about this. I think he had a sincere that the competition feared him, feared him, frightened him in 2016. Uh, the competition frightened him in 2016 into like reconsidering a lot of different things. And, uh, the more that happens, certainly the better. It's not always going to be sincere. A lot of times, most of the time it's going to be cynical. And if it's cynical still means you have members of Congress who are always, uh, not willing or not worthy of anybody's trust making better decisions because they want to get reelected.

35:42So it changes the incentive structure. Yes. You want to change the, you want to make it so the cynical decision is also the right decision. because they're going to be cynical anyway. That's the landscape that you want. Yes, exactly. You can presume that there's going to be some level of cynical political opportunism, which is exactly why I've been excited about the Zoran race as well, because I think there will be a lot of cynical politicians who look at this and go, oh, we live in a different world now, both with regard to Israel and with regard to where you should position yourself on the political spectrum, and this is where the energy is.

36:13And so I think that can create some positive developments as well. And for conservatives, when people are in debt and they can't buy houses, what do they not do? They don't get married. They don't have kids. They don't become, in every case, not in every case, they don't become the same level of investment in their physical surroundings because they want to go into a house someday and they want to build a family in a different school district and a different community. And so it's just, that's the cycle that we're in if none of these problems are fixed.

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38:06Fully integrated, easy to use, and built to grow with your business. Thousands have already made the switch. Why not you? Try Odoo for free at O-D-O-O dot com. That's Odoo dot com. Crystal, let's talk about Grok and the Pentagon, a match made in heaven, because now they can throw this Politico element up on the screen. Now, the Pentagon can start using Musk's Grok via XAI and Grok for government. We can move on to—well, actually, let's talk about this just for a second, because the details of the Politico report are—I don't even know what to call it, Crystal. Basically, they're just saying Grok for government is a, quote, suite of products that make our frontier models available to the United States government.

39:02and customers. Pentagon is obviously, I don't even need to say it, a big client to land if you're ex-AI and now you have Grok for government out there. But all of this happened after Grok completely melted down into abject anti-Semitic, like Nazi rhetoric just last week. And in a way that also exposed these sort of foundational weird quirks of Grok that are infused by what really seems to be a lot of algorithmic power in the hands of Elon Musk himself. A lot of influence over the algorithm from the things that Elon Musk does in posts, whether or not he's tweaking things behind the scenes. And now the Pentagon, which is trying to embrace AI, it sounds to me like what people are using Grok for government for is as a like government portal to be querying AI.

39:58That's what the product sounds like. It's one of those things where when you don't use it, you don't know exactly what Grok for government is going to look like in practice. But as they describe it, it sounds like that's what it is. Just Crystal reaction. Elon never went. Steve Bannon was furious at Elon for never really going to the Pentagon. And now, hey, maybe we know why. Yeah, indeed. And a multi hundreds of million dollar contract with the Pentagon, which is, you know, on top of the many addition, like much additional money that Elon Musk gets as one of the top subcontractors of the Pentagon.

40:32So, you know, this is just adding on top of that. I mean, it's interesting politically because Elon and Trump supposedly hate each other. And Trump is certainly not above like nuking a contract because he doesn't like the person who's involved with it. So that was kind of interesting to me is like, how real is this fight between them if he's getting this gigantic contract? It starts at the Pentagon. But by the way, it also is going to be available for purchase by any other government agency through the General Services Administration. So obviously, like you said, Pentagon is a giant contract, but any other government agency also is able to procure this XAI Grok for government product.

41:12What does it mean in terms of Elon? I mean, I think this was probably one of the core goals actually of Doge, not the cost-cutting efficiency bullshit, but being able to advance his AI product, both in terms of situating it as like the product of the United States government, but also potentially in hoovering up all of the data that is, you know, that is held by the United States government and government employees and being able to use that to feed his AI and whatever else he wants to do with it. Obviously, the timing of it is quite noteworthy, given that Grok was just on its Mecca Hitler arc, which I think you put well, Emily, that part of what it exposed is, first of all, I mean, just the fact that a few tweaks can instantly lead an LLM into just outright abject Nazism, pretty wild.

42:01And we'll stencil rape fantasies for some reason, pretty wild. But there were further problems because people found that when they would query things like, Grok, what do you think about the Israel-Palestine conflict? When you looked at Grok's reasoning, because you can ask it to list like how it's, you know, going through its reasoning, it was querying, what does Elon think about this conflict? And then using that predominantly to inform its articulated views. So that's pretty wild. And XAI put out an explanation of that. And basically what they said is when you asked Grok, What do you think about something?

42:40Grok's internal process is like, well, I don't think so. Let me go out and look and see how I can align myself with this company and, you know, the founder of this company. And that's how you ended up with this situation where we just be like, well, I don't think so. What does Elon think? But that's pretty terrifying. We all remember the previous incident where Grok started just randomly talking about white genocide in South Africa all the time. So this is the technology that we now are about to have, like throughout all of government, but starting at the Pentagon, which seems like a pretty crucial place to start.

43:14So, you know, I'm very AI concerned. Most of America is very AI concerned. And that is deeply at odds with the position of, you know, certainly the Trump administration, but of I think most elites, both Democrat and Republican, because of how much tech money, how influential tech money is and the sort of national security imperative, oh, we have to beat China. So we need to just go full steam ahead without thinking about any of this stuff. But, you know, this is just one more, I think, deeply troubling development on our path to God knows where. On our path to Mars. I mean, with Musk, everything is bundled into this fantasy of getting, well, I shouldn't say fantasy.

43:51I mean, I think for him, it's not a fantasy. It's relatively realistic. But for him, it's like his sort of, that's his holy grail in the sense that that's his fantasy, in the sense that it's his holy grail. So this was a$200 million contract. Similar ones went to Anthropoc, Google, and OpenAI. And just reading from the BBC report here, this is being framed as something for national security use. And your point about the data and how important that might be, it's also Elon basically renting his brain to the Pentagon to the point you just made, or the Grok interpretation of what Elon Musk's brain is to the Pentagon at some point.

44:33So to that extent, it actually is for$200 billion. That understates the influence that Elon Musk has sold probably to the Pentagon with this product, which is obviously going to be in competition with Deanthropic and Google and other products. Yeah. It feels like a Trojan horse. That's what it feels like. It feels like a Trojan horse. So let's put D2 on the screen. This was the apology over Grok, which by the way, the CEO, Linda Yaccarina, actually left in the midst of all of this last week. Our intent for Grok is to provide helpful and truthful responses to users, said X. After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the Grok bot.

45:17This is independent of the underlying language model that powers Grok. Now we can move to the next one. This is an element from Rolling Stone. Elon Musk's Grok chatbot goes full Nazi, calls itself, quote, Mecca Hitler. This was from the original. So the apology was in reaction to all of this. Grok was acting. I was going to say Grok was behaving badly, but that completely understates what Grok was actually doing. It was like just madness, insanity. And Crystal, in fairness, this is actually not just a problem with Grok. Like this is something that doesn't just worry me about Grok. I think it's especially worrisome with Grok because we see this charismatic eccentric billionaire who wants to have a lot of influence over politics, exerting a lot of influence over XAI.

46:09And part of their apology, I think actually makes that really clear. Like you see that in the apology where we had the poll quote where it says the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the Grok bot. This is so granular. Like it gets to how such small changes can produce massively consequential results and potentially repeated. Like you can have all the safeguards you want in Grok for government or open AI for government or whatever it is, Gemini for government, you can take all of those precautions and safeguards. Small changes are going to affect the algorithm and the LLM in ways that you cannot always predict.

46:50And so putting them in the, or spending so much, actually taxpayer money to create access to this at the Pentagon for the purposes of national security, I'm sure the Pentagon will be taking safeguards because there's so many obvious problems with this, but the problem with AI in general is the unknown unknowns. We don't even know what to prepare for. And that is absolutely frightening. That's so true. And I've said this before, but it bears reminding what makes this technology really different is like, if you make some change in the iPhone, there are engineers out there who can go through and test and predict, okay, making this change is going to have precisely these impacts on this piece of hardware.

47:35it is not the same with these LLMs. And that's what you're seeing here. And Elon is incredibly arrogant and egomaniacal and thinks that he can just go in and tinker and do whatever he wants with no impact or, you know, with no consequences whatsoever. And so he'll go in and be like, oh, Grok's too woke. Let me just put in this line of code to make Grok less woke. And next thing you know, it's calling himself Mecca Hitler and fantasizing about what it's going to do to Will Stantel. It's like, what is going on? And so, I mean, that's what is particularly unnerving about Grok at the Pentagon is because Grok is controlled by this insane man who will just make wild decisions and is, you know, unbelievable, like the nicest way you can put it is an unbelievable risk taker.

48:20Always doubling down, always, you know, right up against the wall or all the way out on the ledge or however you want to phrase that. And so he's perfectly willing to just go in there and tinker and see what happens. And when it's, you know, when it's on Twitter, okay, that's still not great, but it's one thing when it's embedded in our national security apparatus and throughout our entire government, that's another thing entirely. And so that's really what makes this technology so different is there is an entire universe going on beneath the surface of these LLMs. And even the people who are, you know, programming, designing them and setting them loose on the world, even they don't know how they're going to behave, which is why you have all these stories about like, you know, oh, we went to we did this test and we tried to shut off this other LLM.

49:13and it tried to copy itself to a server and then it went into these emails and tried to blackmail an engineer and reveal this fake affair that we'd cooked up just to see if it would do this to try to keep itself on. Like they don't know until they test it out how exactly it's going to behave. And that is what is part of so, what makes these technologies so different and so unnerving and ultimately so unpredictable. Yeah. Oh, what a happy topic. We'll also toss in here the last element. This is the Wall Street Journal reporting on Tesla's North American sales executive, top North American sales executive, who has just left.

49:51I mean, this is somebody who was there after 15 years, for 15 years, just left amidst the Tesla sale slump. You know, actually, Crystal, I feel like now for Tesla, with the sales lump and with Elon Musk refocusing his energies away from government, partially probably because some of the problems at Tesla, yes, he's in a difficult hole because a lot of the Tesla customer base was alienated. But also, if ever there was a time for things to start climbing back out of the hole or for the company to start climbing back out of the hole, probably be now. If you're an investor, this is not going to give you much confidence.

50:31People internally feel like that process is in motion. Yeah, no, no doubt about it. And you've got obviously trouble there. You've got Linda Yaccarina on as well. I saw someone listing there were a number of other executives from his companies who have also left or were like, I can't do this anymore. And Tesla has their biggest problem is Elon's brand and Elon himself. But they have other problems as well, including increased competition, including the fact that EV credits have not just been pulled in the US, still product line, Cybertruck, a total and complete flop. So they have a lot of kind of deep issues that are difficult to see how they ultimately are resolved, especially because, you know, Elon stock stack the board there with people, including like his own brother, who he expects to be completely and totally loyal to him.

51:19So probably the smartest thing for them to be to do would be to find another CEO, but that is very unlikely to happen at this point. But we do have actually, Emily, one more element here, which is they have added these to Grok, these companions. That's right. I was trying so hard to. Yes. I know you didn't want to talk about it. I get it. I don't even know what the hell it is. So I don't I haven't played with these. I don't know either, but they created these like avatars, like anime avatar companions. Is this just VO we have? What do we have here that we can put up on the screen of that people can.

51:56Oh, it's a sod. All right, let's go and play this sod of one of these AI companions that they you can use to sort of interface with Grok. Let's go and take a look. Tails swinging, totally wrapped up in this cozy moment with you. What's got you so excited to say hi, babe? So there you go. Male loneliness crisis solved? Question mark. Touch some grass. I mean, we as a society need to just go touch some grass. This is too much. It's gone too far. It's gone too far. This time he's gone too far. Well, thanks for making sure we included that in the segment. You're welcome. I got your back, girl. Well, let's move on to Superman and bring Griffin in.

52:43Debate is raging over the new Superman movie. And here to help us break some of it down is the one and only producer, Griffin. He's here. His mustache is here. And he is ready to get into all of this with Crystal. Both of them have seen the movie, the motion picture. I have not. I'm not particularly interested in seeing it because I find these movies very hard to follow. And I don't know, Crystal. I was going to say, also, I'm a woman, but I don't want to offend you. I'm offended. I know you're deeply passionate about Superman. You're always talking about Superman. Sometimes you wear your Superman pajamas and it's uncomfortable.

53:23People can't see it. It's under the desk. You're wearing Superman pajama pants. I thought Crystal's favorite superhero was the Punisher. That's that's how I thought. It's hard to subscribe to find out. You know, we can do this in the premium AMA guys. So subscribe to find out my actual favorite superhero. There we go. All right. So on that note, though, I'm going to go ahead and kick this over to you all so I can sit back and listen and make fun of you and maybe ask some probing questions. Yeah. Well, let me just start because I have the most surface level possible thoughts, which is just Griffin had texted us.

53:57Okay. This movie is definitely about Israel, Palestine, but even so I still thought like, it's probably pretty subtle and there's probably some plausible deniability. It is not subtle and there is no plausible deniability. It's like very clear from even like the flags that they use and what the people look like. And the bad guy country is a close U.S. ally and they're really technologically advanced. They're going up against this like, you know, very sort of like Middle Eastern coded looking people who are equipped with like rocks and their little kids who are about to get murdered and all of these sorts of things.

54:31I mean, it's just like very, very blatantly the central conflict that Superman is, you know, caught up trying to resolve is between these two countries that are very, very clearly Israel and Palestine. And that was absolutely mind blowing to me that and it seems like a really significant cultural moment that Griffin, you can have this major Hollywood blockbuster summer production that instead of like in the old days, it was always like, you know, the bad guy country was clearly the Soviet union. Now it's Israel is the clear bad guy country. That seems like just an incredibly, uh, significant cultural shift coming out of Hollywood.

55:16Yeah. And you know, I like, I don't generally like to like, you know, like turn my politics brain on for movies. Cause generally like they're written by like liberals that are trying to do like a very generic message. They're trying to make something that you could kind of like apply to lots of situations. But what was striking was like the insane specificity in this film. And we've got a Shapiro clip right here, you know, Shapiro movie reviews. And he says not politically charged, not really about Israel or Palestine. Why don't we roll that clip? So the left is suggesting that the foreign policy conflict in which Superman engages is a stand-in for Israel and the Palestinians or alternatively for Russia and Ukraine.

56:00So let me give you the geopolitical setup. The geopolitical setup here is that there is a country called Baravia. And this country called Baravia is run by essentially a corrupt dictator who's working with Lex Luthor and invades another sovereign country, Jarhanpur. OK, and so Superman stops that at the very beginning and doesn't show him stopping it. He talks to Luz Lane about it. The idea is geopolitically that Baravia has been a longtime ally of the United States. Jarhanpur is a country where we don't know who it's allied with. And it may or may not be run by jihadis, but we don't know. Like, we don't know who it's run by.

56:35It doesn't matter. The only reason that Clark stops it, that Superman stops it, is he says because people were going to die. Which, as we'll get to in sort of my final breakdown of why this movie doesn't work and why no really good Superman movie has been made since 78. What did he say? I'll explain in a moment. The people of Jara Hempur are brown. Look at my African-American over here. The people of Bravia are white. Okay, so this is why the left is reading this as Israel of the Palestinians. The reason it doesn't work that way is because we are not made aware that the people of Jarehampur are either wildly terrorism supportive, that they've participated in multiple terrorist attacks on the people of Baravia.

57:13They're led by a corrupt dictatorship that murders gay people, right? None of that's in the movie. So it doesn't match up that way. And the idea that Baravia is Israel in this iteration, like a longtime US ally that's randomly invading countries for territorial gain, that does not match up to any of the facts on the ground that we know of at all. That is not real. So maybe in left-wing brain, that's how it reads. I could see if you're a left-winger and you don't know anything about the situation or you think a bunch of false things, you could read that maybe. You could also read this as Russia, Ukraine because it's one sovereign country that's invading another sovereign country and because the leader of Bravia has a Russian accent.

57:46So I guess that if you have like poison left brain. The Russians are f***ing nuking us, go! So sorry, left-wing brain, turn it off. Let's turn movie brain on. Crystal, what did you make of that? I mean, for me, the big one is like, OK, he's like, yeah, they're brown and the Israelis are white. I'm sorry. The Bravians are white. And that's but that could be that could be anybody. It could be like Russia, Ukraine. But I think the one is famously brown Ukrainians. Yeah. Listen, I have you been there? Have you been? uh so for me though like the the real red flag oh this is about israel palestine is that they're a u.s ally which doesn't work in the russia ukraine uh exactly exactly no that's exactly right and also even the technological disparity like it works i guess a little bit russia ukraine but not to the same extent because they really literally show the um baravians rolling in with this high-tech gear and the Jaranpourians who were supposed to be the Palestinians like have you know they're farmers and they have these very like basic weapons and the imagery is 100 % Israel Palestine and specifically Gaza I mean I sort of feel for Ben here because if you are an Israel supporter um you are caught in uh between Iraq and a hard place because if you admit like okay, this is Israel and Palestine, then everyone goes, oh, so you do know that they're like a genocidal monster country that is attacking innocent, poor people and like children.

59:19And if you don't, then you just look ridiculous and coping like he does here. Because again, I thought it would be subtle. It is just not subtle. And the Russia-Ukraine parallels don't work out at all whatsoever. I think they don't make sense. If you watch the movie, it just doesn't track to Russia, Ukraine at all. So and then the leader of Baravia himself, Hassan and others have pointed out he actually looks like the founder of Israel Ben-Gurion. He sounds sort of like Netanyahu in the rhetoric that he uses is very much, you know, coded as similar rhetoric to what not only Bibi, but, you know, Smotrich and Ben-Gavir and others in the Yoav Galant and others in the Israeli cabinet, like things that they say.

1:00:09Yeah, 100%. Griffin, could you address the James Gunn of it all and maybe some of what we know about people who are involved in production and writing and whether that tells us anything about what they may have intended to do with the way they structured the plot there? Yeah, so that's really hard to say because, I mean, what is striking is not only that it's like political, but it's this third rail issue that you didn't really ever see in major Hollywood films before. I mean, James Gunn is a really interesting director because he kind of built like the modern DNA of like the Marvel Universe with Guardians of the Galaxy.

1:00:45And it's allowed him a lot of clout. A very political movie. I mean, that one. Well, Guardians 3 actually is. So like, I guess what I was trying to say is like he has started to add more and more like third rail or uncomfortable topics to major blockbusters. I'm thinking about in Guardians 3, it's all about animal cruelty and the evils of lab testing on animals. And there's really uncomfortable scenes in there that normally wouldn't be allowed in a major Hollywood film because they're not fun. But he's been fitting that in. And now, I mean, with this one, I can't really say what's in his mind or what's in his heart for the people who wrote it.

1:01:25But I mean, there are so many just striking scenes that seem like this was probably conceived of before October 7th. A lot of the scenes actually evoke something closer visually to the Great March of Return in terms of people approaching a fence and being like, you know, attacked, gunned down. Most of them have like rocks or I think like one guy had like a machete, but like very few of them had like any guns. And then, yeah, so I'm not really sure there. To Crystal's point about like, if you're someone who is watching this movie and it's pro-Israeli, like what? That's just got to be a crazy feeling because it's like, like imagine like seeing yourself like in the villain or whatever.

1:02:07Like if I was watching like Silence of the Lambs and I was watching like Buffalo Bill and I was like, are they making fun of me? Like, are they calling me out? I put the lotion on the skin. That's normal. so like it must be really uncomfortable for them but i do give props to shapiro because shapiro like you know outside of politics he does drill into movies and he did have to come up with something like why why is this not it and he said it's because they're not jihadis or they're not it's not told to us that the jarhead poor people we don't know they could be terrorist or not and because james gunn doesn't specify it can't possibly be palestine because because that would be the elephant in the room and he would have to clarify and only then could it be Palestine if they're jihadis so that was driving me crazy last night but you you know they're also Griffin there is a line in there too where Superman says something like they may not be perfect but we need to save these people or something like that so so it was driving me crazy last night and it was like eight o 'clock and I said fuck it 11 p.m screening I'm seeing it a second time uh so i i saw it last night again and i caught you shapiro here's the line that is very specific that uh superman and lois are arguing and uh they're saying basically she lois is kind of coming from the non-interventionist like u.s perspective that it's like you know what that's over there you shouldn't have gotten involved you should have gotten approved by the u.s uh And also, Lois says, you know, a tyrannical regime runs Jharhenpur.

1:03:47So they even do say that. Sorry, Shapiro, I got you. I can't clip it because it's copyright. Wow, damn. You blew up this whole spot. It was worth seeing the second screening. So it's just like it's unavoidable. Which means you probably just got back from it because you woke up so early your time to do this. It's like three hours ago, yeah. You look fresh as a daisy, though, I gotta say. Yeah. And then there was some other line about like, well, they may not be perfect, but blah, blah, blah. So there was even like an allusion to like, well, it's Hamas and they're bad. Of course, you know, it's not directly Hamas.

1:04:18But I picked up on that parallel as well. Let's talk about the other piece that is very political here, which is the immigration part. And this got this was sort of like, I think, before or right after it came out. This was the big conversation over on Fox News is like, is Superman an immigrant? And what does that mean? Did we end up, guys, do we have E4, the Shapiro's take on the immigration part of this? Because this was the other part is, you know, again, his take is I hated the movie, but of course it has nothing to do with the fact that this is related to Israel because it's totally not. And also it has nothing to do with immigration either.

1:04:56Like this isn't political. I just hated it for other independent reasons. But it also seemed to me that the pro-immigrant message was also quite central here. and there were other allusions to sort of you know modern day happenings including and i don't think this gives away too much superman gets locked with no due process and there's even you know um there's even sort of dialogue about why he doesn't get due process because he's a quote unquote alien um he gets locked into this sort of like seacott type prison from which there's no release and no escape of course he figures out a way to escape but um it was in florida too it was set in Florida I think that's right you're so right about that so in any case there were threads throughout that made allusion to and I this part I won't completely give up but you know at the end he sort of wraps this in a bow in terms of like the life you know the life lessons um that you're supposed to take from the film which are also very much related to the immigrant experience in America yeah you know that I agree with you it is present I thought it was going to be the main thing, especially because that's what Fox News was like zeroing in on.

1:06:02But it's kind of secondary, I think, to the Israel-Palestine thing, which seems to be like about, you know, like really the focus of the film. Like, I think like Luther calls Superman like an illegal immigrant at one point or what have you. And there is that jail scene, I agree, which I didn't think about before. But to me, that's like, that was always like a more safe topic for Hollywood, like being pro immigrant so it didn't it didn't surprise me and it didn't feel like uh different from other marvel or like dc property stuff where we've seen that kind of acceptable you know general liberal message that in any criticism of israel is pretty much not you know i mean the only movie that that was like no other land this year uh and i'm trying to think of anything else that's been going on i mean i guess you could say the zone of interest um but uh like people say and Andor second season, I haven't watched.

1:06:54I'm in the first season of Andor. People say Andor second season, right, is about Israel. Well, it is. It's about there is a genocide episode where genocide does happen. And you could apply some stuff to that. That one even you could make more generic. I think this is the most specific like major blockbuster film to talk about this topic. And I guess the big other thing, though, that I was thinking a lot about that does relate to the Israel-Palestine, but also relates to how I see not only Shapiro, but I would say a lot of other like Gamergate sort of incel coded superhero community fans. They're really upset that Superman is weak in the film, that he takes punches, that he gets hurt and that Superman shouldn't be weak.

1:07:44I think we've got a clip of that from Shapiro as well. Let's roll it. He's not very super. He is not a man of steel. He is not invulnerable. He gets his ass kicked routinely. He gets locked up in a prison with a character who's making kryptonite out of his hands. I'm sorry, what? He's constantly in victim mode. Like Green Lantern has much more success in this movie. Mr. Terrific has much more success in this movie than Superman. Zoomer producer Mac is really thrown off by the cringe millennial editing where you toss in. It's tough. Is it not? I think it's cringe millennial, right? Like that, like circa like 2013, that was so edgy and hip.

1:08:21Yeah. So this is a critique that I actually find very compelling. Having not seen the movie, I bet you would get the right and the left both agreeing. I bet you would even get the filmmakers saying this was an intentional effort to make Superman look more vulnerable and to look sort of less toxically masculine. And I feel like that's what Shapiro is saying. He thinks it's bad. They would think it's good. That's sort of what I'm saying. I would anticipate - They made him soy. Yeah, he made him soy-per man. But I feel like maybe both sides would agree, tell me if I'm wrong, that that wasn't probably an intentional part of the character.

1:09:05Well, I'd be curious what Crystal has to think about it. For me, just real quick, Like, yeah, just from a narrative perspective, and I don't think like any of us are like major Superman fans. So we're just kind of approaching the movie as it is. But like if Superman is just invulnerable or like doesn't lose, that's just like narratively kind of boring, like in a movie for him to just like win in every scene. So there's just something like narratively not satisfying about that to me personally. um but i think that like the big question of the film because superman is facing off with lex luther and sort of the question is like who wins between a battle of brains versus like brawn like is it is it the mind or is it the ultimate strength that wins and for me like the film like decidedly says it's actually a third thing it's actually his superman's humanity his kindness and his connection to other humans and even connection to other animals and his like desire to do something that is uncomfortable for the greater good like those things that humanity is ultimately like what saves the day and allows Superman to win and it's like his greatest strength.

1:10:17Yes, I totally agree with that. And when Emily was saying, you know, it was probably an intentional choice to make him not be like toxically masculine. I think it was more an intentional choice to make him more human. And there's some dialogue again, that speaks directly to that towards the conclusion of the movie where he's talking about, you know, raised by these parents, human parents in Kansas. And they're the ones who really instill in him these deeply human values, in spite of the fact that he is technically an alien from another planet. And so, you know, I thought that was a core theme in the movie and another one that you certainly can read in a very political way because, I mean, you've got the tech right.

1:11:03The Lex Luthor character could be a Peter Thiel. He could be an Elon Musk, this sort of like evil genius archetype, you know, you got Peter Thiel out there. Like, I'm not sure if the human rights should survive. Like, I could go either way. Maybe I am the Antichrist. I don't know. Like he was kind of that archetype. And then you also have, okay, well, is it that or is it just like the brawn and the strength, which is also, you know, question right now. And so one of the things, and this may be me viewing it through my own political lens, but we all get to go and watch the movie and make of it what we want to make.

1:11:35Like one of the things that's been really disturbing to me about this era of our politics and our culture is this sort of up is down quality of the characteristics that are valued. Like this sense of just like being nice and being humble and looking out for the little guy and, you know, having some sense of shame and honor. Those things seem to have been completely dispatched with. And it's instead the person who succeeds is like the biggest, you know, most arrogant, like in many instances, absolute like full charlatan con man who's completely shameless, who's just absolutely in it for themselves and what they can get out of the situation.

1:12:14And so to me, it also felt like a rebuke of that era in our politics and in our culture. It's not OK to talk about Sagar like that when he's gone. Don't tell him, OK? Sagar bald, shaking like Les Luthor. That'd be great. Griffin, I just respond to anything you want to there. But I also just want to add, like, taking the politics out of it. How did it land for you is just like a movie. I brought my kids to see it. It was kind of long for them. But at the end, when it got very action-y, like, they were into it as well. I mean, I just thought it was also just kind of a fun, like, kind of campy, classic superhero vibe kind of a flick as well.

1:12:54Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I'm kind of gassed out on the genre. and this one was like fun and interesting. So it's like, I don't know if I'm fully back on watching every superhero film. Like Sager is a sicko. He sees like all the Marvel movies. Like he's seen like Ant-Man 3, which I don't even think is a real movie. So, but for me, I've been a little gassed out. This did feel like a breath of fresh air simply because it didn't feel tied to like larger universe stuff and had interesting messages and really good acting and fun actions. So, and I've always liked James Gunn, even from like his first indie movie slither so it's always fun to see like what he's up to um but yeah like i wanted to go like to what you said about like being kind or whatever because now like you know the end message that well i didn't mean to be dismissive i just didn't remember what you said uh so like the end message is that it's like punk rock to be kind and so i'm seeing lots of people like being like you know kindness is the new punk rock i just like today i saw superman And then I help this old lady walk across the street with her groceries.

1:13:59And like that stuff is good. But I think like the ultimate kindness Superman does is for the people of Jarenburg, that he like takes a really uncomfortable position and encourages others that normally wouldn't have acted like these other superheroes like Green Lantern and Hawkgirl to act and to do something that is dangerous, that is personally scary. but it matters because it's about helping other people. And so like, that is like the, that is part of the kindness part of Superman that I think everyone should take home. A movie does not fix what's happening in Israel, Palestine. And it was like heartbreaking to see scenes of like these kids in the movie and think about the hundred plus people that are getting killed every day at these aid stations.

1:14:46Like a movie can't fix that, but it is like a glimmer of hope that at least some people in this industry, it's very few, it's been very, very quiet industry, and sometimes like a very punishing industry to be pro-Palestine. Oh, yeah. I think of so many people and not even just the ones that get articles written about, but I mean, people I know that work at agencies that are that are trying to rise up in the ranks. I know Palestinian people that are working in Hollywood that have a whole different experience. But this is potentially a glimmer of hope that they can at least start talking about it a little bit more or that it's so it's such an unavoidable evil that it is now the de facto movie evil when people think about like what's wrong in the world um so yeah i don't know what that means but i guess hopefully the movie encourages everyone to be a little more courageous um on this issue and others yeah i think that's well side graph and you know not last thing that i was thinking about with regards to this is like even this campy Superman movie could not make Baravia quite as cartoonishly evil as Israel has actually been.

1:15:55I mean, if you put in there, they're luring the Jarenporians into aid stations and then massacring it. People massacring them. People will be like, that's just like, why would they even do that? I mean, that's just over the top. You know, I mean, the bombing of the schools and the hospitals and the medical workers and the journalists. and, you know, I mean, the intentional starvation and the entire, like, that also struck me is that, like, Baravia was meant to be cartoonishly evil. And even in that cartoonish evil, real, like, the real world has in some ways surpassed that level of horror. And so that really, you know, that really struck me as well.

1:16:35Watching this is you couldn't even conceive of something beyond the horrors that we witness every day on our timelines in real life. So, you know, to me, the biggest takeaway was just what a dramatic cultural shift. No way this movie comes out in this way, you know, two years ago. Not a chance that you have, you know, or even a year ago. I mean, I think it's just a real sign of how much the American public has shifted in the way that they're viewing this conflict, that you could have this Hollywood blockbuster that is, you know, so clearly painting Israel as like, these are the baddies. And by the way, the U.S.

1:17:12is aiding the bad guy country. We are not the heroes. We are the ones who are on the side of the bad guy country. So me and Shapiro are going to fix it. We're going in and doing a little rewrite, re-release, and we're going to just include one line that's going to fix everything. Superman's going to say that Jharhenpur was promised to Baravia 3 ,000 years ago. Oh, my God. Well, that totally changes everything. And that's going to flip the whole perspective. You're going to want to watch the whole movie again with a different perspective. uh noticed we didn't say anything about the uh the very obvious the the not so subtle um overtones in the new lilo and stitch being about nagorno karabakh and everything happening there right now yeah they also made stitch less masculine so we'll talk about that we'll save that for another segment guys it's too much for today too much we call them story stitch oh my gosh uh well that's a wrap thank you griffin appreciate it crystal thanks so much for hanging out thanks salem for us uh that was it was had a fairly long cameo today so we appreciate salem's time always i'll let him know i know people always enjoy when he shows up it's always a little dicey for me because you never know what that crazy kitty is gonna do but i don't know did did that Superman discussion make you want to watch it or make you more like, I don't really need to see this?

1:18:40I just, I don't know. I feel like the country is mostly all in on superhero movies, which I think is totally great and fine. But then there's, there's this cohort of us who's just like, I can't, I can't get into it. Like if I wanted to, I couldn't get into it. I don't know what it is. But I thought you guys had a really interesting discussion and I think it's culturally sort of an inkblot test. And I'm always interested in that. Why some people interpret things one way and like why is Fox News' running segments about super woke? And then you have even like conservative reviewers in National Review, for example, saying there's nothing woke about this movie.

1:19:14And that's the type of thing, even the debate about whether it's Israel or not. It's like, why are people seeing things so differently? A very interesting question. Yeah, I think partly it seems to me that people who just genuinely liked the movie but whose politics don't necessarily fit with the movie want to sort of like under like downplay like yeah totally not it wasn't woke that's why i loved it because it wasn't woke actually when it's like well i mean i guess it all woke is sort of a meaningless term at this point so you can define it in any way you want but um you know the the attempt to claim that it's not political is preposterous i mean almost every movie has some sort of politics to it because that's just the nature of life but this movie is particularly political.

1:20:00I think that's hard to hard to really square with the central messages of the film. And then to try to pretend it's not Israel Palace, I was just like, if you see it, you'll you will see very clearly what was, you know, what was being attempted here. They do not try to make it subtle whatsoever. Interesting, interesting, interesting times. You're parallel back to how the Soviet Union, sometimes it wasn't sometimes it wasn't overt, which is like very obviously created to be the Soviet Union, for example, in movies. I thought that was really interesting, too. So I enjoyed it. I enjoyed hearing you discuss this with Griffin.

1:20:36It was great to have Griffin here. And it was great to have you here today, too, Crystal. You'll be back in with Sagar tomorrow, right? Yep. And for in with Sagar tomorrow for normal breaking points. So I will see you guys then. And we've got Friday show planned and all that good stuff, too. So we'll see you guys soon. Sounds good.

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