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Welcome to Counterpoints, Crystal, thank you so much for joining us today.
It is my pleasure, and we start today with some fantastic, fantastic news. Emily, you want to share the latest with regard to Ryan and his wife who had a significant surgery yesterday.
Yeah, absolutely so.
Ryan was actually able to post on AX yesterday update surgery today went very well. Doctors described it as a quote best case scenario. Thank you to everybody for the wild wishes and the prayers. It means a lot, So Crystal, you just said best news. Yeah, I mean, this is fantastic and a huge relief for Ryan.
So we're very.
Excited for them and continuing to.
Hope for the best.
Yes, absolutely, so he's with her today helping her to recover. But we're really glad to hear that news. We've got a bunch of other world news, domestic political news to get to. Trump making some really significant comments appearing to back down from his trade war against China, so a lot to say there. We also got some numbers from Tesla where their net income was down seventy one percent in the first quarter, so things not going too well for Elon Emily No.
I was going to say, we had the whole show basically set yesterday and we did it late, but even then, Donald Trump suddenly was talking about how well, maybe the tariffs won't be one hundred and forty five percent.
We will get to that in a moment.
We have video, we have more updates on how the tariffs are affecting the economy. And Crystal a great guest lined up for today.
Yeah, Eric, and he focuses on unions. He had a really important piece a while back in Jacobin talking about, you know, debucking the Smith that you can just put tariffs on and you're going to end up with manufacturing jobs, and that those are going to be good jobs. You know, at the beginning of the turn of the century, the era that Donald Trump sort of idealizes under William McKinley, etc. Factory jobs were not good jobs. They were dirty, they
were dangerous, they were low wage, et cetera. It was really the union movement and a series of sort of historical events as well the US being kind of the only power in the world after World War Two that enabled that dynamic. So we wanted to dig into that with him at a time when you're already starting to see actually manufacturing job losses because of what is Trump has done on tariff. So really excited to talk to Eric. We also, Emily have a bunch of updates.
Pete.
Hegsett seems to really be flailing, and you know, I rely on you heavily to understand what the hell is going on in this situation to the best that any of us know, because it just seems like a total and complete mess over the Pentagon.
And both of us will be relying on Ryan, who will be with us in spirit to some extent because he has a massive new scoop about what's actually going on behind closed doors. So that I have to say, I think provides maybe the best explanation, so everyone should stick around for that we have.
Yeah, he actually told me Emily that he was occupying himself working on that piece to distract him while his wife was in surgery. He was in the waiting room and trying to distract himself to keep from going crazy working on this piece.
I forget Ryan.
I figured that's what was happening because the piece ran.
Well at the hospital. Is classic Ryan, but it's a very important story. We will get to all of that.
We're going to do a check in on the Maha movement because there were a couple of pretty interesting developments that just happened yesterday.
A new announcement about food dies.
But we also have some updates on how the FDA is approaching milk and other important questions. So we are going to go ahead and dip into Maha world for a segment this morning, Chris. So we have some interesting stuff from the Dems too. Rama Manuel went on the I've Had It podcast to sort of unload on his fellow Democrats as he considers a possible twenty twenty eight presidential run.
It's so ridiculous to say that, but here we are.
Gavin Newsom made new comments and David Hogg continues to get pressed. We have quite an interesting clip of him and a conversation with Major Garrett on CBS News.
So a lot to talk about there.
Yeah, indeed, And I know you love those ladies from that. I've had a podcast even looking for a reason to pull some content from them and really uplift them. So I'm excited that we finally got you that chance.
Yeah, I do.
I have like a barning bias against them based on Bravo World, But anyway.
I didn't know they existed until recently. You know who clued me into them was actually Pisco, who you guys had on to talk about immigration. He was like, I think you'd love these ladies. Sure enough, I do love these ladies.
That's hilarious. We'll hash this out. I'll clue you in on all of the Bravo drama.
But before we do that, we will get to So sixty Minutes having its executive producer, only the third person to ever lead.
The show as executive producer. By the way, that's wow.
Yeah, it's a crazy fact, but left the show yesterday with a complaint about lacking editorial independence amid CBS's battle with the Trump administration, or I guess its efforts is going to placate the Trump administration as they do get.
Out in court.
So some interesting stuff going on behind closed doors there, and it's probably representative of a broader struggle in the media to Crystal.
Yeah, absolutely, before we jump in, thank you guys so much. We've been getting a bunch of new premium subscribers. You guys made it possible to have the Friday Show officially locked in, which we're really proud to be able to do. If you can't buy a premium subscription, we totally get it. If you can like, if you can share the podcast in particular, if you could share, if you can leave a review, all of those things really help us.
So thank you guys so much for your support.
And Emily, you want to go ahead and tell the people what Trump had to say about the trade war yesterday.
Let's do it.
Let's move to these comments that Donald Trump made at the White House yesterday evening as he was discussing the terraff.
So we can go ahead and roll a one here.
One hundred and forty five percent is very high, and it won't be that high. Not going to be that high. It got up to that. We were talking about Fenton hal where you know, various elements built it up to one hundred and forty five. No, it won't be anywhere near that high. It'll come down substantially, but it won't be zero. Used to be zero. We were just destroyed. China was taking us for a ride and just not
going to have It's not going to happen. We're going to be very good to China, have a great relationship with presidentcy but they would make billions and billions and billions of dollars a year and they would build their military out of the United States and what they made, so that won't happen. But they're going to do very well, and I think they're going to be and I think we're going to live together very happily and ideally work together. So I think it's going to work out very well.
But no, it's at one hundred and forty five percent. There will not be anywhere near that number.
So that was at about five fifteen in the evening, and we're going to get to this in a moment, but came after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessett reportedly in a private JP Morgan meeting, had been saying something really similar and Chris, so, we have a lot of elements to get to in this black but I want to just camp out on this point quickly and.
Get your reaction because this is huge.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, because this is what we've gone through the seesaw for the last several weeks about whether the tariffs are this is the best in distinction.
What did he say?
They are negotiable but not a negotiating tactic. And there's Donald Trump putting it very clearly all on the table.
This is just a negotiating.
Tactic, right and you know, I'm going to defer to our no bertrand had a good analysis of this, he says, Trump saying the tariffs of China won't be anywhere near as high tonically is probably going to have an even worse impact than the US economy in the short run, because if you import stuff from China, number one, you're going to wait until the terrors come down. You're not gonna be oh yeah, let me pay the highest possible
rate right now. So that's going to compound shortages right now in the immediate term, because people are just going to weigh out now that Trump has said this is not going to stay where it is, and he says, you're going to be less motivated to look for any alternatives or establish, certainly in domestic manufacturing. Why would you go through that effort when the President has already told you this is not going to last, which, again he says,
is why Trump's approaches anything but fort ychs. He's basically negotiating with himself in public and making the business environment for US companies utterly unpredictable and chaotic. And I think all of that is really well said. Obviously, Waltree is going to be super happy to see him climb down from one hundred and forty five percent. I think the China tears were even technically higher than that at this point.
But you get to a certain level where it's just like, Okay, we're just not trading with China outside of these few exemptions that Trump put into place, which significant, which had to do with you know, a lot of high tech items that we are not going to be producing in
the US anytime in the near term. But you know, we've been saying emily from the beginning that of trade war with China, even under the best circumstances, was going to be very difficult for us to win at this point because we are so reliant on them for so
many things. And Trump did not set any sort of conditions in which it was even theoretically possible that we were going to prevail in this, because he turned the entire world against us in the midst of you know, launching a trade war against not just China, but the entire world, and he's not doing any of the sort of domestic policy to assist US consumers or US businesses, which were, you know, being slaughtered by these terrorsts, especially
small businesses, like there was no way they could survive all of this. So in every way he went about this and just the worst for his own goals, supposed goals, whatever those are, he went about it all in the worst possible way. And now, frankly, it's humiliating that he has to back down already in this very public way when China hasn't budged an inch.
Well, his i mean, his strategy was dependent on maintaining this sort of bluff, and we all kind of knew and there were hints of it obviously that this was just I mean, everyone knew that this was a negotiating tactic, but what they didn't know is whether or not he would just say like screw it, keep it out one forty five, like we're just gonna go full send for an indefinite period of time, even if this was always meant to be a negotiating type but what he did
just there is both take away his leverage but also without providing certainty for domestic producers. And so it's it's really like, not only is it not being augmented with the sort of policies that you would see domestically, not as not only is it not being augmented with a really coherent so far, with a really coherent set of deals to reshore particular industries, to support particular industries, it's still like it's just as he's received from him right there.
It's completely being dominated or defined by what he chooses to say on a daily basis, which is not at all helpful to the project of onshoring.
And yes, go ahead, just really quick, just to summarize, you know, in terms of what he and his advisors claimed. There were a variety of goals that were claimed here, right one of them was to get the treasury bond rate down. That has gone in the opposite direction, And I do continue to think that is a significant reason, the fact that it was so clear the world was not fleeing to safety in US bonds or in dollars,
they were just fleeing the US all together. And I continue to think that was probably the most important reason why Trump is now backing down from this, because that was so incredibly, like catastrophically existentially disastrous the US economy so fail on the chargery bond rates. Supposedly this was going to bring back manufacturing jobs, where we're going to cover with Eric the way that manufacturing jobs were already
taking a massive hit because of this policy. And then the other thing that you alluded to there, Emily is oh, we're going to get all these great deals. Well we have no deals, zero deals. We're at zero deals right now, so you know, none of these purported somewhat contradictory aims. We're actually coming to fruition. And now Trump is you know, Trump is sort of pulling the record saying, okay, we got to we can't keep this up. This is just not going to work out.
And let's roll this clip of Harry Enton on CNN as we try to figure out why Donald Trump so as the things that he says. What's sort of the backdrop Harry Anton explaining some of the drama in the stock market actually historical parallel.
So let's roll this next clip.
A two.
The SMP has dropped the most under Trump for any president at this point in their presidency since the SMP five hundred was in fact created back in nineteen hundred and fifty seven.
And indeed it is not anywhere.
Close, folks, It's not anywhere close.
Under Trump.
It's dropped get this fourteen percent. The next closest one was George W. Bush back in two thousand and one, a drop of just half that at seven percent. No other elected president at this point in their presidency saw a drop of five percent or more. So Donald Trump is on a planet all by himself, a planet you do not want to be on. The American people don't want to be on chance of a recession. You see,
I have four different little metrics. We can look at JP Morgan's sixty percent polymarket fifty seven percent Reuters forty five percent, Goldman Sachs forty five percent. Blame Trump if there's a recession in the next twelve months. Look at
this a lot or quite a bit. That's the majority winner right there at fifty two percent, a little or not at all, Perhaps a little bit high, some might say at thirty two percent, but still here, the clear majority of Americans say that if in fact there is recession in the next twelve months, which at this point looks about fifty to fifty, the majority of the American public says that the buck will stop at the White House, stop at sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue.
So, Crystal, to your point, there's a lot weighing politically on Donald Trump.
And this idea. As they said when they.
Rolled these terraces out, I mean, they had again mixed messaging about how serious the quote short term pain would be. Everyone kind of knew it was very obvious there would be short term pain looking back to Ronald Reagan's presidency and stany recovered by nineteen eighty four from the recession in nineteen eighty one.
But that gave them some comfort.
And the question is, though, how long they're willing to stomach the short term pain, and if the short term pain is actually reflective of something that is a ship that's not going to be turned around by the time the midterms come, by the time there's another presidential election. Whether or not Donald Trump cares about that as a different question, but the politics of this are going to get pretty rough, and Trump seems to be responding to that too.
Yeah.
I just have two questions. One of them is, you know, all the the botchiest of the world, the people, the maga world influencers who were like making name for themselves by being like tariffs now, tariffs forever, this is the greatest economic policy. This is delivering for Main Street over Wall Street and showing the ELI It's like, what's what's the reaction now going to be now that he's like, yeah, we're we're just not really going to do that anymore.
I guess they'll go back to from the this will create jobs. Now, they'll go back to art of the deal. In the meme that shows them going back and forth.
Well, it's interesting because it's also like, where does he land on this when he says it's not going to be one hundred and forty five, What.
Does that mean?
What is it going to be eighty percent? Does it mean one hundred and twenty percent? Like it's just so crazy.
Because it's gonna be one hundred and forty four percent, one.
Hundred forty four And if it does remain something like one twenty or he changes his mind, I mean he's been, you know, trying to maintain a bluff for a few weeks and then just comes out and says that on a day like yesterday. So it's it's really still very hard to know where this goes.
But what we do know is.
That he's willing to make deals, and we just don't know where those deals are going to end up.
But is anyone willing to make a deal with him at this point?
I mean, I think that was the you got you and Soccer covered this like that the Japan dating that they came away empty handed. That's part of what triggered you know, will market selloff on that particular day, because yeah, the rest of the world is that, like, why would we make a deal with you? You people are crazy and you can't even tell us what you want, Like, even if we want to make a deal, you don't even know what you're doing, So how can we even, you know, settle on some sort of terms here.
Nobody knows because it's just Donald Trump and Scott Bessett can go out and make this sort of intellectual case for it and try to put like meat on the bones of the policy that Donald Trump changes when he speaks, you know, just like because he's talking and he's in a question an answer session with reporters and ends up saying something.
That you know, maybe he didn't plan this, but that doesn't reassure markets.
It's not, you know, and we should get into this crystal because this was really interesting as it was happening yesterday. We can put a three on the screen. This is the CNBC tear Street. Tear Street just about how markets closed yesterday. So DOWD jumps a thousand points Tuesday to snap four day string of losses. That's where things ended up. But as the day was going on, there was some quiet interesting movement. We can put the next element up.
This is Joe Eisenthal noticed Scott Bessen gave comments that massively moved the markets earlier to a private JP Morgan event that wasn't open to the public or the media.
What he said.
What Besson said was that quote the tariff stand off with China is unsustainable and that he expects the situation to de escalate. That's per Bloomberg's description of what he was actually talking about. So we can put that element up.
This is the next this is the next element. This is how Bloomberg This was a JP Morgan investor summit here in Washington, DC, is not open to the public, and what Bessant was saying at the investor's summit move markets because when the Bloomberg report came out, it was kind of a preview of what Donald Trump would say later after the closing bell run five PM that they expect to de escalate with China. Charlie Gasparino, this was later in the day as well as around two eighteen PM.
And it's the next element, he said.
I've been told by a person close to Bessett the reports on his remarks about a trade deal with China having been imminent overstate what he said. He meant that there's roover talk to de escalation, but much also depends on China's willingness to compromise on trade as well. So Crystal just stopping right there with the Charles Gasparino point so Besant says something behind closed doors that is on the same page with what the president says later in
the day. But the Treasury tries to clean up, or the administration at least tries to clean up the best remark by talking to Gasparino and trying to downplay what Besant said.
That's my assumption.
I mean, maybe it was somebody who's in the meeting who's not the administration. I don't know who the source is, but he says it's a person close to Scott Bessant. So I would assume that somebody in the administration, they try to clean it up, and then Trump just comes out a few hours later and it's like, yeah, we're de escalating one forty five.
That's a crazy number. Yeah.
Well, and yeah exactly.
And to your point earlier, Emily, like we all know that the only reason he climbed down from his original, like the insane original chart of tariffs was because Bessant and Lutnik figured out how to get Peter Navarro away from him for a little while to be able to convince him and then type out the tweet in real time, you know, so hey, they were able to get a yer yesterday maybe to today. Peter Navarro is going to have his year and it's going to be a totally
different approach. We have no idea but to go back to the Scott Bessant comments and why this I think is quite significant is they're framing themselves and their defenders are framing themselves as oh, they're looking out for Main Street. Here is Scott Bessett giving market moving information to insiders at a JP Morgan investor summit who had hours and the markets were moving for hours, and people are like, why are the markets going Like what is going on?
Why are the markets going up? And now we know it's because all the insiders got this information that hey, we're backing down on the China piece, and the you know, they get to benefit and they get to cash in, and the public gets Charles Gasprino coming out and whatever his sourcing was. We be like, oh, no, no, that's not
really true. That's not really true. So I mean, it's just it reminds very much of the day that Trump spiked the markets with rolling back, stepping back from his original Tarff posture and alone and behold Charles schwab Is in the White House that day and Trump's out there bragging about how he was able to cash into the
two point five billion dollars on a single day. So there have been a lot of people who have benefited and accumulated vast resources because of these massive market swings that have been wholly engineered by this White House.
I kind of continue to think the tweet, or I guess the true social post Trump put out that day, like all caps It's a good time to buy, was a cover your ass post knowing that you know they're going to be It's hard to prove a lot of this stuff, but it also just says like it gives everyone excuse that.
We were listening to the president.
You know, maybe they had information that wasn't public, but also maybe it was just tweet Like that's where you're able to sort of land on all of it. But what I mean this is such a there was a possibility, and I know you and Sager have covered this a lot. There was a possibility I think for something that was upsetting to Wall Street but coherent and did and do some short term pain, but was I think very clearly for the sake of long term and where we.
Are right now. On April twenty third is.
Sort of Trump waving has wand in different directions every other day, and movie markets and affecting I mean, if you think, you know, like the Trump comment is very trumpy and funny for a second, and then you're like, oh my gosh. Small businesses who are trying to make plans around these tariffs just at the whim of what the President decides to do on a given day, their livelihoods are affected by it.
So it's yeah, if you're a small business, like, it's not just your business, it's your life. Like people put their whole like hopes, dreams that you know, lady I've talked about with the busy baby business like she leveraged her house to be able to expand into Walmart, and
it's all on the line for them. And so for this whole thing to be so haphazard and so casual and with no attention whatsoever to the cruelty that is entailed at the heart of this policy with regard to workers and with regard to small and medium businesses is just you know, it's it is astonishing. It truly is astonishing to watch. And now the only question left is so I said earlier, I was like, I have two questions. One is about what are all the defenders going to
say now? The other one is about how much damage has already been done? Like even if okay, let's say he fully backs away and okay, we're not doing this anymore and we're just going to go back to more or less the status or whatever, Like, how much damage? How many businesses have already gone under? How many businesses are already so freaked out about whatever the hell he's going to say tomorrow or the next week or ninety days from now, that they're just like, I'm freezing investment.
We're already seeing layoffs. We're already seeing huge freezes in terms of you know, businesses investing for the future. So is that all going to just magically reappear? Are we going to have shortages and messed up supply chains for a long period of time because of this huge disruption that is engineered by this administration? You know, I think there's probably going to be a lot of fallout even
from what has already been done. Not to mention the way that the world has now significantly moved against the US, as evidenced by you know, gold going up and the dollar weakening against basically every currency, and you know, chargery bonds moving the opposite way of what you would expect if there's a flight to safety. I think some of these things there's no there's no putting the toothpaste back in the tube.
Probably true, And it just doesn't have to That's again what's so frustrating is it doesn't have to be this way. Whether or not you sort of come to this question of protectionism from the left or the right, there's a pretty good argument for some targeted tariffs. And again, if you're a free trader, you absolutely hate that, but there's a pretty good argument for some targeted tariffs, even I think and Soccer and I think I agree on this.
There's a decent argument for the ten percent global tariff. It's not like the craziest.
Thing in the world, but but it doesn't have to.
Be done in a way that leaves people stressed every single day with no clue what's going to happen next. Like, yes, the uncertainty I think was an interesting leverage point for the time leading up to Liberation Day and the immediate aftermath of Liberation Day, But then what did the administration do to actually seal these deals?
With all of these different countries.
What did they do to augment domestic industry that was going to be hit so hard by this.
It just none of it had to be this way.
Even if you support the end goal, maybe you do it from the left to the right.
It just didn't.
This doesn't have to happen like this, and that's really sad at the end of the day.
At the same time, Elon actually waged in yesterday about the tariffs, and Tesla had their earnings call.
We found out that they're earning.
I mean that company is in dire streets and we'll get to a little bit more of that. But on the earnings call, he really did stance himself from Trump's tariff policy, saying, listen, is this the policy of the United of the President of the United States. It's up to him. But I've made clear I don't support this direction. Let's go ahead and take a listen to what he had to say.
I just want to size that the tariff decision is entirely up to the President of the United States. I will weigh with my advice with the President, which he will listen to my advice, but then it's up to him. Of course, to make his decision. I've been on the recquort many times, is saying that I believe lower tariffs are generally a good idea or prosperity, but this decision is pominently up to the elected representative of the people, being the President of the United States.
So you know, I'll.
Continue to advocate for lower tariffs rather than higher tariffs, but that's all I can do.
So the highest profile member of the Trump administration outside of Trump himself saying that he does not support the direction of the cariffs, not that that's any sort of a surprise, and he had been sniping at Peter Navarro
and made clear already his upset with that direction. He also said something else very significant, Emily, which is he said, starting next month, I'll be allocating far more time to Tesla, but also indicated he's going to continue to spend a day or two per week on government for as long as Trump wants. So you know, it's he's he's kind of doges. I don't want to say it's completely ending,
but it is petering out. And on the one hand, it has certainly been a complete failure with regard to the stated goals of Doge of any sort of efficiency. They've definitely made the government less efficient. They have failed to cut costs. Government spending is at an all time high. But they have done a lot of damage and this will actually come up in the block we do on Maha, you know, cutting food inspectors so we can no longer
like regulate milk. Basically, you know, social Security has been under assault, and now if you need to call, if you need to go to a field office, the line is going to be like a mile long, and you're going to wait hours to get your issue dealt with. So you know, it's been effective at making the government work a lot more poorly. And Elon as libertarian and someone who also has all of these conflicts of interest and doesn't want these agencies regulating his businesses, so he
got a lot out of it. But you know, in terms of the publicly stated advertised goals of efficiency and cost savings, that has all been a total and complete, undeniable failure.
At this point, The.
Wall Street Journal This is a eight had a big piece on how this all has gone down for Tesla as Elon Musk started to get closer and closer to Donald Trump, and you know, it is It was always an interesting move because from Musk's the perspective of his portfolio, it's more than just Tesla, and Tesla, of course, is more than just a car company. A lot of its valuation is about the technology as much as the AI technology, as much as it is about the cars themselves, and
that's why it's always been valued so high. But from the perspective of his portfolio, becoming part of the Trump administration could benefit his other companies in ways that go beyond just sort of Tesla's relationship with the government. I mean, this is a man who has SpaceX and Neuralink and Boring Company, and it's we just keep listing them. So it was just, you know, if you get really close to Donald Trump and you're an electric vehicle company, what
does that do to the customer base? That in and of itself was always.
Like a huge, huge risk.
Crystal, and I feel like, I'm curious what you make of this. I actually feel like that's probably hit the sales the most, Like Tesla has become.
It's a brand.
It's a brand that is now associated with Donald Trump, and that's you know, you get roughly half of the country, a little less than half the country voting for for Trump. That's not a big enough market, especially when you're already trying to pull people who are interested in electric.
Vehicles, right, And the half of the country that support more or less that supports Trump is the half that is much much, much, much much less likely.
To buy evs.
So you're directly alienating your own customer base, and not just here in you know, Europe, in Canada, in China and so yes, I think the net incomes line seventy one percent like that is an astonishing collapse for Tesla, and it I think is not one hundred percent, but significantly due to Elon making him such a toxic, divisive figure. Because remember, he's not just you know, taking control vast swaths of our government. He's meddling in UK politics, he's
meddling in German politics. He's trying to involve himself in all of these countries and they're domestic political life and a lot of consumers. Elon has been profoundly unpopular in Europe for quite for a while before his popularity plummeted here as well, and so yes, the brand is very closely associated with him. There are a lot of competitors out there. Now you know, if you are in most of the world, you can buy a BYD. It appears to be a better car, the technology appears to be better,
it is less expensive. So you have that competition coming online at the same time that he becomes such a toxic figure. And even here in the US, you know the domestic automaker EVS. I happen to own one of them at the board and they're good. You know, it's no longer that they're the only game in town. So and because Tesla as a brand has become such a sort of polarizing brand, a lot of people are not trying to make a political statement with just their vehicle drive down the street.
They're not trying. They don't want to.
Get like dirty looks or judged or like have their political views on display or whatever just based on the car that they're driving. And so that's going to make it less appealing as well. And I think it's going to be difficult for them to climb out of this because you face not only him as a toxic figure and so closely aligned with the brand, you also face this you know, competitive pressure coming from BYD and you
know Tesla has a relatively stale inventory. And then another piece of this that we'll get to in a minute is the cyber truck has been one of the biggest flops in automotive history.
Just a total complete flop.
We cover before that Tesla dealerships are not even taking it as like a trade in. So Tesla is not taking their own vehicle as a trade in because no one wants this thing. They've had to recall almost all of them. They've had all kinds of quality issues. It looks freakish, you know, it's already. It's already just the
look of it is going to be divisive. And then with the normal Tesla cars, it's like, Okay, maybe you got this before, you knew what was going on with Elan whatever, before he was on their sigiling on Inauguration Day. But with the cyber truck, like you kind of feel like, all right, you knew what you were getting with this guy. And so it is a very overtly political symbol and most people just don't, like they're not looking for that in their vehicle.
Yeah, I mean, we could do an entire show on how much I despise the cyber truck, but we should probably get to the rest of the news here, but a nine B up on the screen. This is Joe Wisenthal pulling out a quote from the Boomberg article about how Trump's Tesla says that Trump's trade war has had adverse impacts on Tesla's global supply chain. No surprise there, And the trade war quote could have a meaningful impact on demand in.
The near term.
Again, no surprise there. Then we can move on to the next element. This was the one that we just showed earlier about how bad the quarter was for the cyber truck. That is a twenty four percent dip, which is about double the dip for the Model Y and the other Tesla offerings. And finally, last element in this block is a eleven.
This is a report in the Washington Post.
This is a story about report in the Washington Post in which Elon Musk has reportedly said he wants to leave politics because he's tired of quote attacks from the left. So Crystal, one of the big questions that we've had here on the show is the extent to which Elon Musk is benefiting both in front of the public and behind closed doors. And a lot of that would not come from Tesla, but from probably companies were like Starlink in space that are more closely intertwined with the government,
and that's a giant unopened question or unanswered question. Jury is out on it. We may not know the details of that literally for years to come, because a lot was happening really quickly behind closed.
Doors with DOJ.
But Tesla obviously is like his signature brand company and all of that. I think it'll be, like you said, difficult for it to recover from this. I don't think it'll be impossible for Doesla to recover, because there is a lot of value in the tech itself.
But all that is.
To say this is for Usk, the Tesla drop is probably nothing compared to the benefits he's still reaped by being so closely intertwined with a Trump administration, or will continue to, or we'll see.
Those benefits coming down the line.
So I just wanted to make that point quickly, because well, it's true that Trump is heard in Wall Street and Elon Musk is part of that, and he has probably sacrificed a little bit with Tesla here, significantly with Tesla here, whether it was intentionally or otherwise, those benefits are still we don't really know exactly what he's gotten out of this.
Yeah, that's right.
And you know, I think Elon is a very ideological force. I think it's wrong to think of his aspirations solely being I mean, he likes to make money out and you know, he's been able to shift some contracts in his direction and gut the regulators that were causing him problems other businesses whatever. So he gets that out of it, certainly. But you know, my sense from the reporting on him is that his real tesla is not the apple of
his eye right now. His real goal is this SpaceX colonizing Mars, which you know is sort of an insane thing, like if you know anything about the actual atmosphere on Mars, et cetera. And so remains to be seen how much he is able to shift Pentagon resources and NASA resources in his direction for SpaceX to try to accomplish his like you know, man on Mars colony dream or whatever it is that he has in mind. So, like you said, a lot of unanswered questions about how much this is
going to serve Elon's interest in the long term. It's also possible that he placed a big bet that it would serve his interest in his goal, his main character goal of you know, making humans interplanetary and interplanetary civilization, and then he ends up just screwing himself because the bets don't pay off. That's certainly the possible outcome here as well.
We're sending Sager to Mars and he's going with Katy Perry. That's that's what we're leaving this block.
I think that will heal the world.
He will heal the world, right, Crystal, Let's get to the guests.
Joining us now for a conversation on the way that Trump's trade war has already hurt manufacturing jobs and what it would actually take to make not only more reindustrialization in this country, but make those jobs good jobs again.
Is Eric Blank.
He's an assistant professor at Rutgers and he's also out with a terrific new book, highly recommend. Let's put it up on the screen. It's called We Are the Union. How worker to worker organizing is revitalizing labor and winning big and extremely relevant and timely book given and how important unions were to building factory jobs into good, well paying jobs that were you know, regulated and safety regulations and all of those sorts of things. So Eric, great to see.
You, welcome.
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
Yeah, of course, guys, if we could put up on the screen.
B two.
We've had already some indications that because of the chaos of Trump's trade war and the way that it's you know, unilateral and across the board, we've had some early job losses. A paper mill that has been opened for two hundred years that is now going to be closed. Could put the next one up on the screen. We've got a list of a number of different companies Stalantis, Mac Trucks, Cleveland Cliffs, John Deere, Summitt, Interconnect, Whirlpool, and Tenaco where
workers have already been laid off. Now, I do want to say I think some of this, you know, uh Stilantis in particular, I saw some reporting on how they just you know, bought a bunch of their shares back, like some of these companies are always looking for an
excuse to layoff workers and blame some other factor. But I also think it's fair to say that Trump has created a business environment, given that there's tariffs on so many of the inputs that are required for manufacturing as well, that has led to directly to some of these job losses.
So Eric wanted to get you know, your thoughts on not only the impact of these this trade war now in the near term, but also more importantly, what would it actually take to make sure that we did make more things in this country as many people want to, and not only that that it wouldn't be done just by robots or by low paid workers the way that it was in the early nineteen hundreds that the era that Trump really sort of idealizes.
Yeah, you know, the first thing to say is that Trump's actual rollout of these tariffs has been extremely counterproductive, at least in the short term, for the nominal goal of increasing manufacturing.
So you give the numbers. I don't need to go into that more.
Depth, but it is just worth saying that because of the across the board this and then frankly just because of the volatility and a no ability of what Trump's actually going to end up doing, it's hurt the economy as a whole, and so it's very counterproductive for the goal of if this is actually the.
Main goal of bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US.
That being said, it's also just worth questioning the basic premise of Trump's vision insofar as it exists, which is that you're going to bring back American prosperity just by bringing back factory jobs. And essentially what this leaves out is that the reason today we associate factory jobs with you know, a middle class lifestyle, you know, images of the nineteen fifties and all that is because there were unions.
Factory jobs were horrible in this country before unions, and it took the unionization jobs of the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties to make them decent jobs. And you don't need to just look back, you know, to the Gilded Age, which is what Trump does. You know, Trump's always talking about, you know, we need to go back to the Gilded Age. Well, you know, read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair to get a sense of, you know, how horrible it was to
work in the factories of that era. But you don't have to go back, you know, the century you go to understand what kind of jobs would come back if these factory jobs aren't union jobs. Just like look at the US South right where Honda workers, for instance, Honda workers in the US South make less than McDonald's workers make in Denmark, right, the pay and the security that we associate with factory jobs in general just don't exist when you don't have unions.
And I wanted to actually ask about that tension because I went back and looked recently at where the jobs from chips restoring all of the industrial policy basically went over the last.
Several years, and they went overwhelmingly to write to work states.
I mean, if you map them onto a map of right to work states, it's like, it's crazy. And it's not just red states, it's purple states and more Lake Arizona places like that, And that speaks to I guess
I'm curious for your take on this. How it's true that American labor costs more than labor in Mexico or in other parts of the world, and so if you want to reshore in a way that actually benefits the middle class and doesn't create jobs that pay less than the example you just gave a fast food work that.
Has to be coupled with something.
And the way that I'm asking this question to you is we've seen the right really struggle with what to do with organized labor and what to do with this idea that you know they want jobs that support middle class families and communities. So what would your advice be, or what would your response be, your argument be to people on the right who say, these are coming in to right to work states, we need more right to work, we need cheaper labor, how should they be thinking about that?
Well, you know, the first thing to say is that for a lot of these capital intensive factory jobs, labor costs are really a marginal part of the overall profitability. So it's just not the case that what is driving these companies to Mexico and to China is just that labor coasts themselves are so large. This is a tiny
fraction of the overall pie. And in fact, a big reason for the lack of competitivity of America and manufacturing is just, frankly, the lack of investment in new technology and the lack of real infrastructure development, the types of things that you need government policy to boost. So it's not the case that the only way or even the main way to have a more flourishing manufacturing sector is by keeping wages as low as possible.
We've seen that in the nineteen fifties.
Think about the peak era of the US, when we had the best manufacturing we've ever had, well that was when it was entirely unionized. So it's just not the case that it's necessary precondition. In fact, you can argue the opposite that oftentimes it's unions because they raise the wage ceiling of force companies to have to develop more because they can not getting that just by extracting sort
of superprofits from exploitation. They have to innovate, they have to do the things that frankly, our competitors and other.
Countries are doing.
We can go ahead and put your article for Jacobin on this topic. You you know, you really make the cases say union's not just factories will make America grade. And you know, I think another piece of this with regard to and your answer with regard to, you know, labor costs being a comparatively small part of the profitability of these companies as well taken. But the other thing I think we have to consider is because the US has such a barebone social safety net and frankly insane
healthcare system. It means that you are relying on workers' wages to provide everything for them, so you don't have a government healthcare system, so that cost is borne somewhe by the businesses. You know, housing is extraordinarily expensive, so if you want to have a prayer of even getting an apartment, you're going to have to earn a certain
wage as well. So it seems to me like the social safety net piece of this has also been missing because you know, at the time of peak manufacturing post war manufacturing power in the US, which is somewhere around nineteen fifty three, not only did you have high unionization, it was a time period when we were in the process of expanding the social safety net through the New Deal as well.
Yeah, and this is one of the ironies of the fact that we don't have Medicare for all like we should in the United States is that it would actually in many ways benefit most big employers, right because it would take off these costs that oftentimes they end up having to bear, and it would you know, socialize them. So this is a reason for having a strong social
safety net that we don't have. And then just more generally, I think your point is well taken, which is that you know, it's not just about the union, it's about, frankly, what the broader policy environment is to make this stuff happen. And one of the really bad aspects of the Trump rollout is that it's not real industrial policy.
Tariffs. Targeted tariffs can work, right.
Unionization in factories can be boosting productivity, it can be conducive towards a flourishing manufacturing economy, but it has to take place in a context of an industrial policy that's comprehensive that we saw aspects of frankly at its best in the early Biden domestic agenda, where there really were real incentives from the government to manufacturer in certain like key industries. This is the type of thing that you
need to pair unionization, real industrial policy with tariffs. And in the absence of those other background conditions, including a stronger welfare state, well then just tariffs on their own aren't going to deal what Trump is saying they're going to do.
And can you talk to us a little bit about what you've seen from organized labor. I mean, obviously we've seen you know, Sean Fain be sort of in the media having these conversations in the last couple of weeks. There's the big bet from the teamsters over the course of the election, and this is, you know, April twenty twenty five, and here's where we are So what do you make of how organized labor has approached Trump? Super interesting and complicated figure for them, no question about it.
But how have they handled this discussion about tariffs just in the last let's say, the last month.
Yeah, I mean, I think I think the UAW is in a tricky situation because the UAW is very on the record is being opposed to Trump, went really hard against Trump, and I think it's to their credit that they did and they understood the stakes because frankly, Trump, contrary to all of the rhetoric about him being pro worker, pro labor, has been the most anti labor president in
US history. It's certainly recent US history. Just the fact of taking away a million union members right to collective bargaining overnight through an executive order, this is just, you know, this is the type of administration we're dealing with. So on the one hand, the UAW sees that and many of their own members, because it's not just autoworkers in the UAW, they represent researchers and the representing graduate students,
are being attacked by the Trump administration. At the same time, the UAW correctly understands that the free trade you know, experiment if you want to call it that, for the last three or four decades has been just a total disaster for their members. And so in that context, I think the UAW has threaded the needle pretty well, which is to oppose the overall Trump agenda while saying, yeah, targeted tariffs could work. This is frankly different than some
of the other blue collar unions. You know, I would include the team stars there that have really been completely uncritical at this point of the administration. I think the UAW is walking and showing them at the same time.
But it's not easy.
Eric.
I wanted to ask you a little bit more specifically about your book, which again I highly recommend to people where you dig in for you know, this is the first book that really does this to these new labor organizing movements, whether it's at Amazon and whether it's Starbucks, the sort of worker to worker organizing model, and you see this as a really hopeful direction for the labor movement, even as you know, you have Trump decimating the National
Labor Relations Board and you know, really, just like you said, being the most anti union president that we've had in modern history. So do you still see even in this context, you know, hopeful developments within the broader labor movement.
Yeah.
I mean, look, the labor movement resurgent hasn't just gone away now that Trump got elected.
We've already seen this.
Federal workers are organizing all across the US and fighting back. There's actually been a surgeon membership in the federal workers unions and response to Trump. You know, despite all these sects, in many ways, because of them, You've had more workers joining the unions in the last three four months than joined in the last three or four years combined. So in the federal sector, we're seeing that sometimes the boss is the best organizers.
It's old labor saying that's true.
Sometimes these attacks force people to fight back, and just more generally, I would say that even if it's the case that a lot of the battles right now are defensive, and it's certainly the case, you know, right now we're facing an authoritarian takeover. You know, the attacks on federal
services and unions are really intense. But labor can keep up its momentum, and it's starting to if it is able to rise to the moment and take a lead in defeating these really crucial attacks for all American people. You know, it's not just unions. If you destroy federal services, how are people going to get their Social Security?
How are you going to get your medicaid? Right?
So, these workers are sort of the front edge of the spear in fighting for all working people at this point. And so if labor is able to win that battle, and that's a big if because frankly, most unions are at least on the top, extremely risk averse, extremely calcified,
which is why the energy has come from below. This goes back to Sabanda you've thought a lot about, which is the teacher strikes in twenty eighteen, you know, starting then where the rank and file took the lead, and one in you know right to work states, Republican states, that show that's possible even under Republican governments, to win
big if you get the community support. So I think that we're going to need to have that energy again like we saw in the Red state teacher strikes, and that that moment spread to Starbucks, that's spread to Amazon. And I think if we're able to defeat Trump around these fights right now, that's going to set a huge precedent for then going on the offensive to organize the Amazons to organize Starbucks, which I think will get their first contracts soon.
There's a lot of potential there.
There's a lot of young workers who are still angry, and there's a lot of anti billionaire sentiment.
To me, it's actually is.
Very interesting because if you think about like my normy liberal family members, who are you know, now all into Bernie and AOC and an anti billionaire. That's the overall sentiment of a lot of the base is very anti billionaire. And then the question is posed, well, how do you beat the billionaires? What's the labor movement? So I think there's a lot of political space for continued labor re vitalization. It's a question of the unions and if the rank and file take advantage.
Of that moment, Yeah, I think that's that's a great point.
This was I mean, I guess somewhat of a small gesture, but I was really hardened to see the president of the sheet metal local that kil Maraabergo Garcia was part of come out and call out the Trump administration for disappearing him into El Salvador, and I thought, you know, we need to see a lot more of that, And you know, it gets into a complicated question of different unions have different views of like, you know, we just focused on our wages and you know, working conditions right
here in the here and now, or is this a broader movement?
But the way you put it, I think.
Is very apt that there has been a real sort of radicalization of normy liberal Democrats and you see that in a variety please watching MSNBC, and Nicole Wallace is out here sounding like you know me in twenty sixteen. So it certainly creates an opportunity I think for labor if they can, if they can seize the moment. Eric, tell people where they can follow you and where they can buy your book, which again highly recommend to everybody.
Yeah. Thanks.
The best place to follow me is probably at my substack, Labor Politics.
You just go Labor politics dot com. You can sign up there and yeah, get a copy of the book We Are the Union. You can get it anywhere online or in person. Yeah, and again thanks for having me on it.
And I'll just say, if you're out there and you want to get involved in fighting background the federal workers, you should go to Save Public Services dot com. There's a growing movement to support them. And if you are a worker who's not in a union, you should organize your workplace and the way to do that is you go to worker Organizing dot org. Sign up and you'll get support for organizing a workplace today.
Amazing. Thanks Eric, It's always great to see you.
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
Well defend Stuckert. Pete Hegseeth is still under fire. He gave an interview to Fox and Friends. We covered some of it yesterday morning, just as we were reacting in real time as it had recently happened. But there's so much more to get to, including I think a real bombshell from Ryan and drop site about what's going on
behind the scenes at the Pentagon. This report explains a lot, but let's start with this clip from Pete HeiG Seth on Fox and Friends yesterday morning, trying to defend himself amidst all of these firings.
That's why we've I've fought for the budget that the Defense Department requires, and the presidents said, we'll have our first trillion dollar budget because my kids, my fourteen year old, if he joins, he's going to have a great military, he's going to have peace through strength because of the historic investments of this president. So no, I haven't blinked and I won't blink because this job is too big
and too important for the American people. And I'm grateful for every opportunity the President has given him.
And I was grateful to see the heg that Seth army on the Easter egg roll yesterday in the backdrop they are ready to go.
Okay, So Pete HeiG Seth went on Fox and Friends to defend himself amidst what we've been covering here. It's a major story, all of these terminations of his very very close staff, people who have been around him for a long time, just in recent days over allegations.
Of a leak.
So one of the things we covered here yesterday just to catch up if you didn't see the addition of breaking points yesterday, is that Dan Caldwell. Again, this is a very senior advisor to Pete Hegseth, someone who's.
Been around him.
I think, going back to their concern veterans for America days, really long time, Dan is terminated, walked out of the Pentagon along with another guy who's been around heg Seth for a long time, pretty high up in the circles at the Pentagon these.
Days, I think the total comes to like.
Five major departures, one of which Juliot is sort of anti Hegseth, and more and Concamp, but just around Hegseth himself, four people who are sort of allies to him have left the Pentagon recently. Caldwell then goes on Tucker Carlson's show says he absolutely did not leak.
He has no idea if there is.
An investigation into a leak. And then Ryan comes out at drop site with the story that I think blew this wide open yesterday, Crystal. So let's put the next element up on the screen. So what Ryan is reporting basically is that, I mean, it's the narrative itself, and Ryan's writing is so good, but this is just an insane story. But what happened basically is that, let me
summarize it this way. The paranoia about being caught leaking at the Pentagon is so strong that people are getting falsely accused of leaking because there's such a freak out about whether or not anybody is leaking. So think of it like this, and just to go through Ryan's story quickly. So on April, Star Calling Carol gets a phone call and it is from Dan Littman. So Politico reporter Dan Littman, who had recently written a story kind of a hit
piece on Carol, calling him a quote bad boss. I don't mean hit piece in necessarily a pejorative way, but it was negative negatives. Yeah, exactly. So Carol texts Dan Caldwell to tell him about this call with Litman. Litman had asked if Joe Casper was facing an investigation by an IG and he wanted to know if Carol could confirm that. So you have a reporter calling someone at the Pensagon and saying, hey, do you know about Joe Casper being under investigation?
So he then texts Caldwell being like, what do I do with this?
I don't want to be accused of leaking like that is the fear, and says I just had a political reporter call me and asked a comment on an ongoing IG and criminal in messation the Casper I told him no comment. Same reporter that did a hit piece on me two weeks ago for getting fired for bad leadership last time around. I feel like I should report this call to someone, but not sure who.
Given the leak and disclosure stuff.
This is an amazing signal message that Ryan has in the story. Ryan's sourcing here is just incredible. Called Well replies flag it for your PAO, and then Sean Parnell, who does comms at the Pentagon, so that all happens, and basically then Carol Caldwell and the deputy chief of Staff Darren Selnik get marched out of the Pentagon and subsequently fired and accused of leaking information. So Crystal this story again, it is insane. It is like ripped from
an episode of Veep. But the takeaway here is they're so paranoid about being caught leaking that even when they're not leaking, they're getting accused of leaking.
Even when they're paranoid, when they're trying.
To cover all of their bases, they're still being in case of leaking.
So just basically their association with this political reporter and the fact that they surface this created this impression of oh, you're leaking, and you're trying to sabotage Joe Casper in particular, so he and it also feels like Casper, there's all kinds of stories down about him. At this point, he seems like, you know, a real will just say wild card.
Apparently he's in high level meetings bringing up exploits at strip clubs, announcing to everybody that he's just taken a giant shit Like that's the level of leadership that we're talking about from that dude in particular. But it seems like he was also looking for a pretext to fire
a knife some of these people. So then when they get associated inadvertently with this political reporter and this potential leak coming out of the Inspector Generals with regard to Joe Casper, he potentially sees this as an opening of like, oh, this is how I'm going to get these guys out of here. So some of this is just complete insanity and paranoia, you know, very poor leadership in terms of Pete hegg Sath clearly like that's just undeniable at this point.
Some of it is potentially ideological. That's the piece that we don't really know, And it sort of doesn't matter whether it's ideological or not, because the end result is that you've got Dan Caldwell out, who was a really important voice for you know, restraint with regard to Iran and not going along with Israel and what they want the United States to do. So whether or not it's ideological,
it has an ideological impact. And then some of this just seems like, you know, people who don't like each other in turf wars and like kind of bureaucratic bullshit run amuck because you have such a weak and ineffectual and chaotic leader in the person of Pete Heggsath.
So Carolyn Levitt was asked about this d yesterday at the White House briefing. Let's roll clip not I should say she wasn't asked about the drop site story. I don't think it had come out by the time the briefing happened. But let's take a look at her answers to questions about Pete Heigseth.
I have two.
Questions, one on the Pentagon and another on the economy. You said on Fox News that the entire Pentagon is working against Secretary HeiG Sith.
But the people who were fired were.
Heikesa's own guy. So how do.
You square that and what do you say to concerns that that's bad management?
They were Pentagon employees who leaked against their boss to news agencies in this room, and it's been clear since day one from this administration that we are not going to tolerate individuals who leaked to the mainstream media, particularly
when it comes to sensitive information. And the Secretary of Defense is doing a tremendous job, and he is bringing monumental change to the Pentagon, and there's a lot of people in the city who reject my fumental change, and I think, frankly, that's why we've seen a smear campaign against the Secretary of Defense since the moment that President
Trump announced his nomination before the United States Senate. Let me reiterate, the President stands strongly behind Secretary Heigseth in the change that he is bringing to the Pentagon and the results that he's achieved thus far speak for themselves.
And christ Lo, I want to bring up this New York Times rundown that published yesterday because it gets to the points you made about Joe Casper, some of the allegations about how he conducts himself at the Pentagon, bringing up conversations about strip clubs and then.
The literal shit show.
Apparently, this New York Times story has all kinds of details from behind the scenes, but Joe Casper, Heike Seth has stood behind. And what's very interesting about that is the question that I believe that was Dasha Burns just asked Caroline Love.
It's as though there has been.
A wedge driven between Haigs's own allies side the Pentagon. And if you are Pete Heigseth, and I'm just speaking hypothetically, you come into the Pentagon hypothetically and sort of charitably like say you're you're Pete Hegseth. You have these goals that you want to accomplish at the Pentagon. You really want to do some reform, whatever that reform is. You let's just say, want to bust up a status quo that has been around for a long time.
And it is very hard to disrupt.
What's very predictable is that these sort of forces that you're trying to reform and disrupt are going to drive a wedge between yourself and your allies. Because again we talked about this when Heike Seth was first nominated. Basically nobody, even in the private sector, has the experience that you need to be the Defense secretary because it's.
Such a vast.
Job. It's your oversight is just over such a vast swath of the economy of the sort of global security apparatus.
It's a really really difficult job.
And even if you lad concerned vets uh and you know you're a Fox of Friends host, it just there's nothing that can prepare you, whether you're that or you're Jamie Diamond, Like, nothing can prepare you for what's going to happen at the Pentagon, let alone if you want to reform it. So I think some of this Crystal is really like bad faith neo conservative defenders of the status quo trying very hard to push Heg Seth out and replace him with somebody who's more along the lines
of like a Mike Waltz or a Mike Pompeo. So, I you know, as as wild as the sort of or let's just say, as unorthodox as HeiG Seth is as a defense secretary.
I mean, I think some of this.
Is just like the predictable machinations of the neo conservative blob that operates inside of the Pentagon, and it was always going to happen, and that's I mean, it's sort of It's a very difficult job. And as much as like hag Seth has made some pretty obvious mistakes, signal Gate being the clearest man.
This is this is a mess.
And I don't know, I don't know what. It doesn't make me feel great about what's happening at the Pentagon.
That doesn't make you feel great, doesn't make me feel great, Crystal.
I mean, I don't know.
I'm just I'm going back to the first clip where you played, where he's like bragging, my, oh, we're gonna have a trillion dollar defense budget. It's like, Okay, where's the grave, where's the big break with the status quo? You know, I get it. He talked about DEI and Wokeness a lot, and you know, you wanted.
To get rid of like a bunch of those guys, you know what I mean, like the generals that have been along around for a really long time.
Like yeah, but now we're just like reinflating the budget and making it bigger than ever. So I you know, I'm just I'm not all that sympathetic to the narrative that he really is, that he has really had this grand evolution in terms of his ideology and his really pushing in a different direction than what we've seen before in terms of fighting wars, you know, endlessly around the world. I just don't think that he I think he is
an ambitious guy. I think you know, when it was the thing to do to get ahead to be in favor of the Iraq war, he did that. When it was the thing to do to get ahead to be in favor of the Ukraine War, he did that. When it was the thing to do to get ahead to turn on the Ukraine War, he did that. And now he's going to do whatever Trump wants him to do. That's how I ultimately.
He's not going to push back on Trump.
Yeah, no, we know that.
I mean, you know, he saw it in the Signal Gate in the chats that we all got access to. And then I don't know if we've covered on the show or not, there is another signal Gate controversy now where he was including his wife and his brother with this sensitive information that had been shared with him. We know it was classified because it was shared with him from a general who shared it through the proper classified channels,
so you know. And the reason to share these things a signal is because you can evade any sort of government transparency. That's the reason they do this. They never said they were going to stop using signal and I'm sure they've continued to use it routinely, et cetera.
And you know, there is like.
A basic level if if you okay, let's let's take seriously the idea he's a revolutionary, really wants to change the direction of the Pentagon, et cetera, et cetera. Like that does mean to your point that you need to be even more locked down, competent, you know, efficient, like all of it versus this you know, chaos, paranoia mess
that has apparently been fomented at the Pentagon. So if you want to do some sort of revolutionary action, you better have all of your ducks in a row, because of course, the you know, the neocons and the people that are going that are in the entrench status quo are going to be coming for you, and you can bet that they are organized.
So you know, I, I.
Personally don't give a lot credence to the narrative about his big ideological shift, but even if you do, that makes it even more important that he be a hyper competent person. And there was never any evidence of that, frankly, never any evidence of that. There were mismanagement problems that his you know, concerned vets organization. Being a Fox and Friends weekend host like doesn't require you to manage personnel whatsoever.
And so the the short.
Falls in terms of his basic level of leadership and competence are even more important if he is trying to truly do something different here.
And let's we can put the last almond on the screen, because this gets to the point that you're making about to what extent Pete Heike Seth is able or willing or interested in reforming the Pentagon. Donald Trump posted on True Social yesterday quote, I've just spoken to Prime Minister of Israel Bibi and Yahoo relative to numerous subjects, including train trade, iran, et cetera.
The call went very well.
We are on the same side of every issue.
Now cool, great, love that Chris issue.
And this speaks to how serious I guess the tensions or the because what is genuinely different or was genuinely different about Haig seth Pentagon is that he surrounded himself with people like Dan uh. Dan Caldwell is somebody who would look at that True Social post and say, this is ridiculous.
We're on the same side of every issue.
This is a huge problem with American foreign policy and for a Republican or Democrat administration frankly to have deep skeptics of the US foreign policy establishment, especially as it pertains to the Middle East, especially it pertains to Russia in such a senior role.
That was genuinely.
Different, and it was you know, whether it would have translated into massive substantive differences. I mean, we saw this on the signal Gate chat itself when jd Vance pushed back a little bit. It was Pete Hedseth who jumped in and made the argument on behalf of trump Ism basically for the UTI strike. And so whether it would have translated down the line into big substantive differences, we
don't know. The early signs suggested that it wouldn't. But this is the sort of like classic Trumpian dilemma or
not dilemma. But one of the big questions is whether his I guess, stylistic gestures that he's willing to make on things like organized labor, with Chavez, Drimer being in support of the Proacer, formerly being supported the pro Act, all of these different things, do they ever translate into sort of substantive or trade war for example, Does he end up going like blinking on these tariffs and you know, pissing off Wall Street so much that he ends up
playcating Wall Street like these we just don't you never, you never have a good sense of how serious he is about actually reforming the status quo. And in this case, the potential reformers have been pushed out the door.
What's three months into the administration?
Yeah, and I mean yeah, bottom line, this goes again to you know how much Pete Hegseeth really cares about going in some different direction. He fired maybe the best guy that he had around him on these issues, the best voice against war with Iran, One of the best was Dan Caldwell, and Pete Hegseth is the guy that fired him. So you know, what are we to make of how committed he is to a different ideological direction.
And you know, these things matter because Trump can be very impressionable, Yes, you know, you see that certainly in the tariff fight, where Bessen and Lutnik realize that they if they can get Peter Navarro on the other side of the White House and some other meeting, they can come in and they can you know, make their case and they can effectuate some sort of action just from them being there. And Peter Navarro not being there. So that's why it is very consequential who is who is
in the room. And to see that tweet from Trump saying, oh, We're on the same side of every issue with Israel
like that, it's just it's just so preposterous. We should not be on the same side of every issue of any country in the whole world, like the whole idea of America versus you have your own interests, right, And that's the kind of the polar opposite of what is being conveyed in Sweeten is deeply troubling because obviously Israel wants us and has long wanted US in a war with Iran, even though many of even Mike Waltz acknowledged that, you know, it was it would be a risky gambit
to try to take out Iranian nuclear facilities through military means. So, you know, you have a lot of Americans who realize that this would be a bad direction. But that doesn't mean that you aren't going to have you know, you aren't going to have a lack of patience for Trump
to pursue the diplomatic process. And at the end of the day, the neocons be able to catch him in a moment when you know whoever is a voice of reason is on the other side of the of the White House and persuade him into taking really dangerous and horrifying action.
Yeah.
I think your point about the importance of having people in the room who are skeptics or kind of heater docs on these questions is really really well taken and important. Let's go check in on the MAHA movement, Crystal, because there's some developments we should talk about. Yesterday it was a pretty big announcement on food die. We have stuff to talk about when it comes to milk inspections. Let's start with this this clip of Robert F. Kennedy Junior,
who's obviously Secretary of Health and Human Services. This was this was a clip that came out last week. We're going to get into the new developments this week. But the clip that came out last week when RFK Junior was speaking about autism, we want to start with because it went really viral and was was really polarizing, polarized had had some polarized reactions that we'll talk about, but we could go ahead to roll the clip first. This is RFK Junior speaking on autism last week.
This is an individual tragedy as well. Autism destroys families. More importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which are our children. These are children who should not be who should not be suffering like this. These are kids who, many of them, were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure
into autism when they're two years old. And these are kids who will never pay taxes, they'll never hold a job, they'll never play baseball, they'll never write a poem, they'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted. And we have to recognize we are doing this to our children. I mean, in your direction.
We are going to know by September.
We've launched a massive u testing and research effort that's going to involve hundreds of sciencests from around the world. By September, we will know what has caused the autism an epidemic and will be able to eliminate those exposures.
This comes as news actually broke yesterday.
This is D two.
We can put on the screen that this big autism study that he is trying to wrap up, I believe by August is amassing medical records of many Americans. As the CBS headline puts it quote, the new data will allow external researchers picked for Kennedy's autism studies to study comprehensive patient data with broad coverage of.
The US population for the first time.
NIH director doctor j Batcharia said the idea of the platform is that the existing data resources are often fragmented and difficult to obtain. The NIH itself will often pay multiple times for the same data resource. Even data resources that are within the federal government are difficult to obtain, he said in a presentation to the agency's advisor.
CBS goes on a note.
That medication records from pharmacy chains, lab testing and genomics, data from patients treated by the Department of Veterans Affairs and Indian Health Service, claims from private insurers, and data from smart watches and fitness trackers.
Will all be linked together.
So Crystal, that's On the one hand, it's sort of like, if you're doing these studies, yes, you should be getting as much data as you possibly can.
On the other hand, it sounds like.
What the government is doing is correlating data that can be bought from third parties. So if we're talking about smart watches, fitness stuff, there are serious efforts to ban that the government being able to buy that data, because then the government is able because I mean, you can buy it like a private people can buy that data.
Should the government be able to buy it is a different question, But the government's argument is that, well, if you can buy it in the marketplace, why should the government be at a disadvantage to sort of have access to it. So it's not the clearest cut question in the world, but is always creepy.
Yeah, they're creating a national registry of people with autism, Like, it's very creepy, and then collating all of this data together allegedly. I mean, this is some of what DOGE is doing in other departments as well, putting together this like mass federal government database of every characteristic, every interaction
you've ever had with the government. And I think people are right to be uncomfortable with that, you know, going back to RFK Junior's like, if you're autistic, you'll never play baseball, you'll never go.
On a date. The one that's jumped down to meze he said, you'll.
Never pay taxes, Like is that a shot at elon Musk not really paying taxes because I'm just saying, I'm like, you do know that the most powerful man in government outside of Donald Trump is autistic?
Right?
Like?
Are you aware of that?
Probably?
You know would I would wager probably significant number of the Doge Packer apparatics may also share that diagnosis. So I just when you hear comments like that, you're like, do you not recognize the very basics of this thing that you claim to take such interest in? Because clearly it's a broad spectrum of people with many varied capabilities, and yes, some are more profoundly impacted than others. So it again speaks to me to a just ignorance on the basics of a topic that he purports to have
a deep interest and you know, supposed expertise in. And there's a lot that's really concerning about the way that he's going about this whole study. I mean, first of all, he's already decided he thinks vaccines cause autism. We all know that, we also know that that is not the case. The primary study that you know, purported to show that was thoroughly discredited. This he's got involved in this study. This guy David Giery's a vaccine skeptic. He was fine
for practicing medicine with analycense. He's known for retracted papers linking vaccines to autism. So that's the other question is if they're basically just like cooking the books to get the answer that he believes, whether it's you know, vaccines are some sort of other environmental you know, toxin factor.
And I think it's great to research and learn more and really test the case of whether it is truly that there's you know, a greater diagnostic awareness and that's why we have a you know, a larger percentage of people who are autistic. Is that really true? Is there something else going on? But you also can't just discard all of the research and the science that has been
done before, including research into significant genetic factors. He calls autism like an injury, Like it's something specific in the environment, whether it's vaccines or toxins that have been done to you. But there's tons of research to show like if you have a real genetic component, if you have someone else in your family who's autistic, you're much more likely to yourself be autistic. You can't just ignore that and pretend that doesn't exist. So I mean, this is my issue
with him. I just I think he's dishonest. I think he's a crank, and I also think he's incredibly poorly informed, as is evidenced by you know him thinking that people who are autistic, none of them can play baseball or go on a date or use the bathroom by themselves.
It was so there were some groups that represent the interests of people with autism who took issue with what he said because of their argument is that it stigmatizes people with autism. Yeah, and you know, this is the sort of trouble with RFK Junior is similar from my
perspective also to what happens with HeiG Seth. It's like there's there's something really serious that they get right, which is these like structural problems with the agencies that they've been tapped to lead and with the culture of the industries that the agencies are supposed to oversee. Then the problem is those what does that mean in terms of like the policy execution. Mass data collection is not my favorite thing, whether it's private companies or the government do
doing it. So this is Jay Baticharia. I've interviewed him. He's great. I really like Ja bodicharia. But the description of this database is definitely troubling. They want to use it for more than just research into autism. They want to have a pretty broad, comprehensive database that they can use to study other health issues. And they're promising protections for privacy. I've heard that many times before and deeply
suspicious of it. While we're actually talking about badicharia, I just want to mention the Lefong story from yesterday as well. You can go read it on Lee's substack, But basically that nih was making Grant's contingent on people not getting involved with BDS, like, yeah, you can. You can look at the new policy and it has some stuff that I fully support about because like my take on this is that DEI violates civil rights law and we don't
have to necessarily agree on that. But they put in this poison pill about BDS into this basically new policy, saying that you can't be discriminating on the basis of race in the name of DEI. But then they toss in a description essentially that's that's BDS and compare it to racism, and it's just some of the stuff is so frustrating.
I mean, he said he was going to use AHHS to combat anti Semitism, like it yeah, whuich he likened to like, you know, a greenhouse guest. So yeah, it's it's just it's I don't think anyone really asked him. Well, I know there were some people who asked him, but I don't think that the MAHA movement was looking for him to weaponize the HHS in a hyper woke fashion to combat this alleged scourge of anti Semitism.
And you're right.
I mean, the reason why an RFK junior can rise to such prominence is because people recognize, of course they're are big issue. There's you know, obviously big issues with our food supply that is making us sick. We obviously have a system that is set up to keep people chronically ill because that is profitable. I mean, that's really the core of it is. You have, whether it's big food or whether it's big pharma, they profit off of
people being chronically ill. But none of that is actually in the analysis of what he is trying to accomplish at HHS, Like none of the you know, going after making sure you know, whether you want to nationalize big farm or whether you want to push for medicare for all, to take the profit motive out of these things. None
of that is really there. And so even you know, he's announced this effort, which I support, to get some of these food dies which are there is some research to suggest can be you know, can can be negatively impactful to kids in particular. And so look, if there's a question, just yes, take it out. I'm all for that absolutely. But even with this, it's like a voluntary program, and if food companies feel like it, whatever, So let's
go and take a listen. This is D three to RFK talking about getting these food dyes out of our food supply chain.
Hey, the FDA is taking action to remove petroleum based food dyes from the US food supply and from medications.
For the last fifty years.
American children have increasingly been living in a toxic soup of synthetic chemicals. The scientific community has conducted a number of studies raising concerns about the correlation between petroleum based synthetic dyes and several health conditions.
We are spending as much on mitochondrial disorders like diabetes as we spend on our military budget. We can't continue to exist like this. And you know the problem is industry is making money. I'm keeping us sick.
And these are a.
Broad category, the ones that Marti mentioned like ADHD, neurological disorders add ADHD, speech delayed language delay, TICS to red syndrome, and arcolepsy, ASD, and autism. All of these are injuries that I never heard of when I was a kid. They were not part of the nomenclature, They weren't part of the dialogue. There was zero spent in this country treating chronic disease when my uncle was president. Today is about one point eight trillion dollars annually. Is bankrupting our nation.
Seventy four percent of American kids cannot qualify for military service. How are we going to maintain our global leadership with such a sick population. We have all these autoimmune disease, these exotic diseases, and again I never heard of juvenile diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, loupis, Crohn's disease, and one hundred others that were just unknown when I was a kid.
And I mean again, it's like part of this is correct about definitely the you know, obesity and chronic illness, et cetera, and then part of it is just like complete, you know, ill informed bullshit of these you know, various illnesses that he describes again as injuries. It's trying to indicate that these are all, you know, environmentally caused or vaccine cause or whatever that he never heard of when he was a kid. Well, I mean, you could go through each one of them. But some of them it
was because they used a different word for it. Some of them is because, you know, I mean, some of these things that he says he never heard of had been identified in the late eighteen hundreds, et cetera. But you know, I think the effort to get these food dies out is a good effort. But we could put the next peace up on the screen. Like I said, it's completely voluntary to the food companies. And I also don't think we should delude ourselves about like this is
not going to change the health status of Americans. You need a much more rev plutionary program that actually attacks the central problem, which is the profit motive. And you know, they've got the head of the USDA is a freaking seed oil lobbyists. So I'm just you know, and at the same time, Emily, the other piece of this is most of the and that the seed oil lobbyist things speaks to the fact that most of the Trump administration is running a million miles and the other direction of
like giving chemical companies and polluters everything they want. And Doge has gutted the FDA so they can't even properly regulate our food supply at all. I mean they were already incredibly stretched thin, so it was difficult for them to be able to, you know, make sure that what we eat is safe. But if we put D five up on the screen, this is great reporting from lever
News about industry getting a big win here. The Trump administration hid data that allows communities to know about dangerous chemical facilities in their midst comes after lobbying from the chemical industry and after massive inauguration donations from chemical companies.
We can put up D six about milk.
So they are halting milk quality tests at the FDA amid workforce cuts. So thank you Doge for making it. And you know, it's not like there's like an avian flu that we're worried about passing through a milk supply right now or anything. So this is this is not all that you know, I guess this is not all that important, making sure that the milk supply is safe and sufficient, and then put this last one up on
the screen. They're also set to cancel tens of millions of dollars in grants from the EPA to scientists studying the environmental hazards faced by kids in rural America, the harms of pesticide exposure, and preventing forever chemicals from contaminating
the food supply. So, you know, I don't know what I don't know what administration he's talking about when he, you know, thinks that we're going to be getting the toxins out of the food supply and whatever, because the the doge efforts, the overall Trump administration coziness with business has meant that some of the small things that the Biden Ministry, small steps that they took with regard to forever chemicals in particular, are being rolled back a million
miles per hour by this administration and making it so that we can't even know whether there are toxic chemicals anymore in our own communities.
You know, the Obama administration initially considered RFK Junior to head up the EPA, And this is what's actually and by the way, you've seen as.
Too much of a liability to the Obama administration.
Because he's been always kind of on the fringes of the left. And that's what's so interesting about slotting him into the Trump administration is that you have these sort of directionally radical and I mean that in a good way radical correct points about how completely corrupted our food supply is, how corrupted the government is. And he's surrounded by because he's at HHS, which is extremely powerful, but it's not in charge of it's not entirely in charge of things like agriculture.
That's where Brooke Rollins, this is your point.
About seed oil, it is that's where Brooke Rollins comes in, somebody who's had really good relationships with the industry there. That's where over at the EPA, Lee Zelden is somebody who's really opposed to, you know, the broader green agenda.
And I'm sympathetic to that.
But if you're RFK Junior, you are now I guess your efforts to clean up HHS in the name of reforming American government and improving American health from your own vantage point. This is the like fascinating tension and in Doge and elon world, it's like a more efficient government.
But that's like if your goal is a more efficient government, if you're a RFK junior, you're not really somebody who's historically loved this idea of slashing and burning, because a lot of times your argument is in fact that the government is understaffed and has been gutted by industry, isn't able to perform oversight.
It is the most bizarre. It is the most bizarre.
Like marriage in the most bizarre time, and it's I guess having the expectedly bizarre effects.
Yeah, I guess so.
And you know, he talks a lot about or did talk a lot about corruption in these agencies and the way moneyed interests, you know, get to say in all of this, I would I'm very comfortable saying this is the most corrupt administration in certainly modern American political history. There's nothing like you know, Trump saying Okay, you can pay a million dollars, you can come tomorrow, Laco, and you can make your case directly to me. I'm going to set up a shit coin so you can just
like bribe me and catch in directly. We covered earlier all of the allegations of direct insider trading over the way that they're moving the markets, and you know, you can see it in these moves with oh, we're just not going to regulate the food industry anymore because they want that. We're just not going to expose you know,
where toxic chemicals are and communities because that's what industry wanted. So, you know, he, in his supposed quest against corruption, has signed up to be a defender of a wildly like historically corrupt administration where you know, everyone is just trying to trying to get theirs and certainly Trump and his family are trying to cash in in every way that they can.
It'll be interesting to see how RFK Junior responds to some of this stuff. He'll definitely be getting questions about it as we go forward. What's happening with agg and EPA, So we will.
Stay tuned for that.
And meanwhile, christ so let's turn to the Democrats because rom Emmanuel went on the I've Had It podcast and this comes as David Hogg is facing tough questions over not just from the media, by the way, but also from Hakeem Jefferyes. I think we have a clip of that over his pledge to actually like have a robust primary effort against the democratic status quo. Let's take a
look at this clip. Let's start with this clip of Ram and Manuel Rumored, twenty twenty eight presidential candidate on the I've had a podcast.
This was released yesterday. Take a look.
So what have you had it with?
I would say, we have a series of topics that I think sometimes consume in the other topics that don't actually get the attention that they should get, And we ended up fighting for the wrong things.
We were really south on kitchen table issues. We weren't really good about the family room issues.
Disagree with you, I disagree with you.
Okay.
The only room we are the only room we do really well was the bathroom, and that's the smallest room.
Such bullshit, that is total bullshit. That is buying into the right wing media narrative. And I'm so sick of democrats like you selling out and saying this. You know who talks about trans people more than anybody. Maga Kamala Harris talked about homeownership, she talked about kitchen table issues. Trump's over there droning on about Hannibal Lecter.
Are you kidding me.
This is where the Democrats lose because we're playing the game with the rule book. They've writ the rule book up and a cramedit down everybody's throat and crows are upset because Joe Biden pardoned his said, we kind of fucking fight. They're the gender obsessed weirdos, not us. We're the ones who fight for social security.
We fight for Medica.
And yeah, we're not gonna bully trans people. We're not gonna.
Fucking do it.
Do it fine? I mean, I love this lady. I don't know you.
I did not know they existed until like a week ago. So Emily, give me, give me the backstory here, And you're antipathy towards it because I enjoyed her given it to Rama Manuel, even though my view was like, in a nuance way different from hers, But I just enjoyed her being like, the problem is people like you, ram Emanuel.
Yeah, no, I mean that is that was deeply cathartic to watch.
And of course, because ram Emanuel is sort of squirming, he's like, you also seem to be a wealthy Democrat.
Why are you yelling at me?
On the podcasts, he thought he was giving her exactly the answer, Oh, yes, you're right, the bathroom too much and not enough the kitchen table, and she's.
Like fuck you.
Basically, I mean the one before I hear they're like backstory and what they've been up to. The thing that I would say is that the reason that the party has become has lost its credibility on kitchen table issues is because of people like Rama Manuel. So you don't get to now come in here and pretend like, oh, you understand and you're the savior of the Democratic Party. No, you are what's wrong with the Democratic Party. And she's also right that, like, you know, the reason why Republicans
are successful at or were successful. I don't think they're particularly successful at this anymore, but we're successful leading into this election of painting Kamala Harris as being, you know, just concerned with these sort of like niche, unpopular issues is because Democrats don't have a broader narrative of what they're fighting for a lah Bernie Sanders and oligarchy where it's like, okay, yeah, he's you know, he supports trans rights, but no one is going to say that's like the
thing the core of everything that he is focused on so you know, that's why I say my view is like subtly different from hers, because really the problem is that the way Republicans were able to successfully paint the Democratic Party as being overly concerned with issues that were not top of mind priorities for them is people like Rob Emmanuel and their abandonment of the working class and affirmative alignment of the Democratic Party with corporate interests.
Well, her point, I mean something that we've covered and I think is a helpful point that both you and Ryan have made for a long time. It really undermines the point she's making that it's the right wing that was talking about all of the stuff for a long time. Like I don't disagree obviously that the right has exploited some like culture war issues that I think are really
serious and they do it for red beat purposes. Like when the r and cl Richmond North of Richmond at a debate was that the rn C, I think it was, like, I think it was a decision from the RNC.
To play it.
I think that's right. I think that's right.
There certainly was a lot of enthusiasm for the song at the time, but.
The RNC USUIA is just like so grading in so many different ways.
So I don't disagree with that point.
But these issues were used as shields by corporate Democrats who were actually talking about them disproportionately to distract from their oligarchical policies on like labor and families and all of that. So that underminds the point she's making that is just the crazy right wing people who were talking about these things. Actually there was a concerted effort by corporate America to embrace things like DEI and ESG to shield to.
Play kate the left.
And so that's what really pisses me off about that, And it pisses me off when Rama Manuel is also suddenly coming out in twenty twenty five and acting like it's a really like big point that he's brave for making and he can sort of design this presidential run.
Around like it is stupid and profoundly stupid.
It Also if he does want to, I mean, I don't really take seriously this whole like he wants to run for president or whatever, But him, Gavin Newsom, there's a handful of them that are so out of touch with where the Democratic base is.
Yeah.
Well, and again, like he's someone who who worked for Barack Obama and Gavin Newsom is somebody who has not like exactly been kicking the left to the curb. Like if they really were good at reading the political wins, they would probably be coming to this in a way closer to her, to be honest, because the ram Emmanuel
Gavin Newsom approach is getting pilloried on social media. Like even Charlie Kirk, who had that conversation with Newsom about trance stuff, has come out and been like, oh so he was just lying, like the face to face having this great conversation. But Gavin Newsom is now getting hit from the left and from the right. He's not making the right happy and he's not making the left happy. So if they were actually really adept at reading the
political win they would sound closer to that. I've had it podcast Girls who My Beef with goes back to Bravo World. They had a show on Bravo called Sweet Home Oklahoma. And we don't even need to open this can of worms, but.
It open it. I want to know what I want to know these worms.
I just I hate, like I just really hate the whole, like corporate America, like propping up the hicklib thing.
It just drives me nuts.
It just I can't stand it because what I think, like genuinely lacks representation in that world is like people who aren't who.
Are are Hicks but not Libs.
And so I think corporate America just like soothes itself by saying, oh, we checked off the Oklahoma box, but they can throw people out there who are utterly unrepresentative of probably most of Oklahoma.
So anyway, so you're judging them for their identity. I got it, for their identity. You wanted a different framing of identity politics.
I want affirmative action for fascist conservative pixs, affirmative action for fascists.
It's like the same thing that the Trump administration sent to Harvard, like you can only only MAGA is allowed into your school now, sorry, only MAGA professors heading the physics department, et cetera.
Representation for Curtis Jarvin and academia is DEI worth doing.
Let's let's get to David Hogg actually.
Because like we could we have a serious discussion about the different point.
But that's basically the backstory of my being.
Okay, your antipathy towards them, Okay, Yes, exactly, but I want I'm enjoying them. I'm enjoying them. I want to try to get them on the show.
The Oliver Anthony.
They actually kind of connect to it, by the way, which is that like the right uses Oliver Anthony and thought like, oh, we finally found someone that we can elevate who's like this working class guy. But they didn't love it when he started coming out against Republicans either. This is actual presentation of how people think, but it's
never convenient to people who elevate them. So anyway, David Hogg, let's roll this clip of David Hogg tustling with Major Garrett on CBS, because Hogg, as we've covered before, is now supporting this idea of a fairly robust primary campaign against establishment Democrats.
So let's roll e too.
Let me let you address some social media criticism you've gotten, Matt Bennett from the Clinton Gore era. This is insane behavior. John Angeloni Polster, most recently for President Biden. Twenty million dollars should be spent on swing state legislative races, meeting
state legislative races, and down ballot, not on this. Steve Shale of Florida Democratic strategists, saying the DNC's vice chair should be focused on this kind of engagement meeting, engaging in places in battleground states where Democrats have lost ground, not over which deem in a plus twenty seat should be primaried.
And you know, look at the last results of the previous election. Those are the purported experts that brought us here. Just to say, it's not personal, right, I don't take those attacks personally in this regard. This is a strategic disagreement. And I want to be clear. All this money that we're raising is not just only being spent on primaries by any means. That is the story of a lot of journalists and media run with We.
Are working to spend it on, We're.
Also going to be spending it on frontline seats where great young people are running right if they are the Democratic nominee, to make sure we're bringing in fresh faces to Congress right now. We talk about diversity all the time in Congress. One of the things that we don't talk about as much in regard to that is age. Currently, if we have the same number of twenty five to thirty year olds in Congress as we do proportionally to the population, we would have over forty people under the
age of thirty in Congress. And I don't know if you've looked at Congress recently, we have one that is under the age of thirty. That is not good for the future of the Democratic Party. Is this just out with the old and in with the new. I would say no, this is out with the ineffective and in with the effective, because we need members who are ready to meet this moment to fight back against Donald Trump.
And what that looks like are people like Senator Van Holling who are literally going to El Salvador to say this man needs to come back. It looks like people like Corey Booker, who mind you did primary somebody to get to that position. It looks like people in many ways like a king Jeffries who primaried multiple people to get to that position. Right, this is a healthy process for our party and I think we should have an embrace of that when it doesn't risk us losing the House.
Meanwhile, Gavin Newsom is also giving more interviews on his attempt to write the ship of the Democratic Party.
We can put the next element up on the screen. This is E three.
I gave an interview to The Hill yesterday where he said, we have not done a forensic of what just went wrong, period, full stop.
I don't think it, I know it. I mean to the extent that I'm marginally part of his party.
I remempresent the state larger than twenty one state populations combined, and I can assure you there's not been a party discussion that I'm aware of that has included the state of California. I don't know what the party is, he said. I'm still struggling with that, Gavin. Maybe people aren't considering the state of California as prominently as you want them to because the state of California is an utter disrepair.
Maybe that has something to do with it.
Well done, Gavin, on that we can move to the next element, as well as another comment from him about when he had Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon on. He says, what I feel was exactly to me exhibit a of what I feel is wrong right now with my party, an unwillingness to even engage in platform to listen, and so I'm testing that at the same time I'm being tested by it because the reaction has been a little more bumpy than I anticipated.
And you know, this is such a bullshit from him.
Honestly, it's such because the vast majority of people who were who were unhappy, myself included. With the Charlie Kirk and the Steve Bannon interviews, it wasn't because he platformed them. It's because you, like it was a softball interview. You elevated them, You made them look good, even as they were the whole time taking jabs at him. I mean, Charlie Kirk from the outset was like, oh, you don't lunch, your son stay home from school to meet me? Why
not you close the schools during COVID? You know, the whole thing with Steve Bannon. I think it was I can't remember who it was that said the Sun. Twitter was like Gavin Newsom being like, oh, you're amazing and I appreciate you, and Steve Bannon being like you're a demon. So the problem wasn't platforming them. It was Gavin Newsom. We know you're actually good at debating. We saw you
do it with Ron DeSantis very effectively. Make the case for your principles, make the case for like a liberal view, you know, an appealing democratic party. They used you on your own platform to further their ideology. So yeah, of course the Democratic base is not going to be psyched about what you were doing there. And you know, also it was not like it was just Democratic elites or influencers online or whatever. Look at how he's faring in these early who do you want as the next time
Democratic leader? Like the Democratic base was disgusted by this approach because there truly is and I think you see Chris van Holland, and you see Maxwell Frost, you see other Democrats who I think have been coming around to Okay, we got to do something, We've got to be more aggressive, we got to use the tools that we have, etc. But that has been led by a base that has been utterly disgusted with the failures of people like Gavin Newsom to put up a fight who were much more inclined,
whose instincts were all in the direction of let me just lay down and capitulate. And with Gavin Newsome in particular, like I know where it comes from. It's because he's so close with all of these Silicon Valley donors who are all super jealous of the you know, Mark Andrieson's and the Elon Musk and whatever of the world who jumped on the other side, and so they're not getting
their goodies now because they picked the wrong team. And that's who he that's who has his ear and why he so profoundly misad this political moment in terms of what the Democratic base wants.
Huh, that's really interesting.
Let's roll this clip of Hakim Jeffreys responding to the Hog aligned efforts to potentially primary some candidates, which were I mean, I think similarly tone duff, though not unpredictably tone duff.
So let's roll the club.
Well, I look forward to standing behind every single Democratic incumbent, from the most progressive to the most centrist, in all points in between. Primaries are a fact of life. But here's the thing. I'm going to really focus on trying to defeat Republican incumbents so we can take back control of the House of Representatives and begin the process of ending this national nightmare that's being visited upon us by far right extremism.
So, I mean, that's his job, Crystal. He's not going to come out and be like, yeah, we got some old people we want to just give the boot.
Yeah, well, listen, if he actually holds to that. That would be an improvement because in the past, Yeah, in the past, the Democratic Party has yes stood behind their like corporate aligned members. But if you know, if a Jamal Bowman or Corey Bush orra Shidah Hlib gets primaried, they're good with that.
They're good with that.
So you know, if he actually listen, I understand if you are the you know, you're the House majority leader, and these are your people, and you're just going to uniformly back whoever the incumbent Democrat is. I mean, I don't support that, but at least, you know, that's a principle of neutrality ideologically, but that has not historically been the case within the Democratic Party. And so that's what they're really upset about with regard to David Hogg is.
They're worried that, you know, he is going to be on the side of you know, people who are more progressive, who are even outside of the ideological valance, who just you know, actually understand that what they're up against, that they're up against this authoritarian takeover, that the stakes are quite high, that they need to be visible, that they understand social media, and you know, I was actually a little bit hopeful about David Hogg coming into this position.
I argued with Soccer on the show about this simply because he is younger and he does at least understand the current media ecosystem, and that is something that is sorely lacking within the Democratic Party. And so I think that it has already borne out that to have him as DNC vice here and be like, yeah, if you are a weak and ineffective Democrat who's been around too long,
We're going to come for you. I mean to me, that is an extraordinarily like positive development that I think will be wildly supported by the Democratic base at this point, which really has Eric Blanc was saying this too early in our interview, really has become much more radicalized in this Trump era and much more disenchanted with a lot of Democratic leadership.
Yeah, I think you were totally vindicated in that about David Hogg, and I think I was pretty skeptical of it just and maybe I'll be vindicated in that way too, in like a cultural sense. I don't know that Hog is right, but this is I think probably outweighs that to be honest, like coming out and saying no, you have to put the fear of God in the Democratic
Party's establishment, and they just haven't had that. This is very like Mitch McConnell versus Ted Cruz circle, like twenty fourteen, And it's kind of what the Democrats need to be honest, because there's been a lot of going along to get along. It doesn't mean you have to burn the party down, but you have to threaten to burn the party down
otherwise you don't get anything. Now, you don't negotiate with Donald Trump, like Donald Trump on tariffs, but you can, you know, have some measure of like serious like it just mounts a serious threat otherwise you don't get taken seriously.
So I think that argument about howg has been vindicated so far and Crystal, this is just, I mean, genuinely a very difficult problem for Democrats to solve on the cultural front because the people like Rama Manuel and Gavin Newsom, they're the ones who were happy to use these issues as shields and.
Now they're happy.
You know that they don't believe anything because just as quickly as they embraced all of this, and you have Gavin Newsom on tape waxing, you know, sanctemonious about the Latin X community just as quickly as he did that. He's literally saying no, I would never use that word. So that's how you know, he believes literally nothing. And they were using these issues all along as like to they were exploiting these issues all along as like shields, and they're not willing to go along with the like
genuine anti oligarchy policies. And that's the crossroads that, as I see it at least, is really difficult for Democrats. By the way, what was really difficult for Republicans is the Tea Party base was actually more similar to Occupy Wall Street than anybody.
Wanted to admit.
And they never were like they were willing to like sort of do these cultural signifiers like we need term limits and we need to like screw Mitch McConnell, but not until Trump came along, and even to this day with Donald Trump in office, they're not really willing to wrap their arms fully around the policy agenda that a lot of their working class voters would want them to. And that's sort of that's the impasse that Democrats find themselves at too.
Yeah, I mean liberal elites and the rama manualsives did virtue signaling and on the Republican side they do vice signaling like that's but it's functions the same, it's the
same function. You know, we were talking about Pete Hegseth earlier and it's like he can, you know, talk all about DEI and make people feel like there's something probationary going on at the Pentagon I. Meanwhile, he's like, oh, and we got a trillion dollar budget, so yeah, it's going to be the biggest military budget ever in the history of the world. So you know, this was used as a trojan horse also for a lot of the like dose agenda of completely defenestrating the ability to regulate
corporate America. You know, if you just say like, oh, Conservats are being debanked or cancel culture DEI wokeness enough times they felt like they could smuggle in this pro oligarch agenda. And so you know, at this point, the wing of the party that has most stepped up to fight has been the left, or at least left liberals. Bernie and AOC really set the mark when I watched MSNBC and you got Nicole Wallace out there like they're the leaders of the party and they're doing a great
job and they're doing everything right. I'm like, what is even going on here? I mean, is so profoundly different. I can't even wrap my head around it. And the cynical take is, well, that's all nice, well and good now that Bernie is too old and is never going to run for president again. I do think that there is some of that that now it's sort of more
safe for them to embrace him. But I also think there is a genuine divide among people who thought who genuinely wanted to fight Trump and saw his threat for what it was, but thought that the way to do it was through you know, democracy talk, fascism talk, and like a standard liberal approach like Joe Biden and people who So those are people who you know, genuinely understood the stakes and want to fight, and now that the information has showed them like that was not the right
way to fight, they are shifting their approach. And I think much of the Democratic base falls into that camp. And people like rom Emmanuel who have I wouldn't say they don't believe anything. He believes in his own ambition. He believes in, like, you know, serving corporate interests, and so even though the writing is on the wall, about what would be more effective to combat Trump and trump Ism.
They are not going to change because they're ideologically committed to preserving a certain status quo that is deeply unpopular in the country.
Let's move on to the drama at sixty Minutes and CBS more broadly crystal. Because a story broke yesterday in The New York Times that the executive producer we can go ahead and put this first hairs sheet up on the screen. The executive producer of CBS's sixty Minutes resigned and cited a quote loss of independence.
This is Bill Owens.
He's actually only the third person, as the New York Times notes, to run the program, and it's fifty seven year history that speaks really the continuity of leadership behind sixty minutes.
And I think Chris.
Will probably also how serious CBS is about having continuity of leadership at sixty minutes, Owen said, quote. Over the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what is right for sixty minutes, right for the audience. So having defended the show and what we stand for from every angle, over time with everything I could, I'm stepping aside so
the show can move forward. That memo was leaked to The New York Times strategically, probably not by CBS, but maybe by CBS. But we learned more as the day went on about exactly what happened there.
This is from This is from Semaphore.
They had a pretty good report on what was happening behind the scenes, because I just want to say that Bill Owen's memo is pretty careful in remaining vague about how he wasn't able to make quote independent decisions. Obviously, the New York Times immediately framed it in the context of the suit that Donald Trump is fighting CBS and over that Kamala that edited Kamala Harris interview on sixty
minutes ahead of the election. The Trump campaign is still the Trump camp is claiming that that amounted to election interference. But we've seen like ABC News settle with Trump over the Georgie Stephanopolis case, and so questions about what's really going on between the Trump administration and CBS were immediately raised in light of this information. And then Semaphore had a scoop from Max Tanny yesterday that Sherry Redstone, who
is the head of CBS. She owns paramount and is therefore the head of CBS, was keeping tabs on sixty minutes sixty minutes segments about Donald Trump. According to two people familiar to the situation, this was in quote recent days, she sought to know which upcoming sixty minute stories were about Trump and why that's interesting.
Also is that sixty.
Minutes there was an ap story I went and found yesterday Crystal about how fearless sixty minutes had been about Donald Trump after he was around the time of the inauguration, despite the legal battle.
So there's something in.
Recent days here according to the Semaphore report, where Redstone was looking to kind of keep tabs on how they covered Donald Trump.
So what's your reaction.
Crystal, Yeah, no, I mean I think there were a lot of indications. So sixty minutes has I think done some fantastic journalism in the Trump two point zero era. We highlighted here a report they were one of the first to dig into, like, okay, well, who actually were these people you claimed were the worst of the worst gang members that got disappeared into the torture dungeon in
El Salvador. In particular highlighting the case of Andre the makeup artist, and they, you know, dug into his story and those of others and talked to his loved ones, and they were the ones to first analyze and find I think it was their finding was seventy five percent of those who were sent had no criminal record whatsoever. So they have done some extraordinary work. I don't think
anyone could deny that, and seemed to be unflinching. On the other hand, apparently Emily, according to I believe this was a New York Times report, some of the problem began after a sixty minute segment that you might remember in January about the war between about Israel's assault on Gaza, and they interviewed State Department former State Department officials who had resigned over the you know, their horror at what the US was doing there. They shared exclusive images from
within Gaza that exposed how barbarous it was. They talked about how by one analysis, there were seventy thousand Palestinians who had been killed there. And apparently Sherry Redstone after that complained to CBS executives about that segment, and they appointed a CBS producer to a new role overseeing the news division's journalistic standards, and she was put into place to review any segments that were deemed politically sensitive, so that appears to have been part of it as well.
And then and she, by the way, she's paramounts controlling shareholder, so she's like the one one in charge, and they're trying to approve get approval for a multi billion dollar sale of her company to Skydance, which is run by Larry Ellison. So you know, I mean, this is the problem with corporate media, right, This is the problem with corporate media. Sixty minutes is not important to Sherry Redstone.
They want their merger deal to go through. That's what the real you know, the real interest of the bottom line is, and doing really hard hitting journalism on the Trump administration is not consistent with the goal of obtaining your merger approval, especially with this administration which weaponizes the government to punish those that they perceive to be enemies.
So you add to that the Kamala Harris thing, and you can see that, you know, pressure was coming down of well, how often are you going to say negative things about the Trump administration and cover things that they're doing in an unflattering light. You know, we need to soften the edges, we need, we need to be made aware.
And even just that, and I speak from experience, even just that insertion of like the top corporate brass needs to know if you're doing a Trump related story that is intended to have a chilling effect, because who wants to always go up the chain to the boss and beg and plead your case and whatever. So if you're weighing two different storylines and one requires you to do that and one of them can sail through and you're not gonna have many political issues within the company, there's
going to be heavy incentive to move in that direction. So, you know, I think it's I think it's I think it shows a lot of integrity that he got to a point where he felt he had fought as hard as he could to maintain his journalistic independence in that of the program and got to a place where it's like, I can't associate myself with this anymore.
And this is really interesting, the guidance stuff. So The New York Times, in this report says Redstone is eager to secure the Trump's administration. The Trump administration's approval for multi billion dollar sale over company is Skuydance, a company run by the son of tech billionaire Larry Ellison. Bear in mind, and I'll get to this more in a second.
Larry Ellison is fairly close with the Trump administration. The Times also reports that Redstone has quote expressed a desire to settle mister Trump's case, which stems from what the president has called a deceptively edited interview on October with Vice President Kamala Harris that aired.
On sixty minutes.
That would essentially, I mean, it is such a stupid and ridiculous case, even if CBS did deceptively, which they but corporate media.
Is always like deceptively editing stuff.
It's not illegal and it's not defamation in the vast majority of cases, including this one. To settle that case, Unlike the George Stephanopolis one, which I think was actually a lot trickier from ABC, this is not the same thing that would basically amount to a bribe in the context of this sale. Like, that's how stupid it would be to settle this case with Trump. From just a legal standpoint, that's how stupid it would be. But from a business standpoint, it may indeed be it very clever.
I want to flash back to a New York Times headline or a New York Post headline I'm sorry from January when Donald Trump announced his big AI deal.
This is an exclusive in the New York Post.
Larry Allison's backing of Trump's five hundred billion dollar AI project could help save Paramount merger. According to sources, Ellison, Right, whose networth is currently pegged by Forbes at two hundred and five billion, is likely hoping his show of support for Stargate will help his son, David's Skydance Media to gain regulatory approval for his controversial eight billion dollar deal
to merge with Paramount. That's what's going on. That's like how serious they are about this freaking merger that it's now affecting sixty minutes. It's just so I mean this again, like this is not exceptional.
This stuff happens. This is the habit of corporate media. It's how they.
Handle their news. But holy smoke, so this one is so brazen.
I mean, I think, yeah, this is at a new level. I don't think there's any doubt that it's at a new level. And it's because the Trump administration is at a new level and just making it really clear that they're going to help their friends and they're going to fuck their enemies, and they're going to use, you know, every power that they have in the state, legal and
illegal in order to do it. And you know, this is my concern with the you know, something like an anti trust agenda, which I think is so important and which you know, was significantly moved forward under the Biden administration with Lee Na Kahan and with Jonathan Canter, and you know, one of the most positive developments of the
Biden administration was moved in that direction. But if you have an administration that is just going to use those powers of green lighting and blocking mergers as basically a political weapon, you're going to discredit an entire project which is actually really important and really positive for the American people.
And that certainly that's how corporate America thinks that the Trump administration is going about their business, that it has nothing to do with the merits of whether the merger is going to be beneficial for the country or not, and everything to do with whether or not you appropriately praised him, how much money you gave to inauguration, whether you ponied up the money for his Stargate thing, whether you spent a million dollars to go down to mar
Lago and plead your case, et cetera. And that's a that's a really bad place for a purported democracy to be. That's a very bad place for it to be, because then you just end up with a cult of sycophantic, favored oligarchs who get to do what they want with impunity and run everything.
This is yeah, I mean, this is oligarchy.
This is i this is your classic example. A source coast to Paramount back in January said, quote, this is very smart for Larry to do. It tells me he won't have any issues with the Paramount deal. And that's in reference to again him backing the Stargate project, the five hundred billion dollar AI project that Trump came out and did that press conference with very early in the second term, surrounded by Sam Altman and Larry Allison and
others right away. And so then you have a source talking in your post say, oh, it tells me he's not gonna have any problem at all with this Guide Dance merger. Unbelievable, it really, I mean, it's perfect. But what's also interesting about it is it reminds me so much of what happened with Mark Zuckerberg last week.
We'll see, But Mark Zuckerberg.
Has been pouring millions of dollars to lobby the Trump administration to back off the anti trust suit, and he got smacked in the face for glue last week when Trump's.
FTC went through with it. Because Trump's FTC, in a sort.
Of nod to the New Right that kind of helped Trump get back in power, is staffed by legit like Lena Kahan type, and we'll see again. You know, if you're Alena con type operating under Donald Trump, you probably aren't the same as Alena con type operating under Joe Biden, who was like just vacant, mentally vacant for most of his presidency. So you know, if Donald Trump does pick up the phone and tell them to stop the anti trust case into Facebook or Meta, then maybe that does
legitimately change things. But Zuckerberg was in for a spent all this money and was in for really harsh awakening when he realized Andrew Ferguson was not dropping the suit and Gil Slater is serious and these people are like actual we don't know how much power they'll have when everything is said and done at the end of this administration. But they're like actual anti corporate ideologues who have this like opposition to the ideology of anti trust that was popular.
On the right and the center left for a long time.
And I don't know if Larry Elson is about to run headfirst into the exact same thing. Maybe because this is the nature of Donald Trump. We were talking about this in the tariff block. This is about what move Donald Trump is in on a given day, and who can have his ear on a given day. We now know that with Facebook he was urmeta. I'm sorry, he was persuaded by a meeting that he had with Andrew Ferguson.
So we don't we actually don't know what's gonna happen with us, but it is sort of I guess the silver lining is amusing Crystal to watch the oligarch sort of stretch their necks out with millions and millions of dollars, put the credibility of their flagship news program on the line to get a freaking merger through.
It's just so pathetic. It is pathetic.
I mean, Zuckerberg is particularly pathetic, particularly pathetic because he didn't just do all the like sucking up up and the you know, here's some cash for your inauguration or I don't remember the details. I think he did give for the inauguration. But he also like completely changed his personal appearance and went on joor gonna like I'm moving content moderation to Texas, like he did the whole, the whole thing, and they're still like now I still don't like you, sorry.
And it's just like it is.
So it goes to what we're talking about with Rom and Manuel again earlier in the show, or Gavin Newsom going from like using latin X to being like I never used latin X.
It's like they.
Believe in their own power and their own bank accounts and their own businesses more than they believe in any of the politics that they wear literally in Zuckerberg's case, like fashion.
His big chain.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, he wears his politics like his politics changed with his fashion because he's trying to like suck up to people and he's trying to do something with his like it's all very.
Obvious what he's what he's doing. It's very transparent what he's doing.
Yeah, and with him, he goes from taking meetings with the FBI and then taking their wink wink and suppressing the Hunter Biden's story on Meta to being like, oh, the censorship is horrible and we never intended that, you know, to be as it's just so stupid.
And well and they're still censoring aggressively on behalf of the Israelis by the way, which has been exposed, especially on Instagram.
It's so pathetic. It's also a pathetic.
Yeah, it's I mean it is, Yes, it is pathetic.
And it does get to like the Gavin Newsom point too, of like they still don't like you, bro, Like they still aren't going to like you.
And I just want to say.
Like the instinct on the from the base of the Republican Party on the populace right that the tech oligarchs are an evil, malevolent force in American society, like that instinct is correct. Yeah, I think that they are a malevolent force in the world. I think they are anti human. I think they are Naomi Client said this, and I agree. I think they are anti creation. I think that they do.
They you know, have these bizarre like End Times cult type fantasies about uploading their consciousness to the cloud and what did Elon say, We're being used to like boot ai Like, that's their view of the world, and I think they should be I think they need to be
stopped at all costs. And one of the most one of the things that has disturbed me the most in this Trump administration is the way that their ideology, through the person of Elon and Doge and how much power and sway he has had in the government, has been quite ascendant in a way that I think is genuinely like a threat to people who value humanity.
Yeah, and we'll see.
I mean, I think there's just we're in a time when people are so you know, rootless, and you know, it's easy to get caught up and going along with, you know, whatever someone like Donald Trump is surrounding himself with, because people put their trust in different figures and we're
like looking for that. I think it's where the the you know, whether you agree with it or not, the moral clarity that Bernie Sanders has come out with in the last month or so is really really attractive to people because it's not wishy washy milk toast rama, manual Gavin Newsom and bullshit.
It's this is a coher a clear and coherent.
Worldview that I deeply believe in in the fire with every fiber of my being. Here's why. Uh, that's really attractive to people right now. And you know that's something for I think the right to watch out for as well, because it's it's not clear, it's it really muddles it to bring Elon Musk and some of these tech guys into the picture.
Yeah, yeah, no doubt about it, no doubt about it. And the agenda that they want is not when that serves humanity, that's right.
Well, I not know, Chris, the destruction of humanity.
I like that we started with this peg about sixty minutes and somehow ended up in the tech barons wanting to destroy the world. I'm not even really sure how we got mergers.
That's how.
I was just over here like googling Larry Allison getting to the New York Post article, and then we went off the rails, because why not.
It's a girl show.
Girl show, that's what it is, the girl shows.
We need to invite those ladies what are their names from the the.
What I've had it, I've got a podcast.
We need to have those ladies on with us, Emily. We need to make amends. I can I can do like a you know, we can do a restorative justice with you and them.
Wit cough.
Be like, you don't want me to meet with.
Them, Emily because you are afraid I'm gonna realize they're actually nice people.
Maybe I don't know. We'll find out. Maybe we'll find out. We'll see, we'll see what we can do.
Crystal, there you go, we'll work it out. Well. Thank you for having me, Emily.
I enjoy it. It's always fun. And I'll be back with soccer tomorrow. Should be back to normal tomorrow. And we've got the Friday shows, so we'll see who can who shows up for that. We kind of keep it loose about which hosts joined for the Friday show, so you'd be surprised.
Yeah, no, it's always a fun surprise. I was actually Ryan and I didn't know that you and Sager weren't going to be on last week, and we logged on and we were like, oh, okay, I guess we're We're just going to be playing the roles of Crystal and Sager as best we can, in addition to the Ryan and Emily, which was you know it was an interesting experiment.
You don't have to play our roles.
You guys just do you, but you're always with us in spirit.
Well, thank you, I appreciate that.
Well, we'll see everybody on Friday. Thank you so much for tuning in.
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