9/11/26: Houthis Hit Saudi Pipeline, Trump Pledges Voters Should Cheat, AOC Courts MAHA, Wall Street City Killer

17:30Griffin:Oh yeah, and here he's asking about this recent pact that Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey agreed to, this defense pact. Are the Houthis scared that Pakistan and Turkey are going to enter the fray? The answer to the Houthi leadership about that. I mean, silly for Pakistan even to sign that agreement. I believe the main reason for Turkey and Pakistan to sign that agreement is because they want to get money and fund and help from the Saudi regime, especially Pakistan. They've been getting billions of dollars in funds and aid to the Pakistani economy because the Pakistani and the Turkish government should know and should remember that during the prosperity guardian with the United States and as well with the Zionist state of Israel and United Kingdom and many countries have targeted Yemen with thousands of airstrikes.

18:22They couldn't even stop Yemeni from blocking the Red Sea in front of the Zionist state of Israel. So what could Pakistan and Turkey add to that? We know that United States is one of the most powerful countries in the world, and they couldn't do that. As well, during the 10 years of war, the Saudi conducted 3 ,000 airstrikes against Yemen, destroyed almost all infrastructure, but all Yemeni ability or army was not intact. So is the peace process now dead once and for all?

18:57I can say that at this point there is no any negotiation, but Yemeni demand before attacking Saudi Arabia, when Saudi broke the ceasefire two months ago by targeting the airport, the demand was to lift the blue gate and to implement the roadmap that was signed, agreement that was signed in 2023. after the truce that was as well agreed in 2022. But I believe the demand of today, it will be different than the demand of yesterday. The demand of today will be different than the demand two months ago. Because now I believe that Yemeni here government, their demand now will be different. It's not about implementing the roadmap.

19:37It is now it will be about that the Saudi must withdraw from all Yemen. They must stop funding and sending logistics supplies, and as well money and any type of weapons to any of the groups in Yemen. And as well, they should stop interfering in Yemen. They should as well, they must pay a compensation to everything that has been lost or destroyed in Yemen. And I believe that Yemeni government will make sure that those demands are implemented because it will be silly that you have been asking. We have been asking since 2023 here in Sana 'a for the Saudi to implement the roadmap. Matt, Matt, and now when we are advancing, when we are attacking, when we are liberating our country, we're going to go back to the same demand.

20:21This will be actually the silliest and the most stupid.

20:25Griffin:That'll be the stupidest thing we could do. So, yeah. And he starts with, look, you came at us with the Americans, the Israelis, the Saudis, the British. You bombed the hell out of us for 10 years and look at us like, what are the Pakistanis and Turks going to do? It's a reasonable question.

20:40Saagar Enjeti:and Ryan like so you know Trump has been reluctant to end this war and pay off Iran for all these damages and give them control but now we have a second straight that we're also going to have to pay off and still somehow that seems cheaper than continuing this war like please pay both these

21:02Griffin:people off CNN was reporting we better hurry up and end this before we find a third straight that we're going to have to start paying.

21:07Saagar Enjeti:Yeah, there cannot be a third straight. It's a straight of Taiwan. There cannot be another body of water.

21:11Griffin:The straight of Gibraltar is in play, yeah.

21:14Ryan Grim:It's in play. Gibraltar is like, wait a minute. These cruise ships are paying.

21:20Saagar Enjeti:And like we mentioned at the top of the show, but it's good to go back to this east-west pipeline that's been destroyed as well for the Saudis is pumping, what, 60, 70 % of the oil that they're putting out a month right now? And so we're not, the diesel... just broke$6 here nationally for the first time historically in the country. And that's going to look cheap soon. I mean, are we going to get into energy rationing? Are there going to start to be lines at the gas pumps? Crystal, Emily, what do you think about that? Well, we said earlier on the show this week, someone asked Ryan and me, or maybe Ryan and I were just talking, what is the breaking point?

22:01I didn't even mean to say that, but what is the breaking point for the public in terms of gas and diesel prices. And I think I said, I don't know, is it six dollars? Two days later, here we are. So I don't think it's going to be any type of breaking point with the public because the public is already furious and the public is already in complete and total opposition to this. But that's insane. And we haven't even seen the ripple effects throughout the rest of the economy yet.

22:30Ryan Grim:Yeah, I mean, I would say the public, If you look at the fact that of the political ramifications that could be in play when you're talking about a Nebraska and a Kansas and an Iowa and a Texas that are now legitimate targets for Democrats in the case of Nebraska with an independent candidate that are now legitimately at risk for Republicans. I think you have to say the public has already hit their breaking point, even if the politicians in D.C. are very much insulated from the way that the already high gas prices have deeply hurt people. With diesel, I mean, this really gets to the lifeblood of your entire economy because you have, obviously, this goes into farming.

23:15Ryan Grim:You know, farmers are already just suffering in so many ways. And then every good that's shipped to the store in a big diesel truck, the prices are going to be going up. I watched a video yesterday of a guy who runs some sort of a trucking business. and he was saying, I can't, I voted for you, I still support you, which is kind of wild to me. But anyway, I voted for you, I still support you. I can't run my business. Like this truck cannot leave this garage with prices as they are because I can't charge my customers anymore. They'll just say, hey, I'll do the project later. I'm not paying this increased price.

23:51Ryan Grim:So I'm at the max of what I can charge. It does not cover my cost. This is just one guy, but you can imagine this playing out over and over and over. across the entire economy. So, you know, the diesel prices are not the ones that most people feel immediately in terms of the sticker shock. But as far as the impact on the broader economy, diesel, arguably even more important.

24:16Griffin:And have you seen the scandal that's hit Roger Marshall in Kansas? The incumbent Republican senator. He's a doctor. And it emerged that he had sued something like 700 plus of his patients in this extraordinarily draconian fashion over bogus, you know, bogus billing practices that he was engaged in, driving these patients, like into bankruptcy and misery, his own patients. And so this is now becoming a major story in Kansas because people are like, you know people like they hate this stuff like it's it's the epitome of the kind of thing that they hate these these fake you know fabricated medical bills that nobody can really understand um where you just layer on top charge after charge after charge and then set you know bounce it off between the insurance company and the and the patient then you sue over it like that that's the level where it gets to the most predatory.

25:25Most times they'll stop at debt collection or

25:31Griffin:something along those lines. He's taking it all the way to the courts and suing his own patients, driving them into bankruptcy. And so people are like, wait a minute, you're a public servant? You're a United States senator? And you're running against a liberal megachurch pastor who seemed fine?

25:49Ryan Grim:Which I didn't know was a thing, by the way. They found one in the entire state.

25:57Griffin:Yeah, Emily, what is the liberal megachurch world? Well, you've just opened up a can of worms, Ryan, because a lot of evangelicals would say many megachurches, or Catholics also would say many megachurches, even if they're conservative, are already too liberal. They have sometimes female pastors and that sort of thing. But like genuinely overtly sort of Episcopalian, like that would have the politics of an Episcopalian or like Elka type evangelical Lutheran type environment. That is actually a thing. And especially in places like in the middle of the country where, yeah, they tend to be more liberal.

26:40It's not as common as more conservative evangelical churches, but it is a thing. It's especially a thing in black evangelical churches. So I don't know much about that congregation, but it is interesting. Like, I don't know that we've ever had a major Democratic candidate with that background before.

26:56Saagar Enjeti:Well, going back to the battlefield for just a second. What do you guys make of the fact that the Saudis just kind of folded like a paper tiger, even though they have all this tech? It's very reminds me a lot of our own tech being. Because it is ours. It is. Yeah, that's true. You know what? That's why it seems so familiar. It's not all not working. They're about to have laundry fires on their boats. And, you know, which leads me to this reporting that there are many actors running CLAWD to create missile guidance systems. This report says we identified a cell of threat actors based in northern Yemen running three weapon development programs, a guided rocket that uses a commodity phone class flight computer with final phase homing guidance.

27:43Saagar Enjeti:The actors use Claude code in place of human software engineers to develop the guidance, navigation, and control software that steers and stabilizes a flying vehicle. For example, they use Claude to integrate an open-source autopilot onto a phone class flight computer, writing the control and position estimation software, turning the control settings, running a firmware build pipeline, and performing a flight simulation. The actors managed several clawed instances at once, assigning each one a role, much as a lead would delegate work on a small engineering team. So thank you. Thank you, Big Tech, for contributing to this war in some way.

28:25Saagar Enjeti:This shit is insane. But it is kind of wild that they have just let this technology just fly. And now it's being used against us.

28:36Ryan Grim:Well, I mean, it's so predictable, right? It's so obviously pretty. I saw it not to pick on him, but I saw Matt Stoller tweeting out like, hey, if this AI is so powerful, how come we're getting our ass kicked by Iran when we've got all this fancy AI enabled stuff? And it's like, well, maybe there's the answer. They can use it too. They can also use the AI that's available. So not only the Whoopies, but Iran also has been using apparently Claude for their own purposes very predictably.

29:04Saagar Enjeti:But they're hitting real targets, not the schools. Anthropic had that huge blow up with the Pentagon, which was actually just very interesting. It raised interesting questions about the ethics of having these massive, super powerful AI companies. And do I think Pete Hegsus' rationale for wanting to have Anthropic totally under the control of the Pentagon was pure? No, but it, of course, comes to the enormous potential these things could be used for military purposes, either by us or against us. And Anthropic just casually drops this report after they have their guy out there responding to Coxson saying, yeah, we think there's like a 10 percent, as you guys covered, a 10 percent threat to humanity from it.

29:50But it's still it hasn't gotten that high. 10 percent. That's their own person who hasn't even resigned or quit saying that. So then they casually dropped this report about how enemies actually are using their own shit. And we're just supposed to go about life business as usual and hope Jim Clyburn figures out how to use. He's already mastered chat GPT. Next up, he'll master how to use Claude. And somehow the government will regulate this in a way that makes sense.

30:20Ryan Grim:Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of the concerns that are being raised now on the existential front, especially after the Hugging Face hacking and other similar incidents, were about what if AI is misaligned from humans? What if it sort of goes rogue and you have these rogue swarms? The immediate problem we're facing is what are the humans doing with the AI? Because humans are not always particularly aligned with human values. And there are a lot of conflicts about what those values are and what they should be and the way that tech should be deployed. There's another report yesterday, I think also from Anthropic, that they stopped a number of scientists from using their products because they thought that it looked like they were trying to develop biological weapons, which is, again, something that has been anticipated and warned about.

31:10Ryan Grim:So that's already the realm that we're in right now, is that you have technology which is quite capable already. And the IRGC. They mentioned the IRGC in that report. Yes, exactly. Technology that is quite capable already. That's in the hands of anybody who wants it. And there's no real government regulation. There's certainly no international cooperation around what the boundaries and the guidelines should be. And I think most people find that to be very troubling. So, yeah, I mean, it's an incredible it's an incredible amount of American arrogance that we just assumed like only we're going to use this product that's completely publicly available.

31:51Ryan Grim:We should have known when we saw the Lego videos coming out and they were picking our ass just in propaganda, like A.I. Slot propaganda that they were going to put Claude and everything else to use to the fullest extent possible. And so that's what we're learning now. I'm petitioning to change the Department of Justice to the Department of Human Alignment. We should get some human alignment first. Your local police, they're human aligners.

32:18Saagar Enjeti:Yeah, I mean, it's not looking good for Trump leading into these midterms. For us, Griffin, it's not looking good for anyone. You're right, you're right. But I think the only way that Trump could actually take these midterms is if he starts arresting people at these companies. I think that would be the only thing that would turn the country around. But I think that leads us nicely to a riveting midterm GOP convention. Let's take a look over there now. Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile with your summer price forecast. Now, unfortunately, we're seeing rising costs across the country with possibility that big wireless hates you 100%.

32:55Saagar Enjeti:Now, over here at Mint Mobile, we're seeing sunny skies and dropping prices. Every plan to just$15 a month. Give it a try at midmobile.com slash switch.

33:05Ryan Grim:Upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. New customer offer for initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. Hey, everyone. It's the Jonas Brothers with the Hey Jonas podcast. We've been catching up with some great friends.

33:18Saagar Enjeti:Paul Rudd, Michael Buble, Seth Meyers, Niall Horan, Jake Shane. And making some new friends while getting into what's really like to have sisters, like Alex and Astrid and Earl. She likes to control everyone and tell everyone. Okay, well, control is a harsh word. I would say that's a harsh word. I am more outspoken. Growing up a lot of the times because she was so quiet, I would speak for the both of us. Now I'm working on thinking a moment, really knitting, thinking before I speak. And Joey King. You know if your mom is yelling at your sibling, and even if you're annoyed with your sibling, you just won't let that slide.

33:52It's like only you can yell at your sibling. I'm like, you can't do that here. That is not in my house. You don't want to talk about her like that. Only I talk about her like that. Plus, we've been taking your calls, listening to your voicemails and giving you advice. Or at least trying to. So if you've got catching up to do, now's the perfect time. Listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.

34:32I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed.

34:42Ryan Grim:So obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters and that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages.

35:16Saagar Enjeti:A riveting, jam-packed GOP midterm convention was had and we just wanted to flag a few eyebrow-raising quotes from Mr. President Trump. Let's start with this one where Trump asked for a pledge from the audience. This was last night. Please raise your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. Put your hand on Ryan. i want to hear the pledge first can't even breathe hashtag i can't breathe i will go out with my family my friends i'll do it anyway i don't care if i'm registered or not i'm gonna try and cheat like hell like they do they never there's never been bigger cheaters i don't care i am gonna go out and i'm gonna get my friends my family And we are going to vote on November 3rd or we are going to vote before that.

36:23Saagar Enjeti:All right. So our new election security is fine. You don't have to register. You don't have to register anymore, Ryan. You missed the part where he said that if you don't, you go to hell. That was also another.

36:35Griffin:Joke's on me, though. There's nobody running in D.C. because we don't have senators or representatives. Yeah. So this speech was last night. He gave nearly a two hour speech the night before. And last night was J.D. Vance as the keynote. J.D. gives a normal speech and then Trump comes out apparently just to close the convention. and it did not go as expected or it went exactly as you might expect. He got up there and started riffing, telling people they're going to go to hell if they don't vote for it. It had to have been close to a half an hour. That was that was rather unexpected from, I guess, the people who organized the convention, who thought that he was just going to come out there and close it.

37:22But indeed, he was not capable of saying the convention is over. Thank you for coming. It went much longer than that.

37:28Ryan Grim:Well, they're certainly not beating the cult allegations between the creepy pledges. And then, Griffin, can you cue up the montage that they did, a spinoff of, yes, the famous Paul Harvey speech, which was probably made even more famous by the Super Bowl Dodge Ram commercial that used the speech. They did their own version of this, and I'm particularly interested in Emily's view of this. They've done this before, by the way. Oh, really? I forgot about it. God looked down on his planned paradise and said, I need a caretaker. So God gave us Trump. Good Lord. I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office.

38:17Saagar Enjeti:Eat supper with G. Sounds like my everyday. Trump, I need somebody with arms strong enough to rustle the deep state and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild. Somebody to ruffle the feathers. Tame cantankerous World Economic Forum. Come home hungry. Have to wait until the first lady is done with lunch with friends. Tell the ladies to be sure and come back real soon. I mean it. So God gave us Trump. I need somebody who can shape an axe but wield a sword. Who have courage to step foot in North Korea. Who will make money from the tar of the sand. Turn liquid to gold. Who understands the difference between tariffs and inflation.

39:03Will finish his 40-hour week by Tuesday noon. But then put in another 72 hours. So God made Trump. God had to have somebody willing to go into the den of vipers. call out the fake news for their tongues as sharp as a serpent's. The poison of vipers is on their lips and yet stop. So God made Trump. God said, I need somebody who will be strong and courageous, who will not be afraid or terrified of the wolves when they attack. A man who cares for the flock. A shepherd to mankind who won't ever leave nor forsake them. I need the most diligent worker. A shepherd to mankind. And remain strong in faith and know the belief of God.

39:46Oh, Paula. Somebody who's willing to drill.

39:50Saagar Enjeti:Is this going to go forever? I feel like I've been watching this for half an hour.

39:55Ryan Grim:30 more seconds. Come on, Griffin. We got to stick with it. It's too good. Farm the lands, secure our borders, build our military, fight the system all day, and finish a hard week's work by attending church. At the golf course. Church on Sunday. Yeah. He never goes.

40:22Saagar Enjeti:Why is Don Jr.

40:28Saagar Enjeti:getting a shout out here? I don't know.

40:31Ryan Grim:Probably because he spoke last night would be my guess. I don't know. It was a lead in. Yeah. People were saying he was a little too sober and the speech was boring. So I don't know. I didn't watch it myself. That's just what the internet commentary was saying. But I know for some reason, Emily, the part of that that triggered me the most was when they talked about how hard he worked, given the fact that this man is like, first of all, at every sporting event that's anything, on the golf course, like multiple times during the week, has way more leisure time than literally any one of us and is somehow president of the United States.

41:02Yeah, there's that. And it's also I saw that they had aired this right after listening to J.D. Vance's speech, which I thought technically just from a political standpoint was pretty well executed. And then I saw that they had run this ad and what Vance was intentionally trying to draw contrast out of in his speech is kind of the weird he was doing Tim Walls, like a reverse Tim Walls. He was trying to, like, depict all of the DSA candidates as weird and wacky. And it's like, you cannot pull that off. If at the exact same night of the convention, you're rolling this, like, abject MAGA cringe about God creating Trump to be a shepherd for mankind.

41:46It is so deeply bizarre that it undermines any effort that you were making at this convention to depict the left, which was basically clearly an intentional strategy. So it was basically the through line of the entire two-day convention was Vance making this pitch to Vance and all the other Republicans. Yes, we have some problems. Like, we understand the Trump administration. You know, they didn't outright say this. We understand the Trump administration. You may not agree with us on everything. Vance was like straight to camera last night going to young men who may not be happy with the Iran war, may not be happy with certain choices the Trump administration has made, but said basically we're better than the other guys.

42:29Hell of a political pitch, but it's really hard to say everyone else is weird. Griffin, you can pull that clip back up. It actually is a great segue here. When you're rolling God made Trump or God sent Trump to be the shepherd of mankind.

42:43Saagar Enjeti:but god also made tallarico's web browser history this tallarico guy he will not shut up about how there are six genders he will not shut up about how quote god is non-binary i don't know what the hell that even means my friends he won't shut up about having traditional christian values makes you a bigot and i gotta say a guy that age who was so obsessed and focused on transgender or children. I don't know about you, but I never want to see that guy's web browser history.

43:17I think that's an enormously cynical thing to say. I was listening to this.

43:20Saagar Enjeti:We'd rather be here. I was listening to this live last night, and I actually, again, I thought he technically delivered a pretty strong speech. But listening to that live, it struck me as enormously cynical to accuse someone of implicitly being a pedophile, basically, from the vice president of the United States is not something I think we should be particularly numb to. There's absolutely no evidence that James Tallarico, as much as you may disagree with him or dislike him, as many people, myself including, do, that he is a pedophile and don't want to get numb to some of these Trump-era reflexes that Republicans have developed.

43:55But again, on the politics, you're trying to make Democrats look completely like they're bizarre, they're weird. It's a reverse Tim Walz and then Trump, God sent Trump to be a shepherd of mankind and all of the other weird Trump stuff that happened at the convention. A little hard to pull that off.

44:13Ryan Grim:So Ryan, just from a political optics perspective, night one, you had the montage featuring Hassan Piker's meat and night two, you had God made Trump. Which one do you think was more politically salient and effective? Yeah.

44:32Griffin:I mean, did you see Hassan using the meat photo with his join the DSA? Griffin, you got to find that.

44:41Ryan Grim:Yes.

44:41Saagar Enjeti:And also the Google searches at the convention, some of the top three were, is Hassan Piker gay? Hassan Piker shirtless? These were some of the top Google searches.

44:52Ryan Grim:Typical grinder outages all around. Yes. I said they should have used the picture of him in the dress. They should have used the picture of him in the cosplay.

45:00Griffin:As long as we're leveling charges without evidence, like how many people at that convention would flunk the browser test? Like just just ballpark percentage.

45:08Saagar Enjeti:Let's release Jade. I want to see JD's browser history go up against Tallarico's. I think it's an interesting inquiry. Let's see them all.

45:16Ryan Grim:I think we need to know less about people. After I watched that Bill Maher episode with that OnlyFans chick. Actually, I didn't watch it. Why did you watch that? Unfortunately, I could not avoid the clips because Kyle was like, did you see this? Kyle talks to you at home like headlines.

45:35Griffin:Last night. I love The View.

45:37Ryan Grim:We need to know less about all public figures. I'm tired of this oversharing. I don't want to know about your browser history. I don't want to know how many times you're jerking off a day. Bill Maher at 70 years old. I don't want to know any of these things. So could we just keep that to ourselves, please? He didn't say that, did he?

45:53Saagar Enjeti:He did. Bill Maher needs a restraining order against any woman under the age of 45. You need to be using Anthropic to figure out how to metaphorically neutralize Bill Maher.

46:04Griffin:So last night I did an event in D.C. with Medea Benjamin. I interviewed her on stage with some other folks. And beforehand, they were all talking about, did you see what they did at the Republican convention to Hassan? And you had this multi-generational group of women who were just scrolling through their phone and all passing it around for research purposes only, of course. Of course. Obviously. All of them. It was one of the funniest scenes that I've ever seen. All of them just ogling this, like, but ironically and just laughing, of course. That's, you know, none of us are, it was so good.

46:42Ryan Grim:The funniest thing to me is how at the convention, how they blurred out his package.

46:49Griffin:Only forcing him to Google more.

46:51Ryan Grim:Shows the picture, but we need to have some decorum about this. That's right.

46:55Saagar Enjeti:That's right. Well, going into the convention, there were all kinds of leaks to places like Puck and Playbook from mostly Republican consultants and insiders. One lobbyist close to the White House, according to Playbook, said, quote, the vibes are very bad. Dems are salivating. Our people are debating Israel or melting down about this or that. No one is motivated to vote. Only the DSA rise is what's keeping us in the game. Another person said, my only hope is that no one watches it, referring to the convention, since it's competing versus NFL opening games. Hopefully nobody notices the embarrassing show.

47:28I don't think it will matter. No one knows about it. No enthusiasm. And it's during football. Only D.C. people care. The other point, not only did they schedule this going up against football, but another point that people were making is this is the week of night. This is your crescendo is the anniversary of the death of Charlie Kirk and the week of 9-11. And so instead of Republicans being able to capitalize politically on both of those commemorations, the commemoration of 9-11 and the first anniversary of Charlie Kirk's death, they're at this convention for lobbyists in Dallas. And you have way less control of the messaging because it's in the hands of the RNC.

48:14So instead of having those conversations, they're listening to a two-hour speech from Trump where he's bragging about the Iran war and calling Ken Paxton dumb and ugly, which I think is actually brilliant because it neutralizes the main concern people have when they look at Ken Paxton. Like, I can't vote for this guy. He's dumb and ugly. Because he's ugly. Yeah. And Trump is like, yeah, we know. We know. Don't worry. Don't worry. Like, we got it. We understand that. He's just a really good attorney general. But anyway, it's just the I know I have no idea what they were thinking when they put this together.

48:46Ryan Grim:Yeah, I mean, they were thinking I'm sure this was all Trump's idea. It's all about his ego. That's why he has to speak both nights of the convention. And it's and say, you know, just pretend like I'm on the ballot and make it all about himself and run a bunch of ads, spend a bunch of money running ads about how great he is. So I don't think it's really political strategy. I think it's an ego stroking strategy, and that's why it doesn't make any real political sense. I mean, Trump is as unpopular a president as you could possibly get. We're talking George W. Bush towards the end of his term, levels of unpopularity at this point.

49:20Ryan Grim:The last thing you want to do is make that person the center of attention and make them as visible as possible. And for some of your candidates, like Mike Rogers was there, for some of your candidates who are trying to do a little bit of distancing, to have to go and pay fealty and be part of all the spectacle and all the weirdness. So, you know, on the Tallarico thing, I wonder what you guys think. But they have been running these attacks on him the whole time, the Tallarico, you know, the six genders and the non-binary god and all this stuff. According to the polls, it's not really working. He's close to getting 50 % in most of the polls.

49:57Ryan Grim:And you'd have to have all of the undecideds go to Paxton If you presume that the polling is correct, it seems like the Latinos in the Rio Grande Valley have wildly shifted back towards the Democrats after a dalliance with Trump specifically. If any of that is actually true, then, you know, Tallarico's got a real shot in this race. So I think they underestimate him at their peril. And it reminds me of here in Virginia in the gubernatorial election year, Abigail Spanberger was the Democratic nominee. All the ads against her that I saw on TV were about trans in sports and trans in bathrooms. And they really leaned hard into the culture war.

50:42Ryan Grim:And it just fell flat because J.D. Vance is out there saying like, oh, James Tallarico is obsessed with talking about six genders. You guys are the ones that come off as obsessed about this stuff. You're the ones running ads about it. All the questions on Fox News are about this. You end up being the ones that look like you're obsessed with this culture war wedge issue. So, you know, at a time when the economic landscape is incredibly grim and probably getting only grimmer by the day and Trump is a historically unpopular president, I don't think it's it's not looking like it's going to be enough, especially given that Trump himself is acknowledging now that gas prices are not going to come back down before the midterms.

51:22Ryan Grim:They are only likely to continue to escalate. Yeah. Importantly, in 2024, when everyone went to vote in the Biden economy, inflation had been coming down month to month. And so it wasn't such a precarious situation. And I think people are much more willing to engage with some of the cultural questions in a better economy when you don't have what feels like an emergency to a lot of people, to farmers. You have crude at 100, diesel at 6. Again, we haven't quite even seen the ripple effects of that, which is why Trump also floated the idea of just giving Americans$5 ,000. Another extremely cynical move to make people who trust him, because there are still some of our fellow countrymen who trust Donald Trump, whether we think it's crazy or not.

52:02That's a really sad thing to do, to make them feel like you might have an extra$5 ,000 in your pocket if you go out and vote for Republicans. That plan is not going to happen. He's not actually going to do that. So it's another piece of, I think, really serious cynicism from Trump. There are people who trust him. But on that, I think also Tallarico, let me share this, has done, I meant to do a segment on this recently. Like he has done the messaging on the trans stuff from his campaign has been, I think, pretty close to like the best I've seen a Democrat handle that. Now, you have to be willing to be like Tallarico and say you made a mistake when you were talking about there being six genders.

52:43He said, obviously, I misspoke on that. Obviously, there are two sexes and there's a small amount of the population that has that identifies in different ways. something like his answer on that. He says, obviously, I believe that sports need to be safe. And so I don't support wherever safety is in question. I don't support boys and girls sports. That's been his answer. So I think partially he has changed on the issue and that's helped him. But look at this. Look at this. This race was tied, according to RCP. In fact, Paxton was ahead of Tallarico in RCP's average until July. Tallarico starts pulling away and the gap has only widened.

53:22They're doing absolutely nothing to make the gap go in the opposite direction. They haven't figured out a single way to do it yet. It's kind of plateaued, but it's way wider than it was over the course of the summer. And this is the opposite of what was the case between Cruz and Beto. In that race, Beto never led in the RCP average, never even led. Beto has been leading for months in the RCP average and it's only been going in a good direction for him. I'm sorry, Tallarico has been leading for months And it's only been going in a better direction for him.

53:52Saagar Enjeti:Well, Beto was born to run. But, you know, we've got one last clip here. You mentioned Ted Cruz. And there is one area where the entire convention was laser focused and productive. And that was in wanting to shoot Abdul El-Sayed. Let's take a listen. And you're going to have to hear this from the crowd. Oh, wait, this is about Tallarico. Is it? No, it's also mentioned.

54:20Ryan Grim:And Zoran. Yes. All right.

54:22Saagar Enjeti:So it's a hit list. When Mondami says he wants to seize the means of production, he means it. When Abdul Al-Sayed says he has a, quote, obligation to comply with Sharia law, he means it. And when James Tallarico says he wants to dismantle capitalism, he means it. So, you know, the first Trump term, it was lock him up. But now it's he should be shot. How are we feeling about that new slogan?

55:01Ryan Grim:Pretty disturbing. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, by the way, on the one year anniversary of Charlie Kirk's assassination, too. So there's that as well.

55:14Saagar Enjeti:Yes, they are not carrying the flame. And that was the midterm convention. Much more, I'm sure, to be made of that in the weeks to come. But why don't we take a look at another area of American life that is going swimmingly under Trump? And that, of course, is our food.

56:00Working on like thinking a moment, really not in, thinking before I speak. And Joey King. You know if your like mom is yelling at your sibling and even if you're annoyed with your sibling, you just like won't let that slide. It's like only you can yell at your sibling. I'm like, you can't do that here. That is not about her. You do not talk about her like that. Only I talk about her like that. Plus, we've been taking your calls, listening to your voicemails and giving you advice. Or at least trying to. So if you've got catching up to do, now's the perfect time. Listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

56:34Ryan Grim:If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.

57:09Ryan Grim:It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files.

57:50Ryan Grim:I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

58:35Saagar Enjeti:So let's talk a little bit about food. Everyone put your Maha hats on. Groceries are expensive and they're also filled with glass and other things that you may not want to consume. But we wanted to raise an interesting little note here that AOC has been doing Maha outreach. She may still be mulling what she does in 2028, but her outreach to one particularly disaffected and surprising slice of the electorate could offer a clue how she's preparing for her future. What are your reactions to this, this this left Maha alliance? And maybe I start with Emily. Is Maha feeling rejected, isolated from the Trump administration?

59:21Saagar Enjeti:I mean, they got their guy in there. Like, are they feeling disappointed? Why are they interested in speaking to AOC? Maha is absolutely split on this question because many of them are close to people in the administration. I mean, basically all of the major Maha leaders are close to people in the administration. But even the ones who are close to people in the administration have started to kind of isolate themselves or not isolate themselves, but kind of ostracize the people in the administration because predictably they're losing trust. They have been furious. People like Alex Clark have been furious since the glyphosate emergency declaration was granted to Bayer back in, I think that was January.

1:00:00And after that, it got really dark with about half. My estimation would be about half of Maha. And I think those are the people you can basically draw a direct line after that to the people who are now willing to talk to AOC. I don't know what you guys think. I think it's absolutely brilliant on AOC's behalf. I think it would be really foolish of the left to leave Maha on the table. Having covered the Maha MAGA rally on the National Mall ahead of the 2024 election, firsthand, I'm looking at people who have mostly voted Bernie or people in the Bernie lane for probably their entire lives. It was like the barefoot hippies with Christian evangelicals who have always voted Republican.

1:00:43But the barefoot hippies had this like moment of optimism because of Trump seeing some political value and bringing RFK Jr., who was deemed too liberal for the Obama EPA administrator position. And people were like allowed themselves to be optimistic for a fleeting moment. And I don't think they necessarily were unaware that this could happen, but it did happen. And so that's just leaving politically, it's leaving a lot of capital and votes on the table to not at least try to make amends with people who have good intentions about glyphosate, about PFAS and all those sorts of things. So I think it's really smart.

1:01:21Ryan Grim:Yeah, I mean, to your point, a lot of these folks were previously on the left. These are issues that have naturally landed on the left. They were cynically exploited by Trump, who saw an opening of a coalition that was dissatisfied, and especially after COVID, kind of up for grabs. And, you know, and I just generally think that any constituency that has an actual principle that they're committed to and care about are up for grabs at this point. You know, it's a relatively small proportion of the actual MAGA base. But these other pieces that were brought in or the parts of the MAGA base that were genuinely principled, which, again, is unfortunately, I think, a small percentage, for example, that wanted to avoid a war with Iran.

1:02:08Ryan Grim:Those are the people who you can you can do something with either if you can't bring them directly into the coalition because of social cultural values or whatever. They could be depressed and not show up. They could vote for independence. They could be taken out of the sort of MAGA coalition tent. But I do think there are some folks in Maha world who, if you had someone who was serious about things we would all care about, you know, a healthy food and a clean environment, that you should 100 % take advantage of that. Ryan, I'm curious your insights into where this strategy perhaps comes from.

1:02:44Ryan Grim:There was a funny quote in there from one of the activists who was like, I can't believe I'm agreeing with AOC. And I'm like, why? Because the left has always opposed these sorts of chemicals and wanted more regulations and wanted to make sure that we had more inspectors to make sure we're not having the food disasters that we're currently having. So it just demonstrated to me the level of propaganda against, you know, against the left that has been taken in by a lot of these folks.

1:03:09Griffin:Well, it depends on what parts of Maha you're talking about, because even in your summation there, some of Maha, correct me if I'm wrong, Emily, would say, well, hold on, there'd be a record scratch at the inspections. Like, do they, because some of Maha doesn't. Yeah, they don't want the raw milk inspected. Yeah, seriously. Some of Maha thinks of these food, some of the food inspectors as authoritarian, you know, telling people, you know, what, yeah, exactly what milk they can drink or whatever. But when it comes to fighting the chemical companies and the other corporations, somebody like AOC has the most credibility there because she does not need and does not have the support of corporate America.

1:03:53Griffin:Like that's like that's clear. Like whatever you want to say about her, like her her funding base, her social base, her political base is not does not involve multinational chemical corporations at all. And so if anybody's, whereas Trump, as soon as he gets in, puts a chemical lobbyist in charge of making the policies. And so if anybody's going to be remotely trustworthy on that, it'd be somebody like AOC. But then you run into vaccine stuff. Right. Do the Maha people think that she's too valorous of science? Quote unquote, they put science in quotes. or do they think that some of the inspections are draconian and are preventing genuinely healthy alternatives from people who just want to make autonomous decisions about their own nutrition?

1:04:44Griffin:The question is how big is that? Because she also wants to appeal, I think, to many millions of people who are sick of every day being told, now guacamole is going to kill you. Now lettuce is going to kill you. Now this is going to kill you. It's like enough. Yeah, let me pull this list up, Ryan.

1:05:01Saagar Enjeti:Just to get you guys to react to this list for a sec. This is from September 1st from last week. 14 current food recalls shoppers should know about this week. Just to give you an insight. Yeah, this week. And I'll get to the list for a second, but I wanted to read some of these numbers here. In President Donald Trump's second term, the FDA has lost 20 % of its workforce and the Center for Disease Control about 25%. That includes eight of the 11 scientists tasked with tracking food parasites. I mean, that's like basically all of them. Going through this list here, we've got everything sprouts, E.

1:05:39Saagar Enjeti:coli and salmonella. Panorama mangoes, salmonella. Grand Central Bakery, sourdough bread. Metal fragments, dryers. I hate when that happens. Fruit bars, glass. Glass in your fruit bars. We've got jalapenos, salmonella. There's salmonella on everything. I didn't know that. Jalapeno avocado salad, salmonella. Salmonella, salmonella, listeria. Salmonella.

1:06:07Ryan Grim:Mix it up a little bit there. Oh, it's the E. coli in the mix. E.

1:06:11Griffin:coli. Yes, it's... We're not discriminating. Did I say frozen berries? Oh, come on.

1:06:14Ryan Grim:Yes.

1:06:15Griffin:Yeah. I know.

1:06:16Ryan Grim:Yeah, you know, that's the other thing that's been freaking me out. Actually, Tim Dillon had a whole bit about now the healthiest thing to eat is like a fast food burger with no lettuce because it's the only thing but then when you add in the mystery meat that's being imported i think that even takes that off the list so now what are we too but yeah because a lot of these things are actually like you know healthy um griff you gotta get that motel denim sorry the lettuce that was in the cyclospora epidemic you know is uh as the central culprit the guacamole the frozen blueberries all this stuff.

1:06:46Ryan Grim:And Axios had a report that the number of current investigations is at an all-time high. Some of the cope that I've seen is, oh, well, if there's all these recalls, that means they're doing their job. But no, what that means is that they're not catching it before it goes out to the consumer and the consumer bites into their dull fruit bar and it's like, there's a piece of glass in here. Somebody should do something about this. So the whole goal of the food inspection regime is that you catch it before the consumer eats glass or metal or has exposure to salmonella or listeria or E. coli. And since the whole, you know, FDA and CDC has been just stripped to the bones and specifically some of the key people in being able to identify and track and some of the key programs that were meant to identify and track some of these parasites, that's why we're ending up with this situation.

1:07:43Ryan Grim:I mean, there's a direct line between these things. So what I was going to say to tie it in with the Maha folks is perhaps they can be persuaded that genuinely healthy food does require some government oversight because otherwise you just have giant corporations that don't give a shit about your health whatsoever that are just looking to cut corners and make their product as cheaply as they possibly can that your health and the health of your children is then in hands of. Poynter went through some of the numbers. They say so far in 2026, the FDA has posted approximately 2.71 investigations each month.

1:08:21In the first seven months of 2025, the FDA posted 2.29 investigations per month. In 2024, it was 1.43 per month, 1.86 per month in 2023, and 2.29 in 2022, but there's some question as to how we're under the kind of Kennedy regime, how we're reporting and tracking those things. Back to AOC, this partnership has already borne fruit. When she questioned Lee Zeldin, I forget whether it was Politico, the article we referenced that reported this, but actually her conversations with Maha pointed her toward a very particular line of questioning that made Lee Zeldin look utterly foolish about who he had met with.

1:09:00I think it actually was about glyphosate. But they gave her a pretty real substantive piece of information that led to a substantive line of questioning, which I think shows good faith on both sides. And the last thing I wanted to mention is that it's not just about the narrow political coalition of Maha. It's also about the fact that we have record low institutional trust almost across the board in the country. And that means there are all kinds of people who are way less trusting of major corporations in charge of the food supply, everything. So it's voters in general that want to see a kind of corporate accountability.

1:09:34And this is the one that affects people as much as big pharma. It's what you're putting in your body every single day. So it's very, very smart to try to take a leadership position on this policy issue from AOC because it's not even just about potentially making inroads with a pretty strong political coalition that has a network of inroads with major podcasts. A lot of Maha people have been on Rogan. A lot of Maha people go on very popular shows and have popular platforms themselves, Instagram, TikTok. So it's smart, but it's also about the whole country, I think, which has record low institutional trust in corporate America.

1:10:14Ryan Grim:Yeah. And I think that is an important point, too, is that, you know, the whole food safety, the fact that you can no longer just inherently trust what you're buying at the grocery store when you go to a restaurant, it speaks to this overall sense of decline. The sense that of a shitification. That things that you previously took for granted, that you could fly and it would be safe, that you can go to the grocery store and just grab whatever you want off the shelf and not check the recall list and not check the history of this particular brand. Those sorts of things are falling away. And so, you know, I think it goes beyond just that concern, specific concern about like, can I eat the frozen blueberries?

1:11:01Ryan Grim:It speaks to this deeper sense that things are getting worse. Things that I used to have, that used to be good, that I used to take for granted are no longer there. So, you know, I was talking to Griffin about this when I was pitching these stories. We're actually supposed to cover them earlier in the week with Sagar. This is one of those things that the normies in my life are talking about constantly. Oh, yeah, big time. They're very, I mean, understandably, very disturbed by like, okay, there's metal in the bread. Like, what are we doing? And every day there's a new horrifying story. The whole cycle got kind of kicked off with the explosive diarrhea epidemic that got traced down to lettuce from then you start to learn about, oh, this farm conglomerate that makes all these bagged salads that whether you're buying them at Wegmans or you're buying them at Target or Walmart, maybe getting some of these whole foods.

1:11:53Ryan Grim:That's the one I was trying to think of. Whether you're paying a large price for it or a relatively discount price, it's the same damn lettuce and you still have exposure. It's very unsettling, especially for people who thought they could sort of like buy their way out of any sort of food crisis. Well, and also it's like this is this is lettuce. It's fairly easy to grow domestically. And we now have to worry about whether it was upstream or downstream of a sewage spill in Guatemala and Mexico. And it's like you're in Iowa or you're in Rhode Island. Like, why do you have to worry about a sewage spill in a river in Mexico?

1:12:25Yeah.

1:12:26Ryan Grim:Just. Griffin, can you put the beef one up on the screen? Because and this is where it all comes together with like Trump's corruption. You know, he took a meeting with this, the owner of JBS, Brazilian company that has also, you know, a lot of meat processing here in the U.S. And the guy had donated to him. So he's got all this influence. And Trump decides that in order to deal with the rising prices of beef, that he's going to order up this, you know, this mystery meat into our food system. And it's very disturbing because already you have a situation where you don't have country of origin labeling on beef.

1:13:07Ryan Grim:This is something that we have all talked to ranchers about and how hard it makes for them to be able to distinguish their product. And it makes it very it makes it impossible for unless you're buying directly from a farmer, which if you can do, I recommend doing. It makes it impossible for consumers to know where this beef is being sourced from and whether it's safe to consume or not. China just rejected a shipment of some of this beef because it had way too high level of antibiotics in it because that's the sort of thing that you do to cut corners. If you're keeping your cattle in horrific conditions and they're all getting sick, what do you do?

1:13:43Ryan Grim:You blast them with antibiotics so that you can get them to market. You know, that's this kind of ties back into the midterms thing, because in Texas, they may be benefiting somewhat economically from the spike in oil prices. But the ranching industry there is really suffering both from a combination of, you know, all of these things that are going on with cattle and Trump's decision to import this beef everyone is very upset about. And then you also had the screwworm epidemic, which also ties back to a bunch of these cuts on programs that sounded ridiculous when they were on a Fox News hit, you know, about tracking the old world screwworms mating habits or whatever.

1:14:26Ryan Grim:But turns out it actually kind of mattered. That was actually some money that was being well spent. So we're in the reaping phase here of all of the cuts that were made at the very beginning of the administration when Elon was going through with his chainsaw and everybody thought there'd be no consequences for anything ever. we're now in the phase where we're finding out where that money, you know, maybe was being spent to actually something that was useful, something that we took for granted, something that was happening behind the scenes that we weren't even aware of, but enabled our ability to go to the grocery store and just buy a package of salad off the shelf and not have to do an intensive check over whether or not this is tied to the latest recall.

1:15:12Ryan Grim:Yum.

1:15:13Saagar Enjeti:Yum, yum, yum. I I was going to say that Trump is forcing us on his diet of Diet Cokes and patties, but now the patties aren't even safe. That's upsetting to me in my personal diet. I wanted to ask one last question of all of y 'all about AOC and this Maha outreach. You know, this Maha outreach, which is kind of a national project, doesn't really seem like something you would do if you're running for senator. AOC also went to the South. Um, she went to the South, um, in political reporting here, um, down to Florida to speak on a panel at the annual session of the National Baptist Convention. I like how you made it sound like Nixon going to China.

1:15:58She went to the South.

1:16:01Saagar Enjeti:Listen, I haven't seen her in Florida in a minute. Um, but it's the nation's oldest and largest African-American religious organization. Uh, what do we make of all this? Is this really her starting to put out feelers for a potential 2028 presidential run? Well, if she ran for Senate, she would need I mean, Ryan, you would know this, but like New York has a lot of rural areas. She'd probably be fine. But if she wanted to put up like really good numbers, you could still do. It doesn't hurt to do outreach to like trump your versions of or trump your slices of the population. But it does look like more and more.

1:16:40I mean, I can't imagine why she would go straight to president and not do the Senate route. But that's just me. I'm curious what you guys think of that.

1:16:47Griffin:She could also do both because they're on different calendars. The presidential race has basically started, but it starts by November through January. People are going to start launching. Bernie launched late, right? And that was like April, maybe, of 2019. So we're talking like next spring. So she would know by January, February, whether or not she's in line for the nomination. And the New York primaries are extremely late, usually like mid-June. So she could launch in March for Senate.

1:17:28Ryan Grim:So what you're saying is she could be, it could be the case she hasn't made a decision, but she's keeping her options open kind of a deal.

1:17:35Griffin:Right, because one doesn't foreclose the other. Like you can run for president. And then if you decide it's not going to go your way by March, which you should know by March, you'd still have plenty of time to run for Senate. That's interesting. Yeah, that is. But it is looking like she's leaning towards actually launching a presidential bid. She entertains those questions when Julian asked them or anybody at Pablo asked them much more willingly now. And I agree, Griffin, that just some of these decisions do smack of presidential ambitions. All right.

1:18:09Saagar Enjeti:Keep your eyes on that. Keep your eyes on the food. Keep your eyes everywhere right now because no one else is. Head on a swivel. Head on a swivel. All right. It's our favorite time of the show and something that you can contribute to if you sign up for a free trial at Breaking Points. You can submit written questions that we'll answer here on the Friday show. Hashtag points on the board for Griffin if you sign up today. This one's from Raphael Dimion. Do you guys have any personal 9-11 stories? And how do you remember pre-9-11 America all these years later? My dad tells me it was a better time.

1:18:45Saagar Enjeti:I was born in 2004, so I've always been curious. After frantically leaving the WTC complex, my dad and his co-workers watched United Flight 175 fly over the Verrazano Bridge and crash into the second tower. Jesus. Wow. Well, Griffith and I were, I think, like eight or nine. So I have like hazy childhood memories. But you guys were like full adults, weren't you?

1:19:09Ryan Grim:Yeah, I was in college. It was like my sophomore year. And I was on my way to French class and I was running late. And some girl in my class like grabbed me and was like, something is going on. And this is obviously before we had smartphones. So we ran around the building trying to find a TV and found it and then saw what was going on. And, you know, I was at UVA, so there were a lot of people who had a family member working at the Pentagon. So that's kind of my memory of the day. I mean, in terms of the pre versus post, it kind of fits with some of the things we were talking about about the loss of institutional trust.

1:19:45Ryan Grim:Like there's just the sense of an America where you can just leave your door unlocked and, you know, or go the airport security protocols, like all of these sorts of things changed. And then we had the advent of the mass surveillance era, which was, you know, embraced by a partisan on a bipartisan basis. Obviously, war on terror, Iraq war, Afghanistan war. And we've just sort of been on the same slide since then. And the thing that is one of the things that's really blown my mind about the Iran war is just how many villains from the Iraq war are still around to cheerlead us into this next stupid war.

1:20:26Ryan Grim:That's one of the most disturbing things to me is just how little was apparently learned by our elite political class from this, what we turned into a multi-decade disaster.

1:20:39Griffin:yeah i think i mentioned this to emily recently but in like mid-august so i was about a year out of school i had turned down a job at morgan stanley which was in in one of the buildings of the world trade center wow almost everybody at morgan stanley survived um for years i carried around with me the like to get to the interview which had been maybe the month before that they give you a plastic card that said like you know 44th floor um so for years i carried that around in my wallet as like remember but it was yeah mid-august i said no no thanks that job and i was working in a middle school my own middle school on the eastern shore of maryland and uh i still remember that the teachers knew that i read the newspaper and you know actually many of them had been my teachers when i had gone to middle school there and so they were all asking me like what happened like who is this and i remember teaching this giving a little lecture to a special ed class about who osama bin laden was uh and so that's a reminder that like if you were reading the newspaper in 2001 you knew on that day like who was behind this and so whenever the cia is like i knew immediately i'm because of my sources and my knowledge it's like okay Everybody knew.

1:22:01Griffin:Everybody who was paying attention to basic news knew who that was. And the kids were, like, the fear was just incredible. They're like, are they coming here? Like, I promise you they're not coming here. Like, I guarantee that. That was my memory because, again, I was eight. And I remember, you know, they didn't stop school because Wisconsin, everyone is probably at least two degrees of separation from people in New York City. or it's very different than the East Coast, talking to some of my friends who grew up in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts. They just had, Virginia, they just had different experiences on 9-11 than people in the Midwest, and Griffin maybe in the West Coast as well.

1:22:39But I do remember, you know, as an eight-year-old or a nine-year-old looking out my bedroom window that evening and seeing a plane fly over and thinking, are they, is that, like, dude, I was scared. I was scared seeing a plane, yeah.

1:22:54Saagar Enjeti:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if this happened at your school, Emily, or if you were probably in second grade. I think I was in third or fourth. I was in third, yeah. But one experience for kids that age that I've seen a lot of people online talk about that had a very similar experience is, you know, I woke up on the West Coast. Both towers had already been hit by that point. I saw my parents watching it on TV, but they didn't really say much about it. Then I go to school and my teacher just wheels out that classic TV on a cart and just turns it on. No context. That's wild. No explanation. And we just watched it for like two hours and then they sent us home.

1:23:35Saagar Enjeti:No one explained anything. That's crazy. Just tried to absorb it. That is so insane. Apparently that happened in classrooms all over the country, this TV cart 9-11 viewing experience.

1:23:46Ryan Grim:You didn't have a Ryan Grimm to come in and explain it to you. to little griffin did you read them bin laden's letter to america

1:23:57Griffin:i'm sure that i told him like yeah he didn't like that we have troops and saudi arabian the kind of detached zoomer irony about 9-11 i actually don't begrudge because if your experience with it is just through pixels and memes then it's very different but i do think one big difference is that if you were old enough to remember 9-11, even if you're young, it was legitimately national terror. Like it was, there was, if you lived through that day and the days afterwards, there was a experience of real fear. And I think that just changes the, like your ability to, to totally be in on all of those like memes and jokes, because sometimes it's like, guys, sometimes it's, sometimes it's, if it's well done, it's, it's funny.

1:24:41And sometimes it's like, guys, you guys slow your roll on this. Like people were fucking horrified for days and weeks. Like people didn't know if their loved ones who were in the towers made it. So they were in anguish for weeks and months. And so it's just a generational divide that I don't think we're fully prepared for the implications of.

1:24:59Ryan Grim:Yeah. We just are so used to feeling invulnerable in the U.S., you know, feeling like nothing we do. Like we can just do whatever and no one can do anything to us. And obviously that was really deeply disturbed on that day, although I sort of feel like we've gone back to this concept of like we can just do whatever in the world and there's never going to be any ability to do anything to us because otherwise, why would we fund and support a genocide in Gaza? Why would we, you know, attack Iran aggressively, offensively with really zero pretext or justification? Why would we do the anthropic stuff?

1:25:38Ryan Grim:Like what we were talking about earlier in the show. Completely. Yeah. I don't think we would behave the way that we do as a nation or our leaders would if we had really internalized that actually, you know, yes, these oceans help protect us, but they're not we are not invulnerable.

1:25:55Saagar Enjeti:Mm hmm. Yeah. We were supposed to have Glenn Greenwald on this week to not only talk about 9-11, but the post 9-11 era of America and the surveillance state, which, you know, of course, connects to the flock cameras and everything else. So we hope to have him back on sometime in the future to talk about all of that. Another question here from Adam Dean. Thoughts on the Lindsay Clancy trial and the insane discourse around it. We have not mentioned, is anyone really tracking this one? Yes, I am, of course.

1:26:25Ryan Grim:I knew you were. I knew it. I knew you'd be the one.

1:26:28Saagar Enjeti:Give us a taste. No, I mean, there are a bunch of videos on the After Party channel if anybody's interested in my take. After Party with Emily? What's up? I'm just plugging you. Oh, thank you. But no, I mean, Megan's been tracking this as like an attorney who's obsessed with true crime. So it's been I've taken calls about it every day for like two or a month now from people around the country. You know, it's horrible. But Massachusetts law is also really weird. Like their voluntary manslaughter and voluntary manslaughter is is genuinely strange. And so obviously the medical system also failed.

1:27:06Lindsay Clancy, Lindsay Clancy failed Lindsay Clancy and Lindsay Clancy's children in a terrifying and dramatic way. And I think all of these things can be true at the same time.

1:27:17Saagar Enjeti:Mm hmm. I think that's a plenty. I don't think any of us have other strong opinions on that.

1:27:26Ryan Grim:So you're pro-murder. That's what you're saying, Emily. Pro-murder. No, I mean, like, listen, I actually think she should like I think she should be in prison, not in a mental facility. But the actual, like, one of the big parts of the story is how telehealth, like, you can just log on to telehealth. She was prescribed by one of these physicians who never saw her in person. Different cocktails, like Zoloft and then another SSRI. And then was given both. Well, she was given Ativan but also Klonopin. And they were just switching her medications. And some of it was over a physician who purely saw her on telehealth.

1:27:57She tried to check herself into inpatient facilities twice. It didn't work either time. And part of it does sound like their civil suit against these medical practitioners is very strong. Both of them, Patrick and Lindsay, have civil suits against some of the practitioners.

1:28:11Ryan Grim:When you say she failed, they wouldn't take her at the inpatient facilities? Why is that? One of them wouldn't take her. They just said she wasn't a good fit for the program. So I'm sure more will come out in court. Another one did take her, but it was over the new year that year. And so a lot of the physicians weren't present. She asked to leave to go to one of her kids' birthday parties. and they let her leave and she just didn't go back after that. But so because she checked in over the new year, there were a lot of people who were out and it sounds like they did not at all adequately attend to her.

1:28:42I think nobody was taking, I think there's some of the, like, I guess, lib white women who have latched onto this case are correct that she was not being taken, like the threats were not being taken seriously. The potential for postpartum psychosis was not being taken seriously. Wow.

1:29:01Saagar Enjeti:Yes, a lot of inpatient programs will reject people unless there's like already a direct violent occurrence of some sort. So it can be very difficult to hold people there, even if they want to be there. All right. This one, Ryan. Ryan, this one blew my mind two days ago when I saw you tweet this. This is from Sabas 101. for glorious comrade Ryan with the discovery of you liking Attack on Titan. What other animes have you watched? Have you watched Ghost in the Shell or Psycho Bass? And Ryan, but me first. Ryan, you watch Attack on Titan? How have we not talked about this? This is the greatest show of all time.

1:29:44Griffin:You're not in the studio. Mac and I have bonded over this. You gotta get in there. My oldest and youngest kids, Love anime. Iris and George got me into it. The way they talked me into it, Iris was like, you keep talking about this show, Sopranos, and Breaking Bad, and all these ancient things. She's like, but Attack on Titan is discussed in the same conversation as those. And I was like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And so then she's like, well, look it up. Google it. So I Googled it. I'm like, oh, wow. people do actually put these shows in the same category in the same conversations so like okay let's let's do it and so uh my 15 year old and 10 year old we every time we get an opportunity at night we'll watch we'll watch it um my 10 year old had already seen it all the way through and kind of spoiled part of it for me oh no punk um but we're now uh in the final season and we have the last three long episodes to go.

1:30:55Griffin:You know, there's like three. Yes. No. They're movie length. Yes.

1:31:00Ryan Grim:What age do you recommend for Ryan?

1:31:02Saagar Enjeti:It's a little dark and then there's horror elements. So maybe like 11 or 12.

1:31:09Griffin:Well, like I said, George is 10 and this is the second time I'm watching it. Okay. All right. Kids have changed.

1:31:14Ryan Grim:I think kids are advanced though. I think 10. I mean, it's horrifying.

1:31:19Griffin:Like these. It's scary. These titans are, you know, these mindless beasts that are just eating people, including like whatever, and then getting just torn to shreds. So it's extremely gory and gross, and there's sad parts, and people die. But then, Crystal, have you seen it yet at all? Mm-mm, nothing. There are all these themes. There's these really fascinating themes about genocide. Yes, yes. And victims becoming oppressors. Mm-hmm. The stories we tell. And, you know, the Eldians have to wear patches on their arms, which has some obvious parallels to the Holocaust era. But I also wonder how much of it is kind of an allegory about Japan's own experience of being under attack and then becoming this imperial genocidal almost.

1:32:16Ryan Grim:Yes.

1:32:17Griffin:Genocidal, and certainly in parts of China regime. and how much they're grappling with that through this. But it's interesting. I recommend it. It's good. It's incredibly political. A little too much yelling. Like some of the characters yell too much. Anime is about yelling.

1:32:31Saagar Enjeti:Yes. It's very political. I think people would say like, if you really like Game of Thrones and you like the politics of that, I think it's a big entry point for people that are like, is anime too weird for me? But yeah, there's a lot of interesting political stuff in the show, a lot of emotional stuff, and a lot of different ways that you could look at the real world. And, you know, he mentioned Japan, but also, you know, something, the main character in the show is kind of occupied by this evil force outside the gates. And they're put into smaller and smaller concentration camps because the Titans are this force outside that will eat all of them.

1:33:16Saagar Enjeti:And the main character holds a key around his neck to the home that he used to live in, much like Palestinians do in Gaza, and that he always hopes to return home. And that is one of the original goals of the show. All to say, there's so much there to mine and think about. And it's also one of the most incredible action shows of all time. And I always recommend it to people that are not sure if anime is for them or too weird um so very excited that ryan is into it

1:33:50Griffin:and maybe it's the only anime i've seen to answer that other part of the question okay nice speaking of sopranos i got a notification while we were talking that my i swear to you my uh order of a picture that i'm putting in a gold frame of tony soprano with uh pie oh my is on my doorstep and this week the reason it came up online this week was National Attack on Titan Day in Japan yes also my sounds like sounds like my son

1:34:22Ryan Grim:could be a fit for my son I don't think my nine-year-old daughter

1:34:24Griffin:he'd love it yeah Ida gets freaked out

1:34:26Ryan Grim:by like gore and horror

1:34:28Griffin:she wouldn't like it but my daughter told me that the voice actor for Jean the character did you hear this Griffin just passed away Oh, no, I didn't know that. Oh, that's Mike McFarlane. So, Mike, rest in peace, Mike.

1:34:43Saagar Enjeti:Yeah, rest in peace. And maybe around Christmas time, we can do a long extra episode, Ryan, breaking down the themes of the show for some Christmas holiday break one. That's a good idea. Okay. That is going to do it for our AMA this week. Again, you can submit a question to us about politics, anime, whatever, I guess, fashion tips. and breakingpost.com monthly.

1:35:10Ryan Grim:You can send that shit to Sagar if you want. Can I ask, Crystal, is your cat wearing a bow? Yeah, he's got a little bow tie. That's for Salem. Yeah, it's because he has to wear a tracker because his little crazy ass is constantly trying to escape the house, like constantly plotting against us, and he's very smart, so he has to wear a GPS tracker. The other male cat socks also has to wear a GPS tracker, even though he escapes a little bit less. That's your fashion tip. If you have to track your cat, put it in a bow. Cats and bow ties and trackers. That's right.

1:35:46Saagar Enjeti:All right. And, Emily, we're going to throw to a segment that you recorded earlier this week. Why don't you throw to it and let us know a little bit about who you talked to? Yeah, I talked to Joe Lawler. He's a great reporter, a great journalist who's been doing a series of pieces for the New Atlantis, basically on how finance in tandem with, you know, when you have big corporations, they're able to get their will in the government, but kind of how they've made our suburbs ugly and alienating places to live. How so much of it goes back to the schemes of these major financial corporations, in some cases, private equity, we touch on as well.

1:36:21You know, why do the exurbs look disgusting? Why are there these like awful 7-Elevens that look bad, feel bad on different street corners? And how does that go back to financialization? So it was a really interesting conversation and I hope everyone enjoys it. I'm very excited to be joined by Joe Lawler. He's the policy editor at the Washington Examiner and a writer over at the New Atlantis, where he has done a great series on the influence of government and big business. importantly, big business on homeownership costs and also just what has what all of this has wrought in our suburbs, which are now dotted with hideous developments and buildings and sucking the soul out of a beautiful country.

1:37:06So, Joe, first of all, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. And you just said it much more colorfully than I ever did. Well, I have a lot of great quotes from the series that you've done over at the New Atlantis that I want to ask you about because, as I just mentioned, you cover this from both perspectives. One, regulations, but two, regulations that have been shaped by big business. So there are a lot of different factors going on, and you've written about this from different vantage points. Your most recent article is on how we all own the local 7-Eleven. And I'll start with this one because you write, actually, let me pull the article up on the screen so that folks know where they can go read it and they absolutely should go read it.

1:37:47you write in the lead, this 7-Eleven, this hypothetical 7-Eleven. You say, the building and the land it sits on are not owned by 7-Eleven or by an individual. Instead, the 7-Eleven is the tenant of a real estate investment trust, a financial structure that allows huge numbers of people to invest in real estate without having to worry about the details of what it is they're investing in. And you break down why exactly this all happened, but you say this framework helps strip plots of their local context and make them legible as investments. Every real estate investment involves what is known as a capital stack, which is the combination of debt and equity used to finance the construction and then maintenance of the project.

1:38:24So I think this is a good starting point, Joe, if you could just explain to us with the 7-Eleven example, why this is happening, why this has spread rampantly throughout the American suburbs and exurbs and even some rural areas. What's going on? Absolutely. And just to be clear, this is not a hypothetical 7-Eleven. That's a real 7-Eleven in Williamsburg. And we did trace the REIT that owns the land and is leasing it to the 7-Eleven. And that REIT is owned by a lot of index funds and others that if you have any savings, most likely you are a landlord of that 7-Eleven. I am. I know most people I've asked are.

1:39:05So yeah. It's a good distinction. Not so hypothetical. Yeah. I think the point that you raised is a good one, which is that when it comes to neighborhoods, when it comes to buildings, when it comes to aesthetics, scale is kind of the enemy of beauty and charm. And this is something that came up speaking to a lot of urbanists, a lot of designers, a lot of others when I was working on this series. But what makes people feel charm, what makes people think that a neighborhood is lovely is just that the scale is human scaled. And if you orient your regulations, your rules, your tax laws, your credit policies to favor big corporations, then you're putting yourself at odds with creating lovely, unique, charming, walkable, human-scaled neighborhoods.

1:39:56So that's a key point that I heard talking to these developers, to these experts, to investors, to lenders, and all the rest. Well, yeah, and you've focused both on, as I mentioned, finance and government. And I want to focus on finance for a second because you do such a good job with both of them. I love this headline from a New Atlantic piece you wrote, the demise of real neighborhoods is a story of finance. And one quote that I pulled from this one is you're talking about kind of the NIMBY laws. And you say, as significant as those laws are, they're only half the story. The other half of the story, which has received much less public attention, is that the financial system makes it very hard to build traditional mixed-use neighborhoods.

1:40:38Rules promulgated by federal agencies and government-run corporations put mixed-use development at a disadvantage. So, too, do finance industry practices that have developed over decades in response to government regulations. At the same time you write that it disadvantages traditional neighborhoods, the whole set of rules, the scaffolding of the financial system, makes it easy to fund the alternatives, the single-use projects, whether the strip mall, the hotel off the highway, or above all, the single family housing tract. And you could add to this, Joe, I suppose, the 7-Eleven. And I think a lot of people look around them and are so disappointed what's become of their communities, but they don't understand that our entire, as you say, financial scaffolding that benefits these big business owners is behind it.

1:41:19So walk us through a little bit of how finance shaped our communities. Absolutely. And you think about it, we are the wealthiest country in the world. And how is it that we struggle to have neighborhoods that we think are lovely, that we want to visit, that we want to take photos in, that we see as aspirational for our families? And how did we end up with this form of what you just mentioned, the tracked single family development, single family housing development? In some ways it's nice, but who doesn't want to live near a cafe? Who doesn't want to live near their church? Who doesn't want to live near their family and friends in walking distance?

1:42:02If we could all have that, obviously we would. And the key point, which you just mentioned, is that these development typologies like the single family housing tract are subsidized. And I think a critical point is they're regularized by the rules and regulations that make it easy for a tract developer to go in, buy a huge plot of land on a greenfield development outside of a city and build 100 or 200 units of single family housing and then move on and then move on to the next project. And, you know, they're not doing anything wrong. They're playing by the rules. They're playing by the rules that were set up by the system, by the government, by the zoning laws.

1:42:43And they're just businesses. And the interesting thing is that when I talk. But they've also lobbied for those laws, too, right? Like you mentioned some interesting lobbying in the tax cut act that Trump passed. Like that's that's pretty. And this is to me an interesting aspect of it, too. They want to preserve the system now that they've kind of gamed it. True. That's true. So over the years, the home builders and lenders and other parts. Realtors, right? Realtors who are part of the system, clearly, yeah, clearly they benefit from it. That's correct. And what's been interesting to me in reporting this piece, and I didn't really mention these in the series, but talking to a track developer who builds single family housing somewhere outside of a city in a red state where there's lots of open land, you know, they really don't think about, is this beautiful?

1:43:33Is this, maybe they think about that for the homes, but for the neighborhood, they're not even trying to build neighborhoods that are lovely, that are beautiful, that you'd want to visit, that you'd want to maybe retire, like people would love to retire. Who wouldn't love to retire in Charleston, South Carolina or Venice for that matter, right? Like these are really nice places. And we're not trying to build neighborhoods like that anymore. They're just sort of most of these developers, to them it's a business. The land, the developable land is the input, and the tracked development is the output, and that's the business, right?

1:44:15And those considerations don't even factor in. And one thing that you touched on as well in this, and you have touched on it in the series, is scale. And this is one of the things that's happened with a lot of the big apartment buildings. We're talking about single family, mostly right now, but you're in Washington, D.C., and every major city, basically, private equity comes in, incentivizes, as do building codes and regulations and that sort of thing, these massive, cheaply built apartment buildings, and they can spread out the cost because they're building at scale and they're massive. And it sounds to me like that's a bit what's happening where you have a developer buying 200 plots, building 200 houses, and you don't necessarily have to worry too much about the local community after you do that because you're making money at scale.

1:44:59The costs are so spread out that, am I making sense, Joe? Because that's kind of how I, that's what I took away from it a bit too. Absolutely. And I would add something else to that, which is you may not be even in that community. So you might be, you might be building on behalf of a set of investors who are a pension Fund for Teachers in Ontario or Shakes from the Middle East or whoever it is, right? You know, the great example that I had in the last story I wrote was that the Alaska Permanent Fund owns half of Tyson's Corner in Northern Virginia, right? So these Alaskans have no idea that their money is going to Tyson's Corner.

1:45:38I'm sure you've been there. It's not a very organic, lovely plays like there's nice things about Tyson's Corner. I don't mean to bash it or to sing it out unnecessarily. But the point is that the people of Alaska, they're not living in Tyson's Corner. They don't know what their money is doing. And that's the situation that we've created for ourselves, which is different from past regulatory and ownership regimes and ones that exist in other countries where there's more of a connection between the people who own the land and the people who actually live there. But the guys who are putting the money in to create Tyson's Corner, which as you correctly note, there's been a desperate effort to make it habitable for years.

1:46:20And it's mostly just like tech money. People who live here, my impression of it at least is those apartments get filled by tech money. People who spend part of their year here or corporate money, people who spend, because there's so many corporate headquarters in Tyson's. It's not a place where most people are living year round. But the people who run those funds, like the Alaska fund, they can still get their paycheck at the end of the day, and they're still trying to deliver on their pension funds. But they're getting paid a lot of money to spread this money out and create these types of or respond to these incentive systems and destroy the suburbs and exurbs.

1:46:53Yeah. And I mean, you say destroy, but you also just mentioned financially, it's a success. Financially, it's a success in those narratives for them, right? But I think that the point you just raised as a good one is the investors in that particular community and the town itself, the local government, they're actually intentionally trying to make it more walkable and to make it more of a real city. And they're not getting very far. And it shows just how difficult these things are to do artificially, organically. They happened with no thought, Like a neighborhood like the North End in Boston, which was once regarded as a slum, and it developed based on the investments or really development by people who were, in a lot of cases, cash-strapped or immigrants or whatever.

1:47:46They really didn't put a lot of thought into it, but they were able to organically create that really lovely, charming, prototypically American neighborhood. And now with all of the money in the world, we're finding that if you're not actually living there, if you're not investing in your own neighborhood, if you're not building your own home or your own shop or whatever it is, it's very, very difficult to recreate those circumstances that make a neighborhood lovable. And so this really resonates with me because I'm from the exurbs of Milwaukee, where you start to see this creep coming. You know, first it hits the places that are five minutes outside, then 10 minutes outside, then 20 minutes outside.

1:48:22And especially post-COVID, you start seeing that because people have different commuting schedules and abilities with it. You start seeing it go further and further into what used to be exurbs and then in some cases what used to be rural areas because there's some demand. People can live further away. So I think this is happening all over the country right now. But to think of a Tyson's Corner type development coming to the exurbs of Cincinnati or Milwaukee or Minneapolis, something like that, people should, if they're not familiar with this example, read your piece and be aware that it's not a real place.

1:48:56It's where there's like there's so many corporate headquarters, but there aren't there's there's not really any local community. There actually aren't a lot of single family homes, if that's something you're interested in, Joe. They basically bulldozed this whole swath of land for high-rise condos, apartments, and shopping, and corporate headquarters. But it's not clear to me. I mean, I guess the typical argument would be, well, GDP and the people in Alaska are profiting off of this. Their pensions are more secure because of this. And it's been great for everyone all around. But if you care about the community, for example, you grew up in, the risk is maybe you bring in more tax revenue, but it's not necessarily that you're going to have stronger communities, strong families that come with these big developments, right?

1:49:42That's right. And again, part of the motivation for this entire series is the question of how is it that we're so wealthy and yet we are not making these kinds of these forms of wealth? What could be more important to your personal well-being than to live in a house that you love or in a home that you love in a neighborhood that you love? And not only are we struggling with it relative to other countries in some cases, but we're also struggling to compete with our own past when we were poor. when we had a United States that was not as wealthy as it is today and we had more, all of the neighborhoods that people love, all the neighborhoods that people post Instagram photos from are built like from before, basically are built from before World War II, right?

1:50:33And so what is it that's happened in the meantime that's taken away this real form of deep wealth that may not show up in GDP and made it harder to attain. Right. And on that point, let me also share this article, How the Government Built the American Dream House. And you go in here to Fannie and Freddie and actually some of the big history, not just of the government, but also of finance before World War II. Hoover is such interesting history. And I was hoping, Joe, that you could take us a bit through how the government shaped some of this as well. Absolutely. And the key point is that we've come to this situation where we see a house as a financial product.

1:51:20People think about home buying as a decision that's made on the basis of their wealth and their future retirement and a lot of other things that are related to economic security and to finance. and less and less is it a decision about where to live, where your family is, what the neighborhood is actually like and so forth. And for that article, I went through some examples of people who bought a home because they kind of bought into this narrative that a home is the path to financial security and they regretted it because then they had to live their life where they lived, right? So you move into a neighborhood, you get your single family home and then suddenly you realize that it's harder to meet up with your friends after work, or you're not seeing your family as often, and you don't have other amenities close by.

1:52:12And this is a phenomenon that was 100 % driven by the federal government over the course of decades, promoting through policy and also through exhortation, every president, almost every president talking it up, like housing is the way to build wealth. Never talking about let's build beautiful neighborhoods, let's build beautiful cities saying a home is how you build financial security. And then the policies, you touched on the policies, which I went through a lot. And there's a lot more that I could have listed, but the big ones are, there's two really, the tax code and the huge number of tax breaks for mortgages specifically for taking on mortgage debt, not for buying a home per se, but for taking on debt.

1:53:01And then the other one is the government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which also encourage, through a completely different side of the government, families to load up on debt and to leverage themselves as much as they can for this one specific financial asset. And who pushed this? I mean, because when you look at the system, actually, Arthur Brooks, I'll just put it this way, has great numbers on how material wealth has technically expanded over time, meaning people live in bigger houses. And yet our happiness, collectively, the American people's happiness has declined as material wealth has gone up.

1:53:38And again, this is technically as material wealth went up. And I believe these are pre-COVID numbers. So some of that may have changed. But the point remains that we were living in bigger houses, but we were less happy. And we had more stuff, you know, cheaper TVs, that sort of thing, but we were less happy. And when you go back and you look, you think, well, who would design the system this way? Can you explain to us, Joe, a little bit about who pushed for this, who benefited from this? Yeah, and the short answer is it was really everyone. It's hard to pick a specific point, but I think that the best place to start really is Hoover and creating the...

1:54:15So this zoning is a local and state phenomenon. They're the ones who implement zoning codes, but what's not widely known as that this was promoted by Herbert Hoover as Commerce Secretary and was really pushed throughout the entire country. And the reason for that, the logic for that was twofold. Part of it was to sort of rationalize the entire real estate system. But another part of it was to make life easier for companies that built at scale. Because if zoning and building codes are regularized throughout the country, you don't have to worry too much about which neighborhood you're building in, you can be much bigger, right?

1:54:57You don't have to be a builder that just builds in one neighborhood or knows the lay of the land in that city. You can build in multiple cities or across the entire Midwest or all of California. And then the other huge part of it was the New Deal, programs that encouraged mortgage debt and housing, also a lot of housing tax breaks. What's happened is these have become just part of the underlying financial and economic substrate of the United States. Most of the people in the industry have no awareness of these things that happened in the distant, distant past. They're just part of the landscape.

1:55:36They're just part of life. But it didn't have to be that way. It was promoted. All of these things were promoted by people with a specific agenda, which was to facilitate, make things easier for big businesses and to and also to bail out the housing industry. And during the Great Depression was also a big part of it. Every time these conversations are broached, especially by people on the right, you know, I actually heard an interesting Jeremy Boring kind of rant on this recently where he was he was saying that things in America were built cheaply and they look kind of ugly because we had to build fast.

1:56:13And that's kind of a testament to American innovation and ingenuity and entrepreneurialism. And anytime you broached this on the right, as I'm sure you've experienced, Joe, just looking at any right wing reaction to things that you've written, it's, well, do you want people to be poor? You're advocating for the Alaskan pensioners to be poor. You're advocating for Tyson's Corner to be, you know, farmland and nothing else as though that's a bad But anyway, you're advocating for Fairfax County to have way less tax revenue and those sorts of things to fund schools. And what would your response be?

1:56:45First of all, I get it because we hear so often a certain urban agenda, which is based on which is very left wing. So, of course, right wingers are not going to like it. It's about taking away your car. It's about taking away your gas stove. It's about taking away your police. or your single family home. Or your single family home, right. So I think when people hear talk about neighborhoods, walkability, livability, they think that it's bundled with this left-wing agenda. And of course, if you're a right-wing, you're not going to like that. I think that's fair enough. But everyone wants abundance.

1:57:29Everyone wants prosperity. Why is a lovely neighborhood not a form of prosperity? Again, what could be more important to your personal well-being than to feel secure, safe, and happy in your own home? Where you go, it's the place where you leave every morning from that home and you return to it every day at life, every day at the end of the day. It's where your family's gonna be. Isn't that such a key component of your well-being? That not just your own home, but your neighborhood, where you live. Don't you wanna live in a healthy, safe, thriving, beautiful neighborhood? So I totally understand the impulse to think that this that any time this entire topic of of cities comes up to to kind of be on guard.

1:58:15I that's one of the things that I think has been inculcated over the course of decades, because this the people who've been talking about this disproportionately have been anti car. They have been anti big house and they've been more skeptical of policing and all the rest. The bike lane people. Yeah, exactly. Bicycles. But anyway, as someone who uses a lot of bike lanes. But Joe, your 7-Eleven piece was, I think, so helpful because it actually reminded me a lot of the Dollar General discourse. And just thinking about like having lived in private equity owned apartment buildings, the option shouldn't be you either live in private equity owned apartment buildings where you can hear every sneeze that your neighbor makes or you live or you have a 7-Eleven or nothing else.

1:59:01You know, we've come to accept this choice where it's like you get your 7-Eleven, you get your Dollar General that pays people's shitty wages back to a multinational corporation, or you have farmland. Like, that to me feels like a false choice. And that's the one that I would imagine, without putting words in his mouth, Jeremy Boring would say, if it's not the 7-Eleven, if it's not the Dollar General, if it's not the damn shipping container Starbucks, it's nothing. It's that. Or you just have farmland or in the Rust Belt, you have these old factories, that sort of thing. That just feels like an unacceptable false choice.

1:59:35And I don't know if I'm naive, Joe, you've spent more time in the space than I have. It seems like it's not a real choice. It doesn't have to be that dichotomy. right exactly and we can look at the different ways the system has the thumb on the scale for the dollar general or the 7-eleven versus a small neighborhood that has a mom-and-pop store that can survive right next to a bookstore or restaurant or a small hotel or whatever it is in a mixed-use setting. So I think, again, one good way to look at this is the incentives that are in the system for building a really large apartment building that's like private equity or re-owned that has nothing else, has no retail nearby or attached to it.

2:00:29It can house a thousand people, a thousand singles who go back to their apartments or on their phones at night and are not interacting with each other or whatever it is, right? And that is a product that can be defined and it can be legible to big investors who don't need to care about where they're investing. And it's a packaged, understandable financial product, right? It's fine if someone wants to build those in a free market, but why not take the thumb off of the scale and make it just as advantageous or just as easy to build the mixed -use development that has maybe bottom floor retail two stories of apartments above it.

2:01:20people seem to like that in Paris, that kind of neighborhood, you know, a bakery with apartments, a restaurant with a hotel, a church right next to a daycare or whatever it is. Those are products that are discouraged under the current set of government regulations and business practices. So definitely what you're saying is correct. It's a bit of a false choice that we've been pushed into. Before I let you go, I had to ask about what I thought was a fascinating counterexample in Downton Abbey because there's this great subplot in Downton Abbey of the closing of the commons. And if people haven't watched Downton Abbey, this is not a spoiler just to say because of the historic time period that the show takes place, they are grappling with the closing of the commons and arguably globalization and all of that, Joe.

2:02:09So if you don't want spoilers to Downton Abbey, maybe tune out, but I think these would only be gentle spoilers because we're talking about real history. Joe, and I was wondering if you could kind of flesh out for us what happened or how the West kind of came to think about all of this stuff vis-a-vis the Downton Abbey example. Yeah, and I confess that I don't have complete mastery of the plot of Downton Abbey anymore. You forget it. But yeah, so this is a great example, right? The entire premise of the show was based on the fact that the property was going to be given to someone who the main characters didn't even know because of England's very strict property rights laws.

2:02:48So the general point is that the family was extremely tightly connected to the land by the law. And so they had a great incentive to make it as lovely, as successful, and as beautiful as possible because it's their family. The, the, the, not just their house, but their actual town reflected their family name and it's a point of pride. And, and the fact that it could be potentially given to someone who they don't even know was causing a ton of trouble for them, of course. But the property rights laws have changed completely. In the United States, we basically never had laws like that that tied the property so closely to a family that would be there for generations and would invest in it over the course of generations.

2:03:38And for some good reasons because we're not an aristocracy. But yeah, right. And we don't have the feudal history, right? Yeah, of course. And instead, we went in the other direction, which makes land much more of a commodity that can be bought and sold. And of course, there's good things about that. Globally. Exactly. Globally. There's good things about that, and that allows for rapid development. That allows for industrialization if it's going to occur very quickly. But we do have this. It's just an example that shows some of the downsides of losing that connection between the people who own the property and the people who live there.

2:04:14Joe Lawler, thank you for taking the time to walk us through all this. I can't recommend enough your series about all of this in the New Atlantis, which is long. and we didn't even basically scratch the surface because your reporting is so in-depth. Really appreciate you taking the time, Joe. Thank you so much, Emily. Hi, this is Kylie Brakeman. Angela Jaritana. Jeremy Culhane. Patrick McDonald. And we're the hosts of the Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists podcast. The Improvised Character Comedy podcast, where each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft. Join us for a panel of Eurovision participants.

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