Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the reports that a cease fire between Hamas and Israel might be negotiated in exchange for hostages. As Elon Musk continues to spread antisemitism, more and more advertisers are pulling out, leaving the business of X to wither, dragging everyone else down with it in terms of public discourse. And they finish with a talk about the new president of Argentina and what conditions on the ground were like that enabled an authoritarian to be elected.
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I'm also thankful for our audience who are so understanding that they will understand that we're not going to have a weekender edition on Friday because we're going to be too busy eating our feast in thanks of them.
Yes, absolutely.
I will make sure to meditate on how thankful we are.
It's been actually a fantastic journey so far that we've been on.
I, I, when I, I don't know if your family does this, when I sit down to eat Thanksgiving dinner, I actually say what I'm thankful for.
Do you do that?
Um, we have done that and it's been a little bit uncomfortable because I don't necessarily like to be put on the spot per se.
And we've done that where they go around and you're like, okay, what are you thankful for?
And it's like, you know what it's like in the Superman, the first one when they guilty, I like it.
I get earnest.
You know, I don't know.
So it makes me a little self-conscious, like in a way that sometimes I don't want to be put in the spot to have to like generate some sort of, you know.
I like it.
I get earnest.
Yeah.
The people at the table, I want them to know what they mean to me.
So I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to get very personal in that moment, but.
And I mean this.
I sincerely do, Nick.
I say that I'm thankful for you.
I say that I'm thankful for our listeners.
And I am.
And I hope people at home feel that and they know that.
But this is a good time of year to count our blessings.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate it.
And same feelings right back at you.
I appreciate it.
All right.
Let's talk about some substantial stuff.
We've got a lot on the docket today, Nick.
We need to begin in Israel, in Gaza.
There is a possibility of some good news, and thank God we need some.
The reports that are coming out from the administration is that There is a written agreement that so far has been agreed to in principle.
The names have not been put on the line yet, but it is for a temporary ceasefire that would see Hamas release up to 50 hostages at first, maybe more later, in exchange for a temporary halt in exchanges and in violence and for some aid.
It is way overdue.
Way, way, way overdue.
There's a lot to say about this, a lot to pick at with this, but I am hopeful maybe, again, let's give thanks if we can get there.
We can get to the point where people can stop dying and we can get to the point where some hostages are being released and we can start getting past this situation.
Yeah, I agree.
I do think that, you know, ceasefires are always generally temporary.
So that's a concern because, again, what is going to happen?
What is the end goal?
How are they supposed to figure out how to solve this issue, you know, in the long term?
And that's concerning.
But certainly, you know, it's good.
It's good that the notion that they can have somebody mediating And have some influence on this whole thing.
And I think Israel knows that they've lost any goodwill they've gotten from the initial attack.
And that's going to have to be a concern for them as well.
I am not being hyperbolic here when I say that I would love for there to be a ceasefire and for Benjamin Netanyahu and his entire group to be replaced.
And quite frankly, Netanyahu belongs in the Hague at this point.
What scares me, Nick, is something that you have talked about, and it's something that, you know, Unfortunately, we've talked about when it's come to Donald Trump and his campaigning for presidency, when people have a motivation for things to continue in order to keep themselves out of legal trouble, which is what has happened with Netanyahu and a lot of the people around him who are corrupt, that worries me.
It scares me the idea that we might be hoping that these people who need war and destruction, that we might be hoping that they might end the war and destruction.
And again, everybody in Israel blames Netanyahu for this thing.
Everybody understands that this has been absolutely indefensible.
Like, it's my hope that we can get to that point and maybe we can see some new leadership.
But I'm also going to be honest and say I'm not going to hold my breath on it.
I agree.
You know, it is What's the word?
It's so concerning because I was actually shouted down earlier this week when I sort of threw that out there in terms of, you know, I wonder if Netanyahu is sort of thinking that, yeah, if I can eradicate Hamas from Gaza, that will, everyone will hail me as a hero.
Now, obviously, within a week of the October 7th, that was never going to happen.
You know, the reaction was swift and completely against him.
But, you know, I guess it's the conspiracy theorists in me when we talk about this, the intense failure of the intelligence could also maybe be related to the fact that they were warned and they ignored it.
And was it some sort of notion that this would save him anyway before the fact?
It's too horrible to even really kind of because it's so many people have died off of this.
And, you know, it's a conspiracy.
But the bottom line is it had to have crossed his mind that he thought he could say he'd get rid of Hamas and that would somehow, you know, save him.
But, yeah, I don't think he's going to willingly.
It's not going to be easy to get him out of there.
You know, Nick, we've seen a lot of movies and stuff where, like, you'll see somebody who is, like, running scams, and they're always, like, one step ahead of either the authorities, or, like, there's a check out there, or there's some kind of a thing.
Like, you never find a moment of rest with people like Netanyahu.
It's the exact same thing with Donald Trump.
There is no point where you reach where all of a sudden everything's okay, and it's like, oh, the storm has passed, everything's good.
Netanyahu requires this.
It's not a coincidence that there was an almost an earlier agreement that wasn't circulated all that much, but this is what happened.
There was another gap that was narrowed in trying to get this thing taken care of.
Blinken was in Israel trying to make it work out.
And what happens?
While we're getting ready to get to the point for a temporary ceasefire, they moved on al-Shifa Hospital.
And all of a sudden then it was like, oh, well, we're not going to have it now.
And what did they find there?
Nine rifles, one airsoft gun, and a box of dates you can get from Trader Joe's.
And, you know, that's the thing that worries me is everybody with Netanyahu and Netanyahu himself has every motivation to not go with this, to not continue with this.
And Nick, while we're talking about it, there's a whole host of people Who have no motivation for it.
It's not a coincidence while this agreement is being hammered out that Hezbollah attacked the bayonet base and left it in absolute ruins or that Israel was exchanging volleys with Hezbollah and going after them in Lebanon.
This type of thing and particularly Iran doesn't want this to end.
Hezbollah doesn't want this to end.
The entire axes that Iran has created, the axes of resistance, they don't want this to end.
The problem is when something like this starts going and it gains momentum, there's not a lot of motivation for much of anybody to stop the violence and make it come to an end.
Well, I think Hamas's triangulation was that the attack that they did would trigger other countries to rush in.
That didn't happen.
I think it's sort of indicative of the station the Palestinians have in the Middle East.
I don't think that they have what they thought they did as far as solidarity.
Now, are they, in Lebanon, looking for chances just to sort of take advantage of a situation that's upheaval?
Yeah, I don't know if I get the sense that Iran wants to widen this war either and, you know, you have Qatar who is trying to, you know, be a broker of peace amongst the two parties.
So, but it is concerning because I think everybody knows what's at stake at that point.
Once that starts to happen, those dominoes fall quickly.
So, hopefully whatever the, you know, the Americans that we're sending people over there now to try and calm the down between Lebanon and Israel, I just pray that that's going to work.
Well, we're very lucky, you know, in a lot of regards that this hasn't turned into a larger regional war.
We're not lucky that we've had over 11,000 people killed in this situation.
God knows, you know, how many people have died in general since October 7th.
We really do not know the number of that.
We don't know the extent of the tragedy.
But Nick, we're very lucky in the extent that To go ahead and trigger something like a giant regional religious war or a giant world war, that is something that most people shy away from.
You know what I mean?
There's a reason why we've had plenty of dictators, we've had plenty of cold wars, we've had plenty of arms races that seemed like at any moment it was going to explode into something.
The Cold War between the USSR and Russia had a lot of moments where it almost turned into a very, very hot war that could have wiped out the human species.
We are lucky that it is a formidable thing you have to jump over, right?
Whether it's Iran, whether it's Hezbollah, whatever it is, we are lucky that they have not gone ahead and gone over and crossed that Rubicon.
We're also probably fortunate that China has probably kept a lot of this on a leash because they've created their own little axes of influence in this whole thing.
That doesn't mean we're out of the frying pan here.
This thing is still really, really bad.
There are tons of people who are dying needlessly, and at any moment, it could take one, like, false move, and we could be in a really, really bad situation.
And the other problem is, while it's also a hot war going on on the ground, it's also a huge propaganda war, and it's really going to be impossible to figure out exactly what's going on and what's the truth, especially even around Al Shaffer Hospital.
Like, it doesn't, it's very difficult to parse out what the truth is and what isn't, because both sides are trying to Figure out ways to influence everybody.
And on the eve of the assassination of JFK, and as you're talking about, you know, the United States and the U.S.S.R.
having their Cold War, you know, it's most likely the reason why we averted a World War III then was because we had the youngest president ever to be elected, someone who had the whole rest of their lives in front of them.
And his perspective is a lot different than maybe some 75, 80-year-old president who would have had, who was a war mongering before that.
On that note, and just real fast, I'll let you get back to your point, Nick, it's really important to remember the reason why the Cuban Missile Crisis didn't end the world is because JFK didn't want it and Nikita Khrushchev didn't want it.
And that doesn't mean there weren't people around both of them who wanted it so bad they could taste it.
That's the thing.
You always have to have the balance between people who have a cool head about themselves and don't want to destroy the world, and a group of people who are like, eh, don't worry about it, we'll destroy the world and we'll figure it out afterwards.
You're Curtis LeMay's.
But you're exactly right.
We are incredibly lucky that we had someone like John F. Kennedy as president.
And we are lucky at this point that we have a group of people who are not absolutely determined to go ahead and create a larger war.
Not counting Benjamin Netanyahu and some of these assholes in both Hezbollah and Hamas who are like, let's go ahead and let's roll the dice and see what happens.
Uh, yeah, I agree.
I agree.
And, um, yeah, it's, um, you know, we found out much later how close we were, right?
To that.
Right.
And that's kind of a scary thing before you and I were both born.
So, uh, it doesn't have the most, I don't get the most anxiety thinking about it, but I can imagine like my folks probably did and probably were triggered by that after the fact, when they remember what happened and then they realized how close it was because we're, we're in the dark for a lot of this stuff.
Right.
We still don't know our governments are not transparent.
Like we would expect them to be.
And we don't know what half the things that are going on behind the scenes.
Oh no, am I describing a deep state?
I think I just did that.
But there is... I've said this before and I'll say it again, Nick.
The problem with the deep state is that there is kind of a deep state.
There's an administrative state that continues, particularly the military-industrial complex, that is beyond democratic control.
Just because Donald Trump says it doesn't mean that there isn't a facet or a nugget of truth to it.
And, you know, under the guise of national security and stuff, right?
So, which is why we still haven't found out exactly what happened in Dallas in November.
Do you think, on that note, and this is an interesting little thing, we've talked about the JFK assassination ad nauseum.
Do you ever think that, like, we in our lives will see, like, a document dump that, like, actually shines light on it?
Because I don't think so.
You know, that's one of those things, and why do we do this?
Because we want to know, and it's hard to accept that we don't know or we will never know, right?
And that happens across all of our lives in the end of it, you know, in smaller sections of things where you have to just simply accept that you're never going to know why your girlfriend broke up with you, or whatever that stuff is, right?
Even on a smaller scale, right?
And that's hard to take, right?
It really is hard.
It could take a long time to finally accept that, and you have to get to a point of your life where you can do that comfortably.
I don't know.
I mean, the real question probably is, it's a race between are we ever going to find out about, like, UFOs or are we going to find out about JFK, which is first, right?
That's what I kind of feel like.
And I almost feel like I'm convinced there already are UFOs, right?
I feel like that's already happened.
So yeah, now I don't think, I'm not sure we're going to get a document.
I think, and by the way, I tweeted this out earlier, you know, the whole thing with John Dean was around Watergate, was that he destroyed all these documents that were in E. Howard Hunt's safe in the White House when he was arrested for Watergate.
And the real big conspiracy thing in my mind would be that those are the papers that we needed to see that he destroyed.
So they're gone.
We don't have them anymore.
Well, I think that's a wonderful narrative and I hate the idea that those types of things are gone.
But yeah, just before we move on, just really, really hope we can get this ceasefire done and maybe cooler heads can prevail.
We can prevent the further tragic loss of life and maybe we can get past this Netanyahu regime because my God, it's fucking awful and let's get these hostages out.
Nick, relatedly in a weird way, and again I hate that we have to talk about Elon Musk and that he is just inescapably relevant in our political culture, but Musk, who as we discussed earlier embraced openly white replacement theory or the idea that Jews are intentionally using immigration to overwhelm a white population and to control the world, It's had ramifications.
We've seen a ton of advertisers, including Disney, NBC, Apple, and IBM, who now refuse to post over on the white supremacist social media site Twitter or X. And he has now promised a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters because they have talked about this.
And the Missouri Attorney General has now promised to look into this and into this lawsuit.
There's a lot here also in terms of the fact of how the right is going to weaponize their power and the judicial system, but couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
Couldn't happen to a nicer rabid anti-Semite.
I mean, I think we did cover this in the last pod, but certainly here's another interesting part of this is that it's not just when you're advertising in the timeline in the feed on Twitter, It's also that, um, that supposedly the dollars that you're spending as an advertiser on X, then go to content creators who pay that eight or $11 per month.
It's 11.
It's not eight, by the way, it's 11, uh, to, to be a priority member of X, right?
You get to revenue share.
If you can hit certain benchmarks.
I, by the way, have done that on my basketball side.
I will freely admit it because I figured, you know what, I'm on Twitter enough.
Maybe I should just make some money off of this finally after all this time.
But I've also said that I believe a lot of that money isn't really coming from advertisers.
I think that Musk is covering this up his own pocket to make it seem like that.
Because we keep hearing about more and more advertisers pulling their stuff because they don't want to be funding these content creators who are spreading all this stuff.
And in some respects, they are, right?
If you're going to revenue share in that money, then that's their money going into the pockets of these horrible people.
Would you be shocked, by the way, if there is some scandal in the next couple of years that Elon Musk has misappropriated funds through all of his businesses?
Because I sure as shit wouldn't.
Not at all.
And even on my anecdotal version of this, the first two weeks when I did it, I made, you know, X amount of money.
And then for the next two weeks after that, of which I had done 6X the amount of tweeting and interactions and impressions, I got a tenth of what they got in the first two weeks.
So they wet your beak, per se, with some BS.
And there's no analytics.
They just give you a random number.
And then all of a sudden, it's not even close, even though I ramped up everything after that.
So I would not be surprised if he, and I don't know if it's illegal, but I'm sure he's just, you know, moving money around and trying to cover this with that.
And I would not be surprised if, yes, if they found out that this is illegal after all of that, for sure.
So listen, I'm going to be a little bit of a cliche here.
People have been listening to this podcast for a long time.
I am so sorry.
I have to do what I have to do.
It is who I am.
First of all, the entirety of social media and the internet was based on fraud.
From the very beginning!
Because you can't prove anything.
You can't prove how many people are on things.
You have fake users left and right.
It doesn't matter if it's Twitter.
It doesn't matter if it's Facebook.
They created an entire economy that they could manipulate from the very beginning.
They got everybody out in the world to go ahead and believe in it.
That this was the new economy that everybody had to be a part of.
Everything from journalism to other corporations.
To people doing Kickstarter, yeah, Kickstarters, right?
Like, they created a fake thing.
So, the fact that these people are, like, making all these things up from the very beginning, and that Musk is one of the all-time greats.
He is our P.T.
Barnum.
Like, he, and, you know, we talked, we were laughing about George Santos the other day being the Michael Phelps of fraud, or petty fraud.
Like, Elon Musk is one of the greatest fraudsters to ever do it.
Period.
I mean, like, literally, like, if he's not, like, embracing white replacement theory in the morning, a rocket is exploding in the afternoon and he's getting a new contract for another rocket that's going to explode while he has a car that doesn't work and is killing people.
And they're going to sell more of those.
It's an incredible scam.
And the problem, Nick, is that the entirety of our government is pretty much just interconnected with it at every level.
Our space program, our defense, our intelligence, the government, just the bureaucracy itself is so intertwined with people like Elon Musk.
People are starting to look at it and say, I don't really want to be a part of this.
This is disgusting.
But Nick, would you be shocked if next week Disney, NBC, Apple, or IBM is back to advertising on Twitter?
Yeah, probably not.
I would not be shocked.
No, because they're going to be.
That's what's going on here.
The only thing that we really need to pay attention to this is the fact that he might very well sue Media Matters.
Or he can simply tweet something and the Attorney General Daniel Bradley of Missouri is going to go ahead and do his handiwork because they want to suck up for Elon Musk and it'll basically turn into an attack dog situation, which is where all of this is going and where it's been going all along.
Well, you know, I wanted to find the tweet where he replied and I figured I'll just go to his account and I'll go to replies.
Have you ever done that for Elon Musk?
It's crazy.
Does he work?
No, he replies.
And it's a random small accounts that like, I mean, it's he.
And so that means to me that he's just doom scrolling all day long and like reading some random timelines.
It is scary how a guy who's supposedly in charge of all these different companies has that much time to tweet.
And then the worst part about it is he's able to sort of wash his hands with the ADL because, you know, in an effort to make it seem like he's not anti-Semitic.
Now, he's going to somehow, you know, tweet and say, we're going to get rid of, you know, the phrases like from the river to the sea.
you know, and that suddenly just changes the narrative, which is how Twitter works, right?
You can change a narrative over, you know, after one tweet, and then it just changes everything.
And he thinks in his mind that exonerates him and that that's even worse.
Well, and I've got this quote here.
This happened immediately after, again, Elon Musk openly embraced white replacement theory, the idea that Jews are actively replacing white populations with immigrants in order to control democracy and society.
He tweeted on the 17th, quote, As I said earlier this week, quote, decolonization from the river to the sea and similar euphemisms necessarily imply genocide.
Clear calls for extreme violence are against our terms of service and will result in suspension.
Before I read what the reply tweet was from Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the ADL, a reminder, Elon Musk says a lot of shit.
He tells you all the time that he's going to do this or this is going to happen to Twitter or X and it doesn't happen.
So, you know, basically, like you said, it was a manipulation trying to seem like he wasn't anti-Semitic.
But Jonathan Greenblatt, again, the CEO of the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, he replied, This is an important and welcome move by Elon Musk.
I appreciate this leadership in fighting hate.
Nick, that's like two days after he openly embraced white replacement theory.
What the shit?
And here's the weird tentacles folding on top of each other on this is that he had already blamed the ADL.
Musk did.
Absolutely!
Because the ADL had presented receipts with a lot of hatred on this platform and it was not getting cleaned up.
So suddenly like maybe he did he finally start to clean that up and ADL's like okay fine we'll give you it we'll throw you a bone.
I don't understand what this this is reeks of something here some sort of quid pro quo that you have to wonder what's going on with that because I I don't want to cast dispersion on the ADL like they tend to do important work but something's going on here that doesn't sort of make sense to me why they'd be willing to and so publicly you know you know clean them up this week I don't get it Well, because if you kiss the ass of a person who needs you to kiss their ass, and they control a fount of information, there you go.
I mean, literally, it's an information war over how people talk about things, and he just is one person who is just drugged out of his mind constantly.
And you know, maybe if you flatter him, he'll do what you want.
It is, it is a really cynical strategy.
And this is one of the reasons why, Nick, we shouldn't have people who have enough money to simply buy corporatized public spaces.
And Nick, this is the free speech champion.
If you remember, that's the entire reason he bought it, you know?
But like, it's the idea that you can go ahead and try and smooth things over with him and try and curry favor.
And we should mention that Media Matters had done an article, I don't know if you saw this, where they were able to show instances of the worst kind of hatred having ads served on their tweets.
And then Musk came back and tried to pretend like, well, they just refreshed their timeline so many times that of course they somehow got the advertisements on those tweets.
I'm going to sue them.
What do they call it?
Biblical Proportions is going to sue them.
And nuclear lawsuit.
Right.
As soon as the courts open.
Right.
He's going to be waiting like you're out at Target when you're waiting, you know, on Black Friday.
And how's that going, Jared?
Did you hear that?
Yeah, that lawsuit didn't didn't get filed on Monday morning this morning, you know, as soon as it was ready to do that.
So suddenly they're not so into that.
But the bottom line is, if it can happen, then it happens.
Like if you rather you refresh your timeline too often or not, you know, they're not they're not trying to to police, you know, the horrible hatred on their site. - No, they have no interest to because that's the entire pool of it.
The only people who are, like, actively on Twitter, and I'm on Twitter because I'm fighting an information war.
That's why I still do it.
But, like, the only people who are, like, embracing this cesspool are people who are, like, trying to forward white supremacist shit.
And there is interlocking, and like you said, it's hard to even, like, get into it, but it's like The locking between white supremacy and also evangelical extremism and also supportive Zionism, even by people who are anti-Semitic, and it's a weird jumbled up mess that's going on right now.
But if you can go ahead and suck the ass of someone like Elon Musk, hopefully you can gain some points here.
Yeah, at the at the expense of no more advertising, no more revenue.
And, you know, certainly no one, none of people are paying for it to sustain it.
So this is going to go down in flames the way this is going, you know, because even if they do come back, I'm not so sure they come back like next week.
I don't know.
Maybe they do.
But I have to imagine the rates, you know, won't be the same and they're not going to be able to generate the kind of I mean, they still want even if they're even in the good times, they're not making money.
Right.
That was the whole thing.
So that's not a solution to this, and I feel like ultimately it's just going to go down the shitter because A, he helped to accelerate that, but B, I don't know if you could ever make this thing profitable.
I'll just say you will never lose money betting on corporations going back on their ethical stances.
That's all I'm saying.
Real fast, Nick, before we get off this topic, I just wanted to share, because sometimes this podcast is not only doom and gloom, it's about the things that make us feel good.
I just wanted to share with people, this is a story that has maybe gotten through the cracks a little bit.
The Senate Judiciary Committee, which is holding hearings on social media and big tech's influence on the mental health of young people, they kind of got tired of a bunch of these big tech CEOs just ignoring their invites and subpoenas, so they're sending U.S.
Marshals out after their asses.
Nick, all I have to say about this, and we don't need to get more into it, more of this.
Drag them out.
Frog walk them into the Senate.
Make it happen.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I've seen it firsthand how nefarious this can be, the effect.
And by the way, it's on parents, you know, as much as anybody else to help kids avoid the protocols of, you know, of screen time addiction.
But if there could be any kind of regulation as well, again, this is all, you know, this is turning into a socialism, you know, state or something, but it would help to have some oversight into this for sure.
It would help if our government had any understanding of what was going on, and if they were able to actually have gotten out in front of this, as opposed to have sold their soul to these people for, you know, fake, cheap programs, which we talked about earlier.
Well, you know, that reminds me, you know, I think I come up with a formula for authoritarianism, and I think it's related to the amount of anger people have toward the government, crossed by how long they've had this anger.
Right.
So it kind of feels like, you know, because we're going to talk about another country in a minute about how they've gotten there and they're arriving there via democratic ways, who has probably had more civil unrest than we have for longer stretches of time and more intense unrest.
And so it kind of struck me that like this is what we are now experiencing because we have had the kind of ineffectual government for a long time for a variety of reasons and some people have been convinced of one some set of reasons that might not be true but either way there's the dissatisfaction of the government and after enough time and if things are not going well for a certain amount of people yes they will be more than happy to elect somebody who will come in here and and
Radically change the way it's been done in the name of change, but ultimately what they're ascribing to is authoritarianism Well, what ends up happening, you're exactly right, is if there is enough distrust and it grows and grows and grows over time and you're not seeing any of it change, one of two things happens.
Well, one of three things.
You either lose complete interest in it completely and you just become apathetic.
It's not even worth thinking about.
You embrace an authoritarianism, believing that a strongman will go ahead and set it right, or you call for radical reform.
That's pretty much what ends up happening, and we've seen this in cycle after cycle.
And, Nick, what you just expertly foreshadowed here.
We gotta go to Argentina.
And, Nick, I had hoped that we weren't going to have to talk about this story that we're getting ready to talk about, but I had a bad feeling that we were.
In Argentina, El Loco, Javier Millet, won the presidency with 55% of the vote over his rival, Sergio Massa.
Malay is a 53-year-old absolute maniac, a self-professed anarcho-capitalist, which isn't really a thing, and also he's not that, has promised to completely uproot the economy slash programs left and right.
And Nick, tell me if this sounds familiar.
He's a outrageous TV personality who has absolutely attacked his enemies with violent rhetoric.
He doesn't believe in climate change.
He rejects the history of his nation's atrocity, and he attacks the quote, thieving and corrupt political class.
Interesting.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, and he's got bad hair.
Yeah, it's crazy.
Why is it the hair?
Why is the hair always the thing?
I think because it pops on TV.
You know what I mean?
Like, you're kind of clownish, but you can kind of, like, you know, sort of tamp down, like, some of the fears a little bit.
So, like, little peacocking, huh?
Yeah!
Yeah, I'm sure that's part of it.
Yeah, no, it is frightening.
The list of things that he advocates for are kind of crazy.
Interestingly enough, he wants to get rid of the Argentine peso and it goes to the dollar.
Good luck.
You know, I've been trying to scour and ask people if that actually has an effect on us.
It doesn't seem like it because they're small enough in the economy that it doesn't.
But, you know, again, if you're living in a country, and by the way, I lived in Argentina for six weeks, believe it or not, in 2004.
So I got a little taste, and there was a lot of unrest then.
This is what got me thinking about the time of unrest, how it leads to this, because remember, they went through a period where people were disappearing, right?
The government was just making them disappear.
And, and you would think, okay, we never want to go back to that.
You think that that would be on everyone's minds.
But over enough decades of, you know, it was already starting to fall apart when we were there.
You know, the parks were kind of still kind of nice, but also still falling apart.
Like they're definitely like on their way to disrepair buildings.
the whole thing.
Every week there was a big protest for something against the government, even back then.
So yes, this is what happens when, you know, unfortunately the governments that we probably would have approved of, we're not getting the job done for a lot of reasons, right?
I think that's, that's sort of where we're at.
We can't say they were doing such a great job that people were happy.
Yeah.
Argentina has a long and rough history.
And one of the things that has happened, and this is widespread, Nick, I mean, there's hardly anybody that hasn't been touched by this.
You know, globalism, as we've talked about, sort of set everybody in their place, right?
It sort of made like a food chain, you know, with the United States and other so-called Western democracies on the top and everybody else below as sort of client states.
It hasn't been great for anyone, including the United States, which ended up on the other side of that later on.
It's one of the reasons also why, you know, Great Britain went through Brexit in 2016 is because eventually you end up coming all the way around and even the people at the top start hurting.
What has happened is that nations like Argentina, like even if they've embraced democracy and moved away from some of their authoritarian moments, like things get rough.
You know?
Because the economy doesn't work.
This is not sustainable.
Things do not work out.
And eventually you reach the point where, Nick, I don't want people to have deja vu here, but people were out in the streets being interviewed about this after the election.
They said, I don't know, he's crazy, but maybe he'll have people around him who will talk sense to him.
I just needed something different.
I just needed somebody different.
And maybe he'll do something different.
It is the same pattern over and over and over again.
And if you want to talk about what's going to happen with Malay, who again is an absolute maniac, like the best we can hope for is that he is completely ineffectual.
You know, is that he just is not able to make the things happen that he wants to happen.
But because of what you talked about, this rich tradition of authoritarianism that comes in this country, like if he is able to pull together something of a grasp over power and carry out what he wants, this could get very bad very quickly.
I mean, yeah, he doesn't believe in climate change.
He doesn't believe in women's rights, basically.
He certainly wants to get rid of abortion, which had been made legal in that country recently.
So even on that level, those are probably the things he could easily get done, it seems like, in his position.
Again, you know, he kind of also is one on the notion of, like, make Argentina great again, right?
Which is unbelievable.
You know more of the deep history than I do.
I'm trying to think, when did Argentina, like, rule the world or was a world leader?
Were they ever in that role?
No, I mean, it's never been, like, one of, like, the major powers.
But, you know, like, there have been, like, times where, like, Argentina has been more influential.
The last few years have been tough.
And, like you said, like, when did you live there?
When was that trip?
In 2004.
Okay, since then, I mean, in the past, like, 18, uh, 19 years, it has been tough.
I mean, the things that people have been saying about what's going on with this economy, they're not wrong, you know?
Like, they have been led astray, but the problem here is, like, It really was another argument of, like, are we going to continue down sort of the same path, or are we going to try something different?
And if you're not given an alternative, a lot of people will go ahead and say, yeah, I'll take a roll of the dice, whatever, let's do it.
Right.
And they have a lot of natural resources that could actually yield a better economy, but doesn't that sound like socialism again?
It does!
Take over those industries?
It absolutely does.
I got a question for you.
Again, my mind kept going to Brexit.
Um, you know, in 2016 when the Brexit referendum passed and then all of a sudden it was like, wow, maybe something's happening here.
Maybe something's going on.
Um, I, I still, I feel very, very eerily worried about where this thing is going into 2024.
And I don't, I don't think that this is analogous completely to the Brexit referendum, but it does feel to me like we might look back on this and be like, ah, this might've been one of the warning signs here.
For Trump winning in 2024?
Not necessarily Trump winning, but something rough, yeah.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, it's wheezing.
The world is wheezing right now.
It's wheezing, yes.
And it's hard to know which, inhale or exhale, come 2024.
Well, you know, Nick, we were going to talk about it, but, you know, sort of our conversation moved a little bit.
You know, Chinese leader Xi Jinping came and visited and like him and Biden, you know, sort of like did a gesture at, I don't know, trying to repair the order.
Nick, the wheezing metaphor is really, really good.
You have a president of the United States of America who is underwater in terms of numbers and popularity, who isn't able to control what's going on in like a client state like Israel.
You've got Xi Jinping, who has helped build up this big giant axis, this alternative world order.
He's not doing great.
Like, China's not doing great either.
Every major nation right now is in demographic decline.
The economy is sort of failing.
This Cold War that's developing, like, it can be useful for hardliners, but it's not good in terms of, like, production and economies and commodities.
Like, things just aren't working.
You know it's it's if you if it was a modem you would unplug it and plug it back in.
It's real bad and like that's exactly people are looking for answers and a lot of the time it's going to be despots who try and give answers as opposed to other people who offer alternatives.
Right.
I mean, unless you want to argue that there's the natural cycle of capitalism, which is, you know, we have these ebbs, we have these flows, much the same way that people argue that we don't have climate change because it's a natural ebb and flow of our climate.
Right.
I would argue that both of them are getting worse and worse.
Yeah, I agree.
And you can tell, you know, you know, some of it's like the methods are always the same, like just with the economy and stuff.
You know, they raise interest rates, lower interest rates, you know, like, you know, raise taxes, lower taxes.
That's the only thing they can do.
Right.
And at some point, yes, we get stuck in the track where they can't get out of it.
But imagine having, like, in Argentina, 140% inflation.
Like, that's unsustainable.
There's no doubt that they would want radical change out of something like that.
And as a result, you know what?
Maybe his only idea that couldn't work would be to go to dollarize the economy.
I mean, shock therapy is basically what he's proposing.
It's to just go in and basically say, hey, we got to bleed.
And I mean, like he's basically went everywhere he can go and telling people, we're just going to eliminate one thing after another.
It's just gone.
And I'm willing to be the one who does it and it'll be better in the long run, but that's really not what's going to happen.
Nick, last thing before we get out of here and go celebrate Thanksgiving.
The American Psychological Association released their annual report.
The findings are troubling.
They're not surprising.
What has been found is that Americans are more stressed than ever.
They're dealing with more mental illness.
The numbers are off the charts.
They're struggling in the wake of the pandemic.
They're having problems, of course, with the economy, with inflation, you name it.
I mean, double-digit increases in mental health problems, chronic health problems.
I mean, let's not even get started into what's going on with kids right now.
On top of that, very, very sadly, 60% of Americans say that they don't talk to people about their mental health problems because they don't want to burden them, which is just so sad.
We know this.
We've talked about this.
We've discussed it.
This is one of the reasons we have the political problems that we do.
But Nick, I wanted to open a conversation.
Joe Biden became president.
In 2021, as we were starting to try and reemerge from the pandemic.
I think it's not an exaggeration to say that America did not handle the pandemic well, nor have we handled this quote-unquote post-pandemic environment any better.
I think that's one of the reasons why he's suffering in popularity.
I have thoughts on maybe what could have been done better, but do you think there was anything that could have been done to help with this, or that could still be done to help with this?
You know, it's a good question.
I don't know.
See, presidents tend to get a lot more blame than they should for the economy, for instance.
Sure.
You know, and things like that.
And I wonder if, like, you know, is the president, whoever's in the White House, is that going to, on a day-to-day basis, affect the stress levels that you have?
I wonder.
I can think of one recently that did.
Okay, that's true.
So Trump did increase stress levels.
On a daily fucking basis.
Yeah, so okay, so that's a good point.
So yeah, so then the question is, why didn't it feel better?
It didn't, right?
Like, maybe a sense of relief for about a month?
And then, you know, and by the way, he's gotten some stuff done that's been great, you know?
There's a couple of major things they were able to pass.
But it doesn't feel right.
It doesn't give you that sense.
And I don't know.
I mean, my worry is we're never going to get that sense back.
What would it take for you, do you think?
Like, what could a leader do or say or present to you that would help, do you think?
Um, you know, I suppose a leader would come in because it's interesting.
We're talking about the effect of the influence he has over Israel, for instance, and a lot of his numbers seem to be tied to that.
And I was trying to say, like, he's not going to be able to tell Netanyahu to stop.
Netanyahu's going to listen to him there.
But what people did say, which is a good point on Twitter, would be like, OK, fine, he's not going to stop.
You could still just say publicly, we're not giving you any more.
arms, right?
We know you're using it right now in Gaza.
We're not going to give you any more arms starting tomorrow, you know?
And that would be something that would be like a stand.
I think that's what people want.
And they probably would want to figure out some other version of that for Ukraine as well, right, to finally stop what's going on there.
So, you know, it's weird.
Weirdly, somehow foreign policy is going to now affect our stress levels better here or make us feel better.
Like, interestingly, that wouldn't traditionally not be the way that we would probably do it, necessarily, unless it was a war, a world war.
And so I guess, like, those are the things that he could do, you know, probably shore up, you know, abortion.
That would be another one of those things we all do feel strongly about.
And if we could feel better that that won't change, we can get them back into more states again.
Then, you know, that's another one of the examples that somehow could probably turn our feelings around a little bit, right?
Yeah, I agree with you on a lot of that.
One, I think they mishandled the Israel-Gaza situation.
I think that they got caught on their back foot, and they kind of just hoped that they could bring this thing to heel, and they were not able to do it.
It was inconsistent messaging from the very, very beginning.
But that brings me to what I think the problem is.
From the beginning of the Biden presidency, the communication has been abysmal.
Absolutely abysmal.
You know, we saw him campaign on being the person who could beat Donald Trump and who could return America to where it was before Donald Trump.
That was the entire thing.
And then we were treated to a narrative that it was done!
Now America's back, baby!
From the moment, you know, they hadn't even cleaned up the mess at the Capitol yet, and America was back.
That's a problem, right?
That's a narrative that doesn't work.
Then we started going into Build Back Better, and obviously that was a necessary thing that needed to be gotten into.
But, like, we kind of needed to commemorate the pandemic.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, I kind of feel like there needed to be some kind of talk.
And the president, we talk about this all the time, the American president Since Richard Nixon's resignation has been largely sort of narrowed down and depowered in a lot of different ways.
There are ways that a president can sort of build up and muscle up and do things once they gather momentum, but they start from a place where they don't have a lot of control over things.
But I'll tell you what a president is.
A president is a mascot.
A president is someone who gets out there and says things and represents the mood of the country.
And I just feel like we had to try and get the economy back so quickly from the pandemic that we kind of needed to pretend like nothing happened.
And like it literally, I've had so many conversations with people, I'm sure you have, how uneven that was.
One moment it's like, oh my god, everybody's dying.
We have these mobile morgues over here.
And the next thing is like, hey, we're back.
I know some people are still getting sick and dying or whatever, but let's go.
Let's go.
And I feel like that wasn't appropriately communicated.
Does that make sense?
Right, and it would require somebody who has a deafness of touch to be able to communicate that because they would have been saying to themselves, well, we can't talk about it.
Polling is bad.
No one wants to hear about COVID anymore.
But sometimes there are those politicians who have a lot of talent who could do what you want them to do.
Well, Nick, so I think here's the point.
You said something earlier now that's sort of ringing around in my head like a ball bearing.
Like, we want stories.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, we want stories that make sense.
We need these things to sort of put these things together and sort of rationalize them.
COVID was an almost, like, a completely irrational thing.
Like, just completely, I don't know, where something we had never seen before in our lifetimes happened, and we went through immense tragedy.
What did we learn?
Right?
And what we should have learned was that we are actually very dependent on one another.
We're not actually as isolated as what happened in that pandemic.
That needed to be narrativized in a different way so that we could have made sense of it.
And by the way, so we could have mourned.
We did not mourn as a country.
We mourned individually and as communities, but I don't think we mourned as a country.
And I think that leaves, I think that leaves a trauma that we haven't processed yet.
Yeah, I also think that the effect on kids is probably going to be immeasurable.
Oh my god, yeah.
And I think what we're seeing, especially, I mean anecdotally on my side, what we're seeing for the kids who are, you know, 8, 9, 10 at that age during the, you know, during the height of the pandemic, social skills just evaporated.
Learning skills evaporated.
And that takes a long time to try and recover from.
So, you know, it could be a blip because everybody underneath them or below them or younger than them will be coming up as in a normal quote-unquote version of schooling and stuff.
But there's going to be this section of kids who are going to move forward, right?
And sort of, I don't know how they're going to handle that ultimately.
And are they going to be able to re-socialize?
Does it help that they are pawns in a giant political fear-mongering game where they're being told that, like, gay and trans people are, like, you know, coming after them or, like, every day public education's under attack?
Like, if they were going to get the help that they required and the support that they required, it would have come in a society that doesn't do that shit.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, listen, if there ever wasn't a way to expose how, you know, It's nice to think that we live in a country where people care about each other, right?
We already saw with the health care stuff around Obamacare, where nobody was willing to say, hey, I don't want that on my health care plan, but I know it's going to help a million other people by doing that.
You know, we already saw people never being willing to be on that side of the fence.
So it just continued to grow.
And I think COVID ended up exposing a lot more of that.
So I'm just going to go ahead and say this because I didn't know when I was going to say it.
I'm working on a book right now.
I was going to propose it in the book.
I thought at some point or another I'd bring it up in like a bourbon talk or like an episode of the podcast.
I think we need a cabinet level position for mental health.
I think and that's not just health and human services.
We need something that like takes this into consideration.
We need like this is this is an underlying thing in everything.
It's why our politics works the way it does, why society does.
We need a cabinet level position and like we're in the middle of a crisis right now that needs addressed.
I think that's the least that they could do.
Period.
Yeah.
And if Trump would have won again, he'd get rid of it.
And he would slash it immediately.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He couldn't have anybody around him who has that kind of background.
No chance.
No chance whatsoever.
All right, everybody, on that note, let's take care of our mental health this holiday.
These things are tough sometimes.
Being around family, not being around family, there's a lot of stuff mixed into that.
Please, please, please take care of yourself and the people you love.
We are going to, again, take Friday off so we can enjoy Thanksgiving.
We will be back with our regularly scheduled programming next Tuesday.
If you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
