11/19/25: Major Recession Indicator, Sheinbaum Hits Back At Trump, AOC-Zohran Bend Knee To Jeffries, Young Men Crisis

Summary

Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar

Episode Date: November 19, 2025
Main Topics: Recession and Economic Warning Signs, Sheinbaum’s Response to Trump, Democratic Party Power Struggles, Young Men’s Crisis

Episode Overview

In this episode, Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti are joined by Ryan Grim, Van Lathan, and guest Nicholas Eberstadt. The show dives deeply into warning signs of a potential U.S. recession, regional disparities in the housing market, America’s growing class divides, political dynamics in both Mexico and the Democratic Party, and the “men without work” crisis. The discussions blend economic data, political analysis, and cultural critique, maintaining the podcast’s signature mix of populist irreverence and seriousness.

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1. Recession Indicators and Economic Stratification

Starts ~02:00

Key Discussion Points:

• Housing Slump:

  • Over 53% of U.S. homes lost value in the past year; the largest share since the aftermath of the Great Recession (02:00).
  • Regional disparities: prices falling in the Southeast, West, Texas, Southwest; rising in Midwest and Northeast.

• Mortgage System Problems:

  • Interest rates have created a “frozen market,” as most sellers are locked into 3% mortgages and can’t easily move to higher rates (04:00).
  • Ryan Grim floats “portable mortgage” idea: allowing mortgages to be carried to new homes to unfreeze the market.
    • Quote: “If you ran on that right now, you’d have tens of millions of homeowners be like, yeah, I do like my mortgage. I would like to keep it.” – Ryan Grim (06:01).

• Middle-Class Squeeze & Luxury Boom:

  • Saagar highlights divergence: the luxury economy is booming while average Americans dilute cleaning products and toothpaste (08:30).
    • Quote: “The top 10% of earners now account for almost half of all spending, up from about a third in the 1990s… The share of Americans who describe themselves as middle class has dropped from 85% a decade ago to 54%.” – Saagar (08:50).
  • Discussion of “two Americas”: the consumption-driven top 10–20% versus economic precarity for the majority.
    • Ryan’s warning: if the elite can maintain a consumer economy via luxury goods, they might abandon broader welfare policies for the bottom 80% (09:52).

• Tech Stock Bubble & AI:

  • Saagar recounts how the MAG7—Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, etc.—now make up a third of S&P 500’s market cap, raising fears of a tech/AI investment bubble (11:50).
    • Quote: “We are going to look back on this after this bubble bursts as being insane—way obvious… like subprime.” – Saagar (13:09).

• Indicators from Retail Sector:

  • Home Depot’s flagging performance and drop in sales, especially after fewer catastrophic storms, is a signal of consumer slowdown (13:12).
  • Fast-casual chains like Chipotle, Kava, Sweetgreen report significant revenue declines—attributed to both consumer penny-pinching and the Ozempic/GLP-1 weight loss drug revolution (14:47).
    • Quote: “When you’re on these GLP-1s… you just don’t want a $20 salad because you’re not hungry. You’re gonna eat like a quarter of it.” – Ryan Grim (15:30).

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2. Meta Antitrust Win and Tech Regulation

Starts ~17:42

Key Discussion Points:

• Meta (Facebook) wins a major antitrust case against the FTC regarding its acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp (17:42).
• Obama-era consolidation criticized for enabling current levels of tech monopoly (19:09).
  • Quote: “The judge is saying here… well maybe they were a monopoly then, but they suck so much now... there are some other options. So you’re not the only social network, so therefore it’s fine.” – Ryan Grim (19:09).
• Ongoing frustration with government’s inability to address market consolidation or provide serious checks on tech giants.
• Recognition that populist energy on both left and right is deeply frustrated with elite consolidation across the economy (20:57).

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3. Mexico, Trump, and Sheinbaum's Firm Response

Starts ~23:20

Key Discussion Points:

• Reporting on Trump’s recent threats to bomb Mexico and the background: U.S. intelligence suggested Venezuelan involvement in drug trafficking, but the real action is in Mexico and Colombia.

• Trump’s off-the-cuff style: “Would I launch strikes in Mexico to stop drugs? It's okay with me. Whatever we have to do to stop drugs…” (26:12).

• Claudia Sheinbaum (Mexico’s president) firmly defends Mexican sovereignty, referencing the last U.S. intervention:

  • Quote: “As I said, the last time the US intervened in Mexico, they took half our territory… I’ve told them every time that we can collaborate, that they can help us with any information… but that we operate within our own territory. We will not accept intervention.” – Sheinbaum, quoted by Saagar (27:37).

• Description of Mexico City’s protests: mostly right-wing, upper-class agitation against Sheinbaum, sold as “Gen Z” unrest but primarily involving older, well-heeled citizens (33:52).

  • Memorable Moment: Hilarious description of a protestor (possibly Vicente Fox) in “hello fellow kids” attire going viral (35:19).

• Discussion of Mexico’s cartel violence, historical failures of the drug war, and U.S. pressure for a crackdown.

  • Quote: “When Lopez Obrador came in, he was saying… let’s reduce drug trafficking, but also violence. We’re going to make Mexico livable again.” – Ryan Grim (30:58).

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4. Democratic Party Infighting: AOC/Zoran & Hakeem Jeffries

Starts ~40:12

Key Discussion Points:

• NYC councilor Chi Ose is challenging Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries but is not backed by AOC or Zoran Mamdani, raising questions about the limits of progressive insurgency.

• Van Lathan brings incisive (and humorous) commentary, noting that progressive voters often “wake up one day to the sobering reality that all of these people become politicians. They are political operatives and they make deals.” (42:08).

  • Notable Quotes:
    • “My bar is so low right now, guys. I just want you to be clearly anti-genocide and clearly pro—you don’t have to go broke because you got cancer.” – Van Lathan (43:10).
    • “No one watches Star Wars and thinks: ‘I wonder who’s going to come after the Emperor? We can’t do this…’ When you’re inside the thing, you have to make those calculations.” – Van Lathan (45:23).
    • “If you lose complete hope in him, then you are losing hope in that brand of politics. And I think that would be a tragedy.” – Van Lathan, on progressives’ attitudes to reformers like Mamdani (54:58).

• Jeffries responds coolly to the challenge: “Come on in, the water is warm.” (55:48).

• Brief discussion of Jeffries’ tangential connection to Jeffrey Epstein—safer for Democrats to distance themselves from any elite entanglement regardless of party (57:19, 60:57).

• The broader point: Waiters (politicians) need to deliver the ‘meat’ (results), not just charm. Enduring theme: populists become politicians, then are subject to the same institutional inertia as their predecessors.

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5. Young Men Crisis: "Men Without Work"

Starts ~64:18
Guest: Nicholas Eberstadt (Author of ‘Human Arithmetic’)

Key Discussion Points:

• Labor Force Dropout:

  • Millions of prime-age (25–54) American men have left the workforce, a trend stagnating since the 1960s.
    • Quote: “We have a work rate for 25–54 year old guys today that is basically at the 1940 level, which is the tail end of the Great Depression.” – Eberstadt (67:10).

• Underlying Causes:

  • Not just unemployment; most out-of-work men aren’t even looking.
  • Factors: historical deindustrialization, skills gap, patchwork disability/welfare benefits, rising loneliness, and family breakdown.
  • Regional disparities: differences within states, block by block, not just between U.S. regions (69:01).

• Welfare, Disability, and Survival Mechanisms:

  • Over half not in labor force receive one or more disability benefits; many are sustained by family or informal support (71:46).
  • Quote: “They get by with help from their friends, help from their family, and help from Uncle Sam.” – Eberstadt (71:46).

• Social and Spiritual Impact:

  • Growing spiritual distress, substance abuse, loneliness, and “world of hurt” for young men (73:54).

• Mass Invisibility of Ex-Cons:

  • 1 in 7 adult men have felony records; this silent crisis is ill-tracked by official statistics.
  • Few robust programs for skill-building or effective reentry; the prison-to-job pipeline is critically underdeveloped (75:35).
    • Quote: “For every person in prison, there are 10 people with a felony in their background in our general society—and they’re basically invisible.” – Eberstadt (78:28).

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• Ryan Grim on mortgage freeze: (06:01) “If you ran on that right now, you'd have tens of millions of homeowners be like, yeah, I do like my mortgage. I would like to keep it.”
• Saagar on luxury economy: (08:50) “The top 10% of earners now account for almost half of all spending, up from about a third in the 1990s...”
• Sheinbaum on U.S. intervention: (27:37) “The last time the US intervened in Mexico, they took half our territory... we will not accept intervention.”
• Van Lathan on political reality: (43:10) “My bar is so low right now, guys. I just want you to be clearly anti-genocide and clearly pro—you don’t have to go broke because you got cancer.”
• Eberstadt on men without work: (67:10) “We have a work rate for 25–54 year old guys today that is basically at the 1940 level, which is the tail end of the Great Depression.”

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Housing Market & Recession Indicator – 02:00–13:00
• Luxury Boom vs. Middle Class Squeeze – 08:30–13:00
• Tech Bubble & AI Economy – 11:50–14:24
• Retail/Fast Casual Downturn & Ozempic Effect – 14:47–17:25
• Meta Antitrust Win – 17:42–20:44
• Mexico, Sheinbaum, and Trump – 23:20–37:40
• Democratic infighting: AOC, Mamdani, Jeffries, and Van Lathan's Commentary – 40:12–61:47
• Crisis Among Young Men: Nicholas Eberstadt Interview – 64:18–79:41

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Episode Tone & Final Thoughts

The episode is forthright, critical, and sometimes wryly humorous—characterized by Breaking Points’ anti-establishment spirit and the guests’ sharp insights. Serious economic and social anxieties are discussed frankly, especially regarding class divides, housing dysfunction, labor force dropout, and the hollowing out of American politics and civil society. The show remains skeptical of both party establishments and the inability of U.S. governance to address system-level crises.

For listeners seeking trenchant analysis, sharp banter, and a full-spectrum look at economic and political dysfunction, this episode is a must-hear.

Transcript

[Krystal Ball]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Saagar Enjeti]

I turned off news altogether.

[Ryan Grim]

I hate to say it, but I.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Don'T trust much of anything.

[Van Lathan]

It's the rage bait.

[Krystal Ball]

It feels like it's trying to divide people.

[Ryan Grim]

We got clear facts. Maybe we can calm down a little.

[Van Lathan]

NBC News brings you clear reporting.

[Ryan Grim]

Let's meet at the Facts.

[Van Lathan]

Let's move forward from there.

[Ryan Grim]

NBC News reporting for America.

[Krystal Ball]

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[Saagar Enjeti]

Hey guys, Sagar and Krystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive.

[Krystal Ball]

Role in this election and we are.

[Saagar Enjeti]

So excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you.

[Ryan Grim]

Can find honest perspectives from the left.

[Saagar Enjeti]

And the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important.

[Krystal Ball]

Important to you, Please go to BreakingPoints.com.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Become a member today and you'll get.

[Krystal Ball]

Access to our full shows unedited ad.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Free and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media and we hope to see [e-mail] let's move on to this new report about housing. This headline here More than half of US Homes lost Value in the past year More than half of of U.S. homes lost value in the past year. Just to reiterate that the story says home values are falling for more than half of the nation, the biggest share in more than a decade when the US Was still struggling to claw out of the Great Recession. As of October, 53% of homes in the country had lost value in the past year according To Zillow data, nationally, home price appreciation has been roughly flat. But that figure masks large regional disparities. Home prices are falling in much of the Southeast and parts of the west while they're rising in many cities in the Midwest and Northeast. Ryan, right off the bat here, what do you make of the geographic disparity?

[Ryan Grim]

Yes, so you've got the Southeast and the west and also Texas and the Southwest, like Phoenix, Las Vegas. So a couple of things going on. Florida has its own, I think, somewhat unique situation where it's basically anybody who's watching this from Florida can, can testify to this in the comments. It's getting extremely difficult to get insurance and they're probably going to need some like sort of government bailout in the future to just make, to make mortgages possible. Because to get a mortgage you need insurance and to getting insurance in Florida now they're like, wait a minute, you want us to insure this house? It's flooded four times in the last four years and was knocked over by a hurricane. How about we don't insure that? That's not a good business model.

[Saagar Enjeti]

You should take that up with the National Flood Insurance Program, which subsidizes the rebuilding of homes.

[Nicholas Eberstadt]

Right.

[Ryan Grim]

So they're not just going to subsidize, they're going to think they're just going to completely cover it. That's my guess.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Oh yeah.

[Ryan Grim]

Rather than trying to deal with the problem and there'll be some mediation as well. But yeah, so the west coast, it's a different situation. That's more, you know, it's getting unaffordable for people. Right. Like, and also the, and as this reporting alludes to, the interest rates are so stubbornly high that the gap between what the person selling has on their mortgage interest rate between what you'd be getting makes it so that it's an unmatched market. Because the amount you have to spend a month to get a certain amount of home is completely different at 3% versus 6 or 7%. You could develop and I was talking to somebody who does housing finance policy recently. You could develop a portable mortgage so that you could take, you could basically sell your mortgage, which the Trump administration.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Is thinking about, they said, and they.

[Ryan Grim]

Should do, would require you. Because the problem is right now we bundle all our mortgages into these securities. We create these mortgage backed securities. So the bank that makes the loan sells the loan immediately and they slice it up and send it out and securitize it. So the people who hold those securities don't want you to be able to have a portable mortgage. So you'd have to basically unroll those securities by making those investors whole somehow or just seizing them. You have to do something so that the bank can kind of retake control of it, and then you can move it. Then it's totally fine. You have a 3% mortgage. You want to keep it, you can keep it. You have to move. You can. You can sell.

[Saagar Enjeti]

If you like your mortgage, you can keep it.

[Ryan Grim]

If you like your mortgage, you can keep it.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Yeah, try that one out.

[Ryan Grim]

If you ran on that right now, you'd have tens of millions of homeowners be like, yeah, I do like my mortgage. I would like to keep it.

[Saagar Enjeti]

That would go, well. Yes.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah. And I just want a different house, Right. And somebody else can live in this house. How about that? Call it a market. Buy and sell things. Instead, we've just completely frozen the market.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Well, it would definitely help with the phenomenon of boomers who are in houses that they want to downsize from. But right now, it makes no sense for them to sell.

[Ryan Grim]

And they have to pay just as much for the smaller house.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Right.

[Ryan Grim]

With a 7% mortgage.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Exactly.

[Ryan Grim]

As they're paying on their 3% mortgage on their bigger house.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Right. And they're in houses, which would be great for Gen Z and millennials, like, younger families, and they know that would be great for younger families. They wish a young family could move into them, but it doesn't make any sense for them to sell, even though they want to downsize and other people want to upsize. So it's. That actually would help with this disastrous generational mismatch right now.

[Ryan Grim]

Right. So, but it's like. But the question then becomes, is the United States capable of actually governing? Like, can the United States do policy?

[Saagar Enjeti]

Spoiler alert.

[Ryan Grim]

I don't think so. Yeah, it's wild. Like, we're just basically on, like, some type of cruise control. We're just rolling. People can have ideas, and the public can have a will and demands, but the government just doesn't do anything.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Aaron Ren, who's a really interesting substacker, he just yesterday sent out a very interesting piece on two dueling pieces in the Wall Street Journal, actually, where one is about the luxury economy doing just incredibly well, which is fascinating. I mean, markets are up, and the luxury economy is doing well. So, like, luxury hot charging more money, doing really well. But there's also a piece in the Journal about how people are now diluting their Clorox and their Windex to pinch pennies, essentially because it's Getting too damn expensive to continue buying more and more Swiffer pads or toothpaste. This is where one woman in the story draws the line at diluting her toothpaste. But these are two stories in the Wall Street Journal essentially at the same time. And it gets to. As he goes and quotes this Financial Times story that was very buz when it came out. The top 10% of earners now account for almost half of all spending, up from about a third in the 1990s. The layoffs, quote, layoffs are surging. Consumer sentiment has fallen by 30% year to year to near record lows. And three out of four Americans tell pollsters that the economy is in fair or poor shape. And they say the share of Americans who describe themselves as middle class has dropped from 85% a decade ago to 54. Over 40% of Americans considered themselves lower or working class. And so that's, you know, there's a lot that you could read into how we describe ourselves. It was true for years that most Americans, whether they were middle class or not, would describe themselves as middle class. That an 85% number was kind of a constant. And it was a cool thing, actually, about the US that even people who weren't middle class were kind of aspirationally middle class. So they felt like the word middle class described them because they felt like they were relatively comfortable. So the drop in people who consider themselves middle class is, I think, actually a very, very interesting and instructive phenomenon and a sad phenomenon, but also just to see the luxury economy taking off while people are literally being squeezed so much that they are diluting Windex to get more out of it. Now, some of you penny pinchers have always done that. That's. But more and more people, just more.

[Ryan Grim]

And people doing it. Yeah, yeah.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Because the cost of living is just outrageous. And now you have half of home prices around the country falling.

[Ryan Grim]

And what's so scary about the stat that you're talking about there, 10%, the top 10%, accounting for 50% of the consumption, is that there's always been this hope among people that, okay, our, our elites, our betters, do not care about us, but they need us because we're a consumer economy. And so they will take some baseline minimum level of care of the people, whether it's UBI or some other. We haven't figured out how they're going to actually do this, but there's some level of comfort that they're going to, they're going to take care of people just because they need the people. To take care of them by fueling the consumer economy, Right? But if you can fuel the consumer economy just with luxury goods, then all of a sudden you're like, well, wait a minute, what if they don't need us? So if 10% can account for 50% of the purchasing, what if they. That 10%. 10% can't buy everything, but they could push that up to maybe 70, 75%, and then the 10% underneath them could account for another 10, 15% of the purchasing. So you wind up with like the top 20% consuming most of the economy. And so then if you're a consumer economy, like, oh, well, one in five people are actually still buying stuff. So maybe we don't actually have to do a UBI or actually take care of the bottom 80% other than through surveillance and repression and distraction and authoritarianism and dystopia. Maybe let's just deliver them that and see if that's enough. And if you need to, like, you know, just keep them alive, you can give them, you know, you can expand snap benefits.

[Saagar Enjeti]

And so Neil Ferguson had a piece actually in the Free Press recently where he points out, this is where it gets really scary. Financial Times columnist Richer Sharma estimates that Companies account for 80% of the gains in U.S. stocks this year. Not a surprising number if you've been following this, but a stunning number nonetheless. Ferguson goes on to say, blogger economist Noah Smith notes that, quote, more than a fifth of the entire S&P 500 market cap is now just three companies, Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple. Two of which are basically big bets on AI. Ferguson points out that the MAG7 account for more than a third of the S&P 500 market cap. Quarterly capital expenditures by these companies now exceed 110 billion, which is roughly three times what it was two years ago. Nearly 2/5 of that total consists of purchases by everyone else of Nvidia's graphics processing units. Ferguson goes out to point out, goes on to point out how circular is basically illustrating what's pretty obviously a bubble because of how circular the spending on AI often is in the Nvidia's circular investment scheme, which we are going to look back on after this bubble likely bursts as being insane way obvious. You're going to look at it like subprime, like an insane way to organize an economy. But when you see runaway documentary about.

[Ryan Grim]

It in three years and be like, wow, that was crazy, we absolutely will.

[Saagar Enjeti]

And we're like the insane way that you have runaway luxury spending right now. So much of it is predicated on, on these tech stocks that are wildly inflated because again, there's this like circular financing scheme happening. And meanwhile other people are. Let's put this on the screen. This is C2. Home Depot is predicting a recession based on. Ryan, you found this story. Some indicators as Home Depot can be a bellwether. They said the home improvement chain said it served fewer customers in the past three months than expected. This was on an earnings report. Latest quarter earnings report from Home Depot. And Home Depot said it was quote, hurt by fewer violent storms reaching American shores. Well, weird way to say you're hurt. More anxiety among US consumers and a housing market in a deep funk. And so when you see Ryan, the juxtaposition of runaway luxury spending, a stock market that just keeps going higher and higher and higher. And on the flip side, people struggling on absolute basic spending things look really scary.

[Ryan Grim]

I like that side note too. It is, it tells you how damaging some of these storms are that just by the fact that we haven't had as many recently means that fewer people have to replace all the stuff that gets destroyed by these storms. But yeah, the housing market too, like when people aren't selling their home and moving, they're going to go to the Home Depot much less.

[Van Lathan]

Right.

[Ryan Grim]

I mean also the, and the anxiety that they put off refurbishing and then consumers just feeling nervous about it. The. There's also the kind of fast casual collapse that is underway. You put up C3, Chipotle, Kava, Sweetgreen. They have, they have all recently said that they're way, way down, like by high double digits, 10, 20, 30%.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Also, why are we calling these slop bowl chains that's in the business inside. Come on, stop it.

[Ryan Grim]

This stuff's good.

[Saagar Enjeti]

This stuff is so good.

[Ryan Grim]

It's all delicious.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Although Chipotle's problem is they got rid of the honey chicken. But in all seriousness, actually, Brian, you have a theory on this being Ozempic related?

[Ryan Grim]

I feel like there's some GLP1 going on here too. So they're saying, and they know what they're talking about because this is their business. You know, they're, you know, they, they think it's partly, and I think absolutely they're right that people are hurting and don't have the same amount of money. The number of people on some form of Ozempic or GLP1 though is, is astronomical in this country at this point. And the kinds of people that would care enough about their kind of health to, to try to shed some weight, I, I would assume there's a significant overlap with the kinds of people that would eat it. Like Chipotle cava, sweet green. And when you're on these GLP1s or whatever they are, you just don't want a $20 salad because you're not hungry. You're gonna eat like a quarter of it at most. Yeah, you can't. Like a giant burrito. You're like, that's like a week's worth of food right there.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Exactly.

[Ryan Grim]

And that's adding up. Like when Ozambic first came in, like, the brands like Oreos and others were like, yeah, this is hitting us.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Ryan Grim]

People are not. But I think as it's gone from it first was being prescribed to people like morbidly obese. Now it's spreading to people who, you know, just trying to lose a little bit of weight.

[Saagar Enjeti]

And I think in the economy, it's probably a combination because to your point, they're way, way down. So it's a perfect storm for Chipotle or wherever else. But it's also people are really pinching pennies because things are starting to feel very precarious. And if you're, you know, super overpriced salad company, no offense, I love all of those chains, but people realize they can, you know, do that a little differently.

[Ryan Grim]

But I love how people are trying to take the model to everything. Have you seen the Indian one down the street from here?

[Saagar Enjeti]

You told me about this. You said it was good.

[Ryan Grim]

It's very good. It's like, it's basically Indian food, but done Chipotle style. You can get bowls or burritos. I mean, tandoori chicken, burrito. It's genius.

[Saagar Enjeti]

The people that do that with sushi.

[Ryan Grim]

Yes, there are the sushi ones.

[Saagar Enjeti]

That's what I don't know. I don't feel right about it. Yeah. And speaking of the tech stocks, we can put C4 up on the screen. Big antitrust win for Meta yesterday. Today I'll read a bit from the CNBC story. Meta won its high profile antitrust case against the ftc, which had accused the company of holding a monopoly in social networking. What a shocking accusation. In a memo opinion released Tuesday, Judge James Boasberg, familiar name of course Boasberg, he of the many Trump contentious judges.

[Ryan Grim]

Radical leftist, right?

[Saagar Enjeti]

Yeah, Radical left. Judge Boasberg said the FTC failed to prove its argument. The case initially filed by the FTC five years ago centered on Meta's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. And here's a quote from Boasberg in this memo. Opinion whether or not Metta enjoyed monopoly power in the past, though the agency FTC must show that it continues to hold such power now. The court's verdict today determines that the that the FTC has not done so. A judgment so stating shall issue this day. Ryan. These were, interestingly enough, Obama era mergers and some of the big Obama era mergers that people just were blazed right through. Yep, snatch them up. It's all fine. And immediately you started to recognize the consolidation when meta snapped up those companies. But it was at the time the Obama administration was barely giving it second thought.

[Ryan Grim]

Right. Yes. That was one of the huge turning points in our economy that the Obama administration was so corporate controlled when it came to its competition and anti trade policy that they allowed this stuff to go through. I mean, effectively, what the judge is saying here is that, well, maybe they were a monopoly then, but they suck so much now that people have moved into TikTok and TikTok is such a significant competitor. And you got Twitter and I was about to say you've got threads, but that's another meta. Meta one. You got blue sky that there are some other options. So. So you're not the only social network, so therefore it's fine. Yeah, yeah.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Facebook doesn't have a monopoly because of course YouTube exists. Yeah. Amazing argumentation.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah, yeah.

[Saagar Enjeti]

But Trump's FTC is mourning this. So Joe Simonson says, quote, we are deeply disappointed in this decision. The deck was always stacked against us with Judge Boasberg, who is currently facing articles of impeachment. We are reviewing all our options. But that's an interesting little part of the FTC suit in this case is that there really was in around 2020 in particular, you remember this. There's so much populist left, right anger at consolidation, which there should be because this entire segment has been about consolidation, basically driving up stock prices to unsustainable bubble levels. And here you see exactly why that's happening.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah. And we'll see if the government has better luck on appeal or if they appeal.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Yeah. Yes, we will keep an eye on that for sure. I turned off news altogether.

[Ryan Grim]

I hate to say it, but I.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Don'T trust much of anything.

[Van Lathan]

It's the rage bait.

[Krystal Ball]

It feels like it's trying to divide people.

[Ryan Grim]

We got clear facts, maybe could calm down a little.

[Van Lathan]

NBC News brings you clear reporting.

[Ryan Grim]

Let's meet at the facts.

[Van Lathan]

Let's move forward from there.

[Ryan Grim]

NBC News reporting for America.

[Krystal Ball]

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[Saagar Enjeti]

A little of both.

[Krystal Ball]

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[Saagar Enjeti]

Let'S turn to Mexico City.

[Ryan Grim]

Ryan yeah, so last week or the week before, I forget when time blends together, Sagra and I reported that Donald Trump, when he was persuaded to take on Venezuela, was told that the reason that they were going to do this is because Venezuela was a major source of drug trafficking, particularly fentanyl. So he asked his intelligence community to come back to him with targets. So okay, you're telling me that there's enormous amounts of drugs coming out of Venezuela.

[Krystal Ball]

Where?

[Ryan Grim]

Where are they coming from? Where are they going? How can we kinetically militarily intervene here? What can I bomb to change this problem was that this was mostly a lie. Venezuela is not involved in the fentanyl trade and barely involved in even the cocaine trade. There's a couple, there's a little bit of coca Area along the like Venezuela, Colombia border. But it's kind of like a stateless area. It's not, it's barely accurate to say it's even Venezuela. And so the intelligence community came back and this is the danger of these types of fishing expeditions. They came back with a list of targets in Colombia and Mexico because those are actually the places where there's drug trafficking going on. Which reminded me a lot of right after 911 in a meeting, Rumsfeld famously said that they shouldn't go after Afghanistan, but instead they should go after Iraq because Iraq is a target rich environment and there's not enough targets in Afghanistan. Yeah, I mean, like, hold on a second. They didn't have anything to do with 9 11. Why are we. You can't just bomb them because they have targets. That's not how it works. And Rumsfeld, like, no, no, no.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Actually he's like, trust me, I know how it works.

[Ryan Grim]

That's precisely what we're gonna do.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Ryan Grim]

So then that creeps you into a place where now all of a sudden you're discussing war with Colombia and Mexico. So Saga and I reported that a couple weeks ago, strong confirmation of that emerged from Donald Trump talking about wanting to bomb Mexico. Because the things that he gets briefed on, they don't stay secret forever. They vomit out of his mouth when he is surrounded by reporters. So let's roll D1. There's Trump. Would I launch strikes in Mexico to stop drugs? It's okay with me. Whatever we have to do to stop drugs, Mexico is. Look, I looked at Mexico City over the weekend. There's some big problems over there. If we had to, would we do there what we've done to the waterways? You know, there's almost no drugs coming in through our waterways anymore. Colombia has cocaine factories where they make cocaine.

[Van Lathan]

Would I knock out those factories?

[Ryan Grim]

I would be proud to do it. Personally, I didn't say I'm doing it, but I would be proud to do it because we're going to save millions of lives by doing it. So these Colombian cocaine factories. So that to me reads like a very clear reference to a target list that he was given. You can read our story to get more details about that list. He also, and this is where the creep gets dangerous too, mentioned Mexico City. He said, I saw what happened in Mexico City this weekend. So he goes from drugs, Venezuelan drugs, to Mexican drugs to I saw what happened in Mexico City over the weekend. And then would I bomb Colombia? Sure, I'd be happy to. So let's reverse the Record and go back to, okay, what happened in Mexico City over the weekend. And that's when there was this significant opposition party protest where they tried to, like, ransack their way into the, into the presidential palace.

[Saagar Enjeti]

A little bit of opposition from left and the right actually together. And.

[Ryan Grim]

But the.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Go on.

[Ryan Grim]

People are skeptical that there was any non trivial left involvement here. But we can, we can talk about that in a second. Claudia Sheinbaum, the President is still at like a 70 plus approval rating. Yeah, yeah. So she responded to Trump's threat to bomb Mexico. Here's Sheinbaum. You want to read the queen here?

[Saagar Enjeti]

As I said, the last time the US Intervened in Mexico, they took half our territory. True. I've said it many times in my phone conversations with President Trump. He has repeatedly suggested or offered a US Military intervention in Mexico. I like how she went from suggested to offered or whatever we need to combat criminal groups. But I've told them every time that we can collaborate, that they can help us with any information they have. So that's intelligence sharing, but that we operate within our own territory. We will not accept intervention. All right, so that's a very typical line from Sheinbaum and actually, like Morena, that they are defending Mexican sovereignty and don't want any military incursions apart from intelligence sharing, which she just alluded to there on Mexican soil, which is, you know, getting to be, I mean, Trump. The best case scenario here is that Trump is making threats that force other people to clean up their own houses. Whether or not he's in a position to do that is a different question. But when you have these major military buildups, that arguably is the best case scenario is that it's a kind of peace through strength formula. But right now, he seems pretty eager, Ryan, and your reporting suggests that they are putting pieces in place that aren't mere signals of intent, but actually look like intent.

[Ryan Grim]

Right. And they. Right, they certainly are putting the pieces in place. And that's the trouble, that's the fear. Because once they get in place, it's very hard to slow them down. And we're seeing that now in the Caribbean. I was on Piers Morgan, I saw you did that yesterday, or whatever. Talking about war with Venezuela, which is, you know, Trump just keeps. Or Rubio, I should say, just keeps ratcheting up the pressure. And it, you, you get, you. You move dangerously close to a place where you either have to then completely climb down and capitulate and slink back to the US without getting anything, or you then have to launch an actual War. Because your bluff has been called. Because Maduro keeps offering basically the entire store to Trump, but Rubio's refusing to take it. And Trump has not intervened yet to say just take it. Like he's offering you everything. Just take it. So in Mexico City to talk about what's going on there and to back up to the point about pressuring them to clean up, the previous Mexican government, under pressure both domestically and also from the United States, launched a full on, all out war on the cartels. And it was a complete and total catastrophe. And it did nothing to reduce drug trafficking and it only ended up strengthening the cartels in the end. And so when Lopez Obrador came in, he was saying, we're going to try to take a different policy. We're going to try to reduce drug trafficking. We're also going to reduce violence. We're going to make Mexico livable again. Like entire places were just absolute Afghanistan level war zones.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Ryan Grim]

And if you look at the data around violence in Mexico, it's way, way down. Now the idea that you're going to eliminate drug trafficking when you have a wealthy drug hungry country right next door is a fantasy.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Well, and part of.

[Ryan Grim]

Somebody's going to feed our noses.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Well, part of the Mexican economy is built up around trafficking. I mean it's just.

[Ryan Grim]

And the American economy built up around consuming the drugs, definitely.

[Saagar Enjeti]

But there is obviously also that's baked into Mexico as well. Now these cartels for years have been built up on this infrastructure related to trafficking. I remember I asked Yoen Grillo early in the Trump administration, he's a great journalist down in Mexico City and was doing some excellent coverage and getting tear gas down in Zocalo over the weekend. But he pointed out if the Trump administration shuts down the mass human trafficking that was going with migrants throughout Mexico, up through Central America, But Mexican cartel Sinaloa, they were all very heavily involved in that. Where else do they find profit? He was like, what are you talking? Like they'll go back to heroin, they'll go back to, they will find, they will make up that lost revenue with drugs. They've always done it. They're used to doing it.

[Ryan Grim]

And so the, the right wing in Mexico, the kind of upper class in Mexico has always hated Lopez Obrador. They do not like shine bomb. They had been agitating against her over the last several weeks and months. And then in early November, Carlos Manzo Rodriguez, which is the mayor of European and in the Michel Khan state, which is a cartel heavy state, was assassinated Nov. 1. The stay of the dead event.

[Saagar Enjeti]

And he had been military, he had been.

[Ryan Grim]

He was trying the old Felipe Calderon, he was trying the old style that he's going to bring the hammer down. He's going to go to war against the cartels.

[Saagar Enjeti]

He's trying to push Sheinbaum in that direction.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah. And so. And he was assassinated probably by the cartels.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Yeah, Jalisco.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah. And so that generated understandable outrage that looked like you're headed back into this area. Now the idea that, that justifies that you should go back to a military war against the cartels is I don't think the country agrees with. But so the protests then started adopting some of the cartel, we need to crack down the cartel rhetoric too. So these are opportunistic protests. They're trying to create. They're trying to create scenes in the street that, that suggest that Mexico is a repressive place and like Sheinbaum's a tyrant and that the US should then intervene and get rid of her and replace, you know, put the upper classes candidate back in. This was sold as like a Gen Z protest.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Yes, yes.

[Ryan Grim]

You can look at the crowd itself. Like very few young people in the crowd. This is as they're trying to take enter the palace. And if you look, you can see this guy who's kind of like bossing around these other goons. I interviewed a Mexican reporter yesterday at drop site who said that it's. It's well known that there are these elements of organized crime in the city that are for sale for protests. It's like if you need a, if you need a goon squad to cause trouble at a protest, we will bring them. And he said he could just tell by the way that. And that's one of the videos he took by the way that they were operating, that they were one of these organized goon squads. Like he is somebody who's on the left. He knows the black bloc, he knows the anarchists. It's like they were not there. You can tell the anarchists from the organized crime goons.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Right.

[Ryan Grim]

And the anarchists were not there.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Or I mean, what I saw from a couple of journalists who were there was they were in small numbers. It wasn't like a huge comparison. It wasn't a huge, it wasn't equatable.

[Ryan Grim]

Right. You're always gonna have a couple for sure. Like somebody. But like that violence that you saw was organized crime figures ironically saying that we need to crack down on organized crime. We put up the final element too. This was one of the funniest photos that was circulating.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Is this producer Griffin?

[Ryan Grim]

It's Griffin.

[Van Lathan]

It is Griffin.

[Saagar Enjeti]

It is.

[Ryan Grim]

So Griffin was down at the Mexican protest in his one piece T shirt. People thought that this was Vicente Fox. He's claiming it's not.

[Saagar Enjeti]

It does look like him.

[Ryan Grim]

Whether it is or not, it's just comical. Late, middle aged dude with the hat and the glasses, the stash and a one piece T shirt is giving the most hello fellow kids energy that you could ever possibly Skateboard. Yes. The only thing he's missing is the skateboard.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Yes.

[Ryan Grim]

So, yes, the Gen Z were out in force.

[Saagar Enjeti]

The demanding regime change.

[Ryan Grim]

The reporter, we had this on our drop site stream yesterday. The Mexican reporter interviewed a whole bunch of these old people at the rally. And they're just right wing, rich white people who are old, which is fine. Those people are entitled to not like Claudia Sheinbaum and be able to protest her. But you can't also call yourself Gen Z. Like, come on, Gen Z, words have meaning. You're not young. Sorry.

[Saagar Enjeti]

I mean, on a serious note, of course. And Juan, David Rojas pointed this out in his great piece in compact. There have been, you know, if violence is going down overall in Mexico, great. There have been a lot of killings of mayors and journalists. The violence in Mexico is still absolutely horrific. So when you see the killing at A Day of the Dead, it was like a candlelighting ceremony just in front of other people of a local mayor. Horrific, but also part of an ongoing pattern. So still a really, really serious situation for the people of Mexico, of course. But Sheinbaum's approval rating is hovering around like 70%. It's very, very high.

[Ryan Grim]

Nobody can even. You can't even imagine that in the United States.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Even on the question of violence, she has a pretty high. Of cracking down on cartel violence, she has a pretty high. Juan points out her approval on handling of public security has more than doubled to over 50% since she assumed office. So the question of whether this was some type of referendum on Sheinbaum herself obviously wasn't. So that's important to point out.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah, for sure.

[Saagar Enjeti]

All right, Ryan, let's get to talking about the Democrats. I turned off news altogether.

[Ryan Grim]

I hate to say it, but I.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Don'T trust much of anything.

[Van Lathan]

It's the rage bait.

[Krystal Ball]

It feels like it's trying to divide people.

[Ryan Grim]

We got clear facts. Maybe we can calm down a little. NBC News brings you clear reporting. Let's meet at the facts.

[Van Lathan]

Let's move forward from there.

[Ryan Grim]

NBC News reporting for America.

[Krystal Ball]

Autotrader is powered by Auto Intelligence the hyper personalized way to buy a car. AutoTrader's tools sync with your exact budget and preferences to tailor the car shopping experience totally to you. Budgeting lets you input your info to see listings in your price range. Search and inventory helps zero in on your dream car. You can choose from new or pre owned, the style of the car and the features like engine size, color, all the way down to whether you want a trailer hitch. Go ahead and get picky. Don't worry about scrolling endlessly. AutoTrader powered by auto Intelligence only shows you vehicles based on what you can afford and what you want, and Pricing shows you which listings are the best deal so you can feel like you're winning the negotiation without negotiating. You can even choose how to close the deal online at the dealership or a little of both. AutoTrader powered by auto Intelligence makes the process of buying a car less of a process. Try it today. Visit autotrader.com to find your perfect ride, new school year, new routines, and a calendar that somehow filled up overnight. When life gets hectic, the last thing you want to do is cook from scratch. With all of that cleanup for those busy days, Caulipower's got your back. Cauliflower makes the food you crave but made better for you. The best part? You don't have to sacrifice taste or time so you can honor your cravings without compromising. Think thin, crispy cauliflower crust pizzas, all natural chicken tenders coated in cauliflower and crowd pleasing nostalgic pizza snacks. Clean ingredients always ready in minutes, absolutely full of flavor 100%. Answering the what's for dinner? Question has never been easier. Caulifow's products are available in freezer aisles nationwide. Visit eatcaulypower.com where to buy to find a store near you.

[Ryan Grim]

Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is getting a challenge from Chi Ose, who is a city councilor in New York City, represents Bed Stuy and parts of Crown Heights. He's also a Democratic socialist, but he is not getting the support of the most prominent Democratic socialists in the city, Zoran Mamdani or Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. To talk about what this means for the Democratic Party. We are joined by Van Lathan, friend of the show and host of Higher Learning and as people know, man about town. Van Delightful to have you on the program.

[Van Lathan]

Finally.

[Ryan Grim]

We've been talking about doing this. Glad to get you on here and hope to have you back again soon, but welcome to Breaking Points.

[Van Lathan]

Oh man, you guys have no idea what it means to be here after having watched you guys for so long, watching Matt Walsh squirm over Haiti. There's so many things I could bring up. Let's get into the issues of the day.

[Ryan Grim]

All right, let's do it. Excellent. All right. So OSEI apparently had a bit of a falling out with the Mamdani campaign. It was reported that he was not at the election night party as a result of this. I did not see him there. Can't confirm if he wasn't sneaking around somewhere else. And so right out of the gate after Mamdani's win, there start to be rumors that he's going to challenge Hakeem Jeffries for the. For the congressional seat. In that. In that area, you then get reports that Mamdani doesn't want him to do it. And now you have, and we can put up E1 here. So AOC was asked about this, and she said she told Axios in a brief interview at the Capitol, quote, not aware it was challenging, which is kind of crazy because it's been quite public. But she added, I certainly don't think a primary challenge to the leader is a good idea right now. Enormous amount to unpack here. What was your reaction to, like, AOC and Mamdani telling this, telling this challenger Chi Ose that now is not the time.

[Van Lathan]

Couple of things. One, before I even get into it, I want to shout out Chi Ose's dad, who's passed away, Reggie Ose, Combat Jack, pioneering pioneering black hip hop podcast or maybe the first black hip hop podcast. I remember going on Cheese Wikipedia and seeing that Combat Jack was his dad and going, oh, my God, man, I knew your father. What a. What a. The son of a legend. So, you know, the apple doesn't fall too far from the free the tree. As far as making an impact, this is what I'd say it. I sometimes feel for the average progressive constituent, particularly the young ones, because they have to wake up one day to the sobering reality that all of these people become politicians. They are political operatives and they make deals. Right. I need Hakeem Jeffries gone. I need that wing of the centrist. I need him gone. I need him Schumer gone. I need people that are clearly anti genocide and clearly pro health care. Those. My. My bar is so low right now, guys. I just want you to be clearly anti genocide and clearly pro. You don't have to go broke because you got cancer.

[Ryan Grim]

Reasonable.

[Saagar Enjeti]

That's.

[Van Lathan]

That's the bar. That's it. Okay. However, in understanding how these things work. I'm sure there's some sort of deal that's been cut between Mamdani and Jeffries in terms of you don't support a primary challenger to me, and I help normalize you to the Democratic centrist elite base. And we try to get some things done. So everybody out there that is still looking at AOC and Zoron as crusaders and not politicians that make deals, I think they're going to be continuously disappointed in sort of their stomach for actual revolution. This is not to say that these people are not useful. I'm not saying that at all. This is not to say that they don't represent the politics that we want to see. But they're politicians, so they're going to do some things that are going to disappoint you, and it's better that they do it earlier than at a time when you're really expecting them to come through.

[Saagar Enjeti]

It's an interesting question about Jefferies, too, which is like, is it if you topple Jefferies, who comes in Jefferies place, and are they better or worse than Jefferies would be? If you're already cutting deals with Jefferies, you could have asked the same question. And AOC had to confront this many times, as Ryan has written about extensively with Nancy Pelosi. So I guess that's a question in and of itself, is that. I mean, right now is a ripe moment. So it's tempting, of course, to just go full French Revolution and knock everybody down. But then there's a question, Oui, oui. Not in that way. But you know what I'm saying, It is a good moment. This is what the Tea Party did to John Boehner. Get rid of leadership. But then you get Paul Ryan. So that's a question I think that's probably worth confronting as well with Hakeem Jeffries.

[Van Lathan]

Yeah, I mean, I get it. And once again, this is the difference between someone who's in the inside and someone on the outside. No one watches Star wars and then goes, I wonder who's going to come after the emperor? We can't do this. Like we. Like somebody worse might be on the other side of the dark side of the Force. They just go, emperor gone movie. We win. Right. But when you're inside of the thing, you have to make those political calculations. So, yeah, there's a whole bunch of things that you have to think about, but this is what people don't want to believe, what people don't want to believe. And this is the. The what's running up or what's sort of enmeshed in all of this. People don't want to believe that it's business as usual. The thing that people are most afraid of is the business as usual aspect of politics, which is, you know, in 2008, everyone's unemployed, the system looks like it's crumbling, and somebody comes along and says, hope and change. And you buy in. You go, all right, hope and change. We are the ones that we have been waiting for. Still the coldest line any politician has ever. That's up there with fear itself. Yeah, we are the ones that we've been waiting for. You looked at yourself in the mirror. I went tears streaming down my. I was like, oh, me? I. Oh.

[Ryan Grim]

Together.

[Van Lathan]

And then what do you get?

[Nicholas Eberstadt]

Drone.

[Van Lathan]

So, like, my, like the business as usual thing is what sours people to the belief that we can actually live in a different type of world. And so that is kind of what AOC and Mamdani are up against, is we elected them. They promised a revolution. That was worker first, affordability first. And look at them now. They were Hakeem Jeffries. And that is going to be chilling to a lot of people. And it's up to them. Last thing I'll say, I'm typically long. Way more long winded to this. You guys are getting a brief version. It's up to them to make it plain to their constituency that that's not what's happening here. Although it's a tough sell right now.

[Ryan Grim]

It's especially a tough sell because of the history here, which makes it almost even more deflating because AOC in 2018 knocked out Joe Crowley, who was the caucus chair on his way to becoming speaker. When he's knocked out, there's then an election to replace him. And it was Barbara Lee versus Hakeem Jeffries. And AOC got behind Barbara Lee. It was very. It's a pretty close contest. Lost by 10 or 20 or so. But Hakeem Jeffries, who was Crowley's deputy, takes the caucus chair position and then is next in line. And that's how he eventually becomes leader. So to go from there to then, well, it's not time to take him on. I think it's got to be frustrating for a lot of people, but like you said, they're making a different calculation. Like, Mamdani at this point wants to take on real estate developers. He's got his agenda that he ran on. He wants to get that accomplished. And he gets. He sees that going after Jeffries as not just a distraction, but maybe a hindrance. My counter argument might be sometimes the best defense is good offense. Like if you've got. If you've got Jeffries on his heels, and if you've got Jeffries and his allies then defending this position, then maybe they have less time to mess with you the whole time in City Hall. So I mean that. So just even if it's all about pragmatics and we're not revolutionaries here, maybe pragmatically going on offense might work. Like when has backing off helped?

[Van Lathan]

I say never. I tend to agree with your assessment. You know, Mamdani is in the position to where he's not just governing for himself, he's governing for collection of ideas and for an approach to politics to where he is sort of proof of concept of something. And if it fails, he will be the example that it cannot work.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Right.

[Van Lathan]

And sometimes I wonder what that pressure or what that spotlight is like. Now, listen, I don't give any quarter to politicians. I believe that you are basically like a waiter in a restaurant. If I go into a weight shout out to all the servers and restaurants everywhere, okay? But if I go into a restaurant and I say, hey, I want my food, and the waiter is very charming and very nice, but I don't get what I want, I'm gonna say, hey, man, look, I'm glad that you told me about your family. Can you go back to the kitchen and maybe bring the steaks out? Very charming, very nice waiter that lets me down in a very eloquent way. I'm like, no, at some point, bring the meat, all right? That's basically what Bill Clinton did for President Trump, allegedly. At some point, I want the meat. All right, bring the steaks out. Mamdani has to bring the stakes. He has to deliver the protein to the people. And the question is, what else is he going to need to do that? And how much disappointment can you endure from the political process on the way? I tend to believe like you believe, I tend to believe that upheaval is the best way to progress. Clean the trash off the street and you drive down the roads easier. But it's just hard to do. These people are entrenched. They've been around for a very, very long time. They carry an intense amount of favor and they are very good at promise making.

[Saagar Enjeti]

And there's also, I mean, you see this on social media a lot, an understandable impatience on the populist left and the populist right with their proof of concept type politicians. And I'm curious how you see the left's expectations going into the Mamdani mayorality because he's now going to be in this position of great power, not just over New York City, but also over the trajectory of the party. And he's a politician. You know, you like him. You can be a great waiter, to continue in your metaphor. But the expectations of, like, the young generation of the left are on his shoulders. And that is. I mean, nobody can meet expectations that high. So I guess I'm curious how you see people right now preparing to treat Mamdani as a. As a politician.

[Van Lathan]

I saw a good tweet on this, a great tweet on this from Mia Khalifa. Mia Khalifa. Actually, like, actually, I saw she. Smart lady. I saw her tweet. She was like, okay, everybody's for. Was for Mount Donnie. Everybody wanted to see this happen. And it wasn't just because of the collection of policy. It was because, you know, I don't have any problem with. I just can't see anyone having a problem with, like, free buses, grocery stores, and affordability. Like, I don't have any problem with making services more ready, available to people, bringing costs and prices down. I just don't know what was so scary to everyone. But, you know, political differences and economic outlooks aside, the people wanted to believe that there was somebody that was brave enough to say, what we all know is that this isn't working. This religious allegiance to the most cutthroat brand of American capital is not working. It's not working. People are being left behind. People can't live where they grew up. People have to move to the outskirts, Oscars. People aren't finding. It's not happening. Everything is too expensive. We're not looking at the Americans that didn't make this country great, that are making this country great every day. And he said that with a lot of zeal and with a lot of compassion and with just. He was a devastatingly good communicator, all of that. He's not an angel. He's not a deity. He's a politician. He's a local official that now became a mayor. And what her tweet said was, let's not put him on a pedestal. Let's not make our entire lives and our entire belief system, let's not get too down in the dumps about the obvious political disappointment that's going to come at some point from this guy. Let's try to be realistic about what he's up against, what he's going to have to do and who he's going to have to be. Let's try to like let go just a little bit. She says, let's not put him on a pedestal. He's a politician. We're gonna have to do that. And that's gonna be hard. But part of that though, I'll say is this part of that is the media's responsibility. And this is why, speaking of Donald Trump and Bill Clinton now I'm gonna do it to you guys a little bit. This is why independent media is important. Because of the long form investigation into topics, the context that is given the sometimes sobering realities that can be had when something is deep dove into to where you can come back feeling like everything is not a zero sum game, you know. And so to me, this is the whole deal with all of this stuff. Do I envision a world that's closer to Mamdani's world? Sure, I do. I absolutely do. But do I think that he has unilateral authority all he's all powerful to blink and make New York into the vision of New York that he wants it to be? He just doesn't. He doesn't. And so there are going to be some things that he is going to win on and some things that he is going to be lose on. Lose on. If you lose complete hope in him, then you are losing hope in that brand of politics. And I think that that would be a tragedy.

[Ryan Grim]

Meanwhile, so Hakeem Jeffries was asked about OSE's primary challenge. We can roll E3 here. New York City Councilman Chi Ose filed.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Paperwork today to run against you to represent Brooklyn. He has said that Democratic leadership has failed to effectively fight against President Donald Trump. What's your response?

[Nicholas Eberstadt]

Come on in.

[Ryan Grim]

The water is warm. Water's warm. I think it's water is nice is the phrase. But okay. I was talking to a high school friend yesterday actually about Jeffries and he's not a committed. He's an independent. But he was like, you guys gotta do something about Hakeem Jeffries. I'm like, what do you mean, you guys, by the way? First of all, he's like, but he's like that guy's fault, you guys. Bad for the. He's like, every time I see him or Schumer, like, I just dislike Democrats more. He's hurting what you guys are doing. Even that. It's like. And Jeffries thing when he came up was that he was supposed to be this great communicator. Like, that was his selling point. I don't know what happened between now and then. Just for fun, since you Mentioned Epstein. Our man did find himself, unfortunately, in those files. If we can roll. Not in the way you're thinking. Basically, a consultant of his was reaching out to Epstein to do a fundraiser, invite him to a fundraising dinner. But here's E4 him getting dragged into these files. Another email shows Democrat fundraisers invited Epstein to an event or to meet privately with Hakeem Jeffries as part of their 2013 effort to win a majority. So Hakeem Jeffries campaign solicited money from Jeffrey Epstein. That's what we found in the last document batch. The files underscore why former President Trump.

[Van Lathan]

Must appear for his deposition.

[Ryan Grim]

We've subpoenaed him. To date, the Democrats have done nothing.

[Saagar Enjeti]

To help us secure his appearance.

[Ryan Grim]

I support full transparency. The Oversight Committee will continue to work to get the truth to the American people and to get justice for the victims. That's our goal of this investigation.

[Van Lathan]

With that, I yield back.

[Ryan Grim]

Now, I don't even know if Jeffries had any idea who Epstein was, but bad luck for him that his fundraising consultant reached out to Epstein to try to hit him up for money back in. Back in 2013, telling Epstein, you really need to meet this guy. He's a rising star. You know, he's going to be a top Democrat. Yeah. So I don't know, like, Hakeem Jeffries, what's going on with this party?

[Van Lathan]

Couple things. Number one, it's very hard to be a good communicator if you are measuring every single word. Right. If you're measuring every single word, if your brain is cue testing every single word. Are they gonna like me? Are they gonna like me? Do I come off cool? Do I come off like the cool guy? Am I. Is this cool? The swag. Come on in. I bet he thought he killed with that line. He walked off stage and he was like, did y' all see what I said? Yeah, I said. I told him, come on in, the water is warm. And there was some. There was some staffer that was like, booyah. Like, he thought that was so cold. I bet when he got that mic, come on, man. You know, like, be yourself. Like, believe. Say the things that you believe. Living your authenticity. It shows when you don't. I promise. Another thing is this. I want to make sure that everybody on the right, everybody everywhere understands this. I'm going to speak for myself. It don't matter who is in the Epstein files. Done with all of them. There's not a person that could be in those files right now that I'm going to be like. Nah, man, we need to stall them out. Everybody's like, well, what happens when you, when you find out that Bill Clinton is in there?

[Ryan Grim]

I'm like, what are you talking about?

[Van Lathan]

What are you talking about?

[Saagar Enjeti]

Oh no.

[Ryan Grim]

Like, who cares?

[Van Lathan]

What is it, 99? Who cares? And I just want everyone to know this because I said this on TMZ in 19 and this was one of the things that I got in trouble for. All the things I said on tmz, I said this, I said, the death of Jeffrey Epstein is Washington's most bipartisan accomplishment in decades. Right. And that is a thing. It's a fact. Everyone is co. Mingled in this. I want people to take a step back and look at what this actually is. This is the connection that you guys have always feared. It's the elites, it's the people that cover for each other. It's the people that make easy soft beds for each other to lie in. It's the thing that you've been talking about. And when people have been said, been saying, hey, the left is involved in this, the right is involved in this, at least in terms of the political structure. And the political elites, like, no, our guys are the great guys. Our guys are going to drain the swamp. Our guys are the ones. No, it's a class thing. It's a thing that's. There's a political ruling class and how they get on with each other. So sit back, watch it fall and don't get connected to these people. They not the LSU Tigers, they're not the Yankees, they're not the Lakers, they're not political teams. These are people with agendas. And sometimes those agendas involved dealing with people like Jeffrey Epstein, however horrible and disgusting that that is.

[Ryan Grim]

Yep. Van Lathan, really appreciate you being here. Happy to have you back anytime soon. Yeah, check him out. Higher learning elsewhere.

[Van Lathan]

I want to tell Sager something. When I get up and I do my Andrew Huberman thing, when I walk around the neighborhood, there's something else I do in the morning. Saga. And you're not gonna like it. In the morning, like, you know, haha, Saga. There's something else. I'm about to go get into it right now. Don't get mad. I'm still productive. There's something else I like to do. Saga. I want to, I want you to come on and tell me why generations of Lathans are wrong. I believe in them. We've been doing this for a long time. Saga.

[Ryan Grim]

This would be a fun segment that, that we have to get you on with saga.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Yeah, that would be good actually.

[Van Lathan]

No problem. Thank you guys.

[Ryan Grim]

That we're definitely gonna make happen. All right, take it easy and enjoy whatever you're up to next.

[Van Lathan]

Thank you. Every morning, same time. Peace.

[Saagar Enjeti]

I turned off news altogether.

[Ryan Grim]

I hate to say it, but I.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Don'T trust much of anything.

[Van Lathan]

It's the rage bait.

[Krystal Ball]

It feels like it's trying to divide people.

[Ryan Grim]

We got clear facts. Maybe we could calm down a little.

[Van Lathan]

NBC News brings you clear reporting.

[Ryan Grim]

Let's meet at the facts.

[Van Lathan]

Let's move forward from there.

[Ryan Grim]

NBC News reporting for America.

[Krystal Ball]

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[Saagar Enjeti]

We are joined now by Nicholas Eberstadt, who's the author of the new essay collection called Human Arithmetic. Very, very interesting new book. Nicholas Eberstadt thank you so much for joining us here on Breaking Points this morning. We appreciate it.

[Nicholas Eberstadt]

Hey, thanks for inviting me.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Yeah, of course. I wanted to start with a section here from the introduction of the book, where you talk about how the damage from America's men without work problem, which you have written extensively on, quote, radiates outward their unnatural condition makes for slower economic growth, wider income and wealth gaps, increased welfare dependency, reduced social mobility, more fragile families and a weaker civil society. And you go on, make some really interesting points here. But I wanted to ask that in the context of this news report, we can put this from Wall Street Journal up on the screen, the headline here, companies predict 2026 will be the worst college grad job market in five years. And I thought this was a good place to start, Nick, because you've been following this particular problem and actually you've been helping us understand it with, with data and explanations, socioeconomic explanations, for a long time. It seems as though this problem is poised to get worse. But I'm curious if you agree with that, what you're seeing in the data right now and how people should be thinking about it.

[Nicholas Eberstadt]

Well, it would be a little bit more helpful if the government were actually producing the monthly data on the jobs report that we kind of like to analyze. But, but we've been seeing a gradual flight from work by men and by older people. That the other older people part is new. We're also seeing a somewhat weaker job market now. And that's probably not surprising given some of the uncertainties, real and perhaps needless that we see in the, in the job market now, in the economic outlook. Some of this is policy created, some of this is business cycle. I don't think I would make generalizations about long term trends from a single year. Let's just say that.

[Ryan Grim]

I mean, so what are you seeing overall when it comes to, when it comes to young men? And what has surprised you and has anything surprised you about it, as somebody who's been kind of monitoring this for some time?

[Nicholas Eberstadt]

Well, I mean, the only thing that's a surprise is that so many people seem to be surprised by it. This didn't start yesterday. This is a historical trend that's been underway since the 1960s. But because we are still fighting the last war with our employment numbers, our jobs reports were our framework was developed in 39 and 40 to track the Great Depression when it would have seemed outlandish to think that a guy who didn't have a job wouldn't be looking for one. So we have a set of Numbers that are great for looking at unemployment, but nowadays for every guy who's out of work and looking for a job, there are over three who are not looking for work. And, and if you are using just the unemployment metric, you're missing over three quarters of the problem. We have a work rate for 25 to 54 year old guys today that is basically at the 1940 level, which is the tail end of the Great Depression. So we've got a Great Depression scale problem for work for guys. And if we don't look at it, we're going to be surprised by a lot of other things that are happening in America.

[Saagar Enjeti]

And it's amazing how it lurks under the surface and gets so little attention in the ways that you describe it because you've studied for a long time the effect, particularly that deindustrialization, but also welfare programs. And you and I may disagree a bit with Ryan on that. But if we focus on deindustrialization just specifically with this AI transformation of the economy coming, we've seen the effects that, that these rapid changes in jobs have had in places like where I'm from, the Rust Belt and outside Milwaukee, for example. Is that something people seem like they're about to replicate at an even larger scale with AI? How are you thinking about the changes that are about to appear like they're about to happen in the American economy with the examples we've seen over the last several decades?

[Nicholas Eberstadt]

I don't want to make a fool of myself in front of you by making categorical predictions about AI because, because it's evolving so rapidly that I'm not sure that anybody knows exactly where it's going to be in five years, much less 15 years. What we can say in general looking at past technological innovations, is that people who have skills are able to kind of harness the new technologies and multiply their productivity and their incomes, and people who don't have skills are more likely to be displaced. So under any circumstances we'd want to be skilling up our young people. But in the face of this new AI wave that makes it, I think, even more imperative. I should say that one thing we also miss about what's going on in the United States is the extraordinary variety disparity of circumstances from one community to the next. When I was a young guy, we'd talk about the Deep south or Appalachia or later the Rust Belt. But again, this is something that kind of escapes us because we don't collect good information on it all the time. Three quarters of the difference in work rates and workforce participation rates for, you know, young adults, for young guys is now within states. I mean, you go 10 miles and you find radically different employment prospects, community prospects, all within given states in the usa. And we're kind of blind to this because, number one, we don't collect the right information for it. Our information systems are way behind the times. Number two, we need journalists who will actually go out and talk to human beings and take a bus and go from one community to the next, because doing that, you get the kind of the human face on this nerdy sort of number stuff that I do in my basement, so to speak.

[Ryan Grim]

And so you talked about there being three men, what you say, 25 to 34 or 25 to 44, 25 to.

[Nicholas Eberstadt]

54, as the usual.

[Ryan Grim]

So 25 to 54. So for every man who's looking for work and can't find it in that category, there are three men who aren't looking for work. And I think all of us can answer this question kind of anecdotally and make our own guesses at it, but what do the data say about how those men are surviving? Like, how are they? Where are they living? How are they getting by? How are they feeding themselves? If they have families, how are they, how are they feeding their families?

[Nicholas Eberstadt]

Well, as best, as best one can tell from the limited information we have, that's numbers and things that I, you know, sift through. They get by with help of their, you know, by the help of their friends, they get by with the help of their family, and they get by with the help of their uncle, and his name is Sam. There's over half of the guys who are neither working nor looking for work seem to be obtaining one or more disability program benefits. I'd be a little more informative about this, except that our crazy quilt of disability programs don't talk to each other. And so there's nobody in Washington who can tell you exactly how many Americans, much less prime age guys, are obtaining these disability benefits. You can't live a princely life on them, but quite evidently it is possible to live a life where you do not engage with the, you know, with the labor market anymore.

[Saagar Enjeti]

And you also. Oh, Ryan, did you have a. No. Okay. You also write sort of about the effect this has on the spiritual condition of the country on young men in particular. And in light of the news yesterday, we can put this on the screen. This is ProPublica reporting that the Trump administration appears to have attempted to help Andrew Tate. The ProPublica headline is white House intervened on behalf of accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate during a federal investigation. But Nick, there's so much discourse at the moment about narrative Fuentes and Andrew Tate and young men. And just because you're somebody who studied this for so long, what's your, I guess, perspective on this swirl of controversy? Is, is the economic well being related to the spiritual well being of young men in a way that seems to be fueling any of these trends? What do you make of it?

[Nicholas Eberstadt]

Well, you know, I'm a grandfather, I'm a couple of generations removed from this stuff, but I've got ears and eyes now. There's a, there's a world of hurt and loneliness and despair out there that wasn't, wasn't at all comparable, you know, when I was that age. We've got a lot more loneliness, we've got a lot more family breakdown, we've got a lot more spiritual angst, we've got a lot more, we've got a lot more dependence on substances than we had back then. And if you are isolated, if you're cut off from work, if you're cut off from family, if for whatever reason you're cut off from faith and from your community, you suffer for that. I mean, there's a reason that people, that a lot of people think that solitary confinement is cruel and unusual punishment. So we've got to do, I think we've got to do a much better job of reaching vulnerable groups in our country. And part of what we've got going on, I think, is this monumental empathy gap between the describers and deciders in the United States and little people who are suffering.

[Ryan Grim]

So have you seen anything work, any pilot programs, any efforts by communities to prevent plant closures or in places where you have like, you know, workers take, you know, they're going to shut a plant down, but the workers take it over and keep it going. I think, you know, some famous cases.

[Nicholas Eberstadt]

Of, a couple of, a couple of, a couple of thoughts. One is we could look around the country and see where there are healthy communities and when there, where there are communities that are really struggling because there's a, there's an enormous range and disparity of social success in communities in the United States. And they're mostly within, within states, not across states, as I mentioned. And a little bit of, a little bit of curiosity about human beings might help at this point in our national history. I mean, that's one thing to mention. Another thing to mention is the, the extraordinary problem of ex cons in America. Because the ex Cons are almost invisible in our country, and yet it is a gigantic army at this point. We don't, we do not collect information on ex cons. You know, once they're out of the correctional system, they're invisible as far as our stat guys are concerned. But my own back of the envelope working on some, I think pretty good research by some of my, you know, defiant nerd demographer colleagues suggests that one in seven adult guys has a felony record in his background. Do we really think that this has nothing to do with the circumstances that we find ourselves in today? Shouldn't we be at least a little bit curious about this? How, how people live, how they reintegrate into society or repair their job reputations? There's all, it's all anecdotal now because we don't collect the information that would allow us to see what's working and what's not working.

[Ryan Grim]

Yes, I, I've always thought that if you actually, for people who are serving time in prison, like, you know, there's some people can get work release, but most people are going to either, you know, be reading books or be at the gym or just be stuck, you know, either in the common area or just, you know, frittering away, you know, years and years of their life. Has there been any effort to say, you know, let's actually bring some genuine education here, like let, if you do three years, you should come out, you know, knowing how to do carpentry or as an electrician or with it, or with your associate's degree or maybe or an undergraduate degree. Like I know there's some programs in that direction that are very small, but have you, have you seen any of that work to intervene in this?

[Nicholas Eberstadt]

Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of good people working to try to help with re entry all around the country. But this is all a sea of anecdote at this point. And it doesn't have to be that way. It really doesn't have to be that way. And we talk about, we talk about the mass incarceration situation in the United States. And that's true as far as it goes. But what we don't talk about is that for every person who's in prison, there are 10 people with a felony in their background in our general society, and they're just basically kind of invisible. We can do a lot more with, a lot more with skills in the United States. We've got, even with the economy softening, we have so many millions of unfilled positions. Right. And some of that is a skills gap. You don't have to go to college to come up with with the skill set that's going to give you a good income and let you pay for a family and a home.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Nick Eversett, thank you so much. The new book is called Human Arithmetic. We really appreciate you stopping by to break some of this down for us.

[Nicholas Eberstadt]

Thanks so much for inviting me.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Of course. Really big show today, Ryan. We covered a lot of ground and had some great guests.

[Ryan Grim]

We did indeed.

[Saagar Enjeti]

What is the saying? The real victors, the friends you made along.

[Ryan Grim]

That's right. Exactly.

[Saagar Enjeti]

Very true. Today.

[Ryan Grim]

Yes, indeed. And so we'll see you on Friday and if you're a premium subscriber, back on Thursday.

[Saagar Enjeti]

If you're a premium subscriber, we'll see you right now in the live ama. If you want to get access to the live AMA to the second half of the Friday show and get the show to your inbox. No commercials, no ads, nothing every single day. Go ahead, head over to breakingpoints.com we'd love to see you there. We love answering your questions. So head on over and Ryan and I will see you for a See you then.

[Ryan Grim]

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