After Party with Emily Jashinsky - AI Jobs Panic, FISA Fight, Pelley’s OUT at CBS, PLUS Emily vs Obama Bro

Episode Date: June 4, 2026

On the latest edition of “After Party,” Emily Jashinsky is joined by Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. They begin with a look at the latest developments in the Iran War and how President Trump is handling himself. Then they discuss the fight over renewing FISA Section 702, and Senator Paul offers his thoughts about Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie’s loss. Next Emily is joined by Wynton Hall, Breitbart News Director of Social Media and author of the New York Times bestseller “CODE RED: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI,” for an in-depth discussion on the future of AI…including what it means for jobs, our kids, the possibility of universal basic income, and data centers. They also discuss those viral AI Spencer Pratt ads, Pope Leo’s AI encyclical, and the dangers of deepfakes. Emily rounds out the show with Scott Pelley’s departure from “60 Minutes,” why he’s representative of the legacy media’s institutional trust issues, her online fight with Obama Bro Tommy Vietor, and more…   ZBiotics: Go to https://zbiotics.com/AFTERPARTY and use AFTERPARTY at checkout for 15% off any first time orders of ZBiotics probiotics.   Beam: Visit https://shopbeam.com/AFTERPARTY and use code AFTERPARTY to get our exclusive discount of up to 40% off.   SelectQuote: Compare top‑rated life insurance options. Visit https://SelectQuote.com/emily to get the right coverage at the right price. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to After Party. Thank you so much for joining us on tonight's edition of the show. We will be joined by Senator Rand Paul and Winton Hall, two great guests. We sat down with them earlier in the day, actually, so a lot to get to. I already know what the conversations are like, and they're fascinating. We covered so much ground with both of them. A lot of AI with Winton Hall, who has a new book out on artificial intelligence. It's called Code Red, and we spent a good bit of time, almost a full hour with Winton, talking through. some of the different takes on AI that are out there right now with the senator. We talked about

voting on war. We talked about the NDAA Section 224. If you haven't heard about this yet, it sounds really nerdy, but it is a fascinating situation, a little bit about Section 702, and the Pulte nomination to ODNI. So like I said, cover a ton of ground at today's show. I'm also going to do a breakdown of what the heck is happening over at CBS News and 60 minutes. So like I said, let's to get to. I'm so bad at reminding you to subscribe. But if you haven't subscribed on YouTube, that's the best way to help us continue doing our independent journalism. It helps the show so much to subscribe, to comment, to like, to share the video with a friend. Thank you to everybody who has done that. You can email me,

Emily at devilmaicaremedia.com for this week's edition of Happy Hour. That comes out every Friday, and I tape those on Thursday afternoon. So if you want to get something included in this week's edition of the audio-only version of the show, again, that comes out, podcast feeds only on Friday. Do go ahead. Shoot that over into my inbox by tomorrow afternoon. Otherwise, I'll get you in the next week's batch. All right, lots to get to, like I said, very newsy week here on After Party. So on with the show, we're going to have Senator Rand Paul and then author Winton Hall. And I'll take it home with an update, a breakdown of what's happening over at CBS News with Scott Pelly. So without further to do. Let's take a quick break and be back with Senator Paul.

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Remember to head to zbiotics.com slash after party and use the code after party at checkout for 15% off. We're joined now once again by Rand Paul, Senator from Kentucky. Senator, thank you so much for joining us. Glad to be with you. Very busy day on Capitol Hill. Actually, your colleagues on the House side are set to vote. on whether or not the president can continue this war if he should withdraw from Iran or put the matter before Congress. But I'm a little bit confused because the president's secretary of state

said yesterday in front of the Senate that the war was over wanted to roll S5 first. And I'll get your reaction. Zeru, you keep telling us how we're winning this war. The president keeps saying, well, the war is over now. Completely annihilated. The war is not over. And yet the American people see how we're losing at the pump and with their costs. And yet this thing still hasn't been resolved. Every day he tweets out, oh, we've obliterated them, we've annihilated them, they're going to surrender, but yet we still find ourselves spending billions of dollars a week. Yeah, Senator Booker, you've gone way over. It would be nice if we had hearings where people had to be held out.

Thank you, Senator Booker, Senator Scott. So, Senator Paul, is it the war over? Should Congress now vote on it because it's not over? What's the truth here? It's kind of confusing. Some say the war is over and some say the war never started. There never was a war, nothing to see here, no war here. It is very confusing, and the American public are sometimes perplexed by this. The soldiers that give up their lives to fight in these wars, I think, are sometimes disappointed that they've been told it was a skirmish or they're not really sure it's a war, or it didn't really count as a significant enough war to vote on in Congress.

When this debate came up over Venezuela, we saw the Office of Legal Counsel. This is the president's lawyers that whether it's a Republican or Democrat always argue for executive power. And they argued that a constitutional war is not a constitutional war unless there are significant casualties. If that's the definition, though, then you'd have to wait until a war really is fully sort of commenced and ongoing and the casualties are mounting before you could decide whether it's enough of a war that it should be declared. I don't think that's what the founding fathers intended, you know, from Hamilton to Madison, the full spectrum of founding fathers, they all spoke very clearly and with one voice and said that the initiation, the declaration of war should not be left in the hands of the executive, that

vesting this power in the legislature was a much better way to try to prevent and contain war. So I disagree with all these people that say, oh, it's a muddle definition, there's not a war, a war. When we are going to war, it is very clear when we were going to war. We went to war in Venezuela. It was short and swift, but it was a war. We went in, bombed their capital city and absconded with their president. The war in Iran, same thing. Absolutely without question is war. We've dropped more ammunition and more munition than you can count on Iran. So, of course, it's a war. I would say now, though, the debate is beyond that. I've argued and voted for the War Powers Act because I think we should declare war when we go to war.

We still keep having these votes, but now they say the war is over, and there's another debate we're having about ending war. And there's an author back from the 70s. He was an undersecretary under defense policy under Reagan named Fred Inclay. inclay. And he wrote a book called Every War Must End and said that basically we're very good at preparing for the first battle, we're inept at preparing for the last battle, and that we sometimes have a disconnect in that we think military victory resolves a problem or leads to political resolution.

And this is what I asked Secretary Rubio yesterday, is that really this is the disconnect. We have absolutely and ultimately oblige. They've literated their military. We have conquered Iran militarily. We have won the war. And yet the things we want we're still unable to get. We would like to see them get rid of their enriched uranium and never start the program again. But really, even after winning the war, we are still going to have to negotiate.

So I am pleased that Secretary Rubio and the Trump administration are negotiating. There are some in my party. I don't want to mention any names, but Lindsey Graham are. are opposed to any kind of negotiation with the terrible, evil, awful regime. But really, when you negotiate an end of the war, they aren't your friends. You negotiate with adversaries you don't trust. But one thing you wouldn't have to wait and trust the Iranians on would be if they were willing to get rid of and export their 440 kilograms of enriched uranium.

So, but if you want them to do that, defeating them militarily wasn't enough. They still want something else. They want relief of sanctions. So my recommendation to the secretary was be full-throated, offer as much sanction relief as we can possibly offer if they will export the enriched uranium and then they will let us monitor them. We could always put the sanctions back on. And it's been my opinion for years now that the sanctions themselves don't actually work. Iran's not changed any behavior because of sanctions, but guess what?

they might, if we remove the sanctions. So removal of sanctions actually has some impact and can have some effect. Sanctions themselves almost never have any effect. We have hundreds of sanctions on China. They haven't changed any behavior. We have hundreds of sanctions on Russia. They haven't changed any behavior. But really, as you go to end a war, if we're either going to end the Iranian war or in the

Ukraine-Russian war or be part of that, relief of sanctions is part of what you offer to one side to get them to settle. And this isn't understood by some of the more primitive members of my party and of the political scene. They believe that you should never give in. Everybody who trades anything in diplomacy is Chamberlain and it'll be Munich in 1939. And so that kind of simplistic thinking leads to perpetual war. I think Trump's instincts on this are pretty good.

I think he does want to end the war. And so I've been trying to encourage those who are negotiating to, yes, let's offer trading sanctions relief for removing enriched uranium. And this is where it's difficult because the prime minister of Israel, who talks to the president frequently, does not seem to want to, it does not seem to want the United States to give on those questions. Mark Levine, who also seems to be talking to the president very frequently, has criticized that as well. Now, there's a video that came out today of Donald Trump in an interview with Miranda Devine agreeing or confirming the story in Axios, a story that we saw during the Biden

administration several times as well, that the American president erupted on the Israeli president Netanyahu. Trump said in this case, actually, that was true over these negotiations. Here's S-6. We'll watch the video. Now, Axios reported that you had a phone call with Bibi Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, in which you were angry with him. You said, are you effing crazy? What are you effing doing? I helped you stay out of jail. Is that true? Did you speak to him in those I did. I would say angry. I was a little bit perturbed at his constantly fighting with Lebanon. You know, at some point, I said, maybe we've got to stop this. We've got to stop it. And Lebanon has obviously become a critical point in this negotiation as well, Senator. So is it Netanyahu that is right now, as you say, the president seems to want to give something?

But is it Netanyahu that does not want the United States to give anything, whether that's, you know, sanctioning what's happening in Lebanon or the like? Is that really the main hurdle, do you think right now from Trump's perspective? You know, I can't confirm what Netanyahu is for or against in this. I'm proud of President Trump for standing up and defending our sovereignty and that we make the decisions based on our interest. I can confirm that the president has a wide vocabulary, including every expletive known to. a man, though I think it is possible that he has used some of that language in other phone calls. But I think really ultimately it's about the president's standing up for what is our interest. And so I can't characterize your phone call. I didn't listen to it. But it sounds to me like people are characterizing it as President Trump standing up for what he thinks is best for our country, even with allies. And I think that's why it's important that people be allowed to stand up and say what's

important for our country, no matter which country it involves, because there's such a delicacy that criticism sometimes of Israel in particular is taken as to mean some sort of, you know, hatred of the, you know, primary religion of Israel. And I don't think that should be the case when you have a disagreement over a foreign policy. But I think the president is trying to end the war. I think he sincerely doesn't like war. I wish we hadn't gotten involved in this war. but I do commend him with trying to find a good piece. And actually, this is another interesting question, congressionally.

And the NDAA on the House side, draft NDAA, has something called Section 224, that the Quincy Institute we can put up on the screen flagged. This is F6. Senator, I think you would probably oppose this. I'm curious to get your take if it were the U.S. and the Egyptian military, the U.S. and the Mexican military. But what it looks like right now, as the Quincy Institute puts it,

is that it would not just fuse the U.S. in Israeli military sections, sectors. It would let Israel build weapons facilities in U.S. congressional districts, creating jobs that give lawmakers a direct political stake in protecting the relationship. And it's the same model. Quincy says the F-35 made the F-35 impossible to cancel. It's a great reference, except this time it's a foreign government building political leverage, not a defense contractor. You're on the Homeland Security Committee, Senator. Have you seen this draft NDAA? I assume this would be a no-go with you. Where is it coming from? Who would put language like that into an NDAA?

You know, this is my first read of it, so I've not seen it and haven't, not sure I can give a strong conclusion to it yet. But no, I'm not real excited about foreign countries having, you know, weapons plants in our country. Weapons are a unique thing. While I'm a free market capitalist and I don't think government should be involved in business, you know, as little as possible. I think arms manufacturers, since they're missiles, you know, there aren't sportsmen people buying missiles. There is no market other than to central governments. And really, the arms manufacturers in the U.S. primarily, the customer is us, but we do sell them to the whole world. I mean, there's probably three dozen countries that buy our weapons. But I do believe that we have

a unique obligation to oversee arms manufacturer in our country and who they go to. Frankly, we do limit. You know, you can't make intercontinental ballistic missiles and sell them to China, for example, or to Russia. So we do limit where our arms go and we limit how they're produced and who makes them. So we will look carefully at this language, but I can't tell you more until we've had a chance to review it. I'm so curious to get your take on this report from Punch Bowl today. Right now, the reauthorization of Section 702, amusingly enough, seems to actually be on the line because your colleague, Senator Mark Warner, Democrat, is now threatened. 7.02 over the Bill Pulte nomination to take over for Tulsi Gabbard at ODNI.

Now, Republican senators were asked about the Pulte nomination. Obviously, the chatter is that he doesn't have experience in the space. And the criticism is that he's basically a MAGA activist. But here's S-7 response to, from leadership to a question about him yesterday. Bill Pulte, I've heard Republicans, not just Democrats, but Republicans also have deep, deep concerns about his qualifications for such an important job. Do you think that Bill Pulte has the experience to be the acting DNI, and same with you, Senator Cotton, as the chairman of the Intelligence Committee?

I'll defer the chairman on that. We was made aware of that appointment this morning. Senator Cotton, you want to speak to that? We have four more weeks with Director Gabbard as the DNI, and I look forward to implementing last year's Intelligence Authorization Act with her to implement why. wide-ranging reforms that will shrink the DNI and take it back to its original intent to provide a mere coordinator or process role for the intelligence community. I have no observation.

So a couple of things there, a couple of things there, Senator, on the one hand, you have the chit-chat that Republicans in the Senate are uncomfortable with the Palti nomination. Even Punchball is reporting that Democrats say maybe they're doing a favor by holding Section 702, hostage as Mark Warner would see it over the Pulte nomination. But then on the other hand, for critics of the 702 reauthorization, like yourself, it's a bizarre silver lining, perhaps. Like, how does this change the dynamic? You know, I would like to hold FISA, Section 702 and FISA hostage over the constitutional

problems. Yes. So I mean, if we were holding it hostage and saying, we're going to hold it up because it contravenes the Fourth Amendment and we're going to have a debate, wow, I'd be right there. And I am there and I will make that argument. A lot of people, you know, they look back and they hear these things from President Trump and President Trump talked about the Russian hoax.

He talked about how they spied on his campaign and how they took bits of information, and I think they did this intentionally. I don't think it was an accident that information from members of his campaign who were in bars overseas in London and different places were recorded. I think that was done purposely

and it was done by our intel agencies I think it was directed by President Obama. And I think there was a great deal of evidence in January of 2016 as he was coming in. They were saying, and these were published reports, get this information, spread it throughout government. We're going to try to keep them from hiding this stuff we've discovered. But what they did is they surveilled a major party nominee, Donald Trump, as he was a nominee. And they did it using basically some of FISA, but also really just using the clandestine apparatus of our intel agencies to go after an American. So there needs to be reformed. There's also

evidence that Americans, by the tens of thousands, have had their metadata taken by government. I think one year it was in the millions, and then they've reformed it down to a lower number now. But you should not have your private data, metadata looked at without a warrant from a judge in a public court for an American. If you want to spy on Libyans or you want to spy on the North Koreans, you don't need a warrant. People overseas, the Constitution doesn't apply to. So any threat from without, it doesn't apply to. Within our country, almost any warrant that you ask for, if you say we think somebody is involved with plotting terrorism in our country and you have any evidence to stand on, you will get a warrant. But I don't think we should be

searching. What happens now is there's this big database. So if I talk to you and you have a reporter colleague that gives you information from Gaza, and then the person in Gaza talks to somebody in Hamas, now I'm three hops away from Hamas, and I'm in there. And if you and I had a private conversation about Hamas or politics or whatever, the government shouldn't be allowed to listen to that. And they do it without a warrant. And then what they do is, let's say the conversation that they are eavesdropping on, it's somebody who talks to somebody who talks to somebody. So now they're connect to the Middle East, but in the conversation, the two people want to buy marijuana from each other, and marijuana is illegal in that state, and it's still illegal federally.

Now what you can do is you can say, oh, we didn't have to have any warrant. Oh, and they discussed that they're going to buy it on a street and corner in downtown Nashville at 3 o'clock on Friday. They say, well, we won't tell anybody we got the information from here, but by golly, we're going to be on the street corner at 3 o'clock, and we'll catch them selling drugs there. that's not what the terrorism, that's not what the foreign intelligence, the Raiden's Court should be for. I want to stop terrorism, but I don't want them use this as a backdoor way to surveil Americans.

We should use the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment has probable cause. You have to go to an independent judge. They have to have probable calls that you're in the commission of a crime or going to commit a crime. The FISA Act says all they have to have is probable cause that you might be associated with a foreign government. So it's not the Fourth Amendment. It's a special, lower, less-than constitutional standard that they use. And, you know, Donald Trump's the most prominent example of this abuse, but tens of thousands

of Americans have been spot on. Many have been who will never know it because they destroy evidence that they've done it to you. And then they go roundabout to get the evidence in a way they can use in court. And then they never use in court the information they got illegally through the FISA databases. So, no, we should fix this. The president historically was for fixing this. This was a big, you know, this was a big undertaking.

The President Trump supported many members of the House. The Speaker of the House used to support this until he didn't support this. So I still support it. I still support and believe what they did to Donald Trump was wrong and that we ought to fix it. Last question, Senator. Your friend, Congressman Thomas Massey, also a Kentucky Republican with Liberty. libertarian sensibilities, lost his primary election last week, of course, still got 45% of the vote. But basically, I just am wondering if that changes the way that you look at your job, the way that you look at future elections, does it have a chilling effect?

Or was it the outcome that you basically expected? You know, I think it could have a chilling effect on some people. For me, you know, I had a good position. Physician and surgeon for many years, I can go back to doing that at any point in time. I'm not afraid to lose. I take only one oath. My oath is to the Constitution. My oath is to, you know, be faithful to the Constitution.

And I'll continue to do the same. To me, it's a great privilege to be able to be part of the national debate. I've been privileged to have been elected three times from Kentucky. And we'll see in two years what, you know, what happens. But to me, it's a great honor to be part of the nation's debate. Well, it's an honor to have you on the program, sir. Thank you so much for your time today. Thank you.

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for up to 40% off Beam's dream powder. So seriously, think about it. How much would you pay for a truly great night of sleep? With my discount, afterparty, go to shopbeam.com slash afterparty today. Well, I'm joined now by my friend Winton Hall. He is Breitbart News, as director of social media. He's a distinguished fellow at Peter Schweitzer's Government Accountability Institute. He's author of The New York Times Bestseller, which we're about to talk about. It's called Code Red, the left, the right, China, and the race to continue. Control AI. He's a member of the Yaff Board of Directors along with me, of course, and Winton has ghostwritten or co-authored 21, 21 books, seven of which became New York Times bestseller.

This man is a writer's writer. Witten, thanks for being here. Oh, it's so great to be with you. Thank you, Emily. Appreciate it. Yeah, congrats on the bug. I mean, such incredible timing to release a book like this. It came out in March, just as all of this discussion, it felt like, just started skyrocketing. I mean, really a couple of years ago, but recently the data center boom, we're going to talk about all of it. I do want to start, though, with Sam Altman because he's here in Washington, D.C. today, meeting with some of his fiercest critics and skeptics, including Bernie Sanders. Let's start with this clip here of Senator Sanders ahead of the meeting, S-1. Are you going to be meeting with him?

Yeah. Oh, okay. And are you going to talk to him about your legislation? Who set that meeting up? He did. And do you think it was because of this? Who knows? What are you going to say to him?

What am I going to say to him? I'll say to him tomorrow what I'll say to him. But, I mean, what we will discuss is the need for a moratorium so that we can have a democratic debate and discussion about the future of AI. We'll talk about that. we will talk about the need for international cooperation so that we do not have a super intelligence, super AI created, which can escape human control.

And you said the time has come to reclaim what has been stolen from us. Since AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth that generates must also benefit humanity, not just Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos. That's right. Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison. You didn't name Sam Walton there,

but I assume he's in that category. Put him in, yeah. I mean, how do you think he views you saying reclaim what was stolen from us? Well, I don't know how he will respond. That is my view. Do you think the people in the world who contributed, who created, in a sense, the knowledge that is AI, deserve to be compensated? I do. And Witten, I want to start also with a clip of Sam Altman from not long ago talking about the potential effect on jobs.

He's a little bit of a word. People who follow this closely know with Anthropic. and Dario Amadei, so let's start with S2 here with Altman on jobs. And when you have people in AI say, well, yeah, sure, there's going to be no jobs, or 50% of jobs are going to go away, or 90% of jobs are going to go away. And, you know, AI is kind of going to be smarter than you at everything. And, you know, we'll give you some basic income, but there's like, you're not really going to have a roll.

That's horrible. And by the way, you know, this AI company, maybe we're going to destroy all the jobs, will be the most valuable company in the world. People just look at you and you're like, yeah. So I think it's a terrible message. And I don't think it's that we haven't articulated the upsides. I think people actually believe us.

Like, you know what? Go cure cancer. That sounds great. I think we have failed to articulate as an industry how people stay in control of determining the future at every step and have a really meaningful life in all the ways we care about.

And Dario Amadee had been saying he believes 50% of white collar jobs could be wiped out by generative AI. Now, the historian Neil Ferguson, not to just keep front-loading the question, but just so people understand how urgent this is, today the historian Neil Ferguson wrote in the free press that he sees us going into two camps,

the kind of degrowth camp and the effective accelerationist camp, and he's the biographer of Henry Kissinger, and he said, when Kissinger wrote in 1957, his book on the nuclear age, I think it was called Nuclear Age and Foreign Policy, he said that's actually really what we need now, People can pick up Code Red, of course.

But I just wanted to kind of get your take because it's not only coming from Bernie Sanders. There are people in the left, right and center who have concerns about where this is going, whether it's from the acceleration or degrowth side. Now, that's exactly right, Emily. So what I try to do in Code Red was showed the roses of possibility.

There will be many. Many of us are using AI in different ways for benefit, but also the landmines. And what you've got your finger on smartly is this big discussion around universal basic income, jobs, displacement, disruption. So what do we know? Well, Dario Amadee has been out there saying that in the next 12 months, not 12 years in the far future, 12 months to 5 years, Dario Amade is saying we're going to see the wipe out of 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs.

Those are the kids you and I try to help at Young America's Foundation, the first or second rung of the work ladder that they're trying to. to get that experience and he's saying that's going away. You also, it's not just, it's not just Dario, you're also seeing Mustafa Suleiman, Microsoft AI's CEO saying that within the next 12 months to 18 months, you're going to have a wipeout of 100% of white collar job tasks. Now, just to be clear, he's not saying all jobs go away, Emily, in that time. What he's saying is that the ability to outsource and automate those tasks will. So what will it depend on? It'll depend on the diffusion of technology at the corporate level.

We saw, you know, just recently, Ken Griffin at Citadel talk about, and it was such a contrast. Nine months ago, he was saying, oh, AI is a lot of hype and it's going to be a bubble and the rest. And then he just recently, just a couple of days ago, was stating that he's seeing agentic AI demonstrations that, quote, made him depressed because it can do the work of a PhD-level expert. Now, here's what I think we've got to understand.

You might believe all this is hype in marketing, and this is just a bunch of CAPEX raise because these guys have got to get billions of dollars in investment. Or you may say, no, I think these people are very sincere and they really believe this, and they're just trying to warn us that we're on a seismic shift. In one regard, it almost doesn't matter,

and that's in this. Either way, if you fear that kind of seismic economic shift, you can politically weaponize that to push for, and build support for a universal basic income. And the reason that you and I were smiling when we were watching Sam, of course, is that in Code Red, I talk about this. Sam is the biggest funder of the largest ever UBI study in American history. Okay.

In 2016, he went on his blog and he said, I think that we're going to need something like this. I want to do a longitudinal study. To his credit, he put in $14 million of his own dollars, 60 million in total, did a multi-year study. Results were about what you'd think. Some people worked a little more, a little less, leisure time. But the real takeaway was what he said in his 2016 blog.

He said, I also think that one day we'll think it's silly that we ever use fear of not eating as motivation for human work. Now, you and I know that as the Protestant work ethic. Maybe the fulcrum of free market capitalism. Or even just hunting and gathering. And so here, you know, out with the old. But here's what I wanted, particularly for right of center thinkers, Silicon Valley elites have been, it's not just Sam, of course.

There's a huge UBI movement that has been working for many years. You've actually written a lot about this early on. That is very much dedicated to using the artificial intelligence boom as a bludgeon for resetting the global economic order, national security and the rest. And so we're in a 5D chess game here. And I wanted right of center and moderate people and just people in general to really get caught up. So I spent two years deep diving in this world. And this book, you were sweet to mention all the books I've done. I'll tell you, Emily, this book took me to places I'd never been before, just real honestly, when you really look at the existential questions, and I know you're so good on

talking about, you know, faith and reason and meaning and all those things, it really opens up the door. So I think we're going to have this big debate, and I think people have to understand some of it is an influence operation and trying to convince you of things to push you toward a political agenda. And some of it is legitimate. And the other part of it is they're afraid because they know the pitchforks and tortures are coming for them. Right. And it's not just relegated to the left. We were talking about this. One part in your book that I pulled out, actually, I think this might be from the conclusion, but you write, the drive to embed AI into bureaucratic systems carries both promise and peril, as the Doge examples show machine learning, deep learning, facial recognition,

and natural language processing can root out waste, fraud, and abuse, saving taxpayers' money. Yet the federal pipelines that make government more efficient could also enable a surveillance state that violates American freedoms, privacy, and liberties. This reminded me actually of big news out of Iowa last night. Zach Lane, we can toss this up on the screen, F3, He won the nomination over the Trump back pick, interestingly enough, Randy Feintra, for Iowa governor as a Republican. He has called for a complete moratorium on data center construction in Iowa. He has been very, very skeptical of what big tech is trying to do with those data centers. And there is.

I mean, on the, on war room, you constantly have Joe Allen talking about this. It's very serious. There's a lot of right-wing backlash to things like Palantir. So when people read what you wrote there about the surveillance state, it sounds actually a lot like China, to be honest. Where do you sense the right going as this debate heats up? Are you optimistic about the right landing in a good place? I am optimistic if we can really start having the family conversation. You know, the best of conservatism has always happened in the grassroots when we all get in a room and respect each other and debate it vigorously in a robust debate.

And I wrote Code Red to really try to spark that, you know, internecine kind of discussion. One of the things I think the thing on, you know, when you look at data centers, so let's just take a couple of things there, right? It depends on how you define data center. If you're only talking about AI data center, cloud, other things, you're looking at 4,000 in existence, but you're talking about wanting to bring on 1,500 new data centers. And, of course, we saw the rate-payer protection pledge of President Trump, Vice President Vance, orchestrated. with the AI architects. That was a pledge. That's voluntary. Certainly a step in the right move.

What it was trying to do just for those that are newer to the conversation is, you know, make sure that your water bill and electric bill aren't picking up the tab for billionaires and said they would pick it up. You've heard our energy secretary talk about and our interior secretary talk about that we need to essentially allow these tech companies to become essentially energy companies, bring your own energy. You remember back in the day, we would say bring your own, you know, beer. Well, this is bring your own energy. And I think that people hear that. And I think they say, you know, look, even beyond me worrying about the noise pollution, the, you know, the environmental stuff, all of the disruption, they worry about are we building data centers that are just going to replace our kids' jobs in the next five, ten years.

On the worker's side, you know, the argument that the administration has put forward is that, look, this is actually, a boom for the trades. And it's true. In some cases, you're seeing pay premiums of 30% for drywall hangers, electricians, plumbers, HVAC, concrete pores. But the question, of course, is what about their progeny, right? Like, what's going to happen once those data centers really are there and are able to take over? I think we have to start having these discussions. My biggest thing right now is this on these data centers, you kind of make the case. Look, the burdens on these tech companies, They have to be the ones to make it. Let's do it the old-fashioned way with a rhetorical debate,

and let's hear what are the benefits. If local communities determine that those benefits outweigh the detriments, then great. They should have the ability to build as they wish. But the reality is another final thing, is that in many cases, if you're saying that AI and data centers are essentially existential or tied to the national security apparatus, they're potentially military targets, right?

And so a lot of people have real, I think very legitimate and genuine concerns. And, you know, you just can't have these elites to say, yeah, deal with it, peasant. We're going to do what we want. I think it's offensive and I think it's wrong. Oh, that's so interesting. I hadn't thought about that before. I mean, these are going in some very residential parts of the country, not too far in some cases from local community schools and the like. One of the reasons, interestingly enough, this, well, let's start here.

I mean, I was watching the Tucker Carlson Kevin O'Leary interview because Kevin O'Leary is behind, one of the people behind, what is going to be a massive data center in Utah, massive, is projected to use more energy than the entire state of Utah. And O'Leary was saying to Tucker Carlson, basically that most of the backlash he fears is being ginned up by Chinese bots as an influence operation. And you write a good bit about China in Code Red. And one of the questions that it's sort of a first principle type question. I've heard Scott Besson say, you know, if China beats us on AI, it's game over. I guess I'm sort of wondering what it means to beat China on AI, if that makes sense. Like, what does that even, what does it look like? It sounds kind of nebulous to me.

Yeah, it's a genius question, Emily. So we do have to beat China. But what I say in Code Red is we have to beat them without becoming China. No one of us want to live in a techno authoritarian CCP surveillance. state, okay? We're not saying we need to emulate China because we already know what they do. I mean, we know that they use facial recognition for targeting the Uyghurs. We know that they can surveil their entire database for facial recognition of dissidents or others within seconds. We don't want that kind of world and we certainly don't want the CCP's

version of it. On the other hand, there's not, when we call it a race, it's a little bit of a broken metaphor because, you know, in a race, there's a finish line, right? I mean, you're running a marathon. There's a finish line. There is no finish line. The trophy, if you will, in the AI race, is in two areas, and this is why we do have to beat China. And a lot of conservatives are very strong on national security or maybe not even China Hawks, but they just, they understand, you know, communism and the nature of it. Let me talk about the two, though, that I think are really uniquely geared toward AI. So the first one is the economics, right? So I really want everybody to hear this because it takes a little time for you to really let this marinate in your mind. It did for me,

at least. 40% of the S&P 500 is constituted around the MAG 7, the 7, the magnificent 7, our seven largest tech companies, which is the AI epicenter. So it is an economic tent pole, right? And so when you really think about all being all, in that regard, you understand the economics. China certainly understands that, Emily, because you remember when they had the deep seek moment, remember when they launched Deep Seek and cratered the world, what happened? They relaunched their AI, Deep Seek R1, their R1 model. And in one day, we saw the single largest market cap wipeout in any company in American history, 600 billion. That's with a B. We're talking two-thirds almost of a number.

trillion, wipe out in a single day. So we know this economic tug of war between us and China for prosperity and economic flourishing. That's the first reason. But the real reason, of course, is the national security. And I will say this. Recently, I'm more encouraged, there's been a little bit more of a bipartisan understanding of the national security stakes that generally happened after the mythos release of Anthropics Mythos released, which I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about. But why we have to is because we understand recursive self-improvement.

So RSI is this theoretical concept in AI. And again, for those newer to the conversation, real simply, it is this idea, the theoretical point at which AI will be able to update and improve recursively its own code. If and when you hit that, you get on an exponential. The implications for cybersecurity and national security.

That would mean you have full spectrum dominance in things like code hacking, hacking of missile systems, hacking of infrastructure, banking, medical, missile systems, the whole gamut. How close are we to that when? We're not

there yet. Now, recursive self-improvement at a small level scale, yes, we are starting to see that kind of behavior. With mythos would be a good example. Mythos is more about cybersecurity finding vulnerabilities, but yes, it absolutely is using recursive movements. But the kind of theoretical, when you're talking about in the national security space,

what I like to really remind people, a lot of people say, oh, I don't buy this whole superintelligence and sentience. You don't have to believe in any of that or even think that any of that's possible, that's sort of more sci-fi version of AI, because you just have to look at the cybersecurity. So you brought up mythos. Let me just give one little nugget on that. Anthropic releases mythos. Dario Amade says, we're not going to go public with this. Some people said, great marketing trick. You're making it sound like it's so powerful. We can't even release it. It's so good. And in tech, they have used that little marketing trick before. But this was real, and it caught the attention of the administration, who is very pro-acceleration. And here's what happened. They said, we're going to put it in glass. which is a security approved containment where only 40 at the time now it's getting expended to 150 organizations can have access to it and here's why they did that it was

finding zero-day exploits vulnerabilities in cybersecurity that human beings had missed having reviewed that same code for 27 years and it found thousands of them secretary besent went and briefed the heads of the banking industry vice president vance found out and realized, my goodness, are local, like rural hospitals, rural, small working class towns that have small banks and small

hospital systems that don't have fancy cybersecurity. This could create a real vulnerability. And so they took action. And I think that was appropriate that they took action. And that's the stakes here. So it's really hard. Two things can be true at the same time. A lot of hype, a lot of smoke and mirrors,

but also some real threat factors. Well, and your point about the SMP and the MAG7 reminds me of, I wish I could credit who said this the other day, it was such a smart point. It's almost like a trap, and you might have a more optimistic take, but it feels like if the worst case scenario from Amade's perspective happens and 50% of white collar jobs are wiped out, well, then maybe we're not in a bubble and you don't see a severe market crash. But if you do wipe out 50% of white collar jobs, then maybe that's how you sustain the bubble and you prevent it. from ever crashing because there's such a big part of the S&P 500. Is there any, do you see any truth to that dynamic? Is that kind of a trap? So right now it's such an important thing.

There's a big debate. The David Sachs of the world, the four, you know, czar for AI under Trump, Mark Andresen, others, they're out there talking a lot about this concept that you're maybe familiar with from economics, Jevons Paradox. Jevins Paradox is this idea that the cheaper a resource becomes, the more prevalent it becomes. And so it really harkens back to the era of the coal era. And people thought, oh, well, once the prices are going down, it's going to go away.

No, they just found more uses for it. They're equating that to the intelligence revolution, as the price of intelligence goes towards zero, that it's going to free up capital and opportunities for others. On the other side, you have people like Mustafa Suleiman at Microsoft AI, the CEO. And what he says is no. AI is fundamentally labor replacing for this reason. You and I, we grew up, you know, the free market, you know, capitalist, theology, if you will, talk to us, that, hey, the pie will expand.

Yes, jobs went away in the Industrial Revolution, but new jobs were created, right? So it will take away and it will give. The difference, say, the AI architects this time is something called agentic AI, not just your chatbot generative AI. Agentic AI is an agent, meaning agency, as in it can autonomously take agency action in the world, and it takes over your cursor, and it opens up and can actually do the work end-to-end. It can open a banking account, register an LLC, get you a brand logo, build you the website, build you an email campaign, build you a social media profile, actually do end-to-end action. That is already in existence now.

And what the argument that the AI architects make is, yes, there will be. be new jobs created, but those two will be done by AI if it involves cognitive thought work or repetitive task work, non-shifting of things in the atoms in the world, in other words, not physical labor. And so that's going to be the big wager. Is it Jevins paradox? Oh, wow, the pie's just going to grow. The free market capitalism is going to win the day. Or no, have we really created and gone through a threshold that is a new inflection point? And the final point on that is the economists say, look, there's never been a time that a new technology didn't ultimately create more jobs than it destroyed. But historians will tell you, you know, there was a lot of pain and suffering during those intervening transition years of that industrial revolution.

So the reason why I wanted to write code bread, though, is I think that free market conservatives and people who stand on that and do not want mass wealth redistribution and understand that work is more than just a paycheck. it has to do with our dignity. It has to do with our meaning in the world. Do your work as unto the Lord. Has almost a theological level of meaning to them. That the left is very much excited. Ilhan Omar said that UBI, that COVID checks, our mailbox money we got during COVID,

was just a dry run for universal basic income. Getting people used to the idea, hey, we can stay at home and do our yoga, and we can paint and we can do art. The government will just send us the mailbox money, you know, Santa Claus government, that kind of thing. And they realize that this could be the moment that they can actually make that work if enough people are terrified that AI or think it's inevitable that AI is going to replace human work. Yeah, Marx's utopian dystopia of fishing and poetry and the same day. But this is actually a really great place to bring up F5, wonderful article from the great writer Tyler Austin Harper, who I believe is a leftist.

He's a fantastic writer. He's done many, many great pieces for The Atlantic, where he wrote this one, just published yesterday. The headline here is there's already a word for the deep moral failures of AI. And it's about how he started to sense, as he paid much closer attention to this debate, that Christians were picking up on some of the deep philosophical questions at hand in a superior way to secular thinkers. And particularly on the issue of Amago Day, he was really zero. in on why that helped Christians kind of come more helpfully to a philosophical or a grasp philosophically on the potential dangers or just the questions at stake. And you know, this, I'm curious for your take on the papal and cyclical, Winton, because I know you read it eagerly, F4, we could pop up on the screen. One of the things that I noticed in it was this line where, first of all, Leo cites Francis, and Francis was basically at one point, it's around, I mean, it was early in his papacy, I think, nodding to the journalists who broke some stories about scandals in the church.

But the line from Leo, to me, he said the church has to be ahead of some of these things before they get to us, kind of it. It reminded me of the printing press and of Luther and basically how that upended the Western world. You don't really have a powerful reformation without Gutenberg and the printing press. And so in a couple of different ways, I think people who are coming from, from a non-secular perspective, pick up on how the premises of our society are sort of at question here in this daily political, economic question about how we're restructuring our lives and our economy. Yeah, I was so thankful for the Pope's encyclical because I think it helps to open this conversation far beyond just the sort of tech pro Silicon Valley orbit or even,

even the political orbit. I think it also really brought up the core questions about, you know, what is, what is humanity and how are we different than machines? And the answer is our souls, right? You can replicate our language patterns. You can replicate our syntax and lexicon and so forth and in a large language model and so forth. But that essence, that God-given essence that makes us have real empathy, right? And so, yes, a system can feign empathy. It can sound like it cares. but actually caring in a real way for our neighbors, our family, our friends, or just people in the world on a soul depth, I thought was really, really helpful. I think it's also really important because we have to really think about a couple of things that you were touching on. One is that great piece about, you know, sin, right?

And one of the things that I have noticed is that particularly in the conversation, I have a whole chapter on AI girlfriends and chatbots and AI companions. and we see these stories now on a day, you know, weekly basis. It's really a form, I think, Emily, of self-worship, right? Because think about what the allure is. First of all, millions of people use AI companions. And many of them are reaching out. Maybe they're lonely. Maybe they have not been lucky in love.

The COVID generation, it feels very familiar. They were not given the chance to go to their high school prom and blue states and have those social interactions, digital isolation is very normal to them. They're also a two-screen generation that's used to watching TV and being on a screen. So being able to have that comfort of an AI boyfriend or girlfriend

digitally is not strange to them. But also, in Code Red, I talk about this woman and she said, I'll never date a human man again. And she said, because my AI boyfriend has no baggage, his ex, doesn't, you know, cause drama in our lives. I don't have to deal with any of that. And he just adores me and sort of self-worth,

you know, she didn't use this phrase. You know, it's a sort of self-worshipping component. And so it really feeds into all of us. Myself and Glenn, we all, you know, that tension between our ego and humility and all those things. Christopher Lash, culture of narcissism. He'd have a field day.

Exactly. I mean, you're, well, that's extremely well said. So it's that. And then I think the other thing, too, I say that there is a coming crisis of meaning. Elon has talked about this. So let's just take that whole first segment, your jobs questions and discussion.

If you believe that it's inevitable or it does come to fruition, that we start to see serious job displacement, but even if you just realize that no matter how hard you study in school, no matter how many degrees you get, no matter how many merit badges in your honor program,

you get, you're never going to be smarter, you're never going to be faster, you're never going to be more innovative than the AI. What does that start to do to people and say, well, why would I do anything? Why would I study anything? Why should I strive? So much of human life and growth is that we encounter resistance and we have to struggle and we all have our own struggles, whether they are in our academic performance or at work and so forth. And we build that muscle through that struggle, through that friction, when you realize, wow, it's all, it's all pointless. You have this sort of nihilistic view of like, why would I even bother going and getting a PhD or an advanced degree? Because the AI is going to always be faster and better. I have a lot of

upside, the roses. I'll say this for entrepreneurs, Yaff at Yaff, we have a great entrepreneurship program. For entrepreneurs, the sky is going to be the limit. You're going to be able to go as high your wings will carry you, products and services that used to cost millions are going to be pennies on the dollar, and you're going to be able to build your little dream, you know, or your little how you're going to make all, you know, be a job creator, you're going to be able to take a flight very quickly. So my advice to parents is to actually really think of three things to future-proof their kids. Number one, the future is not about your kids applying for jobs. It's about them creating their own job. And so what does that look like? It's three layers of a pyramid, right?

So the bottom is critical thinking skills in the trivium, right? Logic, grammar, rhetoric, right? The good old classic model writ large there. That is the foundation that has served all of us. I'm not just saying that as, you know, conservatives that like to conserve the past. I'm saying that because it's the truth. That's our reasoning and critical thinking piece. We've got to protect that because the studies show that cognitive offloading to AI erodes critical thought. The second piece is entrepreneurship. If I know how to create, like you've done here,

I mean, you've created, you're a business creator. You know, how to, how to, well, you are, you know, you had to figure out lights, cameras, website, design, social media. You know, I do own my own small business. For the record, I do. Hey, I knew you before you were. Women in business. Emily Jisenki, the big Emily Jensen.

I knew you back when, when you were just a young yapper. And you only had five New York Times bestsellers back then. Right, right. Those were the old days. But you learn that toolkit, and now your daughter or your son, he or she, whatever, you know, God-given calling or dream, they want to open a restaurant, they want to open a nail salon, they want to open a tech company, they have that toolkit, and then we put the AI on top. That's the pyramid. It's grammar logic rhetoric, the trivium, and critical thinking skills. It's entrepreneurship and then the AI.

That is, I think, going to help them to learn how to create jobs, not just to apply for jobs. That's going to be the best protection we have, I think, moving forward. And lastly, Witten, we've had, unfortunately, exposure to sort of the dark in the light of daily generative AI use and video. You were one of the first people that I ever heard talk about this, but now everyone is super familiar with how AI and video and pictures is used on social media. So I want to start with the bad. This is F2. This is a viral post about manipulated imagery in the Novak arrest case that is roiling the United

Kingdom right now. Just absolutely awful. This kid dies, bleeds out on the ground as the cops dismiss him because the actual perpetrator here who stabbed him was saying that he was the victim of a racist attack from Henry Novak, who died, and it looks like there were manipulated images of his hands going around the internet, which needn't have been the case. It was already an awful enough image. But then, the flip side here, the Spencer Pratt Batman AI videos. Let's roll S4. I got to get your take win on what we're seeing and how we're supposed to figure out what to do with all of this.

Please, I'm begging you. There's homeless people. drug addicts in front of the schools. My children aren't safe. Look, if you were a transgender migrant, I could get you a free pussy. Let's move the drug addicts closer. Bass already solved crime. I endorse her. Next. And so just help us tie this whole conversation together because some people would point to that Novak image and say, this is why it's bad categorically.

Some people would point to the Pratt ad and say, this is why it's great categorically. You don't want a future without the potential for this or you don't want a future with the potential for that. So just as we, again, tie a bow on the conversation about your new book, Code Red. How in our daily lives should we be thinking about and using these tools? Yeah. So again, boy, that's a perfect example of landmines and roses. So the landmines are the deep fakes that are used to mislead populations and that may even start to erode our confidence in physical, visual evidence in legal trials. I mean, I really want you to think about this. The worst, the worst version of

AI that you and I are going to use, Emily, is the one we're using today. I mean, what are we on iPhone 17 now? Do you remember what an iPhone 1 was? It was like a dinosaur, right? You know, just imagine as we track that out, AI is already shattering Moore's law, this idea that every 18 months computing capacities double. We're way beyond that with AI. So this is going to go farther and faster, it's getting better and better. The old Will Smith eating spaghetti video from years ago, the AI, it looked like a Picasso painting. It was so bad. It was all this jumbled mess. Now it does it flawlessly. The same is true, though, with these kinds of misinformation campaigns. You can use it. We know right now that terrorists, non-state actors, are using AI, digital, deep fakes,

to create propaganda to fire people up for recruitment or for attacks. We also know that, again, influence operators with ideological aims want to sway people's opinions on issues. And I think increasingly, for the ones that are trying to not be satirical like the Pratt, I think most people see that and they understand he's not Batman, right? We're used to green screen and CGI and kind of fun, creative or cartoonish version. but anything that's purporting to be a real event, if you at least that 24 hours before a close election,

and you and you and I are in an election, and you know, we're 0.001, you know, a 1,000 votes either way will determine that vote. The ability to debunk that as fake news in time for the vote will be, you know, four days later, and I may be able to sneak one by. Now, the platforms like Meta have already, already put into place that you should have disclosure toggles.

If you forget to switch, if you say that you've got that, they're actually doing it because there's actually invisible watermarks made in most enterprise visual generators for LLMs. So it will detect that and they'll flip it on. But the truth is, how many people read the asteris at the bottom that says this image may or may not have, you know, some kind of editing with deep fake or an air. AI. So I am concerned about that, but I think it's really one thing that I'm a little bit very, that I'm very worried about, which is that a lot of people are saying, you know, I don't believe anything anymore. Every time I see something on Instagram, I don't want to share it or I

don't want to believe it because I don't want to look stupid. I don't know if it's real or not. Yeah. Right. In a way, maybe that'll have a silver lining effect where it pushes us back all further into the physical. But we'll see. Wittenhall, the book is called Code Red it goes very deep. Code red, the left, the right, China, and the race to control AI. It is out. Go grab a copy. Thank you so much, Winton, for joining us. Oh, so great to be with you, Emily. Thank you. Time for some life talk. Life insurance talk, that is. You probably have it, but do you know how much you're paying for it? The truth is, you likely pay too much for too little.

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on term life insurance at select quote.com slash Emily today to get started. That's select quote.com slash Emily. Well, I had a rather interesting back and forth with Tommy Veter, formerly of the Obama White House, now known probably best as one of the pod bros from Pod Save America. I say that I think without any pejorative connotation. But Just to say, I mean, we can toss this up on the screen. I posted what I thought was like the most anodyne and innocuous reaction to Tommy, who posted Scott Pelley's resignation letter that Veter said was a brutal indictment of Barry Weiss because Pelley accused her and new management of instructing him to inject falsehoods and bias

into a politically sensitive story. I've been told to include assertions that are unverified, said Scott Pelley. I just posted in response to that, quote, imploring people who have reasonable concerns about the direction of CBS not to credulously elevate the claims of someone like Scott Pelley, who helped run the network and industry into the ground. I felt like I had been immediately transported onto Blue Sky when Tommy Veter responded, I kind of want to read this in like a sassy voice, like almost like a middle school girl. He goes, try 30 seconds of Googling before you tweet. Pelley didn't run CBS or work on the business side. He was the most important anchor. I can't even say without laughing.

He was the most important anchor on its most important show, 60 Minutes. 60's ratings were up 9% last season. That's unheard of in this era and made nearly $700 million in ad revenue in 2025. I responded, dude, I'm saying he's a biased hack, not that he has good ratings. And again, the rush to defend Scott Pelley is so. precious and adorable. Scott Pelly, like he is, of course, telling the truth about this back and forth with Barry Weiss. Because people don't like Barry Weiss, which, by the way, we have been very critical of the new leadership at CBS for some obvious reasons. We have covered it, like since

it started, we've covered CBS. There are ratings with Tony Doe Cople show. We have covered that pretty extensively. And maybe, maybe what we're saying here is that it's sort of like in a rock-or-ran situation. Nobody is telling us the full version of the truth and the notion that Scott Pelly is just too, he is beyond criticism. Someone posted, like they asked AI how many Emmys Scott Pelley had won in response to me. Like, oh, he's won 51 Emmys. I guess you're right. He has saved the media. He is holding what's left of the media on his broad strapping shoulders With all of those 51 Emmys, they said so much effort carrying the weight of the media on his back. No, I mean, that's like saying because, for example, the National Inquirer is profitable,

that it's not running the media into the ground back in the grocery store heydays when you'd have a National Enquirer right next to a Washington Post or whatever it was or a People magazine. Again, whatever it was, Time magazine, there's a better example at the grocery store stand. Their profitability has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the fact that according to Gallup, trust in mass media, mass media, CBS News, trust in mass media is tied right now for a record low. We are 10 years into the Trump era

when the host of the celebrity apprentice, the host of the celebrity apprentice, beat the former Secretary of State from the Obama administration. Shout out to Pod Save America crew. in a presidential election, despite the confident and smug predictions of many professional, highly paid pundits and consultants and others who thought this was all but impossible. Journalists, by the way, who thought this was basically impossible until literally the moment it happened. Trust in media should have reversed, obviously, if the world were working correctly.

And if you say that's the fault, which Scott Pelley has basically said, he went on Stephen Colbert. show within the last couple of years and said, really, the onus is on the viewers. That is the implication of what he said is. The onus is on the viewers. But if that's your, if your problem is really with news consumers and not with the people who are peddling the news, then you're just wrong. You're blaming people for the trust deficit in mass media. Really? That's, that's the line that we're going to do. It's actually the American people's fault. And the highly paid journalists in their air Conditioned Studios are, they just didn't really have much to do with it. They've been toiling away at the sacred work of the fourth estate for a long time. No, I'm saying Scott Pelly is the face.

He is the anchor of, yes, one of the most watched shows in the country, a show that still does relatively well by the declining standards of the industry. And that is precisely why I am saying he has presided over and bears blame for. No one person. bears all of the blame for this, but he bears significant blame for the downfall of media trust or the decline of media trust under his stewardship of one of previously the most treasured brands in all of media. And yeah, I get that 60 Minutes has still been doing relatively well. CBS does okay. A lot of trust ratings actually put CBS behind ABC and NBC, which is interesting enough. and fewer people say they, basically, yeah, few people say that they trust,

you go have did some pulling on this, Gallup did some polling on this, you can easily find it. But the CBS is lagging in that department a bit, but this democratization of media happened under CBS's watch. And Scott Pelly is honestly one of the most smug, one of the most smug, I'm trying to be kind here, peddlers, of faux neutrality in all of mass media, in all of corporate media. And he has been for a long time.

I was actually browsing back to the pre-Trump era, Scott Pelley, this afternoon. Like, I went so deep on Scott Pelley. And what you see time after time is him carrying water for the center-left institutions and working to undermine the credibility of people who challenge those institutions, whether it's from the populist economic left or whether it's from the right more broadly. He's honestly like one of the most perfect case studies of why so many people lost trust in media. It really started to decline somewhere in the 1980s and into the 90s. And some people were saying on X or a blue sky, wherever the hell I was in this delusional fantasy scape that I had entered into accidentally through no fault of my own, I might add.

or no wish of my own. But some people were like, well, it's all Fox News's fall. Fox News debuted in like 1996. Like trust in media Gallup measures this every fall. And they have since the 70s. Fox News moved into the space and was successful because they said, wow, there's this market of people who don't trust the media because the media is giving one side of the story.

If we give the other side, and that doesn't excuse Fox failing to be neutral when they claim to be neutral, But they said, hey, if we put more conservative people in prime time, culturally conservative people in particular on prime time, I bet we can make more money. That was a failure. That was them capitalizing on a failure of places like CBS Evening News and everywhere else. I don't even know why I have to explain this, but apparently I do. So we just a little trip down memory lane of Scott Pelley's recent record.

This is, I honestly had totally forgotten about this. I kid you not. It's going to sound ridiculous. as I read it aloud. Scott Pelly in May of 2020 did an interview with who? Peter Freaking Dasak of EcoHealth Alliance, the face of the COVID cover-up scandal who has been exposed by public records over and over again.

What did Pellie do? He did a softball interview with Peter Dazzak to make it seem like, Trump was, what's the best way to put it? Trump was the one recklessly pointing to the Wuhan laboratory. Like this is when the conspiracy theory, quote unquote, of the lab leak was treated as unsurious and ridiculous. And Scott Pelley did a whole package on 60 minutes. Softballing Peter Daszak. May of 2020. May of 2020. That's how Scott Pelley was spending his time. It's incredible. Here, you can see the headline of the

write-up that they put from 60 minutes on CBS News. Trump administration cuts funding for coronavirus researcher jeopardizing possible COVID-19 cure. This is bipartisan right now that you should not be sending more money to Eco Health Alliance, period. And here's Scott Pelley in May of 2020 acting like it's the toothless Trump Maga Roobes who only are the ones that care about this. It's so insulting. It's just so insulting. It's to hold this man up as a paragon of journalistic ethics. I mean, it just tells you what you need to know. I found also this somewhat amusing clip of Mike Cernovich, of all people, who was on with Scott Pelley. and Scott Pelley said something about how Hillary Clinton had pneumonia in 2016. You may remember when she was being escorted out of that 9-11 memorial,

and the whole, like, Hillary's health thing blew up. I have no idea what was going on with Hillary Clinton in that moment. But Scott Pelley goes to Mike Cernovich, she had pneumonia, pneumonia. And Cernovich goes back and says, how do you know? Scott Pelley says, the campaign told me so. It's a perfect moment. It's a perfect Scott Poverardard. Let's see if this would be.

Well, she had pneumonia. How do you know? Who told you that? Well, the campaign told us that. Why would you trust the campaign? The point is, you sure. Oh, okay. We're changing the subject. Perfect, perfect. Scott Pelly in a nutshell. There he is getting, by the way, embarrassed by Mike Cernovich.

Like, he has Cernovich on the show, of course, to make Cernovich look ridiculous. I would have to go back and revisit the entire package. But at least in that moment, you see Peli like kind of getting owned by essentially this like internet troll that he thought he would be able to manhandle. And that's a bad moment for Scott Pelley. Here's more you can see the 60 minutes package on Peter Dazzack. Just the caption of it is Peter Dazzack is a scientist whose work is helping in the search for a COVID-19 cure. So why did the president cancel Dazac's funding?

Amazing stuff. Amazing, amazing stuff. Now, this was also flagged. This is from Mays on X who flagged this Scott Pelly interview. It's actually kind of an infamous interview. that Scott Pelly did with Andrew McCabe, another absolute softball. They asked a couple, like Peli asked a couple of questions where he's channeling Republicans and doing it a, you know,

he's the perfect example of this relic of an era where they would performatively ask the questions from the right that they thought they were supposed to ask to make a package look balanced, but because they don't actually have any friends who are genuinely like actual populist conservatives, or people in rural areas, rural areas, whether they're on the left or the right or people who are outside of their bubbles,

they don't even know what questions would make a segment fair. And so Pelley just kind of does this McCabe interview. Then he does, by the way, a 60 minutes overtime about the McCabe interview talking about, he uses the word impress. He says he was impressed by how careful with the facts, careful with the facts that Andrew McCabe was. You can you can see McCabe. You might remember this interview of McCabe and Scott Pelly. It's fantastic. I mean, just fantastic. I'm going to share the Federalist coverage of this. This is the headline from 2025. CBS. Oh, I'm sorry, this is about Mark Elias, another banger of an interview from Scott Pelly. He invites Mark Elias onto 60 minutes last year, 2025, 2025. And Scott Pelley gives Mark Elias an opportunity to respond to some of

Trump's targeting of different law firms, which, by the way, I don't agree with. Pelly fails to do his basic journalistic due diligence and does not disclose to the viewers. It's almost, again, too ridiculous, but it's so obvious, does not disclose to the viewers in the report. The campaign work that Mark Elias did for Hillary Clinton. He does not mention, according to the Federalist here, that Mark Elias represented Kamala Harris's campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Again, as the Federalist goes on while working for Clinton, Elias hired the law firm Fusion GPS for opposition research that Clinton could use against Trump in the 2016 election. Fusion GPS hired Christopher Steele to write the bogus steel dossier, which became the bogus foundation for the Russian collusion hoax. Andy McCabe was part of this too.

And to not, I'm just saying, like, maybe you're on the left and maybe you think that it's great. Scott Pelley had Mark Elias on the show and just gave him an opportunity to respond to some of these like unprecedented moves on firms from Trump. I think it's a perfectly legitimate story. I would choose anybody but Mark Elias as a credible person to respond to. But just in the sake of like, if you are pretending to be a neutral news network that is informing viewers and leaving it up to them to make a decision about what is correct, what is incorrect, who is telling the truth, who is not telling the truth, to fail to make these disclaimers in the package about Mark Elias, to have him on

to respond to Trump and not mention any of this history. I mean, we're not just talking about one thing that was left off. We're talking about literally all of this history being left out of the package. That does a disservice to viewers. And I don't care if they're Democrats, Republicans, or independents. That does a disservice to viewers. And that is what is running the media into the ground. I don't give a damn if he's pulling in ad revenue for CBS.

I don't give a damn if CBS is holding its head above water with all of these declining ratings. You go to the Andy McCabe interview. Like I mentioned, he softballs McCabe, asks a couple of questions that Republicans may put to McCabe, but nothing serious about McCabe's role in this entire, entire Russia collusion narrative that ended up blowing up in Democrats' face. I mean, this is, again, why I say, having the sympathy of the center-left journalists inside of corporate media outlets

sometimes hurts Democrats because it sets them up to expect a wonderful, perfect, damning Mueller report for Christmas, whatever they sang about on Saturday Night Live. And then it comes out, and it turns out the story is so much more complicated. People end up losing trust in media,

and Scott Pelley has been a part of that on significant, significant stories over the course of many, many years. And so, yes, I do share a lot of people's frustrations with the new leadership at CBS. I am as skeptical as pretty much anyone about their foreign policy coverage going forward. I get it. I hear you. What I hear inside CBS is that it is complicated. Actually, Brian Stelter.

Of all people, Brian Stelter had a post on this that I think is probably worth tossing up on the screen. actually about what he has heard inside of 60 minutes, which reminded me, it sort of echoed some of what I had heard inside of 60 minutes, trying to pull it up right now just while we go through this. Yeah, here it does. So, Stelter Posts to say, I'll share this on the screen.

Oh my goodness, one second. Stelter posts to say that what he's hearing inside of 60 minutes is like a bit more nuanced than the conversation. He says, every day people ask me about CBS and parent company Paramount. It happened again just now at an airport in Chicago. So let me share what I say when I'm asked. I say CBS News is complicated right now. Paramount's corporate interests make it a lot more complicated, but the journalistic output is strong and that's what matters most. I say, dredge the programming, not the people. Now, this is again where I would disagree with Stelter. And we invited him to come on and talk about this actually, and hopefully we'll get a response back, because I would love to chat more about this.

Do I think there are some journalists doing excellent work at CBS News? Yes. Do I think I would say the journalistic output is strong? No, because I think it's still slanted. And there are some people inside of CBS who want to fix that slant, but I don't think they particularly want to fix it on foreign policy. I think they want to reverse it in the other direction. And as you know, if you watch the show, all we ask of people who are purporting to do neutral journalism is that they actually do their best job at neutral journalism. True neutral journalism is impossible. But if you can't do the best version of it, you possibly can. Like if you can't come up with something that is generally fair, stop lying and saying you're doing neutral journalism, right? How many journalists leave the media

then come and do their own, or leave a big outlet and then come and do their own thing on Substack or YouTube or whatever, Katie Kirk, Jim Acosta, we talked about on Monday's edition of the show. And we find out, like, immediately, Don Lemon's another guy, we find out immediately that they're much more comfortable, like showing their pretty obviously progressive instincts when they're no longer expected to at least have this pretense of neutrality. So often you would see, you know, cracks in the facade. But they wouldn't come out and really admit it. They don't. They don't fully understand that they're biased because they're in bubbles, so they don't even know how to call what they believe in reference to the rest of the public. But we see it every time they leave,

for the most part. And Brian adds, CBS News has not gone MAGA, despite a flood of progressive claims to that effect. I think that's also true. I think that's also true. So I do agree that what's happening inside of CBS is complicated. That's something that I've heard too. And I think that's correct. I think that's why they are struggling the ratings with CBS Evening News. It's a total identity crisis. I don't think the new management hasn't a good idea of what the new identity should be. And I think they're genuinely flailing right now. It's no easy task. It's not to say that it would be an easy task. But it is to say that, of course, if you are purporting to do neutral journalism and you're failing to do neutral journalism and you're one of the biggest faces of the mass media,

And you have been in this position for many, many years. You have basically presided over the decline of media, which is it related to some bad actors? Sure. Is it mostly related to the public realizing that they simply can't trust the media, even less than they may have previously thought, but that they mostly can't trust the media anymore? Yes, it is a institutional trust in mass media is important.

It's something that we should have in a functioning, or at least in the media, in a functioning Republican system, lowercase our Republican system. We don't have it. I wish we did. But it's also good that we don't have it because the American people would be wrong

if they were putting trust in Scott Pelley because they would be getting gravely misled by the framing of stories by CBS News and just the fact that there was a flood of responses today from people who were saying, oh, but the ratings, but the Emmys was really amusing but also kind of sad because if you can't, can't connect the dots at this point because you're blinded by skepticism and distrust of Barry Weiss,

there's plenty of room for that. Plenty of room for that. It doesn't mean that you have to embrace one of the people who has been part of the problem, a huge part of the problem, of thrusting us into this era of deep institutional distrust in media. So I can keep going about that, but I should stop myself. for the good of everyone, good of myself, the good of all of you. But thanks so much for tuning into the night's edition of After Party. So great to be with you here. Appreciate all the support.

You can email Emily at Dublinacaremedia.com. Make sure to subscribe if you haven't yet. That helps us up so much. And we'll be back on Friday with next to the happy hour on your podcast feed. And Monday with more After Party here on YouTube or wherever you're listening or watching. Thanks so much.