Hey, everybody. It is Wednesday, July 24th. You're listening to the Mone News podcast. I'm Ojwanunu. - And I'm Jill Wagner. This is a place where we bring you just the facts. - Jill, I'm liking our new catchphrase and we read all the news, try to keep up with the news and read it to the line so you don't have to. And I'll be using it as long as this pace continues. - Please no, please, this pace cannot continue. - This is where we try to keep up with the news so you don't have to, everyone. We're trying our best. Actually, I'll get questions on the Instagram. Hey, are you covering this? You're covering that? I'm like, I'm just trying to like manage the biggest stories in the world and then we'll try to get to some of the other stories out there, folks. So we're trying our best. - Can I live? The response is, can I live? - Can I live? Jill, speaking of living, today is National Tequila Day. How are you gonna celebrate? - Is there any other answer besides Tequila on the rocks with a little bit of lime juice or maybe a margarita? - Margarita, you could go margarita. You could go with just on the rocks. Some people do their tequila neat. I mean, there's a whole variety of things you could try. Jill, it's a big week for these days. It's National Ice Cream Day, National Tequila Day. It's like some of my favorite things. - Moshe, I'm about to post something on my Instagram just for you. It's from our friend, Mo Eunice, over at Gallup. He posted a sign that said money can't buy happiness, but it can buy ice cream, which feels appropriate for you. - Especially, yes. I agree with that. I think the only person in the world who likes ice cream more than me might be Joe Biden, and I hope he's getting some this week. - And it money also does buy tequila, which also-- - It does, it does. - We're having a big tequila surge in this country. So, and by the way, we don't have any sponsors, any tequila sponsor. So if those of you in the beverage industry are interested, we hear it more news, are interested in trying your product. - We do not discriminate. Healthy, alcoholic, regardless, whatever it is. - Organic, non-organic, organic tequila, whatever you do. - Okay, let's get to some headlines here. Democratic vibe check, moving on with enthusiasm. Kamala Harris helped her first campaign event in Wisconsin, and the energy was palpable. We have the details. - The Democrats, Joe, are on their first couple dates here with Kamala. - Yes. The Delta flight debacle continues in the wake of that IT outage last week, and now the Department of Transportation wants to investigate. - They have some questions. Why is Delta the only airline that couldn't figure it out? - Two big resignations to tell you about. The head of the Secret Service says that she is stepping down following the assassination attempt to former President Trump and Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey. He will reportedly resign from the Senate at the end of August after being found guilty of being a foreign agent. - Right, if you're looking to move, maybe think about Texas. There's a new report saying Texas towns are dominating the list of fastest growing cities in America. Also some good news for would-be home buyers, why some housing experts say that it's turning into a buyer's market. - And that's not just in Texas. It's in a number of places across the country. - This ain't Texas. (laughs) It's all I can think about. - The Mosh Sunday was the world's hottest ever recorded day according to the data. And Mosh has on the same history. - Jill, a big day in presidential history, music history with a little bit of in-sync news. And one of your favorite TV characters of all time has a birthday today. - Color me intrigued, Mosh. Can't wait. - Jill, your preview is, they started a show that aired in the 90s. - Well, obviously. (laughs) - What I'm thinking is a Julia Louis Dreyfans. Like there's not, is that what it is? - Getting warmer. - We'll have it at the end of today's podcast. - Okay, to the news now that she has lines up a majority of Democratic delegates and is effectively the presumptive nominee for president, Vice President Kamala Harris at the campaign trail on Tuesday in the first rally of her presidential campaign. She greeted an exuberant crowd in Wisconsin and reinforced her new line about Donald Trump that in her roles as prosecutor and California Attorney General, she convicted fraudsters and cheaters and that she knows Donald Trump's type. She first rolled that out at campaign headquarters on Monday and it looks like it's gonna be sticking. Like this is gonna be one of her go-to lines. So let's take a listen to the contrast that she is trying to draw between herself and former President Trump. - As Attorney General of California, I took on one of our country's largest for profit colleges that was scamming students. Donald Trump ran a for profit college that scammed students. (audience groans) As a prosecutor, I specialized in cases involving sexual abuse. Well, Trump was found liable for committing sexual abuse. (audience laughs) As Attorney General of California, I took on the Big Wall Street banks and held them accountable for fraud. (audience cheers) Donald Trump was just found guilty of fraud on 34 counts. (audience laughs) - So get used to that because you're probably gonna be hearing a lot of it. Of course, that is the past. And she also spoke about the future. She pledged to build a strong middle class, protect unions and expand abortion rights. Before leaving the stage, she said, "When we fight, we fight to win." And notably, she left the stage to Beyonce's song "Freedom," the singer has given her the rights to play the song at her rallies. And you are seeing the energy that we saw at her first campaign stop really translate in some early polls. She opened up a marginal two percentage point lead over Trump after President Biden ended his reelection campaign and then passed the torch to her. This is according to a Reuters Ipsos poll and that compares with a marginal two point deficit that Biden had faced against Trump in last week's poll before his Sunday exit from the race. All of this is well within the margin of error. She does still trail in battleground states, but it does show that there is some momentum in her direction. A pollster with Trump's campaign played down any polling that shows an increase in her support, arguing that she was likely to see a temporary rise in popularity because of the widespread media coverage of her new candidacy. At the same time, candidates often expect a bump after formally accepting their party's nomination at stage-managed televised conventions, like the one that Donald Trump had last week. But the polls showed that Trump didn't really get a bump out of not only his RNC acceptance speech, his selection of JD Vance, but also the assassination attempt. - We should note this is one poll so far, but we are getting some data on internals. There's just been so much chill that's happened in about 10 days of politics here. I think that voters are experiencing whiplash right now. So we will get a better sense. You know, what we like to do here at Monuse is not just go off of one poll, but averages of polls, and you'll start to see a lot more data come through in the coming days here as America tries to get its bearings and make a decision here. Who do they like right now? - All of that said, Harris still faces an uphill battle. She is one of the lowest approval ratings for a vice president in modern history at 39 percentage points. That is just slightly better than Dick Cheney and Dan Quail at their lowest points. And remember, neither were able to win the presidency themselves. Cheney didn't even bother running. - We should note, Cheney had other issues. He had shot a guy while being VP. He had several heart attacks. Never really had that ambition. That said, it's not like even if he wanted to, he could have tried. - For context, he shot a guy while hunting. He didn't just like shoot some gunshot in the butt, but now like Aaron Burr. - But many Americans do perceive Kamala Harris as a liberal from San Francisco, a progressive who cares deeply about reproductive rights and racial diversity. The question, will she be able to reach working class voters who believe that neither the Democratic Party nor the government has shown the same concern for their economic woes and fear that their children's lives may be worse than theirs? White working class voters have shifted right since Trump came on the scene in 2015 and polls up until Biden dropped out have shown Trump poised to scoop up working class black and Latino voters in potentially historic proportions. - Yeah, we've seen this movement, especially among working class men. And we've seen the Scratchal movement here among black and Latino men. Now, that said, they still poll on average, the vast majority of them will be voting Democratic, but even that change on the margins, even if five to 10% of working class black and Latino men went Republican, that could basically spell doom for Democrats. They need to have major margins there. Now, we're only a couple of days in to Kamala Harris. We'll see what she means. We have seen some energy, especially in the black community, especially among black women in recent days here, volunteering and excited about a election that many of them were thinking about sitting out for. So we'll see how all that plays out here. As Harris lays out her plans, gets to campaigning, people start to familiarize themselves with her after. So she's been low key as a VP. Why? Because the media doesn't cover vice presidents because they're vice president. So we get many questions for people saying, "What has she done in three and a half years?" And we actually have to Google it because for the most part, the vice president's office will announce a whole bunch of events, but most media outlets don't tend to cover the vice president. So we'll get a sense of what she's been up to, especially as you play Jill, her relying on her prosecutorial and AG background. But what has she been up to for three and a half years? There are some vulnerabilities, right? She has to run on the same issues Biden was running on. There was very high inflation that has gone down. Can she better communicate the recovery there? Then there's immigration, a legal migration that has been significant over the last three years. She was put in charge of the border in that first year. It comes as you've seen record migrants across the border the last couple of years. So that's seen as vulnerability here. How does she communicate around that? Then there's overall global instability. Basically, all of the minuses, all the strikes against Biden here are perceived strikes. She's gonna have to explain, potentially say, I wasn't involved in that. We'll see if that happens, or if she strikes a united tone here and continues to stand up for the president. And then what is she gonna do about it all? Moving forward, she has an opportunity. Trump remains unpopular. We've noted this, that since he came on the scene a decade ago, there's never been a single poll out of tens of thousands of polls that have shown more Americans liking Donald Trump than not liking Donald Trump. And so Democrats here see that as an opportunity. At the same time, she's got high unapproval ratings. Sort of living this era where it's gonna be hard to get about 50% given how divisive things are. Look, literally, you could go around, going back to the top of the pot of jail. If you were a Democrat or Republican passing out free tequila and free ice cream to everyone, the other side, depending on your political affiliation, still will not like you and approve of you. So that's the challenge here. Can she bring up her approval levels? The Democrats will tell you that the largest coalition in America is not necessarily a pro-Democrat coalition, but an anti-Trump coalition. That's something that you took advantage of in 2020. If you look at his electoral past here, Trump has never won a popular vote, right? He lost the popular all along. He won the electoral college by the skin of his teeth in 2016, the Republicans, as he was president, lost Congress in 2018. He lost in 2020. Because of some of the Trump candidates in 2022, Republicans lost again. So Democrats are bullish. They're like, "Listen, ultimately here, "the majority of Americans have shown "not to be a big fan of his, but can Democrats "convince voters to vote for her?" That's gonna be part of her job here. Democrats' job in 105, 104 days, I think we're at now. 'Till election day. Ain't a twist here, Jill. One of the new lines Democrats will be trying is, "Hey, that other guy's really old." They no longer have the oldest candidate in the race. That is now Republicans. Keep in mind, Donald Trump, 78 years old, if he was to be inaugurated in January, he'll actually be a year older than behind was when he was inaugurated. So they're gonna try to make an age argument here. She's 20 years younger. As some people joke, Jill, this is the first time in America, they're calling a woman in her late 50s young, the media's calling her young, because by comparison here, she's 20 years younger than Trump. And by the way, no insult, 50 is young, 60 is young, as far as I'm concerned, now that I'm in my 40s. - I shall take it, Moshe. - There was a former certain CNN anchor who referred to Nikki Haley as past her prime in her 50s. He no longer has a job with CNN, he's independent, but let's move on. The question we have, and I joked about at the top, is will this energy last? It's like Democrats just got out of a terrible relationship, right? They couldn't break up with him, he had to break up with them. They're now on the first date with Kamala Harris, someone new, younger, is this gonna work? Well, it's exciting in the beginning, like all relationships, but. - I'm so into this analogy. - This is why I came up with this as I was thinking about the podcast today, Jill. And will it last? Well, for Democrats, sure, for independents, people who are sitting on the edges, we'll see. We'll see how they feel about Kamala Harris. One big test, who she picks as VP here. According to the Wall Street Journal, she has narrowed down the list already. There is Roy Cooper, the governor of North Carolina. There is Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania. Tim Walsh, the governor of Minnesota. JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois. And Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, an old female ticket there, potentially. But ultimately here, they have to vet them. They have to figure out, do they have skeletons in their closet? Are they having an affair right now? Have they shot a dog? Have they shot a person? Have they had a really problematic Halloween costume in the past? All of that stuff. They're gonna have to go through. And some of it may seem comedic, but ultimately they don't want to have any risky things come out in October, in the weeks leading up to the election. So Eric Holder, the former attorney general, who worked in the Obama administration, has a law firm, and Harris says, kick the tires and all these folks. And that's what they'll have to figure out. There's also Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, though apparently he hasn't been asked for his documents. So I don't know whether she's gonna go for him or not. Jill, there might be surprises, we don't know. But one of the things that you will have to realize is there's gonna be leaks over time because she doesn't have much time. So she has to put out names she's thinking about to make sure how the party reacts to it. So she can watch an MSNBC. You can see party activists and see social media and make sure that whoever she chooses, it doesn't lose her point. So that's the biggest thing with VP, is they might not gain you many points or gain you many votes, but the worst case scenario is that there are a problem for you. And so that's the thing they wanna prevent here. Debate, still set for September 10th. Trump said on a call with reporters on the last day, he will debate Harris. He's willing to do more than one debate. But now after having agreed previously to do the debate on ABC, he says ABC sucks and is biased and he wants the debate moved. I don't know what that'll mean. He tends to do this. But ABC right now currently set to host that debate in September. And then there's Joe Biden, the president, lame duck. That's the phrase they use if you're not running for reelection. He was seen for the first time in six days yesterday, returning to DC from Delaware, where he was recovering from COVID. And he announced yesterday, Jill, that he'll be giving a speech to the nation. EPM Eastern tonight, Jill. Stay tuned to the Instagram feed. He will address the nation from the Oval Office. And for the first time on camera, talk about his decision not to run for reelection. - And now to a follow up on a story that we have been reporting on the Delta Airlines debacle continues. And now the Department of Transportation has launched an investigation into the airline to make sure that it is following the law and treating passengers fairly after five straight days of massive flight disruptions. - Even on Tuesday, days after the global tech outage Delta canceled hundreds of additional flights. - Jill, half of all flight delays and cancellations in the world were all associated with Delta Airlines yesterday. - And this is as most airlines are back to business as usual, Delta and its Delta connection partners canceled close to 500 flights on Tuesday. That was just by midday on the East Coast. You mentioned half of the flights around the world, but two thirds of the cancellations in the United States according to FlightAware. And that is in addition to thousands of flights since the outage first happened late last week. A reminder that outage started Thursday night into Friday morning after a faulty software upgrade from the cyber security company CrowdStrike to more than eight million Microsoft computers around the world. Delta saying its employees are working 24/7 to restore operations. The CEO at Bastion also says it's gonna take another couple of days before quote, "The worst is clearly behind us." Delta has said upward of half of its technology systems run on Microsoft Windows, including a tool that the airline uses to schedule pilots and flight attendants. So that system just could not keep up with the high number of changes triggered by the outage. This investigation though, Moshe, is really about how the airline is treating passengers throughout the debacle. And we here at Monuse have really heard some nightmare stories. - Yeah, Jill, people stock for several days. There's images of videos coming from Atlanta, Hartsfield, the busiest airport in the world. Also happens to be the hub for Delta of just rows and rows of luggage in the baggage area and baggage claim, just everywhere. People just searching for random pieces of hundreds of pieces of luggage, trying to find their luggage. So the transportation department says they have launched an investigation. They're gonna look into reports of concerning customer service failures. Remember, under Buttigieg here, under Biden, they've really tried to ratchet up what the transportation department does for consumers, especially flyers, demanding refunds, not just airline credit. So make sure to know your rights here. It is notable Delta is the most profitable before and after the pandemic. The bet considered the best run operation typically does very well when it comes to surveys. I've been a loyal Delta passenger for a number of years, Jill. I'm gonna be flying them tomorrow. So fingers crossed that everything works out here. They are gonna investigate here how Delta has been processing, why they were different from everybody else. It appears uniquely they were running their crew scheduling system on this software. Crew scheduling is how you get your various flight attendants, pilots from city to city. And that went down. They also focused on canceling a lot of flights on Friday, while others went with delays. So there was a backlog of people. So this is sort of a reminder of what we saw as Southwest Airlines a few years ago, back in December of 2022, that whole debacle, that ended with Transportation Department investigation with Southwest agreeing to a $35 million fine, a $140 million settlement with passengers. Secretary of Transportation Buttigieg says he wants to hear from passengers who believe that Delta has not complied with the rules, issues you are having. The website, we'll put it in the show notes, is secure.dot.gov/air-travel/complaint. Go to the Transportation Department website. There should be a link there. But again, I'm not going to repeat that again for you, but it's in the show notes. - Yeah, as you're listening to this, driving to work. - Wait, secure it over. - That's done. - It's in the show notes, it's in the show notes, ever. - Although you might be at the airport. So in that case, you've got plenty of time, unfortunately, to figure out what the website is and put your complaint in. - All right, and we're always talking about health trends, nutrition trends here on the podcast. And one way to get in all your important nutrition is through Athletic Green's AG1 powder. We've told you about it for a while. Both Jill and I have been using it. It's just one scoop of AG1 with a glass of water in the morning. It's easy, it's quick, it lets you get on with your day, knowing that you've gotten all your key ingredients. 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Again, go to Shopify.com/Monus to grow your business no matter what stage you're in, Shopify.com/Monus. (bell dings) All right, time now for the speed read from the Washington Post, the director of the Secret Service is stepping down from her job following the assassination attempt against former President Trump that led to an outcry about how the agency tasked with protecting current and former presidents could fail in its core mission. Kimberly Cheadle initially had said that she would not resign and would cooperate with an investigation into the shooting, but during a House Oversight Committee hearing Monday, Cheadle faced withering scorn from both Republicans and Democrats when she declined to answer detailed questions about what went wrong at the Trump rally. - Joe, it was one of the worst congressional testimonies I have watched in two decades of watching congressional testimony on Capitol Hill, and I've seen hundreds and hundreds of hearings. We told you yesterday, this wasn't looking good for her. This is one of the rare moments where you got Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alexandria Acasio-Cortez, you've Jamie Raskin and James Comer, political opposites who despise each other and agree on very little besides the sky is blue, and that's about it. All agreed that the Secret Service director failed in her job, they wanted her out, and within 24 hours of both sides demanding that she go, she was gone. Cheadle had served as Secret Service director since August of 2022, so just under two years now, she had faced growing calls to go. We played a couple clips for you yesterday, Joe. I wanna play you another. This is an exchange, a short exchange here with Republican Congressman Pat Fallon of Texas who actually went about reenacting the shooting, the distance, the gun, et cetera. Take a listen. These are nothing but pathetic excuses, and they make no sense, and they're a bunch of cow-dung. All the law enforcement I've spoken with over the last nine days are amazed that the AGR rooftop was not secure, and you wanna know why, 'cause it's dangerous. I have never had any long-gun training in my life. I own an AR-15, and last time I shot it, I shot it one time my whole life was six years ago. That is until Saturday, where we recreated the events in Savoy, Texas, where you recreated what happened to Butler. I was lying prone on a slope roof at 130 yards at 630 at night, and I knew that he had a scope, but he didn't know what kind, red dot, or magnified. So I shot eight rounds from both. You know what the result was? 15 out of 16 kill shots, and the one I missed would have hit the president's ear. That's a 94% success rate, and that shooter was a better shot than me. It is a miracle President Trump wasn't killed. Corey compared, compared to Ray's life is over because that damn shooter made it on the roof. If it wasn't the roof that was dangerous, it was a nut job on top of the roof. You know what else is dangerous? I believe your horrifying ineptitude and your lack of skilled leadership is a disgrace. Your obvious skating today is shameful, and you should be fired immediately and go back to Garden Doritos. Mr. Chairman, I yield back. - Jill, you heard at the end there him saying, "Go back to protecting Doritos." That's a reference to the fact that while she spent two decades in the Secret Service, she had gone on to run security at Pepsi Company, which by the way makes Doritos, hence the reference there, before coming back to run the Secret Service just about two years ago. She sent an email to her team on Tuesday saying, "I take full responsibility for the security labs "in light of recent events. "I make the difficult decision to step down." We got a bunch of questions about the Secret Service budget, staff shortages. We should note that in looking into it, that Congress has actually given the Secret Service more than it's even asked for last year, but that came after a number of years where they didn't get enough. It takes a long time to recruit and train Secret Service agents. It's also a question of how they're allocating the money. So a lot of questions there, but they've been struggling for about a decade as they've taken on more tasks here. And so I imagine given who they protect, this will get a lot of scrutiny. - All right, from the New York Times, Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey told members of his staff on Tuesday that he planned to resign from Congress in late August, and it came after intense pressure from Democratic colleagues who really wanted him to step down or face an expulsion vote after his federal bribery conviction. Menendez's decision to quit months before the end of his third term will likely allow Democrats to avoid a potentially ugly intraparty fight at a highly fraught political moment, New Jersey's Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, is expected to appoint a replacement who would serve until January. - So Menendez has insisted he is innocent. He is vowed to appeal the guilty verdict here. That said, he's faced growing calls from basically everyone to go. Or they would give him the George Santos treatment and kick him out. He was a very powerful senator for two decades in Washington. In fact, what he's accused of is using his position as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to help out foreign governments. Effectively, traitorous activities here. He does plan to step down, it looks like August 20th. So a couple of weeks there, he does face a sentencing, which could put him in a prison for decades. In the fall, he says he's going to appeal here. He believes he has a shot. And he's not the only Menendez to face issues here. His wife, Nadine Menendez, who's undergoing cancer treatment, also implicated in all of this. And she will face a trial as well at a TBD date. - From CNBC, they say everything's bigger in Texas and between 2020 and 2023. That seems to have been true of population growth. Nine out of 10 U.S. cities and towns where populations grew at the fastest clip during that period are found in the Lone Star state that's according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau data. They focused on places with populations of 20,000 or more at any point between April 2022 and July of 2023. Salina, Texas, a city about 40 miles north of Dallas earned the top spot as its population grew by more than 143% between 2020 and 2023. As of July 2020, the city had a humble population of just about 17,000. And by July of 2023, that number had swelled to more than 43,000. Number two, also with more than 140% growth. Vulture, Texas, which is just outside of Houston. - Yeah, so those two blew up more than doubled there. It got Roy City, Texas, Melissa, Texas, Princeton, Anna, Forney, Amherst, Manor, and Georgetown, all with major growth there across Texas. CNBC has a full list on their website. You can attribute this to a variety of factors. One, the low cost of living in Texas compared to other states, the lack of a personal income tax in Texas. It also ranked number three for business ranking, starting a business, managing a business there. So the population has been growing steadily in Texas, really blew up during COVID thereafter. And so there you have it, Jill. I should note, my parents moved to Fort Worth, Texas in the last couple of years. So they've been a part of that move. - They're so on trend, Moshe. - My parents are very trendy, Jill. - Speaking of moves, finally, some good news for anyone in the market for a house. This also coming from CNBC. Inventory jumped more than 23% from a year ago to about 1.3 million units at the end of June. It comes amid record lows, but there's still just a four month supply. A six month supply is considered balanced between buyer and seller. These inventory levels though are the highest since May of 2020, boosted by homes sitting on the market longer. The average time that a home sat on the market was 22 days up from 18 days a year ago. The chief economist over at Realtors says that we are now seeing a slow shift from a seller's market to a buyer's market. Homes are sitting on the market a bit longer and sellers are receiving fewer offers. More buyers are insisting on home inspections and appraisals. And inventory is definitely rising on a national basis. Moshe, I was unaware that people were skipping home inspections. Not a good idea. - Oh yeah, during COVID, I mean, some of these sellers were getting like 20 offers, love letters about their house and you didn't even need to look at it or inspect it. That's how desperate people were to scoop things up. - What kind of love letters? Like I could see myself sitting out. - Yeah, like I could see my children here. I love your garden. I mean, Jill, it was remarkable if you talk to real estate agents in the past couple of years, the lengths people had to go to get, not even their dream house, like a house that they want to buy in an area they wanted. Now that said, it's not like prices are collapsing here and it's become a total buyers market. We're just speaking relatively compared to the past couple of years. A reminder, the median price of an existing home sold in June, just about $427,000. That's up significantly over the last couple of years here. And there's still a lack of inventory here. Jill, when you look at homes priced at a million or above, they are seeing some more sales there, notably the biggest price drop, came for homes priced $250,000 or less. So depending on where you're buying, how much you're looking at, et cetera, it could be different. Again, trying to paint national trend lines is challenging given the changes you're seeing regionally across the country. Supply still an issue, interest rates still higher than they have been for a number of years. So caution to the wind here, but again, things are starting to look slightly better for buyers. And finally, from the Guardian, world temperature records were shattered on Sunday on what may be the hottest day that scientists have ever logged. Partially due to climate change here, the average surface air temperature on all of Earth hit 62.76 degrees Fahrenheit Sunday. That's according to preliminary data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, which holds data that stretches back to 1940. The reading inched above the previous record of 62.74 degrees Fahrenheit set on July 6th of last year. But the scientists caution that the difference was not statistically distinguishable. - So we should note when they talk about global temperatures, we're talking about the Northern Hemisphere where it's summer and the Southern Hemisphere where it's winter. So that's significant here. They have been tracking global temperatures like this since 1940, but based on understanding from paleoclimate scientists who test tree rings, ice cores, lake sediments, a whole bunch of materials, they believe this is the hottest in 100,000 years here on Earth. So we already know that 2023 was the hottest year on record. It's looking very much like 2024 will beat that record. And this continues to spill over here into impact on our health in terms of wildfires. And we talked recently about all those heat related deaths in Texas. All right, now it's time for On This Day in History. On This Day in 1911, an American archaeologist named Hiram Bingham got his first look at the ruins of Machu Picchu. If you haven't been there, it's pretty remarkable. I'm told Alex has been there. I haven't gone, but I want to go at some point. This is tucked away in the rocky northwest of Peru. Machu Picchu is believed to have been a summer retreat for the Inca leaders of civilizations past. It was virtually wiped out by Spanish invaders 500 plus years ago. And for hundreds of years, its existence was only known to the peasants as a secret that will change on This Day in 1911 when Bingham arrived with his explorers. My husband has also been there, but I have not. All right, so our spouses have been there, Jill. We're taking the pot on the road to Machu Picchu someday soon. Fast forward to 1974 on This Day of the US Supreme Court rules that President Nixon has to provide transcripts of the Watergate tapes to a special prosecutor, the president they held-- this is the Supreme Court-- could not cite executive privilege as a reason to refuse releasing tape recordings that had been subpoenaed in a criminal case. Nixon would do this, and then eventually resign 16 days later. On This Day in 2005, American cyclist Lance Armstrong became the first rider to win the Tour de France. However, just seven years later, in 2012, all of it was stripped away, all of his titles, as he revealed doping, a lot of doping. He had initially denied using drugs. Then he finally admits it publicly in an interview with who else, Oprah, in 2013, tripping much of his success to performance-enhancing drugs. On This Day in 1998, the World War II drama, Saving Private Ryan, was released. One of the films in modern history that has heave the most amount of critical and commercial success at one five Academy Awards and a Best Director for Spielberg. Speaking of Spielberg, he is allegedly involved in the production of the DNC, so we'll see what Spielberg has in store for the week in August, which looks like it's going to be Kamala Harris' introduction to America. The Jaws soundtrack. Well, that's the soundtrack the Republicans will put on it, Jill. I don't know that she would use that one. I think there's more uplifting soundtrack. Beyoncé's freedom, I think, is probably about it. She's going to go with that. But maybe they get John Williams in the mix. He's composed like most of Spielberg's major epic films over the course of the past few decades. Speaking of music on This Day in 2001, turning 23 years old today in Sinks album Celebrity. It includes "Dirty Bop," "Girlfriend" and "Gone," among others. And Jill, I promise you a few birthdays today. J-Lo turns 55 years old today. Actress Elizabeth Moss is 42. And I assume this, but Michael Richards, Kramer from Seinfeld. Where does he rank on your favorite Seinfeld characters? Low, actually. He would be my least favorite. Interesting. Of the four. Of the four, yeah. Of the main four. I mean, he ranks probably above Newman. But Newman's underrated. Oh, wow. You put Newman above Kramer. I love Kramer. I happen to love them all, but just, I would say, in terms of ranking them, Kramer of the core four. Kramer's probably my least favorite. His number four. Noted. Well, anyway, Michael Richards, 75 years old today. All right, well, a big happy birthday to all of them. That music, by the way, no instruments used there. If Jill makes it on to Jeopardy, watch out in a Seinfeld category. I'll take Seinfeld for 400. Thank you. All right, thank you, guys, for listening to the Mo News Podcast. If you like what you hear, please share this with your friends. It will help us grow. Follow us and subscribe so you don't miss an episode. And review us in the App Store. Jill, we've got some really wonderful reviews lately. We appreciate all of you who've taken a moment to let the world know how you feel about the podcast. So make sure to do that, especially over on Apple. If you listen to us on the Apple Podcast platform, either way. Thank you, guys. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye. Thanks for listening to the Mo News Podcast. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
