Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 10/5/21: Debt Ceiling Crisis, Facebook Crash, Fed Corruption, CA Oil Spill, IATSE Strike, Fauci Documentary, Russell Brand Smears, 2020 Murder Spike, and More!

Episode Date: October 5, 2021

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Hey, guys. Thanks for listening to Breaking Points with Crystal and Sagar. We're going to be totally upfront with you. We took a big risk going independent. To make this work, we need your support to beat the corporate media. CNN, Fox, MSNBC, they are ripping this country apart. They are making millions of dollars doing it. To help support our mission of making all of us hate each other less, hate the corrupt ruling class more. Support the show. Become a Breaking Points premium member today, where you get to watch and listen to the entire show ad-free and uncut an hour early before everyone else. You get to hear our reactions to each other's monologues. You get to participate in weekly Ask Me Anythings, and you don't need to hear our annoying voices

pitching you like I am right now. So what are you waiting for? Go to BreakingPoints.com, become a premium member today, which is available in the show notes. Enjoy the show, guys. Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. A lot of big developments to get to.

First of all, you might have noticed Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, all down for most of yesterday in a gigantic collapse. Huge. Still don't have a lot of answers about exactly what happened, but some new indications there this morning. And that happened the same day that the whistleblower who had brought forward lots of files to the Wall Street Journal, and they've been doing a big investigation into Facebook the same day that she was on 60 Minutes. So very interesting timing there. New report about massive corruption at the Fed. I cannot understate how important this is.

Of all of the actors that drive our economy, I mean, the Fed is literally responsible for who gets money and who doesn't. The idea that these men and women are corrupted and trading stocks and profiting off of what they're doing is massive news, wildly undercover. We're going to bring you the details. Another big story out of California. Big oil spill and new questions this morning about when officials knew that this leak had happened and this spill was occurring. And when they actually got their act together to do something about it and alert residents. I'll give you the details there. IATSE, a huge union representing basically the crew on movie and other productions,

they have authorized a strike. This is 60,000 workers who would be impacted. Hollywood could potentially come to a halt. Negotiations have restarted. They are ongoing. We'll bring you all the details there. But we wanted to start this morning with the dumbest but realist crisis in all of DC, which is the debt ceiling. I did a monologue a while back laying out, you know, the details of the debt ceiling, some of the potential solutions. But I just want to go over some of the basics here because there can be a little bit of a misunderstanding.

When you talk about the debt ceiling, it sounds like it might have something to do with, like, fiscal responsibility and balancing your budget and those sorts of things. So if you're into that, the debt ceiling has really nothing to do with like fiscal responsibility and balancing your budget and those sorts of things. So if you're into that, that is not, the debt ceiling has really nothing to do with that. It is this arbitrary historical relic. The spending has already been authorized. The debt has already been incurred. This is just a question of Congress doing its job to figure out whether they're actually going to pay the bills that they voted to spend this money. So it's a stupid crisis. No other country has the same debt ceiling situation. And yet the consequences of breaching the debt ceiling,

which are going to happen, which will happen in mid-October, are incredibly, incredibly serious. I'll get to that in a moment. So there are a couple of options in order to raise the debt ceiling. One is Republicans could actually help Democrats and do this. McConnell has said he's absolutely not going to do that. Two is Democrats could use the reconciliation process where they only need to use their majority. They don't have to rely on Republicans. They've been really reluctant because they feel like it might be a political problem for them to do this on their own. So they've been throwing up all sorts of objections to doing that. And at this point, it's late in the process. And it is a gamble to be able to get this through the reconciliation process on time. The other solution, for which I am an advocate, is to do what's called minting

the coin. There is a provision in the law that would allow the Treasury to mint a trillion dollar coin. It's effectively an accounting gimmick. Yes, it sounds stupid, but it is a real solution that actual smart people and members of Congress have floated and have backed. You essentially move assets from one part of the federal government's balance sheet to another. There's no inflation. There's no additional money to get us around this thing. I personally think that that is the direction we should be going in at this point. But all of the actors involved have effectively ruled out every single one of those potential solutions. So here is Joe Biden yesterday getting asked about the debt ceiling. And I think these remarks will give

you a sense of how dire the situation is at this point. Falling on the debt would lead to a self-inflicted wound that takes our economy over a cliff and risks jobs and retirement savings, Social Security benefits, salaries for service members, benefits for veterans, and so much more. A failure to raise the debt limit will call into question Congress's willingness to meet our obligations that we've already incurred. Not new ones, we've already incurred. This is going to undermine the safety of U.S. Treasury securities and will threaten the reserve status of the dollar as the world's currency,

the world relies on. American credit rating will be downgraded. Interest rates will rise for mortgages, auto loans, credit cards, borrowing. Folks watching at home, you should know this is the Republican position. Here's it is. They won't vote to raise the debt limit to cover their own spending. Democrats voted with them to cover that spend last four years, the previous four years. They say Democrats should do it alone.

But then they're threatening to use a procedural power called the filibuster, meaning that we'd have to get 60 votes, not 50 votes, to increase the debt limit. This would block the Democrats from meeting our obligations and responsibilities to prevent Congress from raising the debt limit. This would block the Democrats from meeting our obligations and responsibilities to prevent Congress from raising the debt limit. So let's be clear. Not only are Republicans refusing to do their job, they're threatening to use the power, their power, to prevent us from doing our job, saving the economy from a catastrophic event. I think, quite frankly, it's hypocritical, dangerous, and disgraceful. Their obstruction and irresponsibility knows absolutely no bounds, especially as we're clawing our way out of this pandemic. So, obviously, Democrat strategy is to try to pressure and shame Republicans into helping them.

That's not going to work. Mitch McConnell out with his latest statement. And listen, Republicans are certainly at fault here as well. But in fairness, they have been saying since July, we're not helping y'all with this. And I don't know what would have made the Democrats think otherwise. Let's throw Mitch McConnell's statement up here on the screen. It's a long letter, et cetera, et cetera. But here's a key paragraph. He says, bipartisan is not a light switch that Speaker Pelosi and Leader Schumer

may flip on to borrow money and flip off to spend it. Again, that's not what the debt ceiling is about. Okay, put that aside. Republicans' position is simple. We have no list of demands. For two and a half months, we have simply warned that since your party wishes to govern alone, it must handle the debt limit alone as well. Republicans are not coming to the rescue on this. And if we can throw the next element up here on the screen, Biden is also saying, hey, I don't think the reconciliation route is going to work out here. So you're essentially at a complete impasse to read this. It says Biden rejects McConnell's ask, says using reconciliation for the debt ceiling is an incredibly complicated, cumbersome process. He says it would require a voterama with up to hundreds of votes.

He says the Senate should pass the clean House-approved debt limit extension. I think there's a sense, Sagar, that Washington is like the boy who cried wolf. We've had so many of these crises and government shutdown threats and coming right up to the edge or the brink of the debt ceiling and having to take extraordinary measures to keep from breaching it. And in the end, they always figure out some way to do the bare minimum of what is required of them. I think people still have a sense that that is going to be the case. But as of this morning, the three possible routes to lifting the debt ceiling have effectively been ruled out. The very latest is that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is saying she's trashing the coin, the minting the coin idea. So I don't know exactly how they're going to get themselves out of this. This isn't a joke. This could be a

real catastrophe. Yeah, it's really serious. And, you know, we've both seen, I think, multiple debt limit crises. They generally do figure it out. But here's what people don't seem to understand. Biden and the Democrats in particular, they keep trying to go with, well, this was Trump spending. Listen, nobody cares. Like they know they're being hypocritical and they don't care. I was reading this morning that Mitch McConnell was talking about how, you know what the number one goal in all this? It's not to win anything. It's chaos. And I've said this here on the show, which is that at the end of the day, the American people generally were going to blame the person in charge, especially the party in power, if they see an absolute catastrophe, economic crisis. You can say, oh, blame the Republicans all you want, even though it is kind of true and it's not going to happen.

I want to be very clear. Two, people are also completely weaponizing the debt ceiling, as you point out. It's a complicated financial maneuver, an archaic thing that comes across, you know, technically from congressional power of the purse. But here's the problem. If we breach the debt ceiling, it actually would spark a constitutional crisis because then the Treasury Department would be deciding what institutional government programs to spend and not. Congress has the power of the purse. They decide what to spend money on and what not to. The Treasury Department should not have the ability to discern what gets paid and what's not. So that's one argument that's out

of the question. Two is they try to bring it back to spending, irresponsible, whatever. Really what it is, this entire thing, is it is a gimmick that is related to accounting. And on the backs of which we have architected the global financial system. Now, I don't want to scare you, but that is really how fragile things are. One of the reasons why I'm also totally in favor of minting the coin is, and I love this, people are like, how can a conservative want to mint? It has nothing to do with increasing circulation of money. Even if you buy all of that, it has nothing. It's not quantitative easing, nothing. It is simply moving federal accounting dollars from one side of a balance sheet to the other, such that the Treasury

Department then can sell bonds such that we can then pay our bills. That's it. That's nothing. It's something that we do literally every single day. We've just relied on Congress to do this. And the Biden administration and Chuck Schumer, all of them, are fools because they seem to believe that they can use putting the lifting of the debt limit, the debt ceiling, in the initial reconciliation. Exactly. And the reason they didn't do it was because, and I think that this political calculus is stupid, too. They were worried that this would be used as some talking point against vulnerable Democrats, et cetera, et cetera. John Yarmuth, who's the chair of the House Budget Committee, what he's been suggesting is just lift it to some ridiculous Googleplex or whatever, some ridiculous number, ridiculously high. So it's done and you never have to deal with this again. And are they really going to run ads that say so-and-so voted for a Googleplex of debt?

It sounds stupid. It sounds ridiculous. And ultimately, I just don't think that that's what's going to be the linchpin of Democrats being able to hold the House next year, which they're not going to be able to do anyway. So it's an incredibly stupid series of events. There's no heroes here. Everyone's to blame. And Joe Weisenthal, who, if you want to understand, he's been great about explaining these issues. He also is a hashtag meant the coin advocate. He says, you can't believe that a meteor is headed to crash into our economy, which is what POTUS said about the debt ceiling. He said, it's so dire. It's like a meteor is headed to crash into our economy.

Weisenthal says, you can't believe that's the case and then not be willing to go coin. A meteor is crashing into our economy, Wiesenthal says, you can't believe that's the case and then not be willing to go coin. A meteor is crashing into the economy. We're all about to be destroyed in the ensuing dusty explosion that blots out the sun. A simple law on the books would avert the disaster if it were used,

but norms, so we can't. It actually reminds me of, I talked to Sirota last week about this movie that he's involved in. He co-wrote with Adam McKay. It's called Don't Look Up that's coming out this December. And the whole plot of the movie is what if a meteor was actually crashing into the earth and were so dysfunctional that you actually can't even get anyone to care or do anything about it.

That definitely would be the case. That's a reality show. That's right. And like here we are. This is like the real world equivalent of it. It's over the dumbest possible thing, but with these incredibly dire consequences. So it's a stupid and arbitrary problem. But the consequences of breaching this thing are incredibly, incredibly serious.

Janet Yellen said she would be certain that this would lead to a recession within days or weeks. Business Insider hears a headline with a report from Moody's. I cited this in my monologue as well. Could cost Americans $15 trillion, 6 million jobs. They also talk about the stock market would be in free fall. And then think of all of the people who depend for their livelihood or for their basic subsistence on the federal government. You're talking about people who depend on food stamps or other assistance.

You're also talking about servicemen and women. Social security. Are they going to get their paychecks? All civil servants, of course, will they get their paychecks? Social security payments. These are real, serious, gigantic issues. Medicare. You know, I could go on.

Right. Medicare, you know, I could go on. Right, and just imagine sending the economy into a massive recession for really no reason over dumb D.C. dysfunction posturing game of chicken. And again, you know, I think that they probably will figure out a way to avert this because the consequences are so dire. But I just have so little faith in any of these people. And they keep ruling out every single possible avenue out of it. So that's where we are. We deserve this, Crystal. We really do. Which is that we deserve the Republican opposition that we have. We deserve the Democratic leadership who is like, we won't change the rules to avoid a dramatic disaster. And look, you can even be for the filibuster. You can change the filibuster selectively on the debt ceiling. They could change that tomorrow. They're refusing to do that. By the

way, everyone would be happy. Republicans always just suspend the debt ceiling whenever they're in power. Okay, so nuke it. You know, fine. Who cares? Oh, but we have to preserve the rules on this particular one. Oh, well, then we could also do it in reconciliation. They're like, no, we don't want to do that because we don't want to stay here and vote. That is literally the justification is, oh, but then we'd have to stay up all night and vote. Oh, but is it a crisis or not? So they say, Mitch McConnell, you have to do it. Biden's saying, actually, no, I can't guarantee whatsoever that we will extend the debt ceiling. The Dow Jones is already down a thousand points in the last month. It dropped 300 yesterday, largely due to the debt ceiling crisis. Now, look,

personally, if I was a cynic, I think that's probably the only thing that might save us, is if Jamie Dimon and the Goldman Sachs guys all start getting on the phone to Mitch McConnell, and they're like, listen, man, you got to figure this thing out. Maybe. But even then, like I said, an economic crash is great for the Republicans. And I'm speaking crassly here. I do not wish this upon anyone. But pure politics, the shutdown against Obama, that worked. The shutdown against Trump, that also worked. Democrats won whenever it was Trump and Republicans won whenever it was Obama. People blame the people in charge. They don't follow all this nonsense. They don't even know what the debt ceiling is. And you know what? They wouldn't be wrong to blame the Democrats.

They wouldn't be 100% wrong here or there look, the Republicans are assholes. Like, y'all know that. That's not a surprise. Where have you been for the past decade? You thought they were going to help you out of your little problem here? It's a ridiculous notion. Democrats had in their hands the tools to deal with this. So we don't have this period of uncertainty, potential chaos, potential massive recession. They have the tools in their hand to do.. They have the tools in their hand to do. They still have the tools in their hand to do that. They're just choosing not to use those tools because they like another tool better. It is incredibly stupid. And I think you're absolutely right. Politically, Democrats are in charge of the presidency, the Senate, and the House. Who do you

think the American people are going to blame? Yeah? They don't know what filibuster is. They don't care. You know, it's like this happens every single time. And you know what I really think about? During our AMA last week, we had somebody write in who was a nurse who was like, hey, I depend on my 401k for retirement. Yeah, I want to retire. Yeah, that's what's happening here.

They're screwing around with your retirement, with a lot of the people who do are lucky enough or whatever to own securities and stocks but don't have the grand whatever ability to sway the market, that's who's going to get screwed. You drop 1,000 points, you're going to screw with people's jobs, payments, their 401ks. This is serious stuff. Yeah. Well, the consequences are way beyond the stock market even. I mean, you're talking about massive job losses. You're talking about payments that aren't going out. I mean, this is, and of course, anytime the economy is sick, anytime we have a downturn, always the people who get hit the hardest are those who have the least. Working class Americans would bear the brunt of the

failures of the elite class once again. And so that's what we're looking at this morning. And again, not a really clear path in sight in terms of how this ultimately gets resolved. Remember, people die during recessions. A lot of people commit suicide. It's horrible. I remember 2008 was one of the worst periods and actually spawned a significant increase in mortality. So I want people to realize that that's what they're doing here. And it's a damn shame. Let's get to a much less serious story, but still pretty interesting and important nonetheless. Facebook was down for six to seven hours yesterday. That not just included Facebook.com, which is one of the second most visited websites in the world.

It also included, because they own it, WhatsApp and Instagram. Interesting little monopolistic view. And it also happened right after a 60 Minutes special. We have no idea if these two things are connected whatsoever, in which a whistleblower talked about Facebook's way it works inside and what she thinks are some of the social pathologies that it's unleashing upon the country. Let's take a listen. Facebook is a $1 trillion company, just 17 years old. It has 2.8 billion users, which is 60% of all internet-connected people on earth. Frances Haugen plans to testify before Congress this week.

She believes the federal government should impose regulations. Facebook has demonstrated they cannot act independently. Facebook over and over again has shown it chooses profit over safety. It is subsidizing, it is paying for its profits with our safety. I'm hoping that this will have had

a big enough impact on the world that they get the fortitude and the motivation to actually go put those regulations into place. That's my hope. So that's what we have here. She was talking about algorithmic changes, a lot of these investigations in the Wall Street Journal. And interestingly enough, Crystal, that comes out and then immediately we have a site-wide blackout for several hours. Anybody who's read a little bit about Mark Zuckerberg knows that he was actually literally obsessed with creating the website and keeping it online, saying every minute that we're down, we're losing money, people are getting off. So you can imagine him having basically a brain aneurysm.

He had a rough day yesterday. I think it's fair to say. It was so rough that his competitor, Jack Dorsey, dunked on him whenever Facebook.com appeared for sale because its DNS wasn't working. Let's put this up there on the screen. Check this out. The website itself was not working. And what you can see there repeatedly is that Facebook.com was literally for sale on the open Internet. Jack Dorsey joking how much. And then people literally could not get into the building

because the internet of things governed all of their stuff. And then those who were in the building were not able to crystal in order to get into the conference rooms because their badges weren't working. So it was a total and complete collapse. Other people pointed out that one of the reasons it may have taken so long in order to get back online is because they would not be able to get into the server room. And the server room is deeply, you know, it's secure, cold storage, like all of that. So that's actually, that was the last that I read this morning,

that that was in fact the case. That what they had to do was, we've got precious little details right now about exactly what all went wrong, but that once they gained access to the server room and reset the servers, they were good to go. So it was literally like they needed to turn it off and turn it on. That's it. But they had to get to the thing. They had to get to the plug. At least those are some of the details coming out this morning. I want to say I was personally gravely impacted by this outage. Brianna Joy Gray and I played pickleball yesterday. We took a great

photo. I really wanted to put it on Instagram and I was delayed at least four hours. And my ability to do that to this had a devastating impact on me personally. But kidding aside, WhatsApp is not as popular in the U.S. But in other countries around the world, Latin America in particular, I mean, this is the mode of communication. You have businesses that depend on some of these services. Like, there are places where Facebook is still cool and used by everybody and actually matters. I mean, Instagram, their whole business is run off Instagram. Absolutely. So this had real impacts. And I think a lot of what, you know, of course, we've already realized this, but a lot of what this makes you realize is, hey, maybe it's not a great idea to allow these giant tech monopolies to have complete control over multiple critical

modes of communication. Maybe that wasn't the best idea to let that ultimately happen when you see how fragile apparently they ultimately are that they were trying to make some sort of back end change. I'm not a tech person. I have no idea what any of this means. But in making that back end change, they screwed something up and it brought the whole system crashing down. Everything. And they could not resolve it for seven hours or something like that.

Well, so I did some more reading on this. And actually, we got very lucky here because a Facebook shortage, like at the end of the day, Facebook's not critical infrastructure, right? Like, yes, I agree, WhatsApp. I know many people in India, Asia, Latin America, all across Europe, everybody uses WhatsApp. Completely understand. But that was, you know, you still have the ability to send an SMS or a text message. Here's what would have happened if we had lost, say, Amazon Web Services. They say that the costs would have been in the hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars. And the reason why is that we would not have been able to process credit card transactions.

So imagine that. If we saw a single point of failure, that just Amazon Web Services, and not even necessarily all of AWS, just the part which houses those particular transactions or the ability for the servers in order to have all that stuff, if that went down, you could have lost a trillion dollars in commerce in a single day.

And this is the entire U.S. economy, especially in the tech sector. Huge, single points of failure where if it goes down, and then they have all these redundancies built in because, hey, the server is the most important thing, so you've got to protect them. But behind walls of security, oh, well, then the whole thing goes down and now you can't get into the room for the server. What are you going to do? Now they claim, and Facebook has claimed, they've probably spent billions of

dollars on server farms. They don't want any reliance on other networks that they have to contract out. So they run it all in-house and that's fine. So they've spent a lot of money trying to build up the secure thing specifically so that the situation never goes down. This site shutdown alone probably cost Facebook in the hundreds of millions of dollars range. Basically a rounding error, actually, if you think about their trillion dollar value. But like I said, it's a preview of how easy it would be in order to shut down life in a single second. If this had been Google, people's phones won't work. People who have Android or rely on the Google server. Gmail. Imagine if Gmail went down. Any of these very critical communications infrastructures that we have. And it's a very scary reminder of how

reliant we are on the technology and what monopolization in the space can look like and can have an impact on your life. Like, why should you here? Well, you know, yesterday you keep refreshing your Instagram feed. You're not going to get anything. Monopolies make our entire economy and society extremely fragile. That's what you get out of this. I mean, this ultimately wasn't the biggest deal in the world, but what it reveals is that because we've allowed, and not just in the tech sector, effectively in every single sector of American society, we've allowed these giant monopolies to flourish. And that makes us extraordinarily fragile. It's part of why we're having some of these supply chain issues.

It's part of why farmers are so screwed, your family farmer across the country. It's part of why you have critical modes of communication, critical choke points in terms of economic activity. It makes us really, really fragile. That's kind of the bottom line here. Also, by the way, I think we've got a Bloomberg tear sheet. Zuckerberg, again, to his having a bad day. Zuckerberg lost $6 billion in just a few hours as Facebook lunges. I think he's going to be okay. Yeah, he'll be fine. I think he's worth somewhere in the $121 billion.

It says he dropped to number five on the list of the world's richest. Now he's below Bill Gates. So rough day for him. But, you know, the other unfortunate impact of all of this for Facebook is I do think it called even more attention to this whistleblower and the files that she brought forward and what she said about the company. And I've been reading this. created a system to let elites effectively post whatever they want on the platform and face no consequences whatsoever because they know that their algorithm for censorship is so screwed up that they didn't want to have some sort of high-profile PR problem. A deletion incident, right.

Yeah, if an elite gets censored for something stupid. So they basically are just like, well, we'll just have this gigantic class of people that don't really get treated the same way as everybody else on the platform, which is different than what they've said in public. I mean, they've lied to the public about that. Another thing that she revealed, it's easy to take from her comments like, oh, she's just, you know, on the liberal side of more censorship. But what she actually revealed was more interesting than that and actually made me think a little bit harder about the problem of Facebook and all of these social media companies, which back in 2018, Facebook changed their algorithm. Their business was not doing well. Profitability and all that stuff was great and they're gigantic and all of that.

But they could see their key metrics were plunging in terms of people posting new content, in terms of people liking content, in terms of people sharing content. Effectively, the platform was getting kind of stale and old and dead, and people were not using it. They were still on it, but they weren't engaged with it. They were just sort of like zombies sitting there scrolling and not really engaging with the content. So they freaked out, and they changed their algorithm. And what they did in changing the algorithm was to make sure that what you're seeing in your feed is the most salacious content, the most sort of outrageous content that would elicit an emotion from you, make you angry, right? So that would make you want to comment, want to dislike,

want to share and say this is outrageous and all of that. And they knew at Facebook that this was having profoundly negative consequences. They even knew, and this is really interesting, that people liked their Facebook experience less after these changes because they didn't like that this was like super agitating to them. It was making people angry and upset when they're going on Facebook instead of the sort of like warm fuzzies, let me look at my old photos or whatever they used to have on Facebook. But it did drive a lot more engagement. And so part of what that made me realize that so much of what has led to Facebook being such a cesspool and the worst voices having the largest platforms oftentimes is intentional changes that Facebook made to their algorithm.

They're not unique in this, right? Because effectively, all of these companies, by being driven solely by the profit motive, which they're never going to not do, they have leaned into promoting this sort of agitating worst case material. That has a lot of follow-on effects. And again, they knew that this was the consequence. They knew this was the consequence. And they put some safeguards in place during the election, during the 2020 election, that they then immediately took off after the 2020 election. And so they knew that this was going on. They knew it was having these terrible effects. They give an example, too, of or this whistleblower, who I think is very courageous, actually, Frances Hogan. She gives an example of the way that this ripples

throughout society and throughout our media ecosystem. BuzzFeed's CEO had sent them a message saying effectively, like, the stuff that used to get shared a lot was like things about self-care and wellness and these sort of like fluffy. Yeah, like that sort of stuff used to go viral. And now what will go viral is they use the example of what was it called? 21 things that almost all white people are guilty of saying. That goes viral. And it's basically, and this is the email from Jonah Peretti,

who is the CEO of BuzzFeed. He says, mostly it's people just yelling at each other in the comments about race, yelling at BuzzFeed for having written it in the first place. And it was that angry comment frenzy that propelled the virality.

So when you have that sort of incentive structure within these social media platforms, guess what media outlets are going to lean into? Because they're also looking at the bottom line. So they're not stupid. So BuzzFeed is going to do more things like that that are tearing at people and poking and making them angry at each other,

making them hate each other. Effectively, this change in the algorithm helped to fuel the insane culture war that we face now. That's part of the problem. That's all social media, right? I mean, what is TikTok's innovation? TikTok's innovation is time on platform. They've already surpassed Instagram. Really, what they have is the most sophisticated algorithm, machine learning, to see what keeps you going. And there have been endless investigations about teenagers going down horrible rabbit holes and more. And guess what?

That's like you said, that's what gets people engaged. I look at this not as a Facebook problem, a TikTok problem. TikTok has issues for other ones, but Twitter, elsewhere, this is society. Like we actually have to decide, is this okay? We're willing to deal with this. I mean, frankly, it's a capitalism problem because just like in the healthcare system, when profit maximization is the only metric, well, healthcare, if you get decent healthcare, that's like an accident. That's a side effect. And it's the same thing here. If the only value is profit maximization, then you're not valuing like having a society where people can coexist. That's not a value that's embedded

in the system. So the other thing that she said, which I thought was an interesting and thought-provoking point, is she was like, don't break up Facebook. Because what happens then is you have even fewer resources to kind of deal with these problems. Her suggestion is transparency, which I don't think would be nearly enough. I mean, really, you have to either aggressively regulate these companies to force them to value something other than just profit maximization, which clearly is leading to a worse possible scenario, you have to nationalize them. I mean, those are really the solutions if you want to look at creating a better mode of communication. And obviously, look, that's very difficult to do. And we don't even have the political will to not like default on our debt. So I'm not holding my breath here.

But the last thing that I'll say about this, because I did find this all really thought provoking, is Biden and Democrats and the people who are really worried about misinformation on these platforms, they tend to focus on like the specific actors. There's that stat about like, I don't know, 10 people share the most vaccine misinformation or whatever. So it's all focused on these like individual human beings who are putting out bad info.

And then it leads to these witch hunts of like, you're wrong thinking and you said something that I don't like or whatever. But I think what she shows is that this is a lot more systemic. It's a lot more Facebook's fault for elevating intentionally and putting at the top of their platform and putting into your news feed over and over and over again the worst possible actors. They did that knowingly. And so, again, it's really easy to call out this individual random mom or doctor or whatever. It's a lot harder to say, Facebook tech sector, like you did this intentionally.

You are fomenting the worst possible actors because everybody has a right to like say whatever they think. And I'm very much against less sort of agitating, aggravating, and ultimately tear us apart. That's the problem. There you go. I always hear liberals make that point. And they're like, that's why you should promote the Daily Kos and, you know, whatever. It just becomes a race to the bottom. I agree. I mean, look, it's a big systemic problem in the tech sector. They have one goal, to keep you on the platform so they can sell your data to advertisers. That's it. Period. So we have to decide. I actually think transparency would lead to, that's not the perfect world. It's not the ideal situation. It would help. It would help dramatically, in my opinion, because I think that the absolute ability right now for them to not do everything

in a black box, And we sit here and debate it about, oh, this should get promoted. That's part of the issue. Well, so let me say, because it's not so much like, let me pick, we're going to promote the Washington Post and we're not going to promote the Daily Caller. It's they made a choice to promote the thing that made people the most angry, not a particular political ideology or another. So you could make a difference. They used to make a different choice about what it was that ultimately, and it was more neutral in terms of what got served up to people. And it wasn't, we're going to go for that emotion, whether it's left, right, or center, angry making true or false thing. So it's not so much about, I'm going to

pick and prioritize these platforms over that platforms because I have a major issue with that as well. And obviously we see what that does on YouTube. Trust me. It's about the type of metrics that you're going for. And yeah, as long as profit is at the center of this, they're going to go for like, let's make this the worst possible place we can.

There you go. Because that's what they profit off of. Terrible. Hey, so remember how we told you how awesome premium membership was? Well, here we are again to remind you that becoming a premium member means you don't have to listen to our constant pleas

for you to subscribe. So what are you waiting for? Become a premium member today by going to breakingpoints.com, which you can click on in the show notes. Speaking of profit, ill-gotten gains and more, this is also a tremendously important story. So let's put this up there from Public Citizen, which is that the Federal Reserve vice chair traded up to $5 million out of bonds and into

stocks one day before Chairman Jerome Powell signaled a major policy action. Now, you can say a lot of things about this. You could say that he had an inkling. There's no direct evidence that he was even knowledgeable of the situation. But at the very least, Crystal, the appearance of corruption, as we always say, is just as pernicious as real corruption itself. These people should not be actively trading stocks and bonds. We already had the Dallas Federal Reserve guy who had to resign because he was making up to $1 million trades on information, many information necessarily that he could have profited from and knew he was going to profit from whenever he made decisions. This is, again, the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, up to $5 million in bonds and stocks. And what also always galls me about these things is that they are so brazen in their actions that they disclose it. All of this has

actually come from public disclosure forms, from their active portfolios of buying and selling. Now, look, I'm not going to say wealthy people or whatever can't serve on the Federal Reserve. Of course not. Fine. Whatever. But I think that at the very least, if you are going to have a hand in steering monetary policy, you should not be actively trading stocks and bonds, whatever. Something in a blind trust, even then, you know, it's a little sketchy as we've seen blind trusts get, we have seen blind trusts be revoked or, you know, worked around many times in American history, especially amongst presidents and elected officials. But at the very least, they don't even try to hide what they've been doing there. Up to $5 million on potentially non-public information when you have a direct hand in shaping the market

to the tune of hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars? Yeah. I mean, it's hard to wrap your head around, especially post-2008, just how powerful the Fed is and how much it controls our economy. I mean, look, central banks at the most basic level, most simplistic level, they decide who gets money and how much money. And especially after the financial crash, the Fed has been extraordinarily aggressive, extraordinarily involved, extraordinarily important. There actually is not enough focus on what the Fed is doing or understanding of what the Fed is doing. Policy is, you know, policy is also obviously extremely important and all of that. But on a day to day basis, the dudes on Wall Street, the CEOs in

this country, they are watching every single word and every single tiny move that the Fed makes because it's extraordinarily powerful. So they're supposed to be held, everyone involved is supposed to be held to extraordinarily high standards to avoid even the potential appearance of corruption. So when you're talking about moving money around the day before a gigantic announcement is made. I mean, this is insane. And as you point out, this comes on the heels of revelations about two different regional Fed presidents in Boston and in Dallas. Now, the Boston guy says he resigned because of health reasons, but it was right after. Right. The Wall Street Journal investigation. It came out that he was doing a lot of things with regards to real estate, which is another market that they can have a lot of influence over.

So Wall Street Journal revealed this, and next thing you know, he resigns. Again, he says it was health problems, but clearly there's a problem here. Clearly there's a big problem here. And whether it's actual corruption or whether it's just an appearance of corruption, it really doesn't ultimately matter. Apparently, Powell has announced they're going to do an investigation and they're going to look into this and what else they can do to make sure that you don't have these problems again. is a dramatic and incredibly significant failure that will get very, very little attention, but again shows you the way that these elites just think that they can do whatever they want, play by a different set of rules. They are quick to condemn different segments of elite society, quick to condemn people who aren't believing them or buying into whatever it is that they're

trying to sell. But then you have instances like this where you go, well, how is it that every single institution is completely corrupted in this regard? We talked about the judicial system and all these judges that had financial interests in the cases that they were ruling on. Of course, Steven Donziger is a great case in point there. Obviously, we know the way that members of Congress are buying and selling stocks. And again, the Fed is supposed to be held to, not that members of Congress are held to a very high standard, but the Fed is supposed to be held to an even higher standard than that. So this is just an absolutely dramatic failure. There's no other way to put it. There's no other way. It reminds, you know, people have such little faith in our institutions. I saw a Wall Street Journal story about some TikTok

kids who all they do is follow the trades of Nancy Pelosi and of other high-profile members of Congress, and they're beating the market. They're like a hedge fund. They're literally making personal trades on the exact same following the Stock Disclosure Act that many of these members of Congress are doing, and apparently they're actually doing pretty well. What does that tell you? They have zero faith whatsoever that any of this is happenstance. They say, hey, these people look like they're making a lot of money. I might as well jump in on the train. When you have that level of corruption, it is not that far away from a kleptocracy, where you just have people openly, you know, we're not that far away from people openly just making a trade on something.

And especially when you have the culture war to the ability to come to your side or not, or the media. How many people reported on Nancy Pelosi's stock options trades of up to a million dollars on like Microsoft and semiconductor companies? Yeah, it was her husband. Oh, okay. I guess that makes it, you know, I guess she doesn't profit whatsoever from her husband. Oh, okay. I guess that makes it, you know, I guess she doesn't profit whatsoever from her husband. Or how about yesterday we covered this incredible CNN segment where Faz Shakir suggests very gently that maybe Heidi Heitkamp, who's been being paid to advocate for low taxes for the rich, that maybe she has a financial interest at stake here as well. And oh, the CNN anchor jumps in to rescue. They'll protect you. Yeah. Oh, well, first, I loved how she was like, let's not get into inside baseball.

Inside baseball? What are you talking about? You're a financial journalist. If you're not talking about the money in Washington, you are not talking about what's actually going on in Washington. And then she rushes in to defend the good reputation of Heidi Heitkamp. Let's be clear. She lost her seat for taking a vote of conscience. I mean, that's part of what the major problem is here, is people feel like they're not getting

the real story. They feel like they're not seeing what's really driving the decision-making here, because they're not. Because the whole system is architected that you can't even suggest that. You can't ask these uncomfortable questions. Oh, it's inside baseball. We're not going to talk about the way that Nancy Pelosi is profiting off her position. We're not going to talk about the way that these Fed dudes are profiting off of their potential inside knowledge. We can't talk about any of the moneyed interests who have a lot at stake in what happens with this reconciliation bill. That would just be too unseemly. And so people know that they're not getting the real story of what's actually going on and what's driving this decision. Because they're not. I mean, you know, and this happens every time. A Republican senator does it. You know, Fox either

stays silent or doesn't cover it. Pelosi does it. Fox and friends. Top thing. Everybody cares about Richard Burr. Everybody ignores Nancy Pelosi. I mean, I did that whole thing. Unusual Wales, a guy from Twitter, I, you know, writes up guy from Twitter writes up always how the Senate's doing in stock. They're beating the market by 10, 20%. I mean, look, there are hedge funds on Wall Street that charge people $2.20 in order to do the exact same thing, and they're not getting the same returns. So you tell me what's going on here. Are they the biggest geniuses? You see how they speak. I met a lot of them. Let me tell you, there ain't a lot out there. They're not sending their best.

Yeah, they're not sending their best whenever it comes to Congress. Same thing here. I mean, you're really going to tell me that they just – the guy claims he was rebalancing his portfolio. The last time he did it in April. This time he does it on February 27th. Just happens to be the day before the chairman makes a major announcement, which has massive impact on U.S. policy. I mean, look, you know, guys got to rebalance, right?

It just had to be on that day. And they have plausible deniability. But the rest of us know what's going on. We know what's going on here. Elizabeth Warren and some others have called for an SEC investigation. Yes. At the very least, we could have something like that. Look, if it truly was just a rebalance

and they've got emails and stuff to prove it, okay, fine, remarkable coincidence, but the public deserves to know. We deserve to know. The public deserves to know and the public deserves for this to never happen again. That's right. They should not be buying and selling stocks.

They should not be actively trading in the market. In my opinion, they shouldn't be even owning stocks while they are in these positions of incredible power. We throw around the words public servants. Public service is supposed to come with some kind of sacrifice. This is the very least, the very least that they could do in order to give the public some confidence that their decision making is actually about the public good and not about what they're going to personally profit on. Another important story that I wanted to make sure we cover here is there is a large spill of oil, large oil spill in California running up onto Huntington Beach in Orange County.

Let's take a listen to a little bit of what's going on there. All right, we begin with breaking news out of Southern California, where a major oil spill off the coast is being called a potential ecological disaster. The leak is about three miles off the coast of Huntington Beach, and experts estimate as much as 126,000 gallons of post-production crude spilled out, apparently from an offshore oil production site. The impacts to wildlife are already visible. Oil has now started to wash ashore along with dead fish and birds. Total disaster. We still don't know exactly what happened. We've got some photos we can show you too of some of the devastation. Let's go ahead and throw those up on the screen so people can see, you know,

you're talking about massive oil slick. You're talking about this oil goo washing up on the beach. You're talking about birds and fish. It's a terrible situation. And what we're learning this morning is that there are a lot of questions about exactly when and how the government knew about what was going on versus when they actually responded and when they informed, you know, this is a heavily populated area. This is Orange County, California. It's not like we're out in the middle of nowhere. When did they inform residents and when did they actually know? Reading now from the LA Times, they have a headline this morning that says officials knew about the oil off of the Orange County coast Friday, sparking new questions about the response. California federal officials had strong indications of oil on the water off of Huntington Beach coast

Friday evening. Records reviewed by the Times show more than 10 hours before the operator of an oil platform reported to authorities. That document raises more questions about how the massive leak was handled in its first hours. Residents have complained about the time it took to alert the public about the scope of the catastrophe and that initial communications by government agencies said the situation was under control and that oil would not reach land. So effectively, residents were smelling the oil. They thought something was going on. And the government, first of all, didn't say anything and then said, oh, don't worry, it's not going to reach the coastline. Well, now we know this is a massive spill, extraordinarily significant, huge, huge

environmental catastrophe. And it looks like they were incredibly slow to respond to alert people what was going on. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, the CEO or the chief executive, Amplify, they said that their company did not know about that leak until Saturday and that they were unaware on Friday of reports from Orange County that any of this was happening. But then you go and you look at the U.S. Coast Guard is seeing if the company failed to notice a drop of pressure in the pipeline, which would then result in the response that allowed the oil to flow for hours. And again, every single one of those hours, it's hard to comprehend for people who don't know a lot about oil rigs, oil business, and more. Every hour, we're talking about potentially millions of gallons of oil. I mean, just like it's hard to fathom. And I remember covering,

and I grew up in Texas, and I've seen a lot of offshore stuff, the BP oil spill. I mean, people were saying, how did this amount of oil escape? It's like, look, it doesn't even take that long for a lot of this to work. Highly pressurized environment, the way the pipeline works, the entire business is kind of made so that you can get as much transported as possible. So when there is a leak, it's a total disaster. So if they had 10 hours in which they were basically ignoring it, that is, I mean, it's hard to fathom. We don't yet know exactly how much oil was there. But like you said, I mean, right now we know that the slick is moving.

So this is Orange County, California. This is millions of people. Yeah. I've never actually been to Huntington Beach, but even I know it's a beach town, you know, all of that. So it could have an impact on local economy. People are looking into what exactly caused this. A lot of the residents are really pissed off because, you know, their home is basically covered in oil. Now the biodiversity, you know, could be impacted. This

also is remarkable because when you told me, I was like, what oil spill? I didn't even know what you were talking about. Well, and I think I was thinking about that because, I mean, look, I just played part of a CNN report. It's not that it got no coverage. Right. But this has definitely not been a big focus. It's on the national consciousness. Of national news. And I sort of think it speaks to how shitty everything is that something as significant as an oil spill, which not that long ago.

I mean, that's a major oil spill that not that long ago would have gotten significant coverage, people on the ground, I mean, segment after segment, and people really concerned about what's going on. Did you get it under control? And what did officials know? Like, I just feel like there's so much significant bad news and catastrophes, quite a few of them climate- related, a lot of them political system related. I mean, there's just so much saturation of the news that people can't even focus on yet

another disaster. And then, you know, then you also have the news media would rather cover, you know, January 6th and what's Trump doing. Right, exactly. Rather than these sorts of issues too, which this doesn't have a Trump angle. It doesn't have Greene. Right, exactly. Rather than these sorts of issues, too, which this doesn't have a Trump angle. It doesn't have a Biden angle. And they really, they, you know, I don't want to say they struggle to cover because they could cover it if they wanted to, but they just don't think that that's going to be the best thing ultimately for their ratings. So I think that's an important thing to note about the story. The other thing that I saw, and I'm going to pull this up because I made a note of it, from the AP. So the operator of this pipeline has been cited 72 times in the past for different violations, according to the AP. The spill, of course, has already spread roughly

six miles by official estimates. It means closed beaches, suspended fishing, in addition to long term environmental destruction. So apparently the operator of this pipeline is kind of a known bad or sloppy actor. This happens every time. It was the same with BP. Yeah. They were cited for all this stuff, subcontractors. But they're just allowed to continue. Right.

I mean, and again, this is, look, it's two sets of rules. I mean, that's the consistent theme here, right? The Fed corruption with this, they can get away with it because they have lots of money. They have lots of, I'm sure they have lots of lobbyists. I'm sure they have lots of influence. And so they can break the rules and be cited for violations time and time and time again. And nothing's really done to change their behavior. There's no real consequences which are ultimately paid. And then the people that pay the price are, you know, the people who live in this area. And of course, the, you know, environmental damage, which is going to be years to ultimately recover. It's a disaster. And when

you have a known sloppy or bad operator like this, it was ultimately a preventable disaster, not just in those immediate hours when government officials, it looks like, didn't act, but over time, why weren't there consequences? Why weren't they either shut down or significant changes made to make sure that you're not vulnerable to something like this again? I was just reading this, which is that they had an air show at the Huntington Beach with 1.5 million people there on Saturday, the day after the speech. There were a million five people, some of whom were getting into the water. It was a blazing hot Saturday. A lot of people were there.

People were enjoying themselves. I mean, look, just because the oil's not there doesn't mean that there isn't, you know, Trey's Sprite product or whatever that could be getting onto people. And this is a real scandal. And, you know, we'll continue to cover it. Every one of these times, I remember BP was the same story. There's some subcontractor. Nobody got cited. Everybody knew it was a disaster. Even the guys on the rig knew it was a problem. Then it blew. And then, oh,

all of a sudden, we just found out about it. The building that we covered in Miami, I'm forgetting what it's called. Oh, it's been cited. Everybody knew it was a problem. Now it collapses. Now, oh, okay. What else? There are too many things that come to account. It's like these things stack up. Then the collapse happens. Everyone says, oh, well, there's no way we could have known.

It's like, no, we actually could have known quite easily. And, you know, the 1.5 million people who are attending this military air show in Huntington Beach, they had no idea. They weren't told. The government made the decision, oh, well, the wind's blowing that way. So we should be Beach. They had no idea. They weren't told. The government made the decision, oh, well, the wind's blowing that way, so we should be okay. We should be good. Yeah, then the wind changed. See how it goes.

Shocker. Never does that, right? Okay. Significant news also coming out of California, out of Hollywood, although this affects workers across the country. So IATSE, that's the main union representing sort of crew backstage, talking makeup artists.

You're talking, you know, people who are doing the lighting, who are running the cameras, all those types of folks. They have voted 60,000 members to authorize a strike. That doesn't mean that they are on strike yet, but they have authorized that strike. Incredibly significant. Could grind Hollywood truly to a halt. Let me read a little bit from this NPR report. Go ahead and throw this up on the screen. Hollywood crews vote to authorize a strike for better pay and working conditions. Hollywood film and TV productions could soon shut down if contract negotiations are not resolved. They say members

from 13 local unions on the West Coast and 23 other locals around the country, totaling 60,000 workers, voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike if needed. That could impact everyone from cinematographers, editors, makeup artists, food workers who feed the cast and crew. Many of them have complained of having work days longer than 12 hours, few breaks, rates below 18 an hour, and miserable working conditions. Some are asking for more compensation for productions that are streamed online and not released theatrically. Since May, the National Union has been trying to hammer out new basic agreements. And effectively, Sagar, there's a couple things going on here.

First, just at a baseline, these folks are wildly overworked. The people who are in charge think nothing of making them work 12, 14, 15, 18 hours. Very little time for break. You've got huge inequality on these Hollywood sets. You've got the stars who are making millions. And then you have the crew who oftentimes, especially at the low levels, like in an expensive place like LA, are not even making enough really to ultimately survive. You also have a situation where because of the pandemic, Hollywood was effectively shut down. So they had a whole backlog of productions to get to. And so now they are just working these crew members to the bone. I mean,

grinding them into the ground with these work schedules. So that's creating an issue. And then the other part that's going on here is that originally when these streaming services, Netflix and stuff like that, started to come online, they were given some concessions in these contracts so that workers didn't make the same rate working on these Netflix streaming shows and other online shows as they did in traditional TV or theatrical production because it was new and it was seen as sort of like a lower budget, etc. Well, those services have now come of age.

They're making more money than the studios. Right. They're doing okay. Amazon Studios is okay. They've made it. So what these workers are saying is like, hey, okay, we gave you this concession early on, but now we feel like these streaming services, y'all can pony up and pay a living wage and put us up to par with what

these other productions are doing. So those are some of the dynamics here. Again, because of the number of workers, because, you know, we're all very addicted to our entertainment in this country, it's incredibly significant. I also wanted to feature, we've got More Perfect Union has been following what's going on here. They put out a great, great set of videos about the potential strike and featuring some of the workers involved and what their concerns and complaints are. Let's take a listen to a little bit of that. There's a hegemony of exploitation within the film industry. You have people who are multimillionaires who have overall deals who are worth $10, $20, $30, $50 million. You have PAs

who, if the minimum wage is $15, they're getting $15. If the minimum wage is $10, they're making 10. A film set is a place where you can basically see like a cross section of all class dynamics within a singular room. It's so messed up when you're in a Zoom room and you have people talking about how they're renovating their vacation house and you're quietly thinking to yourself, if I cut back to eating one meal a day, can I afford to pay my electricity bill this month? I started to accumulate so much debt in order to stick around in the job.

And there was even a time during the pandemic where my unemployed friends who got laid off due to COVID was earning more money than how much I was earning. My day is never not. So I think they put it very well. I mean, that class dynamic, because it's easy to think of Hollywood as all glitz and glamour. No, these are the people, the backbone. That actually make this all work. And so negotiations have restarted. We'll see if there's actually a strike or if they're able to work it out before it comes to that.

But that's where we are. Yeah, it really is stunning. And I was reading here about how they routinely do not get meal breaks. They don't get break time. They have work for the lowest possible wages. One of the reasons that 98% voted to authorize a strike was because everybody's had to at one point be the low man on the totem pole. And currently under the current system, the low man on the totem pole is not paid a living wage for the city of Los Angeles or Los Angeles County. So in many cases, you know, I was reading some of these guys driving three, four hours, like into work, work in 12, 15 hours. I mean, what do you do at that point? You've got to sleep in your car or something just to show up

at work every day. And they'll work like a month on, you know, month off. The entire industry was decimated during COVID, but we know that these were the people who got actually hurt. Everybody else had plenty of money. The studios, the streaming giants, who hasn't been watching more Netflix, right? They've been making more money than ever. They actually got, they beat their expectations by, I don't even know how much. I don't know, like all of you and probably glued just like the Squid Game recently. So they've got all kinds of new subscriptions and money rolling in. They should not be paying lesser wages on those. It's not 2010 anymore, right? Like if anything, Netflix, Amazon, HBO Max, they are the future of the entertainment industry. Yeah. And, you know, a lot of times what the companies and

what management will argue with these strikes is like, you know, we've been talking about the Alabama strike with the coal miners. And they'll say, well, this is kind of, you know, times are tough. Coal industry is on decline. We just can't afford to pay. This ain't the same thing. Yeah. You can afford to pay these people. Like, you're making money hand over fist. There is maybe not a more profitable industry. Probably the pharmaceutical companies. There probably are some more profitable industries, but this is a highly profitable industry. If you want to pay your people so that they can live closer by, so that they can, you know, have a break, like include that in your schedule.

So many people, there's an Instagram that's tracking the stories of these crew members. So many of them talked about like falling asleep on the way home. Just insane at working 23 hours straight and given, you know, with no effectively like power to say no to that. Because if you won't do it, then someone else will come in and fill your spot. So that's why unions ultimately are so important. And I also want to highlight the bigger picture here, which is there are a lot of strikes and potential strikes right now in the country. I mean, it really does seem like a real wave of sort of worker agitation, labor militancy, renewed interest in unionization coming out of the COVID pandemic. Jonah Furbin, who's with Labor Notes, put up a Facebook post that just had a list of what all's

going on. He's got a union roundup that he puts out. On strike, you've got 2,000 Buffalo hospital workers, 2,000 Washington carpenters, 1,000 Alabama miners, Massachusetts nurses, West Virginia steel workers, Kentucky whiskey workers, Denver janitors, L.A. aerospace manufacturers, Reno bus drivers, Pennsylvania teachers, San Antonio symphony musicians, West Virginia machinists. And then he's got a list of potential strikes, including these 60,000 film and TV workers, 37,000 Kaiser health care workers, 10,000 John Deere manufacturing workers. And it goes on. So there's been no coverage of this, of course, of any of this, very, very little in mainstream news. But it really seems like there is something significant bubbling here in terms of workers saying, I'm not going to just accept that this is the way things are. I'm not going to just be out here on my own and not have the power of a union. I'm not going to just accept that this is the way things are. I'm not going to just be out here on my own and not have the power of a union. I'm not going to just submit to endless work days

and not having a livable wage. There's something going on across the country. I think it's an incredibly important and wildly underreported voting to authorize the strike. As you pointed, 98% and turnout was something like 90-something percent. It was huge. So it was huge turnout, and almost everybody voted to authorize the strike. This is part of a larger story that's going on with workers across this country. Absolutely right. Wow. You guys must really like listening to our voices.

While I know this is annoying, instead of making you listen to a Viagra commercial, when you're done, check out the other podcast I do with Marshall Kosloff called The Realignment. We talk a lot about

the deeper issues that are changing, realigning in American society. You always need more Crystal and Sagar in your daily lives. Take care, guys. All right, Sagar,

what are you looking at? Well, at this point, it's a cliche take that during the course of this pandemic, for a variety of reasons, the phrase trust the science became more of a cultural statement and a media propaganda effort than it ever was about actually trusting the scientific process itself. No person embodies this tragic turn of events more than Dr. Anthony Fauci. He entered the pandemic a trusted medical advisor to the President of the United States. He was above reproach and with whom, his words, could find comfort the American

people at a time of crisis. Now, what can really be described today is nothing than a sneering clown. Fauci, over the course of the last two years, has sacrificed his trust for the American people to a much more important trust to him. That's trust with the mainstream media, the Democratic Party elites, and really with Hollywood, to turn himself into an icon, all effectively to quash serious inquiry into his own conduct before the pandemic.

His greenlighting of grant money to the lab, which may have caused a pandemic in the first place, that's gone, ancient history. His consistent use of his platform and media trust to push his absurd and insane COVID policies, which are ripping the country apart. And finally now, after literally having children's books being written about Fauci, after people in my neighborhood who have real signs erected that say, thank you, Dr. Fauci, after nearly a year of media treatment, Hollywood itself is explicitly stepping in. Disney+, using its ownership of National Geographic, to make a hagiographic film about the man. Just take a look at this thing.

When I think about my dad growing up, I certainly think about that seriousness. But very few people get to see. He's funny, weird, and really playful. God help us. In 1981, HIV AIDS was evolving rapidly and frighteningly. There was anger at the government's response. When you got sick, you were gone fast. It's affecting you now. Yeah. Why? Post-traumatic stress syndrome.

When COVID hit, he became this target. My dad said, we're going to get through this whole thing. And he's held back. You don't do it because you want to make money. You don't do it for the glory. You do it because you care. When you're involved in a race to stop a horrible disease, you always feel you're not doing things quickly enough.

Now I find this pretty gross for several reasons. Number one, Dr. Fauci's a human being. He's not a god. He's never been elected to anything. As for his so-called PTSD, a lot of people actually involved in the AIDS epidemic or to this day actually pretty upset about his handling of that. You can go ask them. In other words, he's an official, not above reproach.

And yet, Hollywood and Disney want to create him into a hero. But here is why it's especially galling that National Geographic is doing this. National Geographic is the organization owned by Disney creating this documentary about Fauci is the exact place where Fauci actually told one of his most pernicious lies in May of 2020. Fauci definitively told Nat Geo, there is no scientific evidence that coronavirus was made in a Chinese lab. Keep in mind, that is five months after he received an email in January of 2020 saying that the coronavirus was, quote, not consistent with evolutionary theory.

Now, Fauci's declarative statement on that day was taken with a whole lot more credibility at the time than anything he says today. Try and remember May of 2020. We are still in lockdown. There was a lot of uncertainty about the coronavirus. Fauci's declaration was considered not only headline news, but as the basis through which people were removed from social media for posting about it and for a number of fake fact checks from the mainstream media. It was only after Trump lost the election that more open inquiry into the lab leak theory was even really allowed in the public square. And the state of the race right now is basically that media is ignoring it. So number one, Nat Geo is doing a documentary hailing Dr. Fauci after he literally lied on

their platform. They are rewarding him with effectively billions of dollars in free reputational defense. But what's even worse than that, what's worse is that they're actually proving one of Fauci's most infamous moments, in which he declared that an attack on Fauci is an attack on science itself. Just remember that one. As attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science. Because all of the things that I have spoken about consistently from the very beginning have been fundamentally based on science. Sometimes those things were inconvenient truths for people, and there was

pushback against me. So if you are trying to get at me as a public health official and a scientist, you're really attacking not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, you're attacking science. And anybody that looks at what's going on clearly sees that. You have to be asleep not to see that. That is what's going on. Science and the truth are being attacked. Hollywood, news media before them, much of the public, they have now made Fauci the incarnate of science itself.

Now you might say, who cares? Let's just not listen to him anymore. Hey, listen, I agree. Here's the problem. The government of the United States and the Biden administration in particular is held hostage by Fauci because Biden voters trust Fauci a hell of a lot more than they even trust Biden himself. If the Biden administration were to run counter to the public advice of Fauci, they would face backlash. And the more famous that the guy gets, the more hagiographic treatment, the more he's turned into a living god, the more all of our institutions will be held hostage by him. Let's say, for instance, that Fauci says it's too early to tell if we can gather for Christmas, something that he said, I don't know, two days ago. Then anyone in the government who is now facing consequences if they say, well, hold on, Dr. Fauci. We have a vaccine that works pretty well. COVID cases are

down 35% in the last month. And all things considered, it looks pretty clear that COVID will be relatively endemic for the foreseeable future. We could live with it with the protection we have. You would be attacking science itself if you said those things, even though they're all facts. Fauci's status as a hero has precluded many honest conversations in media around what is acceptable pandemic response. And the more he is venerated, celebrated, the more power he wields within the government. That is bad for science. It is actually bad for anyone who is actually looking for answers as to the question of what exactly went down in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. What role did Dr. Anthony Fauci play?

What role did the National Institute of Health play? What did we know? Certain facts. When did he not? It doesn't matter. At this point, Fauci could literally admit on TV he funded the Wuhan lab, that he knew it was gain-of-function research, and National Geographic and MSNBC would probably do segments about how really it was the big bag GOP or bad independent shows like Breaking Points who are spreading fake news. That's the unfortunate reality that we found

ourselves living in. And we will be paying the price for this for many years to come. I mean, could you not help but roll your eyes at the glory thing? He doesn't do it for the glory. One more thing, I promise. Just wanted to make sure you knew about my podcast with Kyle Kalinsky. It's called Crystal, Kyle, and Friends, where we do long-form interviews with people like Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, and Glenn Greenwald. You can listen on any podcast platform, or you can subscribe over on Substack to get the video a day early. We're going to stop bugging you now. Enjoy. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, the Daily Beast has taken aim at comedian,

actor, and podcaster Russell Brand in a new piece. They say he has become a powerful voice for anti-vaxxers. They accused him of, quote, going down the rabbit hole. But what's more, they contacted YouTube in an apparent effort to get him banned from the platform or at least have his content censored. So they really went the extra mile here. These are pretty serious charges. So let's take a look at the evidence that they offer. Here is charge number one, quote, recently Brand has found a loyal fan base in right-wing conservatives and anti-vaxxers who have flocked to his YouTube and Facebook accounts, hailing the 46-year-old as a so-called voice of reason. He's played heavy to this fan base, interviewing right-wing trolls Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens, although he does disagree with them on certain points. In June, he asked his watchers if he should accept Fox News' invitation

to appear on the network. Most agreed he should. I would suggest, Tucker, he's very fair, one fan commented. So, in this paragraph, the crimes of Brand are that he hasn't purged his audience of all possible conservatives or anti-vaxxers, that he dared to speak with prominent conservatives on his show, and that one person commented in the comments section that Tucker Carlson is fair. There is maybe nothing I hate more than this type of analysis. This idea that you're somehow responsible for whatever YouTube commenter has to say, or somehow endorsing every view of the people you bring on your show. Now, I would say if you invite someone like Candace Owens or Ben

Shapiro on your show and you've got significant disagreements, then you've probably got an obligation to challenge him. But he does that. In fact, he did a superb job dismantling Candace's ridiculous zombie Reagan talking points. Just watch and judge for yourself. Think of animals in the wild. You don't even have to go to humanity. We can just think about animals in the wild. What is our human instinct, okay? Are you going to make sure that everyone on this block is fed

before you feed yourself? Do you go around and say, hey, have you had breakfast this morning? Hey, have you had breakfast this morning? Or are you going to make sure you're eating? And if you have an excess, of course you're going to do the human human condition and our incentives are going to be to want to help people once the richest 15 people on the planet have got as much accumulative wealth as the poorest five billion but you're that's an excess no no no no no no okay okay excuse me first and foremost you're talking about literally 0.00001% of the world is what you're talking about.

Let's get them! And what are they preaching? What do they want? Socialism, so that nobody else has the opportunity to become what they've become. They're the ones that are pushing for it. They're not preaching socialism. Yes, they are. Are you kidding?

George Soros doesn't want socialist policies. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, doesn't want socialist policies. They want to make sure that no one else has the opportunity to get to where they got. We need to discuss our language, me and you. We do. Here's what my socialism looks like. Take Jeff Bezos' wealth from him, except for a reasonable stipend for him to live on. Something like, you know, he can have 10 million a year or something.

Tax Amazon to the ground. Bezos is a socialist. That is hilarious. Anyway, I think it is clear this was not exactly some softball Candace Owens love fest pandering to a right wing audience. Okay, so the initial evidence that brand should be censored is complete bullshit. Let's see what's next. Quote, brand has also taken issue with the vaccine, casting doubt on the trustworthiness of the FDA, asking vaccine mandates are an assault on people's bodily freedoms, calling the vaccine All right, I'm going to take the time to break down each of these claims in turn. First, they say Russell casts doubt on the trustworthiness of the FDA.

Here's a segment that they are talking about. Let's take a listen. The FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, is the agency that regulates big pharmaceutical companies, and it's funded by those same big pharmaceutical companies. Can you see any potential problems in the FDA being funded by the big pharma companies that is regulating? The FDA used to be funded entirely by taxpayers, meaning it was sort of a public funded body. And I'm sure there was some room for corruption or whatever. But ultimately, the FDA sort of was housed within governmental authority. Now it is

increasingly funded by the institutions and corporations that it regulates. What kind of problems could you imagine that might lead to? The FDA has moved from an entirely taxpayer-funded entity to one increasingly funded by user fees paid by manufacturers that are being regulated. User fees! This is our fee for using you. Today, close to 45% of its budget comes from these user fees that companies pay when they apply for approval of a medical device or drug. All right, guys. I double-checked.

Russell Brand is absolutely correct here. The FDA is increasingly funded by the drug companies, and that is, in fact, deeply concerning. Pointing out uncomfortable facts is not a crime. In fact, it's what actual journalists are meant to do. Here is a Forbes article, by the way, calling attention to this very issue and asking whether this drug company user fee support might be an issue. Guess Forbes is down the rabbit hole fueling anti-vaxxers as well. All right, the next claim is that Russell

said that vaccine mandates are an assault on people's bodily freedom. Now, look, I am not ideologically exactly in the same place as Russell on vaccine mandates. For example, as you know, I think the Biden solution of giving folks the option of opting into testing instead is a good balancing of the competing principles of collective responsibility and individual liberties. But Russell's perspective here is perfectly legitimate. That down-the-rabbit-hole bastion of anti-vaxxers, the New York Times, recently ran an op-ed from libertarian Robbie Suave that made a very similar argument. In fact, Russell quotes extensively from that New York Times op-ed in laying out his own case. The idea that such a view is radical or deserves

to be censored is in itself a radical and dangerous view. All right, the next Daily Beast claim is really disingenuous. You ready for this one? Next, they lament that Russell called the vaccines a gold rush and question whether you can trust Bill Gates. In doing so, they completely leave out the context of his comments, and that context was that he was doing a segment blasting pharma for keeping vaccines from the global south. He specifically called out Gates for his complicity in protecting pharma's patent protection. In other words, it was a pro-vaccine segment. And Bill Gates has, in fact, been one of the primary villains in keeping vaccines from getting to poor populations around the world. Now, full disclosure here, Russell played a little bit of my own monologue on that exact topic to make the point.

So, again, the Daily Beast twisted a pro-vaccine segment to make the case that Russell was a, quote, powerful voice for anti-vaxxers. It's impressive. Which brings me finally to the Daily Beast outrage at Russell's great crime of criticizing Don Lemon. How dare you, Russell? Now, he did so in reaction to this commentary. I think we have to stop coddling people when it comes to this and the vaccine saying, oh, you can't shame them. You can't call them stupid. You can't call them silly. Yes, they are. The people who ate and abetted Trump are stupid because they believe his big lie. The people who are not getting vaccines, who are believing the lies on the Internet instead of science, it's time to start shaming them. What else? Or leave them behind. Now, you all know, I think that type of attitude from Lemon and commentary

which demonizes people and demands retribution is disgraceful. I think deserves to be called out. Good on Russell Brand for doing it. Not to mention that Lemon goes on to pretend that the only unvaccinated people are Trump supporters because, of course, that's convenient for his narrative of shame and punishment. This punching down for media figures is also very convenient because it lets our failed elites off the hook for bringing our society to a place where so many would be mistrustful of the media, of the government, and of the pharmaceutical companies. Maybe, just maybe, if some of the issues of corruption that Russell points to were actually talked about and then actually addressed, you wouldn't find yourself in this place to start with. Look, as I already said, I've got my ideological disagreements with Russell. I'm not trying to sanction all of his views.

In my opinion, he's also too equivocal about the efficacy of the vaccine. We know it works, and that could be stated a lot more clearly. But this hatchet job said a lot less about any issues with Russell Brand and a whole lot more about the insecurities and authoritarian mindset of the establishment media. They are failing. Their view counts and their ratings are collapsing. Russell, on the other hand, is succeeding. Millions of people watch his YouTube videos. His podcast is very, very successful. It can't be that he's just doing a better job than they are. No, it has to be something nefarious. He's got to be down the rabbit hole, fueling misinformation, grifting in some as-of-yet-undefined way. The Daily Beast, they're all over it. Suppose journalists calling the manager at YouTube to demand more censorship.

I guess it's understandable, since it may well get to the point where people will only read their trash and watch their shows if they've got no other options. Sagar, this whole thing, the more I dug into it, the more pissed off I got. Yeah, you should. Because honestly- A troubling trend that we've seen all across the nation, let's put this up there on the screen, we've seen a violent crime spike by about 30 percent with an overall decrease yet in property crime. We've also seen hate crime increase and more. Obviously, this is probably one of the most politically charged debates that exists. Charles Lehman, he's a

friend of mine over at the Manhattan Institute, and he's a very sober-minded person whenever it comes to looking at the data. Charles, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on. Charles, tell us a little bit about specifically what we saw. There were a lot of narratives out there. Just break down. The actual data itself is out. Where are there increase? Where are there decreases? What are some myths that have been busted? What are some that have been confirmed? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, the top line, the FBI is the major entity that tracks this stuff. They look at a bunch of different figures, but sort of the standard way that we talk about this is that there are seven crimes, seven major crimes that they try to track consistently over time. Order 30 percent. Smaller but still significant increases off of a higher base in aggravated assaults and grand theft auto, which are both about 11, 12 percent.

And then declines in other classes of property crime, robbery, burglary, larceny. So robbery, burglary, order 2, 3 percent. Larceny increases big. Actually, I think the burglary increase was like 8 percent. It decreased like 8 percent. Larceny fell something like 10%. So the big synthetic picture that we saw in the FBI's data confirmed what we saw in city level data and state level data. There was a big increase in violence last year, as measured by shootings and homicides. There was a notable precipitous decline in property offending last year, except with

the exception of Grand Theft Auto, which also rose substantially. How do these numbers overall and the geographic distribution of these numbers compare to the crack epidemic in the late 80s and early 90s? Yeah. So to answer both parts, geographically, crime is less focused in certain cities than it used to be. The majority, the overwhelming majority of crime still happens in large cities. That's a phenomenon of where population is. The more people you have in one place, the more crime is going to happen in that place for both just sort of population number reasons and also for concentration of people reasons. But it is the case that we saw increases in rural and suburban areas in violent crime. The increases, as far as we can tell, in big cities was bigger in overall magnitude.

But crime is overall less concentrated in the biggest cities than it used to be. In terms of sort of historical context, in violent crime, we remain below where we were in the peak of violence in the late 1980s and early 1990s. We saw this dramatic crime decline between 1991 and 1994, and really 2008, 2009, 2010, and then there's really a leveling off in violent crime. So on the one hand, we're still well below where we were a generation ago. On the other hand, last year's homicide increase in particular was the largest in terms of absolute numbers and percentage-wise record. And we were much closer to where we were in the 1980s and 1990s. I think there's a conversation we had about whether we should expect a reversion to that norm, but

it's certainly the case that we are closer to those sort of worst years of violent crime in recent memory. So Charles, one thing that has in a lot of people's minds is COVID. People freaked out during COVID in many ways. I mean, one of the things that was a hallmark of 2020 is you can't buy any ammunition, and it was very difficult to buy a gun because there were lines that were out the door. Now, I've actually seen both sides of this argument. Many people are saying, see, increasing gun sales led to more homicides. The other one was, well, there's more homicides, so people feel the need, or people just feel really angry because of lockdowns and more. Can you disaggregate any of that? What do we know about that?

Yeah, let me talk about COVID and guns separately because I think they're two different stories. On the one hand, it's hard to suggest that COVID played no role in the relative increase. I mean, just sort of in general, if something weird happened in 2020, there has to have been some role for the biggest weirdest thing that happened in 2020 in determining that. And so I think it is improbable that COVID had no effect. Among other things, COVID led to large-scale decarcerations, which is like letting offenders out of jail is going to have an impact. You could say it was worth it, but it is going to have an impact. That said, I think there's some questions about if COVID can explain all of it. Most other developed countries did not experience a homicide increase

last year. Similarly, violent countries like Mexico or Honduras did not experience a homicide increase last year. Similarly, armed countries did not experience a homicide increase last year. Some of the armed countries did not experience a homicide increase last year. They were all affected often worse by COVID than we were. So that has to be something unique about the United States that isn't adequately explained by COVID. Vis-a-vis guns, there was a historic increase in gun purchasing last year. March 2020 is, I think, the most single-month background checks since the FBI started keeping track. That's like a lot of guns purchased. That said, we know a couple of things. We know that it takes a long time for licitly purchased guns to move

from the hands of licit owners to criminal owners. The ATF estimates it's about seven years on average. And we know that there isn't a correlation between the states that saw the most gun purchase increases and the states that saw the largest homicide increases um there is some evidence that there was an increase in gun carrying last year that people were like walking around with guns more um i think it is it is plausible that that also played a role in the violence increase uh although sort of understanding why people did that sort of, you know, pushes, but moves the goalposts a little bit. It's like, why did people make that change? That makes sense.

Charles, one of the things that's difficult about this data is, first of all, as Sagar alluded to, everyone projects their own sort of like political inclinations onto it. So if you're on the left, you may be more likely to point to, you know, you had this massive economic crash, you had COVID, you had these huge life disruptions. If you're on the right, you may be more likely to point to the social justice protests that we had and the backlash against police shootings and what that may have done. You know, honestly, there was very little policy change in terms of policing, but what that may have done to police officer morale and those sorts of things. So very easy to project whatever your favorite hypothesis is onto this sort of data.

And it seems to me very hard to actually get at the answers. I mean, people are still debating why you had these massive spikes and then even more critically, why you ultimately had a massive decline that you pointed to around 1994. There are all sorts of different competing explanations here. So is it even really possible with these sets of data to actually come to an answer about what happened? Why did we have this spike in this year? And now it seems like things are trending in a better direction in 2021. You know, why is that the case? Is it even really possible to sort of figure those things out? Yeah, I mean, the answer is at the highest level, no, it's not. At the highest level of certainty, we can't know because so many different events happen simultaneously.

And this is true across the board, disentangling the effects of COVID from the effects of protests, from the effects of policies that were caused by COVID is impossible, certainly with the degree of certainty that econometricians, social scientists want. That said, I think you can get suggestive evidence. You can say, you know, I tend to think that there's a significant role played by de-policing in general, by a decline in police levels and the police activity that was related to the protests that you alluded to. I think that for a couple of reasons. One is that there really are in many large cities immediate dramatic spikes in violence just after the protests begin. The sort of timing is very suggestive. And another is that we have seen,

again, in large cities, dramatic declines in police stopping levels and in police activity. I think that's not a dispositive explanation. And you can't ever, you're right, you can't say. Because the other piece is that, you know, this happened across the country. So it's widely geographically distributed. So it's hard to say that's the whole of what was going on here, right? Yeah. And I think the most persuasive story is going to be multi-causal.

That, again, I think it is hard to say that COVID had no effect. We have no good estimates of what de-incarceration as a COVID policy had. We have no idea because we don't have great measures of how many people are in jail on any single day. We don't have a good estimate of what the different COVID policies did. So I think the best and most persuasive story is going to be a multi-causal one, where we say there are a bunch of different factors, and it's hard to disentangle them, but we have suggestive evidence for what is more and less important. My last question, Charles, is about where things are trending. And so we had a terrible year in 2020. What does the city-state level data look like right now? Are we going to continue to have the same level spike? Is it going to return to the baseline somewhere in the middle? What do things look like? are still elevated above 2019. They're slightly elevated above or slightly below where they were in 2020.

So basically, we're about where we were last year, which is not great by comparison to the baseline. If that's going to revert long-term, that's an open question. We saw a big homicide spike 2015, 2016, and then there was mean reversion. I would guess that the same thing will happen in 2022. My guess is we're not going to see another crime wave for the simple reason that demographic

factors and structural factors militate against it. But I would not be surprised if 2021 is as bad as 2020 and then we sort of see a return to normal. That's my least worst guess at this time. Interesting. Thank you so much, Charles, for helping us sort through this data and make sense of it. We're really grateful. That's my least worst guess at this time. Interesting. Thank you so much, Charles, for helping us sort through this data and make sense of it. We're really grateful. Thank you, Charles. I appreciate it, man.

Thanks for having me on. All right, everybody. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. Crystal, we literally already got the news that one of our segments has been demonetized. Really? The show's not even over,

but our production team is uploading stuff kind of as we go. I was checking my email in between, and it's already there. So look, here's the deal. The only way that we can make sure that we do the show exactly the way that we need to is if you guys support us. Become a premium subscriber. I mean, it makes it so that we don't have to worry about both customer experience

and in terms of what's important and what's not. We're going to pick the topics that we need to, or let's say if we want to play a clip, but we're worried about copyright or something, we should play the clip to make sure that everybody's getting the most important news of the day rather than us having to game some monetization algorithm. Yeah, 100%. I mean, you know, one thing we talk a lot about on the show is incentives, the way they shape human behavior. And we want all of our incentives to be aligned in just providing you the content that we think is important, that we think needs sorting through and bringing that to you in as direct and straightforward a way as possible. And so we intentionally created this particular model to help enable us to do

that. So you guys are the best. Thank you for being there for us. I'm actually surprised. I'm looking at the segments. I'm like, what got demonetized? I, you know, normally- I don't have it. I don't have it here. Which things are edgy? Yeah. Which things are edgy and which might be, you know, they might feel like, oh, you said the word Syria. I can't have that or whatever. 9-11. I don't even know with this one. So we'll find out. But thank you guys for being there for us. We love you. Have a great day, and we'll see you back here on Thursday.

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