Modern Wisdom - #856 - Krystal Ball - Why Does The 2024 Election Feel So Fake?

Episode Date: October 26, 2024

Krystal Ball is the co host of Breaking Points, a political commentator and a podcaster. Politics has changed a lot over the last 4 years, and even more compared to a decade ago. And yet everything feels unreal, kind of like a pantomime. So, do elections even matter any more? Expect to learn if breaking stories have any real impact, whether Elon Musk is even influential in this election cycle, if Kamala is a change candidate or have incumbent legitimacy, the role of podcasts in deciding the future of America, if the polls are underestimating Trump, how the left has a complicated relationship with God and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get $150 discount on Plunge’s amazing sauna or cold plunge at https://plunge.com (use code MW150) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with any purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Crystal Ball. She's a co-host of Breaking Points, a political commentator and a podcaster. Politics has changed a lot over the last four years and even more compared to a decade ago and yet everything feels unreal, kind of a bit like a pantomime. So why do we keep going? Do elections even matter anymore? Expect to learn if breaking stories have any real impact, whether Elon Musk is even influential this election cycle, if Kamala Harris is a change candidate or has incumbent legitimacy, the role of podcasts in deciding the future of America, if the polls are underestimating Trump, how the left has a complicated relationship with God, and much more. I've been loving my cold plunge and sauna from the team over at Plunge.

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period at Shopify.com slash modern wisdom or lowercase that's Shopify.com slash modern wisdom to upgrade your selling today. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Crystal Ball. ["Cycle Balls"] Do you think that stories have any real impact on voter opinion anymore? Or are we just memeing our way through a pantomime campaign now? I mean, of course, of course they do. Um, but I think we have a sort of meta story that has set in where the central divide in politics in this meta story is how you feel about the person of Donald Trump. It's part of what I think is one of the worst things about the Trump era, frankly, is that

all of the interesting policy and important policy discussion sort of gets subsumed into how do you feel about this one individual? And if you don't like him, which I don't like him, then you end up on the side of like Liz Cheney, who I find basically important in all ways in terms of her political views. And if you do like him, then you end up on the other side of that equation. And that has made it so that it's very difficult to do anything, but discuss this person and every

campaign is run on what he's going to do and who he is and how you feel about him. And I think it's been very difficult for any other story outside of that to break through. And certainly we've seen, I mean, Jesus, how much has happened in just a short period of time where you have Biden drop out of the race. Now that did move the needle, right? The polls for Kamala are certainly significantly better than they were for Joe Biden. The fact that he was like manifestly declining before our eyes, and there was no way this man was going to be able to survive four more years,

that did have an impact. But after that, you know, we've had a debate. We've had multiple assassination attempts on Trump. We had a vice presidential debate. We've had all kinds of wild comments out on the campaign trail. And basically, the polls don't really move. They may inch in one direction or the other direction

by one point. That's still within the margin of error of these polls anyway, so you don't even really know if that's actual movement. And I think until we break out of this sort of meta story that we're all recycling over and over again, then yeah, I think these other stories are going to be less impactful. That was the point that I was getting at this, like structurally swapping out Joe Biden for Kamala Harris was something, something actually happened.

I'm aware that something actually happened when you get shot in the ear as well, but it doesn't, nothing happened with regards to politics. It's just more stories. And that's why it just increasingly feels like a pantomime. I was thinking about this the other day. You may actually even know these numbers. But if you think about, around about 50% of Americans are registered to vote,

I think, is that right? Or around about 50% do vote-ish. Yeah. And then, okay, so chop it in half. And then from that 150, how many of those are actually going to go and vote from whatever's left, how many of those are undecided and from those, how many of those live in the counties in the States that actually matter to do this.

Yeah. When you break it down, I need Nate Silver to do this for me. When you do that, you, there is, it would surprise me if that number is bigger than 5 million, like that would be like a massive amount of people. When you think it's only maybe three or four states or whatever that really matter. And then within that there's the counties and all the rest of it. So you're talking about this entire thing, all of this, the dominating the news, all of the podcasts, this conversation we're having right now being

maybe, maybe on the low end, it could be for like one and a half million people or maybe less. Maybe it could be hundreds of thousands of people, less than a million people. Yeah, I think it is less than a million people. Because if you think about it, well, and that is the idiocy of the American political system, because why should it be that a voter in bucks County, Pennsylvania matters more than a voter in New York city, right? That's stupid. That is nonsensical. And yet it's just what we're used to with the electoral college system. But that's effectively what we're looking at. You're looking at a few hundred thousand maybe voters in a couple key

states who are largely not particularly politically tuned in and what their whims are gonna be over the next couple of weeks. And we're talking about billions of dollars being spent on this. I would love to know, there's someone really smart and good at stats that's listening. What that breaks down to

from a campaign expenditure perspective, from both parties, because both parties are trying to get them, right? So you need to look at what they're both spending. And yeah, it's like, I know you could probably retire every voter plus their entire family plus the next three generations of them at like an upper class level wage

or whatever for this amount of money. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And I also just think that there's something, you know, rotten at the core of a democracy where voters in one state matter and voters in another don't. And, you know, for the past several cycles, Republicans have had an edge in the electoral college,

meaning that Democrats have to win the popular vote by a few points in order to also win the electoral college vote. Hillary Clinton famously wins the popular vote, loses the electoral college, does not become president of the United States. Well, there's a lot of evidence that suggests that Trump is making up a lot of ground

in a state like Florida that at this point is no longer a swing state. So those voters that are added to his column don't really matter. He's also closing the gap with Democrats in the state of New York. Again, those voters don't really matter. He's also closing the gap with Democrats in the state of New York. Again, those voters don't really matter. And so that popular vote, electoral college vote, differential between Democrats and Republicans may actually be closing. But it just seems crazy to me when you think about like, well, why doesn't it matter that a Florida voter is switching who they're going to vote for? Why is this not consequential in terms of our overall politics? And overwhelmingly, Americans feel the same way. They're like, this electoral college thing is really stupid.

Why don't we just do the popular vote? Because then you would have to actually appeal to voters across the entire country. But it also points to something else, Chris, which is that I have a lot more, I think, humility this year coming into whatever the hell is going to happen on election day, because first of all, I've been burned several times at this point by thinking that the polls understate this candidate or overstate this candidate, or everybody says in 2022 it's going to be a red wave in the polls show and people hate the economy.

And then like that doesn't materialize. Of course, Trump wildly underestimated in 2020, 2016. I know I am not reflective of that voter that isn't that politically engaged who was going to decide the election in basically two weeks time. Like I know that. And so I just have to be comfortable with the fact

that I really have no idea what's gonna happen. I can look at these polls, they tell me it's really close. That's the best data that I have. And other than that, you can just tell you what I think about the issues. And that's that because anyone who's out there saying like, Oh, I'm certain Kamala is going to win. I'm certain Trump's going to win whatever. No, you're not.

There's no way you can know that because the polls have been off in all kinds of directions, it would only take a tiny miss in either direction for it to be a landslide for Kamala or a landslide for Trump. That's where we are. Yeah. Not only have the polls been off, but this time almost all of them are saying that it's 50-50.

Nate was on the show too. I'm aware everything moves and blah, blah. Nate was on the show like two, two and a half weeks ago. He's like, it's an actual coin toss, which he said for him is the most acceptable outcome going into it because it means that he's got equal chances. He's like, it was 50, 50. I said it was 50, 50. Whoever wins, no one can be like, you told us exactly.

All of the pollsters have got to get out of jail free card. I was thinking about this earlier on. How different do you think the political landscape would be if Roe versus Wade hadn't been repealed? You know, I have to say that, um, young I, I'm personally pro-choice. It's an important issue for me. I think, you know, for, for me and many other millions of Americans, women, especially, but men too, I think they were pretty stunned by the idea that this right that they and their moms and grandmas had taken for granted had been rolled back. but I really underestimated how much it would matter in the American political context.

And we have my entire life as a country been split 50-50 on the question of abortion, like almost exactly. And whichever party at that time feels like they're taking the more extreme position, they were the ones that would be on the losing side of the abortion issue. It's not a 50-50 issue anymore.

There's a very clear pro-choice majority in the country. You can tell Republicans very wary of this, Donald Trump changing his position and just making a mess of what his stance is on the issue. And I certainly think it was determinative in 2022 in terms of there not being that red wave election, you know, Democrats win the Senate. They come very close actually to winning the House.

And it remains to be seen whether it still has that level of force in 2024. But I also think it wasn't just abortion alone. It was also tied in with this sense from voters that like, this party's got some pretty wild ideas. Like a lot of the candidates that were nominated by the Republican Party last time around and this time around that and the fringe views on abortion, that this is a party that they're a little bit wild. They're a little bit out there. And I think that was a big part of it too. Of course, this time around, you see like the Mark Robinson situation

down in North Carolina. I don't know if you followed that at all. No, what's up? Okay, so only in America. So this is the Lieutenant Governor in North Carolina. He's running now to be the Governor of North Carolina. He's the Republican nominee. When he was nominated,

already there were a lot of really, we'll just say controversial statements of his on the record, including things that I think can accurately be characterized as Holocaust denial, et cetera. Well, now it's come out that in a porn chat room that he was a regular visitor of, he described himself as a black Nazi, said that he would actually like to own slaves himself if it was possible. And said, you know, use like absolute slurs against Martin Luther King Jr. And so that's an extreme example.

But that is the type of character who, you know, when it starts to take hold, that that's like the image of the party, that's a big problem for them. And abortion, like I said, ties into that sort of like sense of extremism that I think is a problem for Republicans, especially especially down ballot. Trump can get away with things that I think other a problem for Republicans, especially down ballot. Trump can get away with things that I think other Republicans can't. And that's part of why he's outperforming every single other Republican Senate candidate

in the country, save for Larry Hogan, who's running in the state of Maryland. He can get away with a lot of things that others can't, but I think maybe even Trump, if he out and out came, if he came out and actually said, I'm a Nazi, that might be a little bit of a political problem for him too. Well, look, you don't know who the other respondents in a porn chat room are.

That might be right in the middle of the zeitgeist of whatever they're talking about. Yeah, there's definitely, I mean, this was what we saw when the hot swap summer happened was everything was vibes. We don't really care about your sort of political proposals. We don't need to see a budget. It's just, you know, brat summer and everyone's cool and it's chill and look at the merch.

Yeah, exactly. And I think, um, definitely the Republicans at the moment are the less fun party. And like, they just don't seem to be as, they're not as vibey. And if you do get pulled up on vibes like that, which is a, it's a sentiment, it's a sense, it's kind of a tone and a tenor of what most people are saying that isn't to do with the hard issues. It's just the way that they present themselves.

And if you've got like Marjorie Taylor Greene on one side and you've got this guy in a porn chat room talking about this other stuff, like it's just a sense. It's a sense of how things are. And rather than people being able to point to any one particular thing that occurred, it gives them this, it's what brand is, right? It's all of the intangibles about how do you think about this party at large? Like what's the blood that runs through its veins, as opposed to the sort of skeletal structure that suspends it?

So I think I would have agreed with your assessment that the Democrats were feeling more like the fun party. Certainly, you know, early after Kamala gets in and there's all this enthusiasm, you know, Democrats were like on a death march to November when it was Joe Biden, because they weren't stupid. They were looking like, oh, this is going to be bad. And it was going to be bad if that man even made it to election day. Anyway, we'll just put that to the side. But there's all this enthusiasm. They're excited. They're out on the trail.

They're making jokes about JD Vance on a couch and memeing on TikTok and all this stuff. And coupling with that, she put out some really substantive policy proposals that are extremely popular, you know, taking steps, especially with regard to prices, which Americans say, and understandably, so is their number one issue, like we can't afford groceries, we can't afford housing, we can't afford all kinds of things. And she

came up with a very concrete plan on housing that was solid, on price gouging that was solid. I was like, okay, this is good because you need to show people that you're not just not Joe Biden but you have a plan, you got a vision for the country and you're going to enact it, etc. You add that on top of the good vibes and that can really be something. Post DNC in particular and in the past couple of weeks, they've just really leaned into this like, actually we're, you know,

we aren't going to really talk about policy. We're just going to talk about how Liz Cheney endorsed us and Dick Cheney endorsed us and we're going to have bipartisan commissions. And at the same time, you've got the Trump campaign, Trump is going on all kinds of, um, you know, podcasts. Like I wouldn't be surprised if he offered himself up to, you know, your podcast viewership, um, and kind of hanging out and vibing with a bunch of podcast bros, and I'm not sure that they've been able to hold onto that sense that they're the ones with like the vibe and the momentum and the quote unquote fun.

What was your post-mortem on Call Her Daddy? I mean, okay, so I want to be fair. I don't know Alex, I've never watched the show. Okay. I want to be fair to her. I want to be fair to Andrew Schultz. I want to be fair to all the podcasters who are saying yes to these interviews because on the one hand, you're not a journalist, right? You're not a scholar on the Middle East. You're not a whatever, right? However, I do think that given the fact that these candidates are increasingly turning to podcasters to get their message out, I think if you're going to accept that interview,

you are accepting a level of responsibility to be more than an infomercial. And, you know, whether it's the Nelk Boys or Andrew Schultz or Call-Hert, Alex Cooper, whoever, mostly what I've seen is just like propaganda infomercials. And, you know, maybe it's not fair to those podcasters that that onus has been put on them. But because you have candidates who no longer feel like they have to submit themselves to adversarial interviews from journalists, that does kind of put the onus on you that like, okay, well, this is all we're going to get from these candidates. They're not doing another debate. They're not sitting for that many traditional media interviews. And by the way, yeah, you're a comedian. Yeah, you're a cultural figure. Yeah, you're whoever.

It's not that hard to come up with a few tough questions or a few important questions that reflect things that are on regular people's minds. In fact, if you're someone with the talent to build that large audience, you likely have your finger on more of the pulse than some of the mainstream interviewers do. There's a very particular skill set

for grabbing and holding a politician's feet to the fire. Even if you come in with the best of intentions and all of the prep in the world, you know, you're looking at one of the two most powerful people in the world in a month's time and going, no, no, no, no, but Madam President, what do you really mean when you talk about price gouging? Don't you know that there's been an awful lot of criticism for how this is going to raise real blah, blah, no, no, no, but madam president, what do you really mean when you talk about price gouging? Don't you know that there's been an awful lot of criticism for how this is going to

raise real blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. If we're laying that at the feet of Alex Cooper. So I'm fascinated. It's tough. I'm fascinated by this. You know, Douglas Murray had that famous double debate last year about mainstream media versus independent media and is one thing better than the other.

And it was him versus Malcolm Gladwell and a couple of other people, I think. And yeah, when I think about that, this is the podcast election. So much has been laid at the feet, but, and this is the kind of relates back to what I was talking about earlier on, I really don't know how much Theo Von is changing the minds of the registered, undecided Pennsylvania electorate.

Do you know what I mean? Like when you break it down through all of those different bits and pieces. No, that's fair. And I think that's a very fair rebuttal to saying like they have this responsibility is basically like these people are spending a billion dollars on advertising.

And you really think like the podcast appearance with the Yvonne is gonna be the game changer. So I guess the sort of like, you know, the rebuttal and the somewhat nihilistic and probably pretty accurate view is like, well, none of this really matters anyway, so, you know, that's what we need nihilism crystal. That's what we're, that's what we're here for. I have to be honest with you, Chris.

I'm curious your, your thoughts on this. Cause I don't know what your thoughts are on this, but I'm someone who like, this is my space, independent media, you know, what Sagar and I do, also my show with my husband, Kyle. And, you know, we've been very careful about how we cultivate our business model, especially because we are analysts and journalists. And, you know, we want people,

not just to not have a conflict of interest, but we want people to understand and perceive that there is no conflict of interest there. So we've been very careful about the decisions we've made with regard to our business. We don't take any, we don't talk to any advertisers whatsoever. We don't read any ads, all that stuff.

But I have to tell you, I'm pretty black-pilled on a lot of independent media. And I think I've been the first to call out many failings of the mainstream press where they've gotten things wrong, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, it just feels like there's no check on independent media whatsoever. And the thing that clicks the most is the most like outrageous or conspiratorial. And that can lead you, that creates a very ugly set of incentives for a lot of creators. What's, what's some of the scenarios or situations that you've encountered

that have blackpilled you the most again, this will be a cumulative thing over time. It's just this sort of milieu that you're swimming in, but are there any things that come to mind where you go perverse incentive? Well, I'll tell you one thing specifically is I was a critic of the liberal derangement around Russiagate, right? The stated, like the P-tape and whatever that was alleged to be coming on every, any moment about Donald Trump, like that was not true. Right.

So I was a critic of that. However, the DOJ did just indict this, you know, a couple of Russian personally worked for RT who was actively paying these conservative influencers. Oh, this is the Tenet media thing. Yes. And, and not only that, and I'm not saying that these influencers should be, you know, prosecuted or whatever, but they were taking a lot of like an

outrageous amount of money per video from someone that they just thought was like a shady businessman. I believe them that they didn't know it was like a Russian plan or whatever. And it was documented they were taking, according to the government, allegedly, that they were taking direction on what videos to push and what angles to talk about. And like, oh, put up, let's talk about that Tucker Carlson Russian supermarket video as one example. And that just shows you that in corporate media, there's all these incentives with regard to where the money comes from, where the ratings come from, and catering to power and all of that. I don't see that as really any different

in independent media. There's a different set, perhaps, of people that you're catering towards. Audience capture is more of an issue because you have more of a direct connect. You know, a lot of times there's less of a wall between you and any sponsors or advertisers because you may be talking to them directly, you're reading their ads directly. And apparently, some people at least are willing to just take a bunch of money from random shady businessmen that they've never heard of before to make the content

that they want them to make and not disclose it. So, um, you know, I brought up a, I brought up a story that, um, happened earlier this year, it was a good while earlier this year. We got a, an email from some random contact form on the website saying, uh, we want to propose a guest to come on the show. Uh, it's a six figure sum in order to bring them on. And the topics that we want to talk about are below. And it was all oil prices in the middle East, energy.

I'm like, this is so fucking deep state. And so yeah, I got lots of thoughts on this that at no point, this is, you know, public service announcement. There has been no period during the six and a half years, 800 and whatever episodes that I've done this show, where someone has stepped in and given me media training on how to deal with pressure, with criticism, with incentives, with all of the rest of this stuff. So something tells me that most other people haven't either, whether it's fucking Kyle Kalinsky or Tim Pool or whoever.

Like people haven't, they, I don't think they've been given that necessarily. I do kind of get the sense that if you're watching Shapiro's show or your guys' show, maybe not actually your guys' show, yours would be one of the very few that this isn't the case. If you're balls deep in political content, how undecided are you? Do you know what I mean? Like you're giving it. Yeah, sure. You're giving the money to the people that talk about politics because they're the ones

who it seems on brand for, and they're the ones that potentially you can influence to talk about different things. But really what you want to do is give it to like another Travis Kelsey podcast, like the one that where you've gotten even the split of people either way, or when you can access people who are under genuinely undecided. But the people who are undecided probably aren't spending all of their time listening to political shows.

Because the reason that you do, I think, is probably to get your views and opinions and perspective confirmed by somebody that you like and they feel comfortable and you know what they're gonna talk about and it's an update or whatever. I would say that your guys' show is one of the few that sits outside of that.

But yeah, I know exactly what you mean. It's the incentives are incentiving. For me, mercifully, I kind of come from this, I guess like bro culture background, which means that, you know, unless you've got a problem with fitness trackers and whatever, there's limited perverse incentives. No one's coming in to try and give me like big oil money.

Have you ever had a product or a company come to you and say like, oh, we want to advertise and you'd be like, I don't know. All the time, all the time. And this is one of the- See, that's the other thing that's difficult is like, let's say that I did go down the path of, oh, you know, this, this, and again,

I'm not holding the standard out for you. I'm just talking about for us because of our particular space in the media. But you know, I don't want to be on the hook for like vouching for somebody came to us with like an air filtration system. It's like, oh, this is innocuous. But I was like, okay, but is it really because if you're making claims about it's going to improve your asthma or whatever, I don't want to be on the hook or responsible for some claim that's being made on the show, that we're ourselves vouching for.

So I think that, I think it's difficult. I think it's a difficult space. One of the things that you never really get credit for are the decisions that you didn't take. Yeah. And in some ways, rightly so, because people don't know what you were offered. They only know what you chose to do. And, but there is a sense on the internet of a lot of criticism around the acts of commission

that people make, but not the virtues of omission that they didn't make. So I often think about that where I'm like, fuck, like, for instance, it was six, nine months ago when we got that email about the oil baron, whatever the fuck it was that we needed to speak to. And I didn't bother to bring it up because it felt like this weird sort of humble brag

of being like, look at what I'm saying, like my virtue and all of that stuff. But it just makes me feel icky. And at least for me, the show that I'm trying to create is something that's a body of work that I feel proud of. Like the most important thing is, is it interesting? Do I have fun? And am I proud of it once I was once I was done with it? Like at no point in that is revenue like like a big consideration that would, I'd

be lying if I said that I don't want the show to continue growing so they can have to do cool, bigger things and have a nice quality of life and all that sort of stuff, but it doesn't factor in the first, like five reasons that I did the show ever before. Um, so anyway, yeah, I, it's a, it's a bit of a mixed bag on that. I had, um, you mentioned JD Vance earlier on, uh, one of the things that I kind of slipped under the radar, at least a little bit on Twitter, as far as I could see, was it the New York Times lady that he did the interview with recently?

Yes. Lulu something. And she like held his feet to the fire and didn't. So that's an example of what you were talking about earlier on of a woman who is prepared to sit for three minutes in just wallowing in discomfort, as she says, "'Senate of Anse, I have asked you, give me a yes or no answer.'"

She's basically saying, would you have certified the 2020 election? And she just, she doesn't move. She's just like- She asks him five times. Yeah. And there's the really great answers from him, like sort of obfuscatory and evasive

and all of this, like all of the tricks. And she's just like, "'Nope, nope, nope, nope. Like the most mean, sullen mother ever. But even that, like the Vance saying that he wouldn't have certified the election in 2020, do you think that has made any impact? Does anyone even really care about that anymore?

So there's two levels, okay. So doesn't matter that we have that piece of information about him? And frankly, I think that's the single most important piece of information as to why Donald Trump put JD Vance on the ticket, because he wants to make sure that if it comes down to, not that scenario maybe exactly,

but something similarly, you know, outrageous and unconstitutional, will this guy be loyal up to even to that point where Mike Pence said, that's it, I'm out, right? And Mike Pence now, you know, the right all hates him. This was the most loyal soldier for Donald Trump right up until that moment. So I think it's important to have that on the record. And for people to understand

where JD Vance stands on that issue. Do I think it's electorally consequential? Probably not. Maybe a little on the margins because again, look, I want to be humble about my own predictions because I was wrong in 2022. I thought red wave. I thought Democrats are just running on like democracy and people want to know about their pocketbooks and whatever they're offering, any kind of an economic program. But hey, it worked for him. It was enough.

And it's very possible it's enough again. I do know people hate that Donald Trump won't admit he lost. They hate that he lies about the election. They hate the candidates who were election deniers in 2022 performed extremely poorly. And they will perform poorly again. Carrie Lake is running for Senate in Arizona. She is a foremost election denier there.

And her polling is abysmal. She's trailing Trump dramatically. She's almost certainly going to lose, which should be a very winnable Senate race for her. So people do really hate this stuff. So maybe marginally, to the extent that it reminds them of an aspect of the Trump era and Trump himself that they really

find distasteful that may be on the margins. But on the other hand, it's like, well, who doesn't know at this point what happened on January 6 and how they feel about it? So that's where I feel like it's probably unlikely to be electorally consequential, even as I think having the historic record to be able to look back on and increased understanding is important. One of my friends tweeted earlier on, the ease with which dramatic behavior gets attention online

has convinced many political activists that a better world doesn't require years of patient work, only a sufficient quantity of drama. It just feels like that's what sort of Twitter feels like to me at the moment. How, speaking of that, how influential do you think Elon Musk is? Very. It's actual swaying of votes, changing the opinions. Here's the thing. How much do I think Twitter matters? I don't know. You know, you could actually, and my colleague, Ryan Grim, makes the case, and I think it's compelling, although hard to say, that Elon Musk's Twitter is actually in some ways bad for Republicans because it's created this just like right-wing echo chamber where they think all of their worst opinions are super popular, and creates a bit of a disconnected bubble where, for example, you can think it's a smart idea to lie about Haitian immigrants eating pets and think that this is going to sell nationwide and it doesn't.

So, you know, there's, there's a debate about whether Twitter, his stewardship of Twitter is effective for Republicans and for Trump specifically, but Elon Musk, according to Trump, is putting half a billion dollars into the Trump campaign. Could that not be hyperbole from Trump to just make it sound very possible? And that's the other thing about the American election system is we don't know. Trump lies all the time, except for this thing, which is like, I don't want to believe. But we know it's tens of millions. We know it's an incredibly substantial sum. And we know that he's effectively moved to Pennsylvania and is running

And we know that he's effectively moved to Pennsylvania and is running key parts of the Trump campaign. So again, I'll separate, you know, electorally, will it make a difference? Hard to say. Certainly having that money helps Trump more than not having that money and Trump's little cash dropped this election cycle. What matters more to me about Elon's influence is he's already been promised a plum government position with wide ranging authorities as best we can tell. And Elon Musk, how do you feel about him? This is not a disinterested actor. Last year alone, just Tesla and SpaceX received $15 billion in federal government contracts, US taxpayer dollars to the tune of $15 billion

in a single year. He is one of the largest contractors to the Pentagon. Is that because he creates the best technology that's the most advanced? We've got Boeing stranding, making astronauts stranded. I'm not saying that he shouldn't be, but I am saying that if you are that, you should not be in charge of a large swath of the government because you have a massive conflict of

interest. I don't care where this Elon Musk- Surely there's a lot of those as you go up with people that have been in Big Farmer and then they end up working for the FDA. You've got the- Of course. Yes. You know, the leads are replete with these kinds of issues.

Absolutely. And you see it, you know, to make the parallel on the democratic side, because this is not meant to be a partisan point. It's meant to be a principled point about the corrupting influence of money in politics and the rising influence, specifically of billionaires in politics. I do think Elon is a uniquely extreme example pushing the boundaries of this in a way that there

is no comparable other example. And I can make that case in a moment. But to give you an example in Democratic side, Reid Hoffman, leaked in billionaire, Mark Cuban, who we all know who Mark Cuban is, they both are big Kamala donors. They haven't given as much to her anywhere close. As far as we know, again, campaign finance being opaque,

anywhere close to as much. But they're going out there and clearly trying to shape what she does next time around. They don't like the SEC enforcement on crypto in particular. So Mark Cuban is that, Hey, I want to be SEC chair. And there's been pressure around that. And then in addition, Lena Kahn, who's been the head of the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission and been very

aggressive in terms of antitrust enforcement, which I think is incredibly important for competition. Wall Street absolutely hates her because she's putting a sort of icing a lot of mergers and acquisitions that are how a lot of Wall Streeters make fat bonuses and make a lot of money. And so both Reid Hoffman and Mark Cuban and a few other billionaires on the Kamal Harris side have really been trying to use their influence and power to shape what that regime

will look like next time around as well. So I'm not saying that there's like, you know, one party that is immune to this and the others not, but because of the size of the dollar figures that we can tell and the level of involvement and the large government contracts, the fact that he does run a social media giant. In addition, you know, I think it's, um, I think everybody should be deeply troubled by the idea of this one individual, regardless of how you feel about him or who he is or how brilliant you think he is or whatever, any one individual who is not being voted for having that kind of control in the

federal government. What do you think is the downstream implication of having more siloed off social media platforms? I would say that Twitter up until Elon took it over did seem to have not quite a mainstream media, but a bit of a left-leaning sort of partisan sensorial attitude. But now, I don't know how it works.

You may know the ecosystem. Everyone on the left for whom Elon and Trump are too toxic have fucked off to threads. And then there's Truth Social, which is like Twitter's Twitter. And then there's Twitter, which kind of does feel a little bit right of center now, but maybe that's just, you know,

like putting your hand in cold water after it's been in hot water and it's because of comparatively to how it was before. Like, what do you make of the increasing siloing, a compartmentalization of groups to a platform which only really reinforces what they believe? Yeah, I mean, I think it just makes everyone increasingly deranged, you know,

if you're just like circle jerking all day on your own little siloed platform. And not to like, you know, this is very self serving. But I'll give I'll give you an example in, you know, my own professional life. I work with Sager, we co host the show. And, you know, sometimes he'll bring stories to the table. And I'm like, you know, did you see that there's a thing like that's not's not really what I, and I will also, because of the ecosystem I live in, bring some of the table, it's like, you know, did you see on the other hand, there's this

point. And so, you know, as best we can, we kind of have to check each other, right? And so if you just have people feeding one another what they want to hear, yeah, I think it ends up increasingly deranged. And I think we've, I think we've seen that. Yeah. I mentioned the Haitian pets thing that is very prominent example. There's all kinds of stuff going on with like, you know, people floating that Hurricane Helene was generated by Democrats specifically to target Republican areas.

Like that's insane. That is insane. What are some of the ones going in the opposite direction that you've found? I mean, listen, if you go back to Russiagate, there was a lot of derangement there, you know, there is, um, very prominent liberal conspiracies right now about Donald Trump shitting his pants in public. I thought that was a Biden thing. Was that not a Biden thing? Oh, this is, this is like, No one cares about Biden anymore. He's old news.

Right. I need to, we need to talk, we need to talk about that. Like the guy that's running the country at the moment was, I think he was at the beach when the hurricane was happening recently. Is he just, like nobody's paying real attention to him. And I think that this fits into a broader question that I've got about whether Kamala is a change candidate or whether she has incumbent legitimacy, because it seems like the Democrats are trying to bifurcate off where they want her to have this degree

of legitimacy, but also that we have got problems and I know and I'm going to fix it. And you know, the best point, the only really good point that Trump made in their debate was the very final one, which was you've had three years to do this. And what have you been doing all of this time? You can't talk about the problems that you're encountering whilst not pointing the finger at yourself. So how, how do you think that sort of circle is getting squared? And what's the sort of modern role of Joe Biden for the rest of this?

I want to, let me come back to that. Cause there's, there's one other point that I want to make substantive point on the conspiracy question, which is that I, I think genuinely the conspiracy issue is worse on the right right now. And the reason is because the right is more estranged from establishment institutions. And if you look at the polling of trust in the media, trust in government, trust in every mainstream institution

you can imagine, Republicans don't trust them. And so it opens up a lot of opportunity for people to come in and say, well, they're not telling you this, but this is the truth. This is the real story of what's really going on. And so, you know, this is not about like Republicans being stupid or whatever,

but because there is this deep mistrust, I think it's opened up more of a space for increasingly wild conspiracies like Democrats are controlling the weather. And then I think Twitter under Elon has helped to fuel that ecosystem and the siloing you're talking about. I think that helps to fuel that ecosystem as well. And so that's why I think genuinely there's right now, there's some story going around that was like just completely invented by this guy that previously fabricated other stories and got caught about Tim Walls that a lot of people are taking very seriously.

So, um, I do think right now it's more of an issue on the right, but to go back to your question about- Now I've got, now I've got stuff on that one. Sorry. Uh, on your conspiratorial point. Well, just that I was fascinated by this as well, that we're talking about the election coming down to a nail biter. But pretty much anybody, I mean, you can even look at the campaign donations from

big media organization employees. They skew massively left to the point where there's like, it's very, very, uh, sort of biased in one direction. How, how different do you think the outcome of the election would be if you had more equal representation in, uh, legacy media, mainstream media from a talking standpoint? I mean, we've seen scientific American come out in support of Kamala Harris. We saw, who is it that came out the other week? Washington Post or who is that?

I'm not sure. I mean, I'm sure they will if they haven't yet, but everybody has come out to endorse. No, it wasn't. It was not the spectator. What's the equivalent of the spectator? But on the other side, the Atlantic, the Atlantic came out in support of Kamala Harris having only three weeks ago, published an article titled scientific American didn't need to endorse anybody.

Um, so like this, I don't know if somebody applied the right amount of pressure to the right place. My point being big left leaning influence when it comes to legacy media, mainstream media, how big of a difference would that make if we're on a nail biter, if the scales had been evened a little bit in that regard, do you think that that could change the outcome? Potentially. But I think that ignores that, you know, there is a large establishment at this point, conservative

media media ecosystem as well. I mean, Fox News continues to be the largest cable news outlet. Daily Wire is massive and very influential. There's, you know, in independent media, it's dominated by right-leaning, um, podcasts and influencers. Somebody would say, I wonder whether someone would say, look at the, you've had to, you've had to kind of create your own ecosystem in order to be able to make this happen when we talk about the more established, more mainstream, which

presumably have a degree of legitimacy, maybe they reach more people, maybe they reach people that you can't get through independent media. Do they have a degree more legitimacy on their channel? Unfortunately, not anymore. Yeah, you're probably right. Yeah. I mean, my, so I think it's absolutely fair to say that the legacy outlets

certainly have a like liberal pro-democratic party bias. I'm not a liberal, I'm a leftist. And I actually feel like my perspective doesn't really exist in any of these places. And at least CNN will bring on a perfunctory Scott Jennings or whoever to rep the Republican point of view. It is very rare that people with my political views are represented there at all. So I feel very erased in the entirety of the media ecosystem.

But to be honest with you, the bias that concerns me more in all of these spaces, whether they're sort of elite conservative media or elite liberal legacy media, is more of a class and regional bias. Because you have a lot of people who, you know, all went to elite oftentimes Ivy League institutions who grew up with very similar backgrounds, many of them from either New York, Boston, or California, and nothing wrong with having that background, but it does mean that you're getting a very particular view of the world. And I think that probably has been more of an issue for them than anything in terms of getting some just key fundamental things wrong about their understanding of the country and about the

way they frame coverage, the stories they choose to cover and all of those things. To me, that's a bigger issue. And unfortunately, especially as regional papers disappear and there's more and more media consolidation into it's like, it's just the New York Times and it's just the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal and these cable news outlets and that's kind of it. The more you have that consolidation and that nationalization of the media environment,

the more of that narrow biased, like one sort of class identity view that you're gonna get up the world. Well, being British, we're obsessed with class. Even when we think that we're not obsessed with class, we still are. And coming over here, it's, it's really interesting to see people. Nobody ever uses the word posh in the U S in the UK. We'd always, it's always, everybody gets, you know, it comes from a, quite a posh

family, you know, they tend to go on holiday to like Santorini in the summer, whatever. Right. So yeah, as a very scum of the earth working class person from the North of England, maybe that's something, maybe that's a degree of hope for independent media that it is able to cut through class divides because you don't have the same kinds of gatekeepers in that sort of a way. I don't know what like Shapiro or Tim pool or like fucking David

Pacman's upbringing was, but you do have the opportunity in a relatively egalitarian market to have anybody rise to the top. It's basically pretty much exclusively based on talent. It's essentially costless to start and until it becomes very costly to run. Um, so anyway, uh, Kamala Harris, change candidate or incumbent legitimacy. What is she and how do you square that circle? Well, I think that she should position herself as the change candidate, but I think she's utterly failed to do that.

And I mean, one of her biggest mistakes on the campaign trail is going on the view and they ask her this incredibly softball, honestly honestly a question that's an opportunity for her to say, you know, I'm not exactly like Joe Biden, who was unpopular as we know. And she says, I can't think of a thing that I'd do differently than him. And so I think it's difficult, you know, obviously she looks different,

her identity is different, her age is very different. That's important, that does matter. And I think people were really open. In fact, I think their default assumption was that she'd be a little bit different from Joe Biden. But she's been so terrified of, the campaign has been so cautious. And she's been so terrified of this idea that people are going to perceive her as too liberal, that she's been afraid to articulate any specific differences really on anything. And I think that has led her to a very tenuous position in the polls now because people want to change candidate.

They aren't satisfied with the direction the country's headed in. And you need to be able to lay on a few specific things where you're going to push things forward in a way that Joe Biden didn't. You know, I mean, one to me, because this is important to me and a lot of other people besides very obvious example is, you know, you have a vast majority of the country that wants to see a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, that wants us to withhold weapons from going to, you know, Israel to commit more atrocities. And even there, there's zero willingness. The politics have it pretty clear at this point for her on that side. Zero willingness to create any separation there whatsoever. It's a political failure, but more importantly to me,

it's a moral failure. It is kind of funny to think about the opportunities that, the politicians have to say stuff out front and then everybody talks about it as if it was a, a, a rational decision. The reason that for instance, Kamala decided to say or not say a thing on the view, what I'm mostly fascinated by, which we're never going to find out is what is the interpersonal political dynamics inside of the party?

Like, why did Joe Biden drop out? Like, what was that conversation? What was the final thing that pushed him over the line to do that? Was it dirt? Is it some House of Cards bullshit? Like, you know, is that what went on? Or is it just that you can convince somebody

through, you know, like normal motivations? This is going to be better for your legacy, and we'll give you a cushy position in the blah, blah, and whatever it is. But the same thing goes for every single conversation, why JD Vance was picked, why you don't go for Josh Shapiro, et cetera, et cetera. Like all of that to me is just so fascinating.

I want to know what's going on. I want to know, that's why I'm so keen to bring Bernie Sanders on as basically the person who tried to flip the table over as much as you could on the left over the last few years to be like, you're like competing, then you're out of the tent, then you kind of half back in the tent. But also there's this sort of lingering that guy isn't on our side type thing. The skepticism I just want, because to me that seems that's the most interesting thing. And it's a bit of politics that we never ever get to see, which is the interpersonal dynamics

going on behind the scenes. And the same thing goes for the current Harris campaign. Like are you really able to throw your boss, like the guy that's kind of still like the actual president of the United States under the bus while he's still in power? Like can you do that? Well, I mean you can, but like what's the, what's the, what are the fallout and what are you trying to mediate from what's happening internally and externally? So yeah, fascinating stuff that we never get to see. Yeah. I mean, as best I can tell from the, with the, the Biden dropout pressure,

it really just got to be where, you know, Obama was against him. Schumer was against him. Pelosi was against him and the money, that was another key part, the money dried up. And, you know, yeah, he's old and he's senile, but he's also got some muscle memory in terms of being in politics for what, about 40 freaking 50 years. And so he knows the money dries up. That's kind of game over. So I think once he realized that they're not going to just forget it and fall back in line, you know, they're going to continue to pressure, continue to put the screws to me until I'm out. I think that's when he finally, you know, very reluctantly decided to, to hang it up as best I can tell.

Talking about the, uh, opportunity or the difficulty that some of the candidates have had with being frank when it comes to stating their positions. It does feel a lot to me like there is nothing that you can do to further your cause. You can just mess up sufficiently badly that the other side uses it in a campaign program. Like you know the Trump Schultz within, I think it was 18 or 19 hours from publish the Harris campaign. Had you, yeah, they cut an ad. Yeah.

Cut an ad from it. I'm like, so what you're doing is it literally is a game of playing defense, which again, causes each candidate to withdraw more, not necessarily from appearances or whatever, but they're more cagey with the things that they say. They use more obfuscatory language, they're caveating, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, that again, just that incentive, so funny, so different. Yeah, it's, it's very troubling. There's a lot of fucked up incentives in politics because, for example, like Project 2025,

this big conservative blueprint that's put together that Trump's very anxious to run away from at this point. And fair enough, his campaign didn't put it together. On the other hand, now this is the sort of thing that conservative things tanks put together all the time. And some of that will be implemented because it's the blueprint that's laying around.

But he recognized immediately that actually having specific policy proposals out there is not a good thing, because then people can dig in and they can criticize and they can pull out things that they don't like. For example, in that Project 2025, they're like, we're going to ban porn. And I don't think that's probably all that popular. So putting specific things down gives people an opportunity

to attack those specific things. Doing interviews that even a relatively friendly setting still opens up a possibility that you're going to screw up in some critical way that your opponent can clip into an ad and you know, use to their benefit. And that's why Kamala Harris for a long time was deciding like, I'm just not really going to do interviews because I don't have to. the media is not pressuring me to the public. Isn't actually really pressuring me too. And I know that I'm the type of person who might like well screw this up

in a way that's kind of bad. And you know what, to be honest with you, she was kind of right. It's bad for democracy, but impressively unimpressive on a long form interview. You know, she in that view interview, again, friendly space gave them so much ammunition. You talk about, you know, the Harris campaign clipping an ad of Trump with Andrew Schultz. They clipped an ad of Kamala saying, I'm just like Joe Biden and are reportedly putting money behind it, playing at their rallies, et cetera. So you know, I mean, you can't blame them for doing that.

Like they're trying to win a campaign. But especially, this is the downside of the norms being broken. I'm not a big lover defender of the norms as a leftist, as someone who is adversarial to both of these parties. But there are certain things that were better. So for one example, we had this norm of a certain number of debates

that wasn't a legal requirement, but you just expected. Both candidates, they're gonna subject themselves to three debates. So we at least have that much time to evaluate what their answers are and compare them, et cetera, et cetera. That norm is now gone. We used to have a norm that was like,

you would sit for the 60 minutes interview and the time interview and the New York Times editorial board and you would subject yourself to this sort of like rigorous adversarial press process. And that's no longer the case. Now it's like, you know, I can go hang out with Alex Cooper on Caller Daddy. I can go hang out with the NELC boys and, you know, do that thing. And hey, that's a lot easier. It's a lot lower stakes.

I'm reaching a large audience. I'm reaching demographic groups that are important to me, so why would I? So I mean, that's the downside of the disruption of these quote unquote norms. Personal, I don't know if this is a radical view or not, but I personally think that candidates for office should be required to debate a certain number of times.

I do think it should be a legal requirement because it's the very least that voters deserve in terms of making some sort of a decision. In fact, going back to the point about Joe Biden, Joe Biden did have primary opponents. They were completely iced down from the media. One of them, Dean Phillips, who I disagree with on a lot of things. He's been on the show. Oh, I'm sure that was a great conversation. He's a nice guy. He was sounding the alarm. one of them, Dean Phillips, who I disagree with on a lot of things. He's been on the show. Oh, has he? I'm sure that was a great conversation. He's a nice guy. You know, he was sounding the alarm.

He's like, this guy is too old. We're going to lose. This guy's too old. And by and large, he was iced out from the media. The Democrats said, we're not having primaries. In some states, they literally just canceled the primary, did not have any debates. And think about, not only was that a detriment to the American people and the Democratic Party because they didn't have an opportunity to have a process by which they might

vet a candidate and choose who they want to succeed, Joe Biden, but it ultimately really hurt, you know, Democratic Party elites who want to presumably win this election because if he had had to be subjected to a debate in a primary process, we would have seen much earlier like, oh, holy shit, there is no way this is going to work out. And then you've got time to not just go with, ah, who can we grab and like throw into this place. There's actually time to go through a process to generate excitement to see which candidate is going to perform the best.

And I firmly believe that they would be in a much, much better position to win if they had gone through that price process and had an actual democratic process to choose Joe Biden's successor. Do you think there would be a different successor? 50-50. Yeah. I think Kamala came in with a lot of advantages just because of her position. Um, she also has a lot of advantages in terms of like her fundraising base.

You know, she has from being AG of California, she's got a lot of like Silicon Valley and Hollywood connections and money matters in American politics. A lot of people who also are excited about the idea of, you know, first black woman president. I understand that. I'm not denigrating that whatsoever. But there's also a reason why she didn't succeed last time around, right? There's a reason why after voters saw her on the debate stage, saw her in interviews, were like, maybe we'll go in a different direction. So I sort of think it's 50-50 whether you would have ended up with Kamala or someone else.

But even if it was Kamala, she would have then had to go through that trial by fire. She would have, it's just like anything else. You put in your reps, you get better at it. She would be a more effective and better politician if she had had to go through that adversarial primary process. Um, so I firmly believe they'd be in a much better place. Obama was unhappy with black brothers for not sufficiently supporting Kamala. Yeah.

How about that? There's a lot to say about that. So there's a good bit of polling at this point that indicates there has been some shift among all men actually, but specifically among working class black and Latino men, some shift away from Democrats towards Republicans. And to shout out one of those mainstream outlets, New York Times did a deep dive into both the polling and also what's going on here. None of the answers they came up with were democratic politicians aren't lecturing them enough and scolding them enough about how they're failing. That was not one of the answers that they came up with.

But there was a piece, there were a number of potential rationales. One of them though I thought was really significant, really important, which is that, you know, when people voted for hope and change with Obama, and especially when Black Americans felt like, okay, having a Black man in the White House means that my interests are going to be represented in a way that they never have been. And then they're, I'm not going to say nothing good, and you know, Obamacare improved things marginally, et cetera, et cetera, but nothing really fundamentally changed. And so there's a large percentage of black men and Latino men who say that they don't believe that Democrats keep their promises. And I think that's an important part of the story of how the Democrats have started to

see erosion in some of these key groups, where Democrats are still overwhelmingly going to win black voters, including black male voters. It's still a question mark whether some of these polling trends really manifest on election day, et cetera, et cetera. But I do think that the failure to really offer and fight for a concrete economic agenda that again goes to those class interests over the racial identity interests has been a major failure of the Democratic Party and has opened up space for another message from the Republican Party, one that I wildly disagree with. Trump in particular just loves to demonize immigrants and blame immigrants for every problem. But that's going to be a lot more compelling if you're not offering an answer on the other side. So, I think is it the groups that we serve on the Harris Waltz campaign funding website?

And it's a list of every group in the world except for men. And then there's another one, which is a bunch of proposals and there's different examples and it's like a black woman in a hard hat on a construction side and it's a blob that group, not even black men, there's just no men, no men at all on that. So it really does feel like I've had a number of conversations, Richard Reeves, if you know who that is from the American Institute, we interviewed him as well.

Yeah. He's very insightful, phenomenal guy. But this election very much seems to as well. Yeah, he's very insightful. Phenomenal guy. But this election very much seems to have, at least on the left of the aisle, forgotten men. Well, there was the White Dudes for Harris organizing call. I don't know if you were on that group. I wasn't on it. I had a few friends that were on. But I am actually curious for your view here. You're more of the expert in the bro sphere of-

Correct, if there's any expertise I've got is that. Of what's going on because there's, you know, obviously there's a large gender gap. I think that the gender divide in this election may be the most profound one over, you know, perhaps any other identifying characteristic. I think part of that certainly is abortion being such a central message,

but you also see the way that the Trump campaign is really playing into that, both with their media appearance choices, also with just the vibe at the RNZM and Hulk Hogan up there and Dana White and whatever, playing into almost like a camp version of masculinity. But I wonder what you make of what's going on there under the surface. I think it's going to be very difficult to get men to feel supportive or welcoming when so much of.

So much of their sex is sort of demonized in one way or another. And even if you can't point your finger to the precise Harris ad campaign that happened, there does seem to be a lot of sort of. Harris ad campaign that happened, there does seem to be a lot of sort of men bashing that happens on the left, whatever that mean, like however you want to define it. There often seems to be a sense of male privilege and sort of the diminishment of the issues that men have. Like I haven't heard anybody, not one, and this is both left and right, talk about male suicide. And Richard was telling me about the most recent set of stats

that they've got out of the Institute for Boys and Men, which was if men had taken their own lives at the same rate as women from 1999 until today, there would be half a million more men here. Jesus. Which is more men than died in World War II. So it's just such an obscene number of people. And I don't know, there just seems to be,

you don't feel particularly welcome by the left. At best you feel like not demonized and then sometimes sort of outright do, especially if you're sort of a white guy at the top of the privilege hierarchy. But then again, what were we talking about before that nobody's discussing class? It feels strange to me that, you know, But then again, what were we talking about before that nobody's, nobody's discussing class.

It feels strange to me that, you know, whatever Appalachian or Cumbrian or sort of North East of the UK in person, some guy is like, yeah, yeah, please tell me again about my like white male privilege that I've got. It just seems this, the, the purity spiral doesn't seem to be particularly useful anymore. And I think that people are kind of, they've got fatigue around that kind of puritanical approach to victimhood hierarchies. I think there's something to that.

I will say, I think that Kamala has done better than Hillary in not obsessing over, like Elizabeth Warren famously had a plan for like rural black disadvantaged farmers and really slicing into these very specific like racial or other identifying characteristics group. Now she did just put out a plan that I find whatever we can talk about. Did you see the crypto one? The black man, yes. We can talk about that. Yes, we get to talk about the black man. Yes. We can talk about that. Yes. We got stuck with the crypto one. I will say that, um, you know, when she's got been asked, for example, about her

own trailblazing status, she's very quickly pivoted to this isn't about me. This is about you. And diminished, diminished being black and diminished being a woman. Hillary really leaned into like, this is about me. This is about my ambitions. Like, it'd be cool if a woman, namely me. Well, what was that? I'm with her.

I'm with her was the tagline, right? Exactly, yeah. And so I do think Kamala has done a lot better job in terms of that dimension, but that doesn't mean that there's not still, you know, quite a lot of overhang and this sense that, you know, issues that may be specific to men are not the focus of the Democratic party or there's just like not a sense

of this is a place for us. If I put on, you know, if I take a step back from these two particular candidates, parties, whatever, and I'll run this by you and you can tell me what you think. I think part of what is happening in society right now is in American society and Western society in general is people are much more precarious.

It's very difficult to secure those basic trappings of middle class stability, the house, the education, the family, like those things, even before the latest inflationary spiral, we're getting wildly more expensive over decades. I mean, housing is the main example, but college education, the price tag on that is insane. Healthcare, the price tag on that is insane. Childcare, the price tag on that is insane. And so culturally, like the classic view of the man is like the provider, right? The person who's gonna be able to secure that lifestyle for themselves and their family. And so if over a decade,

it's both parties effectively collude to make that next to impossible, you're going to have a lot of people who are unhappy and who are searching and who are manifesting the higher suicide rates and all of those things that are very real. And so I think that if you just completely, you know, invisible eyes that or, you know, just dismiss any man who explains that he's got something that he's unhappy about or he's struggling with or whatever, then yeah, of course, they're

not going to come your way. They're going to search in a different direction. And you've had, I think this is maybe more of a symptom than a cause. But Hassan Piker talks about this. Basically all of the sort of male hobby spaces have become more and more right-wing. So like if you're a gamer, right? There's a very right-wing gamer pipeline there. If you work out and you're like a gym buff guy, that space is is increasingly like right leaning as well.

All, as I mentioned before, you know, most of the major podcasts, um, bro podcasts tend to be more right leaning. I suspect your audience is probably more right leaning as well. Um, and so whether that's symptom or cause, I don't know, but that's the other thing is that's like, that's just kind of like the natural progression and pipeline for young men in particular, um, online pursuing whatever their hobbies and interests happen to be. Yeah. It's an interesting question.

I've thought about it a lot. The, I'm sure you saw that famous Colin Wright image where he stayed in the same place and the left moved further left. And then the last like two and a half years has just been different polling and analyst companies trying to work out whether we have moved more left or we have moved more right or whatever it might be. There would be, I don't know where the data has come to settle on that. I don't even know if this is directionally correct, but I could see a world in which

that was what men were all along and the political landscape has moved. So it's not that the target has moved. It's that the site that you're using to cite it with has changed. So that could be one potential reason for it. Another could be that, I don't know. I just, I was largely apolitical until like seven or eight years ago. I just had my head firmly inside of my own ass and was running a business and just doing stuff and then with no real sort of predisposition

just came out and was like, okay, who speaks to me? And I do, I just largely don't feel spoken to ever by the left. Like if it's the white guys for Harris thing, which like in many ways sounds like a struggle session, like it felt like a fucking public, a public humiliation ritual in lots of regards where you're talking about how we need to do this. It's never positive. like it felt like a fucking public humiliation ritual in lots of regards,

where you're talking about how we need to do this. It's never positive, it's never forward thinking, it's never inspirational or aspirational. And I understand that the right can play into that in ways that are like a bit cringe sometimes. But the most recent campaign ad that got cut for Kamala where it was like a black farmer in a hat going like, I'm man enough to vote for a woman and I'm man enough to know when I can change a carbure like, I'm man enough to vote for a woman

and I'm man enough to know when I can change a carburetor and I'm man enough to do the rest of the thing. It's like that was so disjointed from pretty much everything left of Santa that I'd seen from a messaging perspective that it just looked like what it was, which was kind of like shameless, hopeful pandering to an audience that you think doesn't really care about you

in the hopes that they're not going to remember that you've never spoken to them before. So yeah. I think, um, contempt is a very, like people feel that, right? Contempt is very powerful. And I think the democratic party, not just with regard to men, but with regard to any number of voting groups in the country, there has been an attitude from democratic elites, a sense of contempt. And my own view is that there are specific examples where it makes sense to have a policy

that's targeted at a particular identity group or another. But we know if we go back and look at history, at the policies that have made the biggest difference, for example, for black Americans, they've been universal policies. They've been actually increasing the minimum wage was one of the most successful policies at- Class-based, not race-based. That's right. And like I said, universal, right? So, you know, you mentioned the like black male policy from, from Kamala. One of the things was like more healthcare for testicular cancer or something like that. That's great. Right.

I certainly support people being able to get treatment for whatever kind of cancer they have, but we really got to like slice and dice the body parts to be able to get universal like, boy, look at that. I mean, I'm not saying that you can't get it. I'm just saying that you can get it. I'm not saying that you can't get it. I'm just saying that you can get it. I'm not saying that you can't get it.

I'm just saying that you can get it. I'm not saying that you can get it. I'm just saying that you can get it. I'm not saying that you can get it. I'm just saying that you can get it. I'm not saying that you can get it. I'm just saying that you can get it. I'm not saying that you can get it.

I'm just saying that you can get it. I'm not saying that you can get it. I'm not saying that you can get it. I'm not saying that you can get it. I'm not saying that you can get it. I'm not saying that you can get it. support people being able to get treatment for whatever kind of cancer they have. But we really got to like slice and dice the body parts to be able to get universal health care. Let's just have universal health care and then whatever kind of cancer you have or other illness, you could get treated. And whatever group it is, you know, especially when you have groups that are particularly marginalized in society, which, you know, certainly,, which certainly black men in particular, still historic amounts of wealth inequality and these sorts of things.

Those are the groups that benefit the most from universal policies like universal healthcare, lifting the minimum wage, increasing unionization through things like the Pro Act, which just increases the level of democracy and power in the workplace, something that I think is really, really important I focus a lot on.

So if you pair those universal policies and perhaps some specific ones that make sense for different demographic groups, but with an attitude of acceptance and understanding and trying to meet people where they are, I think you're gonna have a lot more success. And, you know, like I said, I do think Democrats will kind of recognize this Obama scolding, not withstanding. You see, they're really trying to, you know, to send them out and,

and talk in some of these male spaces, both Kamala and Tim Walz. You know, I think they know that there's an issue there. And like I said before, I think Kamala has really toned down a lot of the like super identity, uh, focus, like slicing and dicing type of, um, policies, but you know, these aren't, these aren't things that get resolved overnight. It takes time to rebuild that trust with a community that feels like, ah, you just, you know, you're not really for me. Do you think that the left's got a complicated relationship with God now?

Complicated? Like- What do you mean? That by talking about it, you kind of play into what now has become a cliche sort of Republican, God country type position. I don't, I just haven't heard in the UK, for instance, we don't have a religious

right. There's no religious right in Britain. That's that as a huge fuck off voting block simply doesn't exist in the UK. So me, me coming over here and seeing, you know, an increasingly secular world across everywhere, but I haven't seen anything really to do with religion except maybe like we're accepting of people of all faiths and so you like from a multicultural perspective, I haven't I haven't seen and I imagine that because of the meme that is becoming increasingly prevalent of kind of the Bible bashing right wing, you know, alligator swamp, gun toed in person, that if you try and

lean into the God shaped hole in your campaign messaging, maybe it seems in some ways exclusionary to the group of people that you're trying to cultivate. And that's why I meant by complicated that it must be, I haven't seen much of it. And I have to assume that that's because it's difficult to thread the needle of talking to people on the left about God without seeming like you're making some sort of value judgment that's gonna get you in trouble. I think you have to be, it has to be authentic. And if it's not, then stay away, right?

And, you know, there are more liberals identify certainly as like non-religious than conservatives. That means very likely you're going to have fewer genuinely religious democratic elected politicians. And so, you know, it's funny, my husband Kyle and I were talking about this just the other day. Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish, but not, he will say himself, not particularly religious. He was asked about that back maybe 2016.

And he was very upfront about like, listen, I'm not that religious a person, but here to me is what religion means. It's these like sort of core values of, acceptance and kindness, whatever he said. And so I think if you're not coming, I don't think everyone can pull that off. Like, I think you have to be coming at it

from a genuine place of this is my faith, and this is important, and this is how it informs me. And there just probably are fewer messengers on the Democratic side who can pull that off. I'll tell you one person who does speak with that kind of religious moral authority is Dr. Cornel West. That is very clearly authentic to him,

to his tradition, to his ideology. But that strain, I think it's fair to say that strain of leftism is somewhat less common than perhaps it once was, which, you know, is a reflection of a shifting society. I'm not myself religious, though. If I tried to talk about it, like, people would be like, what are you talking about?

This is ridiculous. Like, you don't care about this stuff, you if I tried to talk about it, like people would be like, what are you talking about? This is ridiculous. Like you don't care about this stuff, you know? Speaking of the Shifting Society, did you see Anna Kasparian's sub stack post? I did. What do you make of that? I like Anna, you know, and I have always had like a friendly relationship with her. You know, I guess I need to know more. I don't think that there's a lot of accusations being,

oh, she's a grifter, and she's doing the same thing that Dave Rubin did, the same grift Jimmy Dore, whatever. Pick whoever you want to go back to the religious point, like Russell Brand getting accused very credibly of rape and then doing this very demonstrative Christianity conversion is like, okay. But I guess I'm a little bit confused about what where exactly she is. And it seems to me that as she self described her political evolution, which, you know, it's fine for people to evolve their views, et cetera.

It actually has put her more in line in some ways with sort of like the core democratic party. So I, if I had to characterize Anna's views based on, you know, what she said publicly and what was in the Substack post, et cetera, it seems like she still has some like leftish views on social safety net stuff, which you know, you're definitely more likely to get on a Democratic party than the Republican party. And then she's moved right or is more vocally right on things like crime in the border. And the Democratic party, I mean, Kamala Harris has been running this very aggressive like border hawk campaign and tried to pass this very aggressive border hawk bill as well. So, um, it, from what I can tell, it just makes her more actually in

line with where the democratic party is. So I don't know. That's, I don't, I don't impute any like negative motivations. I think it's fine for her to shift. I'm just like a little bit still trying to figure out where she is exactly. I think people have got concerns around, uh around Kamala and the border because again, like you've been in power for so long and it does seem like-

I mean, the vice president can't really do anything. Let's be real, like they don't have any real power. But she not the borders are? What does that mean? What authority does that actually confer? I'm pretty sure it was retconned out of a New York Times post or something like that in retrospect. Yeah, I mean, listen, the thing is I don't agree with the way the Democrats have positioned themselves.

Personally, I'm in favor of a controlled border and a lot more legal immigration, but like a lot more legal immigration. So I think that the Democratic messaging, which is just basically embrace the Republican frame of like immigrants are bad period end of story. I think that that's been a political and a moral failure. But you know, they genuinely did try to pass this bill that was very hawkish and abandoned all of the previous previous Democratic commitment had been, we'll do the tight security, but we also want a path to citizenship. It scuttled all of that, added a bunch of new border agents, et cetera, et cetera. So they really did try to pass that and Donald Trump really did try to stop it. So, you know, if that's your, if that's your thing, if you're looking for the

Democrats to move right on the border, like congratulations, they already have. Crystal Ball, ladies and gentlemen, Crystal, I appreciate you. It's fun to get to hear a different perspective and I love your guys' show. I think it's what you do is really, really impressive. Where should people go? Don't wanna keep up to date with the stuff that you've got going on.

That's a good question. Just go to breakingpoints.com, YouTube channel, whatever. If you wanna get angry at me, you can look at my Twitter feed. But I wanna thank you for inviting me on and the back and forth. I really enjoyed it. I hope your audience doesn't hate me too much, but I've had fun here. They won't.

I appreciate you.