Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here, and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election.
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Wall Street Journal published a piece about Biden's age, and boy, oh boy, there were some upset liberals morning Joe freaking out Holsworth, I'll meltdown. Is interesting. The whole thing is interesting. We've also got a look at Trump's shortlists for VP. Kind of an interesting list there too, so we'll dig
into that. A new survey has revealed that the number one policy priority for gen z is housing affordability, something we have been covering here quite a bit but does not get nearly enough tension here in Washing.
We also have an interesting story for you.
So a remote tribe was given starlink and gained internet access, and it's not going so well. A lot of revealing things about what you know, internet does to us, some modern society, and new research about our children's brains, and all kinds of stuff to get into there. We also have some very serious news coming out of Israel and the Gaza Strip, in particular New York Times revealing that the Israeli governments behind an influence up targeting American lawmakers.
This comes as we are just waking up to additional carnage in the Gaza Strip. Another Israeli airstrike targeting a school, dozens of Palestinians dead.
A lot going on there to get into.
Meanwhile, Columbia Law Review they published a single pro Palestinian article and the board was so upset that they killed the entire website, not a joke, took down the entire website because of this one article. So we have a fantastic guest in to talk to all of that.
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Now, as Chrystal said, the Wall Street Journal really poked the hornet's nest here by reporting the most obvious story in the world. Let's put it up there on the screen. Behind closed doors, Biden shows signs of slipping.
Wow.
Really, just behind closed doors, it's the only place.
Participants in meetings said that the eighty one year old president performed poorly at times. The White House said Biden is sharp and his critics are playing partisan politics. Now, I encourage everybody to read this. It's a couple thousand words.
What they do is they have compiled this piece for three separate meetings focusing on Ukraine AID, on debt sealing AID or sorry enough, previous economic negotiations, and others that compile in concrete terms, how and when the exact circumstances of Biden kind of losing it manifest themselves in private meetings, because that's always been the span. Yeah, and public he may lose his step every once in a while, but he's sharp, he's there.
He's a dynamo behind he tell you he is a dynamo and there.
I mean, really, what comes through here is just the Pravda esque nature of how they want to deny reality.
For example, forty one people, as I said, were interviewed for this piece, including many Democratic lawmakers who share details and recordings, and in fact, one of those congressmen, Representative Gregory Meeks, was explicitly told after the White House was told that he had been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal to call back the reporter and just say, you know, I should just give you a callback, According to Representative Gregory Meeks, so why House wanted me to set the record straight.
Yeah.
They also had people like Hakeen Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, give quotes like this quote, Biden is incredibly strong, forceful, and decisive. I mean, this is like North Korea level propaganda, and I think we have that.
Yeah, they they dis closed, they say after the offices of several Democrats aired with the White House are recording or details about what was asking our interviews. Some of those lawmakers spoke to the journal a second time and once again emphasized Biden's strength. So the White House was like, wait, what are they asking you about? You need to call them back and tell tell them just how amazing he is, and you know, be more strident in your defense of him.
So very clear what's going on here?
I mean, okay, so none of this will be a surprise to anyone with eyeballs and years who've been watching Joe Biden. Some of the details just to give you a sense of what they're reporting behind closed doors. They lead the piece by saying, when President Biden met with congressional leaders in the West Wing in January to negotiate a Ukraine funding deal, he spoke so softly at times that some participants struggled to hear him. That's something you see
repeated a couple times in this piece. In various meetings. According to five people familiar with the meeting, he read from notes to make obvious points, paused for extended periods, and sometimes closed his eyes for so long that some in the room wondered whether he had tuned down.
There were other anecdotes.
Mike Johnson was involved in one where he seemed to not grasp of the details of his own policy. What is described overall is what they call a quote unquote unevenness. So it's not that he's one hundred percent adult one hundred percent of the time. Sometimes he appears sharp, and sometimes he appears, as he reportedly did in this meeting, where he's kind of out of it and he's really reliant on note cards and defers to everyone in the room.
You aren't even sure whether he's awake or asleep.
His speech is very difficult to understand, both because it's soft and also because he fails to annunciate. You get the same defenses from the White House as oh, way, this is nonsense. You know, they actually what a great job he's doing as President of the United States. They also go back to his speech impediment, the stutter. The one thing I'll say so what opened this piece up for criticism from liberals is the fact that they couldn't
get any Democrats on the record to say this. So all of the on the record comments are from like Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson and other Republicans, and so that's what opened this piece up to the criticism that it was like a partisan hit job. But the other thing that's funny to me, saga is that we go through these periods of time that it's like, there's certain moments when you're allowed to say these things out loud.
Remember there was a moment.
A little while ago after the report came out, and you know, Biden was this like adult old man, and they're saying, I don't even know if you can prosecute this guy, because the jurists is going to think he doesn't really know what's going on.
And none of this was intentional.
There was a moment there where there was some elite ability as reclined, et cetera, to say these things out loud. And now that window has once again closed and the ranks have been closed once again. You know, it's very clear Biden is not going anywhere. He's not being replaced. So we're once again in a place where you are not allowed to say these things that are patently obvious to probably ninety percent of.
A enters extraordinarily well said.
It's like this constant oscillation between he's too old, we got to replace him. Actually, no, he's completely fine, as opposed to the best defense you could really muster is his name is not Donald Trump, and he's fine.
He's fine ish. That's basically it.
But Biden is such a incredible egomaniac that any suggestion that he's lost any step whatsoever is met with the full fury of the White House. In that Time magazine interview that we spoke about on Tuesday, they ask him, can an eighty five year old really do the job of president? And he was just like, He's like, I could do it better than you. He's like, I could take you. Like, looking across at these two like mid
forties journalists, that's just obviously not true. I mean again, he's asking us to deceive, you know, to not believe our eyes. Like that's basically what is being as it's again nineteen eighty four Pravda level. And then speaking of Pravda and of state media and propaganda, you have regime apparatchicks basically Morning Joe here, Mika and Joe Scarborough absolutely losing their minds over this Wall Street journal story.
Let's take a listen, people around Mike Johnson and admit that this was basically House Republicans whacking.
Why didn't they just ask Marjorie Taylor.
Green Well exactly why didn't Yeah, they could, Lauren Bobert. You see about those guys right there. I've spent time with both of those guys privately. I've spent time with Biden and Trump. Privately, I've spent time with every House speaker over the past thirty years. And Joe Biden, I'm not just it's just not close. If you want to talk about international affairs, if you want to talk about how to get bipartisan legislation, Joe Biden is light years
ahead of all of them. And I could also talk about what the French delegation said when they were negotiating with him, and what they told me and friends that I have in that French delegation who are part of those negotiations, who said that mccrawan came out like, wow, okay, it's a lot tougher than we expected. And actually I think mccrawn sort of got his back up because Biden was pressing so hard. I can tell you the same thing about Middle Eastern leaders that I talked to. Nobody's
saying he's not coaching. Some people are suggesting that he he you know, it's a bit too tough in negotiations, that the United States throws their weight around a little bit too much.
Oh wow, the French said that he's good Crystal barely is the sharpest tack in the history of France.
Again Dynamo behind closed doors, like okay, well, you know, maybe let us see it.
Sometimes I want to.
Address the Republican thing too, because it's like you said, yeah, you know why they have to rely on Republican on the record quotes because.
The Democrats won't call on the record say what's actually going on?
Yeah, and again, to actually be very fair to the journal they even quoted Republicans who defended him, really elderly senators who said, no, yeah, actually what you see is what you get. He's okay, you know, he's sharp, not sharp as attack. But they defended him saying, I've never been in a meeting with him where I didn't think that he didn't one percent have what it takes. So what they're upset about is the very concrete examples. Kevin
McCarthy maybe being the best one. Is he a partisan guy, absolutely, but he's like listen, I used to meet with him when he was vice president eight years ago. I went over to his house all the time, and in fact, he's always had this reliance on note cards.
And by the way, I love that.
That's the defense is that, oh no, he's always been a scripted buffoon, being told exactly what to say by his aides or and nowadays, whenever I meet with him, I am honestly shocked at his diminishment. They also talk about in many of those meetings where, like you highlighted from the story.
He doesn't take a commanding role.
He'll very frequently just defer to a lot of the people around him. And again they just say, this is standard operating procedure. Even if that's a young and healthy president.
That worries me.
I don't necessarily want a person who doesn't have a lot of thoughts, who is not driving the meeting, who's constantly deferring to his advisors. You are the elected president of the United States. So even their own defense, it just doesn't pass a smell test on any of this.
There's a few other things, So to be honest with you, I think if people felt like the economy was great, they wouldn't really care that much about Biden's age even if they had a sense of like, yeah, maybe sometimes in meetings he's not what he as sharp as he used to be, or sometimes he has these moments, or he's not as forceful, you know, when he's giving a speech,
et cetera. I think if people felt like the administration had delivered for them and had been effective then and was in control both on domestic policy and on foreign policy, I think that they would be able to overlook these things. But when you have a sense both that Okay, my personal finances things are not going well.
And I don't have confidence you're the guy.
That's going to be able to get it together to write the ship, that's when it becomes really a really difficult combination.
And we should also say too, and people.
Were pointing this down, I won't be the only one that you know, Biden really he didn't fully commit to this, but he really suggested when he was running for president in twenty twenty that he may be a one term president that he would be, you know, the bridge to the next generation. So it wasn't just us or the American people were like, you know, that's really an advanced age to be holding this incredibly powerful, incredibly demanding job.
He himself was basically suggesting that when he was running back in twenty twenty one. Other thing I want to address is, you know, part of what Biden's advocates and what Joe Scarborough here are saying is like, well, just look at the results, look at how effective he's been, and he shouts down in particular foreign policy, and how amazing and incredible. It's like, what country do you live
and what world do you live in? Do you see the way that he's just sort of careening from humiliation to humiliation when it comes to the Middle East in particular, when it comes to Israel in particular.
I mean, his own.
Aids have basically acknowledged, he's basically acknowledged that the Bear hug Net Yahoo strategy was an utter and complete failure, failure every single quote unquote red line, none of them, of course, which were actually red lines, but all of the concerns that were expressed, all of the tough conversations that were being had behind the scenes, none of them
amounted to jack shit. So how can you look at that and say, oh, this is so effective and he's so commanding, and he's so in charge, and this is going so well.
So you know, just on every.
Level, it's gaslighting, it's asking people to not believe what they see in front of their eyes, and it's also paying an incredibly different portrait of the record itself. Which again I think if the record was effective and people felt like he was delivering for them, his administration was delivering for them, Yeah, I think they would be willing to overlook these things. But when you put the two together, that's when you end up with a very dire reelection landscape.
Absolutely no, it's very well said, and you know, with what we see in terms of the public and in the private, it is clearly a man who is not fully in control, or whenever he is in control, does so at the whims of his emotions, which this is one of those where it's not even necessarily him being old. What they always say about being old is it just makes me more of who you already are. He's always been that way, this stubborn guy that's always been from the very beginning.
Of his career.
Let's put this up there on the screen, as we can continue to see here with Joe Scarborough, he says, I have spent a good time talking to Kevin McCarthy through the years and hours of Biden in twenty twenty four, There is no comparison. Biden is far sharper, more intellectually curious, and far more insightful on global affairs than any house GOP speaker I have met in over thirty years. It's just again, he wants us to believe fake version of who the man that we can all see in front
of our eyes is. And funnily enough, whenever it comes to the American people, they can see right through it too.
Now I definitely agree with you.
If the economy is doing better, I actually think it'd be okay because people will be like, yeah, whatever. You know, Reagan was old, we reelected him, everything was fine. But let's put this up there on the screen when things are not going well and you're banking on everyone just saying but Trump, but Trump, but Trump. Really, what you see is that Trump versus Biden. The conviction so far
is not having a big impact yet. This is from New York Magazine in their review of a few of the polls that have come out since the conviction of Donald Trump has come forward. You've seen a slight movement, maybe two points or so. That's been very temporary, but overall, the big promise of the convicted felon really moving everything has just not materialized.
It. Over and over and over and over again.
We see a consistent thing in all of the national polling is specifically a lot of the voters Democrats I supposedly care about young people, black people, and Hispanics, they're like, look, Trump, yeah, he's an asshole. In fact, many of them agree that he should have been convicted. They agree with the conviction, and they still say, but I think that he represents some sort of major change, and the economy is just
not very good under Biden. So a lot of this is coming back or reverting to the fundamentals, which Biden was really the greatest beneficiary of not having any real fundamental Elections twenty twenty was a crazy year for a variety of reasons, mostly because of COVID twenty twenty two, the same thing he got the great abortion bump and defied history. But you know, the only question is, is like that really that tail and effect is that really going to hang on here? I still think there's a chance,
but not nearly. Is one a good as it used to be?
Yeah?
I would, I would say that's the case. Put up eight eight guys these screenshots with the voter comment this is so funny because it just shows you, like, you know, as much as we try to get in the head of the average voter, you can never get in the head of the average voter.
They are their own that they have their own love view of the world. And I genuinely love this.
So this was a frank once moderated focus group post Trump conviction, and we've got this guy Ben. He's forty two, he's from Texas, he's white, he's a college advisor. And there were a few a few comments he made that people were taking note of with regards to the conviction. So one of them, he says, listen of the Stormy
Daniel stuff. We're all regular people with regular jobs. If any of us all did like one thousands of what this guy did for being on trial, the financial stuff that forms the bribes and meeting with people, we all would have been fired. True, we all would have been out on our butts applying for jobs at grocery stores or driving uber or whatnot. You're saying it's all like a political theater in farce and whatnot. But he was having an affair with a porn star, and not a
particularly attractive one at that. There are so many wonderful porn stars out there, So the first comment is about, like, really, this porn star or other, so much better porn stars out there for you to have an affair with. But that's not all from Ben So talks about how he wants a president.
This is his quote.
I want a president who's.
Gonna be able to cover up a one hundred and thirty thousand dollars bribe to Stormy Daniels. If he can't pull that off, I'm not gonna trust him with the nuclear football. This seems like such an easy thing for him to screw up.
I'm kind of leaning toward Biden.
He's like, listen, he can't even cover up you're a fair with a porn star properly, Like, how are you competent to run govern I don't know.
I think I'm going towards the other Kuy.
I love that logic.
It's so amazing, it's perfect, perfect. He's got a point to be honest with.
A certain way. You could see it. You can kind of see what he's talking about. We also have to pull the latest Biden moment, which is just I guess odd is.
Odd The kindest way to put this. This is what people.
Think about whenever people are like man Biden, he's really a hold. Let's take a listen.
Do you think the condition will have an impact on.
We'd want to hear your thoughts on the paracter.
For people who are just listening.
He's walking on at this presser very slowly. Old man gait I saw people online saying, looks like he's being controlled by puppets, you know, it's very like.
And then he stops.
Somebody shouts a question, he stops, He slowly turns and gives this weird grin and then slowly turns back, and it's just I mean, listen, is it a b Of course, it's not a big deal. But it was one of those things that went crazy viral because it just was odd and it showed off all of his like old man gates and tendencies and whatever.
And he's, you know, producer maquiity.
He's probably trying to come up with some like witty retort, but his brain just doesn't have that in it anymore. So he just turns back and keeps walking off.
Yeah, I have I have a.
Couple of friends on the White House Press Corps, and like what they tell me is that with him, it's it's all comes across in the camera too. But it's like when he puts those aviators on, he really believes he's forty years old again, Like in his head, he believes he still got it all there, and any suggestion, any even inkling that something is moving away, he just cannot mentally handle that. And on a certain level, you know,
I think we can all empathize. We know a lot of there's a lot of old people who want to feel that way. But he's running for reelection and same thing there with his gait, Like look at him walk, look at the way that he talks. Remember the Afghanistan press conference, That one's burned into my mind because that's the first time I was like, oh my god. Whenever he was like whispering and leaning, you know, they're talking about some of those who died, I was like, oh my, you can't do this, you know.
Like mixing up the president of Egypt, telling stories about you know, the German chancellor been dead.
For how many year?
I died?
Ten years and retelling the same anecdote and again These are things if you have someone in your life, if you've you know, loved dearly and who's aging, like these will all seem very familiar to you.
The inability to grasp.
Certain words at certain times, the mixing up of people of events of years, the forgetting that you just told this anecdote, you know, five minutes ago, and now you're telling this anecdote again.
These are all just very common, typical things that we see.
And you know, I also have to say, if Democrats really believe this rhetoric about how the whole country is at stake and democracy is on the line, et cetera, Like, why do you close ranks against this guy?
We see in every poll he underperforms.
Every single Democratic Senate candidate, all of them, one hundred percent.
He underperforms them.
I am at this point really convinced that you could put almost anyone else into the slot and they would outperform Joe Biden.
Yeah.
I know that goes against history because typically there's a.
Huge incumbency advantage, but you have a very specific and unique set of circumstances here, and Democrats decided to close ranks. I think in large part after the midterm elections, went better than expected. That kind of closed the door to Gavin Newsom or whoever was playing with the idea of jumping in the race. And now they're just locked into denying the reality that's in front of all of our faces.
Yeah.
Absolutely, And so what we really are going to watch is a very similar thing that happened in the lead up to the twenty twenty election. So in twenty nineteen, when Biden is losing his first two primaries and caucuses and he's a joke fifth place, everybody, including MSNBC's Andrew Mitchell, is like, this guy's way too old.
What is it?
Which Castro was?
It?
Was it Joaquin? I think maybe Julian which whatever one was running for office. He even calls him out on the debate stage. This is open, it's acknowledged Democratic elites. We're allowed to talk about Julian.
There we go. I apologize, they're twins. They literally look the same. It's not my fault. But then you know what happens.
The Atlantic article comes out and he becomes the nominee, and then the COVID is a national crisis. So what happens, Oh, he has a magical stutter that he had as a child, and then it happened to just re emerge when he turned, oh around seventy eight years old. And even though we've all seen him in public life, including many of these reporters, know him personally, know that he could speak cogently in
the past. I've played here, I've done monologues in the past of his meet the press appearances over the years up until twenty seventeen, completely different individual. I personally saw him on the campaign trail in twenty twelve, completely different man to what he is. But it was after that article then the attacks come out. No, we're not allowed to talk about it. So very similar thing. Ezra Klein can say it, Nate Silver could write it. That was kosher,
that was okay. Now it's official. We're less than six months to election day. We got to put thing, you know, the guardrails back on. But this is where we don't live in the monoculture media moments anymore. Every person on TikTok, Instagram and everywhere can see these means proliferate everywhere, so they can't cover it up anymore.
So good luck, good luck to you all, I can say.
At the same time, we got some interesting Trump VP news. All right, that's worth taking into This.
Came out very late last night. So let's go ahe and put this up there on the screen. Let's actually get into the official list.
I need to be that Doug burgham is now I did not see that.
Guys right up at the top. Guys.
All right, So the Trump campaign has officially sent a vice presidential vetting paperwork. For those who don't know the paperwork thing, it's like you have to fill out all.
Your stock investments.
Have you ever hired an illegal immigrant anything they could ever be compromising on you, et cetera. So the list so far Doug burghm Marco Rubio, jd Vance, Tim Scott, Byron Donald's, Elise Stephonic and Ben Carson.
So those are the people who are on the list.
I also saw Axios this morning saying that Tom Cotton similarly received paperwork. We'll see here the only individual, Yeah, Tom Cotton is the only individual here that was added to the Axios list who was not included in the Associated Press.
But those are the so called VP shortlist.
Of course, it's Trump and things can literally change at any time. One name that didn't appear on there that some people have spoken to me about is Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
I would not sleep on her.
The only thing ding against her is she didn't endorse Trump immediately whenever he asked her to. She wanted to see how it played out with Ron DeSantis. But that would be the only name I think I would add to this one.
For me.
As I've said, I always think it's going to be one of three people. Maybe Bergham, now I guess since he's filthy rich. But I either think it's going to be Tim Scott, it's going to be JD Vance or at least Deefonic, all depending on the whims of the candidate in the moment. If he wants the race card that he can play on TV, we're going with Tim Scott.
If he wants the woman because he thinks abortion is going to be a major issue, he's going with the Lease, who is much more socially modern than most other people in the GOP. She's literally a New York Republican. And then if he's one hundred percent style and he wants somebody who is like his ID who can help manage the bureaucracy, that's when you pick JD. But you only do that if you're feeling real confident there to win. So that's where my mind.
Is at with all three.
I don't want to even try to get inside Donald Trump's head to I just don't think that I have a good read on how he would be looking at any of these names. But a few things that were interesting to me was first, Aleistaphonic being the only woman on there. That's surprising to me because previously a lot of the commentary was that he was very likely to
pick a woman. We've had a lot of women who've been floated, from Carrie Lake to Christine Hoam, who I think, you know, her chances really fell apart with the whole book situation. And I think also because her state that she's governor of has such an extreme abortion laws.
I think that also was.
A problem for him. But you know, there have been a variety of women who've been floating. The only one though, that makes it on the list is a least to Phonics, so that was interesting. You have three different A lot of these choices, as we see on the Democratic side, there also filtered through an identity lens, so you have three different black men. That's interesting to me. And Mark
or Rubio is obviously Latino. There is clearly some shift in both among black men and among Latino men towards Republicans. Maybe Trump is thinking, I don't really buy into this logic, by the way, but this is like standard thinking. Maybe he's thinking that if he puts a black man or a Latino man on the ticket, that will further the appeal to those demographic groups. Last time around, we know he made a very strategic and very smart electorally smart
choice with Mike Pence. He knew at that point he was a little shaky with evangelicals, and Mike Pence was meant to be a signal to them and to sort of like ease their minds about going with this guy who's not religious at all, Cereal Philander and all of
those sorts of things. That was a very wise choice, and so I suspect, especially given the fact that not only are his electoral prospects on the line, but potentially his own personal freedom is on the line, that he will make a similarly strategic choice of whatever group he thinks needs to be stored up.
Which is why I mean the one that I feel most.
Skeptical of is JD fans, because I just don't see what else that electorally brings to the ticket for him.
What's that's the question is how is he, like I said, I only think he's going to pick jdve He's like, I'm one hundred percent going to win this election.
Now, it's all about governance.
But having met Trump, spent some time with him, I very rarely speaks about government.
So that's one of the issues.
Now.
One thing you could say is that Jeddy has been doing a pretty good job recently of serving as like the media like this is the thing about Trump, it's all about image. So he really enjoyed the you know, he goes on CNN and goes toe to toe with Wolf Blitzer or Caitlyn Collins or whatever. But let's be honest, all of these candidates who are underneath JD can also do it. At least Stefanic that's her bread and butter. She emerged as his attack dog on while it was impeachment one and impeachment too.
They're all also going to do that, whether they're pick or not.
So it's not better than that if you know, if they're not on the ticket, and then you know, with Burgum, I think it's just like he gets the RFK junior choice of like, listen, I just need the money, so come on board, buddy, Like.
Let's not diminish that, because, as I understand it, so Trump has got legal bills coming out of every or coming out of wherever. Trump has got over one hundred million legal bills. He is hitting up every rich person on the planet right now. And in fact, there is a major concerted effort behind the scenes for those two of us who are like billionaire watchers. You had the Sequoia founder Doug Leone come out and endorse Trump.
This guy's worth like eight billion. He just has this. He's got this upcoming fundraiser tonight.
Actually with David Snacks and Chamath Paula Hapatilla over an all in podcast. They actually sold that entire thing out at Silicon Valley. There's a lot of billionaires who will be in attendance. You've got Trump getting this hundred million dollar check from Miriam Adelson allegedly in exchange for no
Palacitian sovereignty over the West Bank. You've got Nikki Haley who recently just took a Gulf Stands jets of Miriam's jet to Israel that we're spotting we've got I mean, like, if you watch these things very closely, he is hard up more for big institutional money this time around than at any previous time. And in fact, just yesterday I read an article about how small dollar donors, both on
the Democratic and Republican side are at all time lows. Yeah, largely because the Dems tapped the crap out of it during Roe versus Way. They've raised and squeezed every dollar that they can, and Trump's been hitting his list for what like nine years straight.
Now, and they had at this one and they hit.
So even though yes, he raised his fifty to three million, on the aggregate, that dollar is an all time low, campaigns are still just as expensive.
Both sides are going to spend well over a billion. So what do you do?
Hire the billionaire? Not a bad strategy, I would add, not a bad strategy.
Well, and you're right that Bergham.
It's not just his own personal net worth, which is quite high. But also he would be a sort of sign of comfort. In the same way that Mike Pence gave comfort to evangelicals, he would give comfort to the Wall Street types who already have kind of warmed to Trump because they don't like Biden's anti Druss policy, as I mean, is the biggest rub there.
And they want Trump to extend the tax cuts.
They want their tax cuts, and he has overtly promised them reportedly at fundraisers like I will look out for you specifically, mister and missus billionaire if I am re elected, you will get your tax cuts, oil execs, you will get your deregulation.
Like it's all there for you.
So he's making these explicit material plays to the billionaire class that seems to be very important to him, and so a Doug Burgham fits perfectly into that strategy of like, look, I'm not getting some crazy lunatic out there talking. This is a business guy right on a Silicon Valley that
has very standard issue conservative Reaganite type of views. That's who's going to be my number two to help continue to shore up his support among these circles which have already warmed to him versus how they perceived him in twenty sixteen and in twenty two.
Yeah, you're right.
And another thing I forgot to mention this came across my radar just yesterday. Trump is actually going to be meeting with the Business Roundtable, which is right, yeah, I mean it's hard to explain these things to people who don't work in Washington, but like the Business Roundtable is like the Chamber of Commerce, like on steroids. It is the top one hundred richest companies in the United States.
Jeff Bezos, Microsoft, exon. Everybody's there, their chief lobbyist, one of the most powerful people up there with the Chamber in Washington. Really, what has come down to, again, as I understood, is people aren't stupid. Twenty twenty five, the tax return, the tax cuts expire, somebody is either going to extend them or not. If Biden is there, he'll probably extend seventy.
Five percent of them. They want one hundred percent.
And not only do they want one hundred percent, they want you to continue to cut the corporate floor, to extend the individual rates. And they don't want to have a child tax credit included, which allegedly is like the trade that the Democrats would offer should Biden win the election.
So this is this is it's all business at this point.
It's just like listen, you guys, you were a great gift to business last time around, So this time around, we're much more overtly comfortable backing you. That's how you see guys like Ken Griffin who said I would never vote for Trump, and he spent one hundred million dollars or whatever on Ron DeSantis. He's like, yeah, I could see it. You know, maybe all back Trump. This is
a business transaction, like you're cut and dry. And so that's in a way, Trump's political genius is mobilizing a lot of these more like working class vote or at the very least like the white working class voters. They're all coming out for him, for immigration, for culture purposes. And then it's it's a really like almost a Reagan play and at the same time, you almost explicitly align yourself at this point with big business to bring those
two in. That's a very very powerful political movement if you can get people past some of the other Trump nonsense. But for them at this point, they don't care about the character stuff anymore. They know that he's here to stay and for the will to make the trade. And I'm probably a good one, right if you see what happened in twenty seventeen.
I mean, he has dropped, Like if you go back and listen to the rhetoric twenty sixteen, the way he really positioned him himself, and it was always a farce we saw by the way he governed, but he really did position himself all that time, you didn't know as a more populous fair I mean, the trade deals were really central to the discussion. Drain the swamp, like, all of that was really core. That is all gone. There's
no semblance of it left whatsoever. Instead you just get report after report of the You know, Hey, I'm gonna sell the American foreign policy to Miriam Mandelson for one hundred million dollars. Hey, you don't like the Palestinian protests, I'm going to crush that. I'm gonna deport them. I'm gonna set that movement back thirty years. Hey you want your tax cuts, no problem, vote for me. Give me, give me twenty five million dollars, and I'll make sure
that you get your tax cuts. Hey, you want to be able to frack and drill and have absolutely no regulations, no problem.
Vote for me.
It's very direct, it's very over and so yes, if you can keep the working class coalition that you started to realign, you know, starting in twenty sixteen, and you can add in all the billionaire class. That is a very powerful coalition. I guess the question the problem is it's not like the Democrats are offering their own like populist opposition to that.
So there's no one playing in the lane.
Really of like working class material politics. And one of the things Ryan and I only covered this fantastically in Counterpoints yesterday. We've seen now a couple elections around the world. Obviously it's not analogous America's his own beast that really
showed the power of those material politics. The overwhelming victory in Mexico for Claudia Shanebaum, the shocking setback for Mody in India, which was very much you know, driven by economics and lowercasts really turning on him because he was only delivering the sort of cultural bullshit and they're like, but I also need my wages and I need a job. So we've in South Africa, the elections there also were a warning sign about you know, material politics and how
important that is. We just don't have a single player in terms of the two main parties that is even attempting to go in that drive.
That's what I was going to say, you know, if the Biden campaign were intelligent, they would say all the things I just said, but they don't have that capatit. They're too busy quibbling with the Wall Street Journal over whether Biden is too old or calling him like convicted don or felon don. As I've said a million times, and as we're about to get to, yeah, if you want to win young people back, if you want to
bring black people back, young Hispanics. The number one reason all of these people are even considering voting for Trump is they think he is a major shake up to the system, and they apply that to their own lives. One of the most important issues which nobody ever talks about, housing affordability. What can we actually do about it? And how central this is for voting issues. Let's put this
up there on the screen. So I hear a lot of Republicans like, oh, these gen Z folks that are obsessed with trans and and some of that is true for people who are on lie, but it turns out that they're just like the rest of us. This is a new survey from redfin. Housing affordability is the gen Z top voting issue outweighing abortion and the economy.
Although I would put it with the economy.
More than nine to ten adult gen zers say that housing affordability is important when considering who they will vote in their upcoming presidential election. It is the top issue by ranking from that new report from redfinn and that gen zers quote were more likely to rate housing affordability as an important factor in their vote than any other issue that they were asked about, including the economy, abortion, guns,
preserving democracy, and foreign wars. This is from three thousand US homeowners and renters that they just conducted in February of twenty twenty four. Why I think that this is so important is that if you look at the breakdown, and this actually is gen Z specifically, but I'll include everybody, this is the ranking housing affordability ninety one percent, strength of the overall economy eighty two percent, education eighty two percent, then guns and abortions. So the culture issues are four
and five that are in that ranking. If you shift over to millennials, you can actually see that the quote, strength of the overall, democracy, education, and housing affordability are all top three.
They're actually roughly tied. It's like eighty nine and eighty seven percent.
We're quibbling within a percentage point or so, housing affordability begins to drop only amongst Gen xers and amongst boomers from fourth and almost six.
Specifically, whenever it comes to the boomers.
So the younger you are in this country, Gen Z in particular, because they're at the very entry of the housing market, they're probably the ones getting squeezed the most by all this rent inflation because they have had to come in where I at least had some roughly cheaper rent maybe ten years ago. But nowadays, I mean, they're walking in and just getting hit right off the bat. Put this up on the screen just to illustrate how
disastrous things are right now. The median mortgage payment in the United States is currently at a record high of two than eight hundred and ninety four dollars per month in May of twenty twenty four. That is a fourteen percent increase from just twenty twenty three. It's a twenty three percent increase from twenty twenty two. And wait for this one. It is a seventy eight percent increase from twenty and twenty one. A seventy eight percent increase for
the median monthly mortgage payment from twenty twenty one. In just the span of three years, No wonder, you should be freaking out. That is straight up unattainable. That's almost three thousand dollars a month. That's thirty six grand a year roughly after tax income that is coming out if you want to try and not break the rule of it shouldn't be more than a third of your take home pay or whatever.
Good luck, hope you make one hundred grand. You know, it's like yeah, And.
Then if you do make one hundred grand, you're very likely not living in a place where you can get anywhere close to that median. You are living in one of the top ten metro areas and you're gonna be pooning up a million bucks per house if you're even lucky to be able to afford one, or you better average parents, good luck to you.
I mean, a seventy eight percent increase just from twenty twenty one.
That that is that is wild. And listen.
One of the things I found interesting in the Redfin survey of like people's issue priorities. So when you get to Gen X and boomers who benefited, you know, when they were coming into adulthood from much more affordable housing. You know, certainly for the boomers, less so for the exers, but still they rank preserving democracy above housing affordability, and obviously that's the pitch that the Democratic Party is really
leaning into that along with abortion rights. But the preserving democracy that's been central for Biden central and the last campaign, it's central for him now. And listen, the bottom line is you can't really expect people to care that much about preserving democracy if they feel like democracy hasn't been good for them, They're just not going to prioritize that that highly. You know, the way for people to really care about democracy is when they see the democracy delivering
for them in their families. Then it's like, Okay, this is a great system. This is something that's worth fighting
for and worth preserving. But if all you see is you know, your concern is getting ignored and asset prices going up and up and up year after year after year in a way that benefits people who already own those assets but completely screws people who are shut out of ever owning those assets, then yeah, you're going to prioritize other things and you're not going to be as impressed with the like but Trump argument this time around, and that's exactly what we're seeing.
I mentioned the asset prices. This is related to this.
Put the Wall Street Journal thing up on the screen, which shows one of the major bifurcations in our economy, because it really is a tale of the haves.
And have nuts.
Americans overall now have more investment income than ever before. Booming economy, rising household wealth help some consumers to keep spending. So people who have houses, people who have four to one ks a flush with investment cash, people who have stocks, who have mutual funds, who have bonds, those people are
doing very well and effectively. Not to get too much in the economic weeds here, but we've had decades where most a lot of economic policy has basically been dedicated to increasing and increasing and increasing asset prices, which again is great if you already own stuff, and it's terrible if you don't, and you would like to one day have a house, for example, and be able to get
into the asset ownership economy. And we never talked about that as inflation, right, it was seen to be totally separate from what people are paying at the grocery store and those sorts of transactions. Well, first of all, they're not totally separate. And second of all, when you create this huge divide between the asset ownership class and everyone else, that just continues to spiral out and control. And we have more indications of that that you can put this
up on the screen. The world has never had as many rich people as it does right now. The world's richest have never been so wealthy. According to a new study, the number of high net worth individuals rose by five percent last year. So yeah, again, if you've got a lot of stocks, if you've got a house, and you're seeing the way those prices are spiraling in, spiraling and spiraling, this is all working out.
Pretty well for you.
But if your Gen Z, if you're millennial, if you're you know, Gen Alpha, when they come along as well, it's assuming this trend continues, this is a really dire situation and you have so little hope of achieving the level of stability and comfort and just like middle class lack of precarity that your parents may have benefited from.
Yeah, absolutely, you really see a real shift too. Also know, I kind of hate stuff like that too, because people will there's a lot of neoliberals out there who will be like, see we're living in the best time. They're like world's richest have never been so wealthy. The vast majority of this new wealth is coming from China. You know, I just listened to this great series. It's called the
Acquired Podcast. Shout Out the Acquired Podcast. It's like a history of companies, and they did air meztle listening.
You know. Interesting in terms of the history of luxury goods.
Over fifty percent of their business now is just from China, like all of their growth is China, and then the other ten percent is Japan. If you look at a lot of this stuff that's getting rolled up, it is at the direct expense of the American middle class, and multi billionaires are getting created overseas. You know, there was a guy named Donald Trump. He used to talk about this back in the day, not saying not as much anymore. Yeah, I guess if he did, maybe it would help him out.
But what we see is very important is that overall fundamentals of the nineteen fifties, sixties, and seventies, the genuine American dream post World War Two order, it has eroded to the point of it basically being dead. With the combination of high interest rates, extremely high prices and a very very middle and soft job market. Now again, I want to explain there, because the Biden administration plays tricks
four percent unemployment, et cetera. When you look at the wages, and you look at the level of underemployment, specifically with a lot of these gen zs, and you combine household debt, credit card debt, and student debt on top of that, it's the raws deal. Since you know, basically from the beginning, let's also put this up there again on the screen just to see people for swing voters. Amongst swing voters, policies that could be Biden part of Biden's second term.
Swing voters are split on which would make them vote for him. But what you see increasingly is that the economy and the high cost of living and anything that
could actually address that is wildly popular. The most popular, you know, in this survey is raising taxes on the wealthy at twenty three percent, raising the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour, Increased border security at seventeen percent, expansion of Medicare to vision, dental and hearing at sixteen, increase protections for abortion is sixteen, crack down on corporate price gouging is sixteen, limit the sale of assault weapons twelve cancel student debt for more borrows, a left an
increased running purpose. So you see a mix and smattering of culture. But you know, at the very very top, you've got raising taxes on the wealthy, raising the minimum wage with fi fifteen dollars an hour. I mean, it's very clear with the impetus and the things that could actually bring people out to vote for you, and you could do it in such a way where you don't have to touch anybody's household.
Balance sheets during these things.
I really encourage people to go and to learn about things like the step up basis for multi gajillionaires and for the carried interest loophole.
I mean that one alone in.
Terms of or a high frequency trading tax, any of this stuff. If you adjust that even marginally to like one percent, right now, it carried interest to zero. So let's say you put like five per we're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars that are unlocked immediately. Nobody on earth except for a bunch of people on Wall
Street and in Silicon Valley would feel that. And yet you know it's smeared by a lot of those people in the same way as if you're going to some doctor's houses making three hundred grand and be like, all right, doc, it's to pony up ten more percent of your income.
That's that's what The sheer.
Reality of how the ultra wealthy get away with paying effective tax rates of like five to ten percent through manipulating the tax code is one which has been lost from the national discourse, and it's.
Really a tragy.
But at the very least people do intuitively understand that you can do that, and you should, you know, in some cases while actually still not touching even the middle class, upper middle class way of life at all, you don't have to.
It's very interesting what has happened in Mexico and the Mexican economic model under AMLO, because it is a direct contradiction of all of the you know, all of the talking points of neoliberalism, you know, the idea of like.
Rise and tide lifts all both.
So if we just keep growing the GDP, if we just you know, keep shipping tax cuts to the rich and to corporations, and that's going to cause GDP growth to rise. That's going to be good for everyone. Well, the Mexican economy, it hasn't been growing gangbusters, and it's
been fairly anemic in terms of GDP growth. But the policy a variety of policies, but one of them in particular, which was the sort of aggressive hikes of the minimum wage, which really delivered for vast majority of average Mexicans, made it so that even under relatively anemic GDP growth, people felt like, but this is working much better for me. That is so directly contradictory to the logic that has prevailed here for you know, my entire life and your
entire life, certainly. So I thought that was an extraordinary example. And obviously, you know, not only was it good for average workers there, but obviously was extraordinarily good for Amlow and now his successor in terms of electoral politics. So you know, if you look at these surveys, it's not
a mystery. The number one thing that people say would shift them to Biden is if you raised taxes on the ridge, and he's got a wide open lane because you've got Donald Trump out there meeting with billionaires and saying I'm going to cut your taxes. I did it last time, and I'm going to make sure that we do it again, so the lane is open if anyone wanted.
To actually take it.
And I think the housing one, I mean, we've talked about this ad nauseum at this point because it's just so obvious, it's just so clear, and they're I want to be fair, there are some democratic proposals that are out there that kind of tinker around the edges, but in terms of someone really taking hold of this issue and really running on it aggressively, it just doesn't happen.
And part of it is because you have a lot of powerful interests and a lot of you know, boomers who vote a whole lot are very interested in keeping those housing prizes high and continuing to see an escalation in their own net worth as asset prices continue to.
Inflate and inflate and inflate.
So very interesting survey, very revealing of what people's actual priorities are and what could move the needle.
Shocking shocking, isn't I mean?
Yeah, Look, and I'll return to to what you said about Mexico, and I mean, this is again, is very counter to a lot of the way that Americans think, and this is empirical crime and under Amlow has got out of control. There have been insane cartel killings and all that. He's still one of the most popular presidents in the entire and those one of the most popular leaders in the world. I would also point back to Modi.
One of the things that people always misunderstand India, the original Moody twenty fourteen Mody It had nothing to do with culture. It was about the broken economic consensus of the Congress Party. There was this whole program called Baratrice where people were getting free food. Eight hundred million people were getting free food from the government. There was also a direct attack at corruption. He himself was viewed as unassailable.
He's not married and part of the thing is that in India it's very common to have like nepotistic arrangements, so his lack of children was like a big selling point.
Yeah, exactly.
No familiar networking can like spread the money around. He was seen in the early period as a real economic savior. Then what happens after COVID You have massive inflation, you have all these shocks to the economy, you have some of this crazy stuff going on with a Nani and company, and they literally they really forgot you know, some of their early routes, and that's what happened with a lot of these low cast voters who then return to the
Congress Party. And now with the new coalition he's gonna have if he wants to win any popular election again or BJP does, they are going to have to return to that devaluation that happened early where they tried to target a lot of the corruption, where they really tried to go after inflation. They have to stop necessarily targeting like rich fdi to come in and actually try and
rise some of the wages and things like that. So let that be a lesson too in terms of what things abroad can teach us, you know, here in the country.
Yeah, I mean, it seems like they really misjudged their own electorate and they thought it was like, if we just deliver you deliver you this like Hindu nationalist cultural peace, that will be sufficient. And you know, it looks like they were really rebuked on that.
Yeah.
Well, and also look, it's a very different country to poll have.
You know, there's a huge portion of the population doesn't even read like it's a tough place to actually gauge, like what the hell is going on people speak all these different languages, and not by no means an expert. This is just from the people that I trust you
cover India from what I've been able to read. But broadly, what it came down to is that they had the choice on what to really emphasize going into the election, and in going with that, they thought they had done enough on the economic front that they could do some of the cultural stuff and fuse that together to win an overwhelming popular majority. But they significantly misjudge how a lot of poorer, lower caste Indians were going to see what they viewed as an abandonment of that economic cost.
So by returning but in the coalition government where they are right now, they're definitely going to have to return to their roots. Or what we are watching is for years everyone said, oh, the Congress Party in India is dead, It's dead forever. Now definitely not true. Now you know Rahu Gandhi and all these people, they're making a comeback.
I don't necessarily want to see that. So you guys better get your back together if you want to return to that big consensus that everybody thought that you had in India. All right, let's go to the Internet section. I've been laughing about this for two days straight because it is just the most perfect story. A gift of altruism perhaps turns into a curse. Let's put this up
there on the screen. So there's a remote Amazonian tribe which very recently was given access to the Internet by Starlink and Elon Musk.
It was viewed as.
There was some other donor who was benefactor, that's what gifted it, but.
It gets it was an Elon Musk darling to the Marubo people, which is deep.
I'm gonna mispronounce this.
It is quote huts scattered hundreds of miles along the Itu River, deep in the Amazonian rainforest.
They speak their own language.
They take ayahuasca to connect with the forest spirits, and they trapped spider monkeys to make soup or to keep as pets. They have preserved this life for hundreds of years through isolation. Some villages take up to a week just to reach. In September, they were given access to high speed internet. And this is a two zousand member tribe that is deep in Brazil. Well, it appears that
since September things have not been going so well. According to the elders, it seems that many of the younger folks are now hooked quote on porn and on social media. Some of the quotes in here are just fantastic. So here's some of the elders who are talking. When it arrived, everyone was happy, but now things have gotten worse. Young people have gotten lazy because of the Internet. They are learning the ways of the white people. They say. The Marubo are a very chaste tribe who frowned even upon
kissing in public. But now ever since the arrival of the Internet and of pornography, quote, young Marubo men have been sharing porn in group chat. I love how they already have group chats and have already observed more quote aggressive sexual behavior. The elders say, we are very worried young people are going to want to try it. He says of kinky sex acts that they have been exposed to on the screen. Everyone is so connected sometimes they
they stop talking to their own family. They also talk about how social media and others has increased the amount of screen time that a lot of people are spending, and they are forgetting that they don't live the type of lifestyle you and I live. Crystal they live an actual subsistence life. They're like, hey, man, you gotta go fish, you.
Gotta go on.
We're not you gotta get your ass out there because we're old. You're the ones who are supposed to feed us, and you need to go catch everything. It's a relatively communal society. So this is like the perfect example what happens when technology rolls it.
It's a tail as old as time.
We've got an indigenous way of life, there's actual balance with nature, and then what happens, Oh, the Russians come in and they happen to leave a bottle alcohol there and a piece of metal and boom, ten years later, everything goes to shit. Every single time you read about something like this, it's almost never a positive development. And yet you know, we can see in the most extreme way what this has done on a macro level to our overall society.
So that's why I wanted to cover it. Yeah, I mean there's a lot. First of all, who's crazy idea was this? You can't you can't open the fire like they got to start with some flip.
Phones, have some dial up.
You know, you got to ease into this stuff. You can't just go full Internet starlink at high speed access. We had years to build up some sort of a tall stuff. It's true. One of the things they talked about is people getting scammed because I think if you live in like this village and you know everyone and you have these communal relationships, like people have to be honest with each other because you have to see these
people face to face. You rely on them for your own like life and ability to hunt and do the things that you.
Need to do to survive.
So the idea of like this random person on the Internet is lying to me and they're scamming me must be so foreign.
You see this with with elderly.
People too, Like the things that we're sort of inured to and we'll see.
Right off the bat is just a scam totally.
Older people because they grow up in a different time when you know that type of skin wasn't prevalent, they don't have the same defense mechanism. You have to develop those things over time. So yeah, I think, listen, it's a new your posts. This may be really overstated. I do want to say there's like, you know, I'm a little bit skeptical of some of the nature of the reporting, but I have no doubt that this has like turned
their traditional lifestyle upside down. And I also have no doubt there's no putting the genie back in the bottle because as much as we know this technology comes with a million downsides that I'm struggling with my own kids and my own life whatever, we also know it comes up to like some really cool stuff. And it's like, you know, I'm not looking to get rid of my smartphone, and I'm sure they're not looking to get rid of their internet access altogether either, because one of it has
had positive benefits as well. Right, They talk about how they've been able to save lives. People get bitten by venomous snakes and now they can get help more quickly. They can actually you know, bring someone in to help people survive. They talk about how it's expanded the horizons of their young people also, where you know, they have aspirations that they never would have been able to have before, and that can be a beautiful thing as well.
So you know, it's a double k.
Of course, we were talking about India and our previous segment, I'll mention this, so I was recently in India. The way technology and mobile payments has taken off is incredible and so much to the benefit of the poorer classes in India. I watched them have cheap access that they
can go on the street. Imagine there's like a cow and a donkey walking by, and you go to a guy who's sitting in a bamboo chair and you buy a SIM card off of him which has two hundred megabytes of data for one hundred repeats or something like that. And they have automatic which is like a dollar just for everybody who was watching. Then they put it into their phone and they've got automatic like five G plus Internet.
Half of these guys can barely read. But the ability for the cheap internet and access and all that, it's opened up job opportunities. It's given them the ability to not have to rely as much on cash. They pay each other through verified payments because corruption and scams are a big problem in India. My grandparents are very old, they're over ninety years old. They literally can WhatsApp the corner stores for what they want. The corner lady comes to their apartment door and then he pays.
Her on what I'm watching. My ninety four year.
Old grandfather pay this lady on WhatsApp, there's no cash or anything exchange, he doesn't have to leave his house. I mean, there's a lot of benefits, right, and this is in a very, very poor place. You watch how technology change things instantly. Even villagers in the middle of nowhere whose parents literally cannot read are learning how to read off of YouTube videos in the middle of nowhere.
It's shocked.
I mean, they don't even have clothes on their back and they're learning how to read on YouTube. So, like I said, there's a huge amount of benefit to this stuff, But what you watch is also the exacerbation of a lot of the worst parts of the Internet and of what the damage that it can do, you know, to a society that doesn't have well established norms and things around it. So, if anything, what it highlights to me is for policy and for institutional and social norms to
be formed around let's emphasize the best parts. The best parts of the Internet are communication connection. I mean, we wouldn't exist, you know, this show would not even be possible ten years ago. But we have to put guardrails and things around parents, society, schools, et cetera. How do we keep this stuff from the worst downsides? I highly
recommend that Jonathan Heyde book is out. I think he's got a phenomenal just like list there of things how you should think of a parent around smartphone, smartphones and specifically with schools. It's obvious we should bance smartphones from schools, like just no question.
I agree with you, absolutely agree with that. We can put the next piece up on the screen. This study that just came out, which if you're a parent, like none of this will surprise you. Internet addiction ulters brain chemistry and young people. This study finds, I mean, it
just is an addictive behavior. And you know, I see this with my kids, and it does, I think tend to in my experience with other you know, parents and kids that I know, it tends to be the boys that have more of the addictive tendency towards the Internet. My son, if I let him go, he would never I'm not kidding you, like, he would never step away
from it. My daughters they don't have to have the same level of concern and limitations because after they do it for what they want to go do something in the world like it's doesn't have that quite that same sticky addictive pull. But what they found is that it will lead to a decrease in functional connectivity and parts of the brain involved in active thinking. That's the executive control network of the brain responsible for memory and decision making,
and it fuels other addictive behaviors. So, you know, this is really profound for young people who are you know, their brains are developing, and you know, you're setting habits and behaviors and neural networks that are going to need to serve them for their entire lives. And part of you know, part of what we've done is because we've really opened the internet up to just whatever is going
to serve capital. Then you have companies that their whole business model is based on how do we fuel this addictive cycle, And you know, no kid is going to be prepared for that. And as an individual parent, like you're, the odds are stacked against you because of the way they're trying to literally manipulate like the brain chemistry of your kids. So it is a it is a very difficult situation. You know, you mentioned the banning smartphones from schools.
One hundred percent agree. My son is going into middle school. We went to the middle school orientation. He's going to be sixth grader next year. The big deal for me, I'm not ready for all that anyway. Putting that aside, the one thing that I think it was the vice principal who's in charge of you know, disciplinary issues, said is please, I'm begging you parents, do not send your kid to school with a smartphone. He's like, you will
not believe the things that I see. You will not believe what your kid might say on the messages they'll said, the photos. They mean that things they may do on the smartphone, like things that you never would have imagine, language that you never could have imagined, the way that interferes with their school work and interferes with their personal relationships. These like please, please, please, do not send a smartphone with your kid to school.
So I think that part to me is very clear.
Well, as a former four Chan kid, I can imagine it, and I definitely don't want.
I don't want those kids.
As a kid, you tend to be a little naive about these.
Things as a kid who was four chan and read it way too early. I don't recommend, but no, there are a lot of studies on this. I highly recommend. There's a bunch of New York Times and Jonathan Hyke write ups about schools that have banned smartphones. If you've ever been to a Joe Rogan show, you know you have to put your phone in the yonder bag. That's another thing that a lot of schools are doing. So you can bring this phone to school, but they put
the phone in the yonder bag. Yeah, they unlock then. But apparently some kids are ringing two phones. So look, these kids are going to figure it out anyway.
They have phones too that are I mean, they're almost basically like I mentioned the flip they're almost like that.
Oh like the call mom, call nine one one.
Yeah you really, yeah, you have.
It's very limited. They can't load apps, they can't access the internet. There might be a few limited like a map app and like a few limited things on there. And they can call and they can text, but that's really about it. And you've got access to it. So there are tools out there for parents, but it's just
yet it's a very difficult, very difficult landscape. And if it's just you and the kids are seeing what their friends all have access to, and it's part of the social fabric now of that generation is a difficult, difficult situation,