Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 11/10/25: Data Center Backlash, Sam Altman Freaks On Bubble, Biden War Crime Coverup, Hegseth Says US On War Footing

Episode Date: November 10, 2025

Krystal and Saagar discuss data center backlash, Sam Altman freaks on bubble, Biden war crime coverup, Hegseth says US is on a war footing.    Trillion Dollar War Machine: https://www.amazon.com/Trillion-Dollar-War-Machine-Bankrupts/dp/1645030636   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.comMerch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Another issue that people are very understandably concerned about is their electric bill, and the way that keeps going up and up. So let's take a listen to Scott Besson of this administration talking about their plans to deal with that problem. The president says, though, he just had posted this morning, that there's almost no inflation. The consumer price index is higher than it was in the beginning of the year. Electricity rates are rising. So are prices for coffee, beef, vegetables, televisions. And it's not just me. It's not just economists who are saying that.

Your own Republican members of Congress are saying that, including Marjorie Taylor Green. Electricity prices are a state problem. And, you know, I was very interested to see in the earlier clip where the governor, the governor elect of New Jersey said, well, I'm going to bring down energy prices. Well, it was her predecessor, Phil Murphy, who took him up. So, you know, look, there are things that the federal government can control. Local electricity prices are not one of them, but energy prices, gasoline prices are way down. And, you know, we are doing what we can every day. I think we are on a very good path to bringing prices down. So what are they going to do for you? On your life, nothing. It's not their price.

problem. These are Biden people. Can't do anything. It's just the states. It's the locality. Sorry. Sorry, not sorry. We can't do anything. We won't do anything. We don't care. I mean, unbelievable. These are literally Biden. This is Biden shit. I remember, you know, during the gas price season. Remember, oh, the government can't do anything about gas prices. It's like, first of all, yeah, it may be kind of true. But wouldn't you want to try? Shouldn't you try? Shouldn't you try? Yeah. Well, and then they actually acknowledge they could because they did their whole like gas reserve, you know, the oil reserve. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. I mean, on the electric electricity price and more. Like, yes, in the immediate term, can the government do anything about it? Should you maybe at least pretend to give a shit? I mean, greenlight some new nuclear power plants. See the path to making, you know, zero. We're going to make, we're going to have the cheapest energy in the world. It would be awesome if somebody said something like that. We're going to build nuclear power. I'm going to bulldoze these NIMBYs all across America. We're going to build 50 to 100 of them. I would like a thousand. But let's start there. We start at 50 to 100. We're going to build a new oil. refinery. We don't even need to be woke. Let's build a new oil refinery. We didn't build a new oil refining these

countries in the 1970s. All right? I mean, look at the Port of Houston or LNG. We can't do anything. Everything is structured to make these like establishments filthy rich. Yeah, and I think you made this point on our call. You were like, you know, when they have something

in their way that they want gone, then they'll like ignore the Supreme Court. Yeah. Whatever. Send in the National Guard. We're not sending out the, we don't care that a court said we have to send out the food stamps. We're not doing. it. Like, when it's something they want to do that benefits them, then it's no problem. But now we're getting like, oh, the parliamentarian type of, like, dem bullshit excuses coming from them. And, yeah, and also think how different from how Trump talked on the campaign trial. He talked all

about low prices and abundant energy, right? That was something that was a core promise that he made. Also, think of the contrast with, like, China, where they're out, you know, massively building out solar energy, like really investing in a green future. and here we have this clown who's like, sorry, sorry your life sucks, can't do anything about it. And you know it's bullshit because how involved is this federal government in pushing in this whole data center direction? And one of the big drivers of increased prices is the builddown of these data centers. I mean, you know, here in Virginia, that has been very clear. And apparently in the state of Georgia as well, because we'll get to some of the direct political results that are

already emerging and we're in the early phases of this data center buildout. Go ahead and put this HeatMap article up on the screen. HeatMap focuses on like climate politics and the climate crisis. But they talk about the fact that this headline is fantastic. The data center backlash is swallowing American politics. Activists on both the left and the right are pushing back against AI development. And one of the things they dig into and they did some very interesting polling here as well is that the opposition to data centers is truly across the political spectrum. Because if you think about it, you know, I live in, I've mentioned this a few times, I live in a rural community.

We have two data centers that may be located. One of them is basically already Greenland. The other one is, you know, there's pushback, Amazon, they're trying, they're in court, whatever. Probably both of them are going to be ultimately located in the county. And it's a conservative county. It voted, you know, some like 65% for Trump roughly. In any case, you know, the people who live there who are more, you know, they're committed

to the rural character of the county, it is like an NIMBY issue. They don't want the data centers there. And there is a genuine bipartisan concern about what is this going to do to our water supply. And of course, a genuine bipartisan concern about what is this going to do to our electric bills. So these are truly like non-ideological. And then on the left, you also have the concern about the environmental degradation as well, which heat map focuses on as well. I wanted to read you this one section, which was kind of interesting to me of some of the activists who have gotten involved. They write, on one end of the spectrum, left-aligned activists and local leaders are raging against the energy and water system strain that will come from the data center boom.

You have folks like Blake Coe, an activist fighting data center projects in San Marcos, Texas. Coe told me he began opposing data centers after being politically awakened by a totally different issue. The Israeli government's offensive in Gaza and alleged genocide of Palestinians there. But as he told me, he didn't have, quote, the clout, the money, the whatever to work on fixing a genocide. After learning about the project in San Marcos, he concluded. the community there was something he can fight for. So, you know, because it's so local, because it's such an extraordinary coalition, you have local activists who are stepping up who are truly across the political spectrum. We're saying we have to make sure that we refuse

these data centers in our communities and block them from being built. In Georgia, this was apparently a major issue that helped to cause a truly historic shift, electoral shift, in that state's statewide results. Put C3 up on the screen here. This is a swing in one Georgia County. So Democrats flipped Morgan County, Georgia for the Utility Rates Commission. In 2024, it was R plus 47. Let me say that again. In the Trump election, it was R plus 47. Democrats won it by three points. It was a 50-point swing. And the Democrats who were running statewide in Georgia, ran specifically on opposition to these data centers, wanting to reduce electric bill prices. And look, it was a low turn on election, so it's unique circumstances,

et cetera, gives you a little taste of how powerful these particular politics saga can ultimately be. And Greg Blustein down in Georgia did some of the fantastic reporting pointing out how much this ended up being a central issue in these campaigns. And we had a few races here in Virginia, too for the House of Delegates, where at least one of the Democratic House of Delegates candidates ran aggressively against a data center that was being built down in their county, and they also were able to flip a swing seat there on the strength of that message. I think what I love about this is that Americans, it's not just their don't tread on me philosophy. A lot of it comes down to opposition to entrench power, which they do not control. That's what this whole thing is about.

If you look at our economy, the vast majority of the growth of the spending is coming from data centers. People understand this. You can look at a basic chart and they can feel viscerally even if they're not reading the Wall Street Journal every day. They're like, this NVIDIA thing, like we're about to talk about that, disvaluation, all of this hype around AI. I'm not sure I like this. I'm not sure this is making me feel better. I'm not sure this is really showing up in my workplace. It's been a couple of years now of AI. If it does show up in your workplace, it's because the younger employees are getting fired. If it does show up in your workplace, it's probably because you have to use it to be like a little bit more efficient,

but overall your wages have not increased. The profits of the companies are going massively sky high. You're seeing your child use it, let's say, in college. You're reading the stories also of people who are using it to commit suicide and IDA of mental health awareness. You see the porn thing from AI, Instagram for teen chatbots that are springing up. You have a deep suspicion.

And then your electricity bill wants to go up. I showed you the Sora memes. It's just shit. It's just literally like a, bear shaking its ass and from a ring camera. I'm not, did I laugh? Yeah. Should I pay more for it?

No. I mean, why should anybody do the benefits outweigh the cost? Do the benefits outweigh the cost? I mean, we're already talking about AI ads in politics. Oh my God, did you see this Bill Ackman thing recently? Bill Ackman posted a video which was entirely AI of Elon talking. And he fell for it. I mean, this is one of the richest men in the United States of America, which gives you a little bit of view into their IQ.

for the for those who are those rich but i mean you know from them to think about it if you're average facebook boomer or anything this how are you supposed to to do anything with this and i think the point that i come back to is if that's all we get is suicidal ideation marginal increase in worker productivity or whatever but huge sky high bills a destruction of social trust and you did you know remember they they said they were going to cure cancer they said they were going to massively benefit all of our lives. Sorry, I don't think so. The only thing is going to cure cancer is probably people taking those Zempic because they're going to be less fat. That's the only thing I could potentially see. Nothing to do with AI, certainly. So you put that together, and that people

are rightfully afraid of centralized control. And they see the infrastructure pop up. Also, if you're our age, we live through the Amazonification of America. We watched Amazon become the second largest employer in the United States, second only to what, Walmart, I think, may have even surpassed Walmart in some cases to build warehouses for goods all over the nation. Everybody's neighborhood in America has the blue vest contractor in the Amazon thing. And they look at that and those guys are shitting in bags and peeing in bottles because their productivity is tracked every which way. And you're like, I don't know about this, right? I don't know about this. This is not right. It doesn't feel good to me. And so you can see that happening now with AI. I think that's

what it all comes down to. And also, we just don't have cheap power. We don't have power in our countries, a finite resources. It's not that finite in China, even though they have over a billion people. The Chinese are willing to do anything. They don't care about environmental regulations, about nothing. They will do build anything to make sure that power is cheap. That makes it so that people can do AI and they can do whatever they want, which is awesome. That's a nice type of country. And you also have a huge electric vehicle, you know, infrastructure and all that built out. Here, we've basically got the worst of all worlds. We have aging oil infrastructure. We have aging, you know, we have complete federal capture in the bureaucracy over nuclear power.

We have no innovation. Power is going up, and everything just looks like it's going to centralize power. And we don't have a government that's allowed to rein those people in either. So I think it's just, I don't know, it's tragic. As someone saw someone who tweeted basically like all of the people who should have been building, like, nuclear power plants are instead building data centers. And I also just saw this morning we will cover tomorrow that there's a number of these data centers in video ones in particular that have been built out that aren't even functional because there isn't sufficient power generation. And yet, where's the, you know, where's the effort to deal with that? So basically there's something for everybody to hate in the data center build out, except for the corporations, you know, who are hoping, hoping that this big bet that they're placing is going to make them wildly wealthy.

On the podcast Health Stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night. Yes, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally, a double board certified physician. And I'm Hurricane Dibolu, a comedian and someone who once Googled, do I have scurvy at 3 a.m. On health stuff, we're talking about health in a different way. It's not only about what we can do to improve our health, but also what our health says about us and the way we're living. Like our episode where we look at diabetes. In the United States, I mean, 50% of Americans are pre-diabetic.

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So tune in. Listen to health stuff on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. She said, Johnny. The kids didn't come home last night. Along the central Texas planes, teens are dying. Suicides that don't make sense. Strange accidents. And brutal.

murders. In what seems to be, a plot ripped straight out of breaking bad. Drugs, alcohol, trafficking of people. There are people out there that absolutely know what happened. Listen to Paper Ghosts, the Texas Teen Murders, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Robert Smith, and this is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History. about the best ideas and people and businesses in history. And some of the worst people, horrible ideas, and destructive companies in the history of business.

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or wherever you get your podcast. And Sager, you know, they've got a backup plan too, which is that if it doesn't work out, they think we should backstop their losses. So all the gains to them and the losses, you know, we're here to backstop and make sure that Sam Altman and Elon and Mark Zuckerberg and all the rest are just fine. Here is Sam Altman in a recent interview speaking to exactly this.

Some level, when something gets sufficiently huge, whether or not they are on paper, the federal government is kind of the insurer of last resort, as we've seen in various financial crises and insurance. companies screwing things up. So I guess given the magnitude of what I expect AI economic impact to look like, sort of I do think the government ends up as like the insurer of last resort. But I think I mean that in a different way than you mean that. And I don't expect them to actually be like writing the policies in the way that maybe they do for nuclear. And there's a big

difference between the government being the insurer of last resort and the insurer of first resort. Last resort's inevitable. But I'm worried they'll become the insurer. insurer of first resort, and that I don't want. So he says there the government is de facto the insurer of last resort. I mean, basically that what he's saying is we're going to be too big to fail. We're already probably. We're already too big to fail. I mean, this is what we're tracking when we talk about how, like, the whole American economy

is just basically one big bet on AI. Most of, you know, all the construction growth is data centers. And then all of the growth of the stock market is these AI and tech stocks. You know, they're, rather than coming up with plans, like, detailed solutions to deal with the housing crisis and health care and whatever, they're just like putting all their wishes in the magic bucket of somehow, you know, AI is going to come to the rescue and save us all. So Sam Altman has been getting a lot of heat over those comments and over a suggestion that he may want government funding to help him build out his data centers. So not just being sure of last resort, but we're then actually on the hook for their build-down. And the reason that this is a question is, first of all, because some of the comments you made, but number two, because they've said they're going to spend trillions of dollars on data center build-downs when their revenue is not anywhere close to being able to float that sort of thing.

So let me go ahead and play D3, which speaks to this issue of like, wait a second, how are you going to spend trillions of dollars on these data-sum? And then I'll give you Sam's response on the other side. How can the company with $13 billion in revenues make $1.4 trillion of spend commitments? You know, and you've heard the criticism, Sam. We're doing well more revenue than that. Second of all, Brad, if you want to sell your shares, I'll find you a buyer. I just enough. Like, you know, people are, I think there's a lot of people who would love to buy

opening eye shares. I don't think you want to sell. Including myself. Including myself. who talk with a lot of breathless concern about our compute stuff or whatever that would be thrilled to buy shares. So I think we could sell your shares or anybody else's to some of the people who are making the most noise on Twitter, whatever, about this very quickly. We do plan for revenue to grow steeply. Revenue is growing steeply.

We are taking a forward bet that it's going to continue to grow and that not only will Chachapiti keep growing, but we will be able to become one of the important AI clouds that our consumer device business will be, a significant and important thing that AI that can audit made science will create huge value. So, you know, there are not many times that I want to be a public company, but one of the rare times it's appealing is when those people are writing these ridiculous, open AI is about to go out of business and, you know, whatever. I would love to tell them they could just short the stock and I would love to see them get burned on that. But, you know, we carefully plan. We understand where the technology, where the capabilities, is going to grow, go, and how the products we can build around that and the revenue we can generate, we might screw it up. Like, this is the bet that we're making and we're taking a risk

along with that. Think about how modest of a question that was. Very touching. It was just like some people say, you can't do that. And he's like, oh, well, if you want to share, if you want to sell your shares, then I'm sure I could find a buyer for them. Many may not remember, but there was a famous moment in the Enron meltdown where the CEO, kind of blanking on it, not the CEO, God, C-O, Jeffrey Skilling, that was his name, the guy who went to prison, and an analyst asked him about irregularities in Enron books, and he called him an asshole on the call.

It was an asshole. It became a massive moment. If you ever watched the documentary, I read the book, the smartest guys in the room, that's what it reminded me of. It was a tell. It was a tell. It was super touchy,

and that's what eventually led into the actual meltdown of the company. And by the way, just so you all know from that whole period about I'd like to see them short the stock or whatever, go take a look at NVIDIA over the last five days. You know, lost 10, 15%, and there were all stock value. Modest reductions, again, in those stocks matter for the overall U.S. economy because NVIDIA alone, the last time I checked, was 8% of the entire U.S. S&P 500.

80% of all S&P 500 gains over the last year are from AI stocks. They are the only reason the United States is not currently in a full-on recession because of AI data cap spending. So if they stop spending on the data centers and, And then what's going to happen? If they come up short, I mean, think about, they've set up a system where a $13 billion company with $1.2 trillion in outlays is a failure if it only spends $100 billion, $200 billion. That's still a lot.

That's very profitable, right? That's an awesome company that was able to go. But they are saying, we're not just going to the moon. We're going to Saturn. You know, it's like, so if they fall short and we only go to Mars, then you're like, oh, it's a whole failure. That's the problem. Yes. And here's the thing, too, with his response there of, like, basically, like, well, our stock's going to keep going to going up.

It's like, that doesn't answer, that is not actually responsive to the question of how you're going to fund this massive build-out that you're promising. And speaks to the concerns that you're, like, hoping that the U.S. government helps you to make sure or some sort of weird, you know, gimmick, gimmicky vendor financing, like boondoggle. Like, okay, I actually don't doubt that the stock continues to go up because I think that. This government is now all in on AI and is going to make sure that you don't collapse. You are too big to fail. Your entire industry now is basically too big to fail. So the fact that the government is likely to continue to inflate the bubble is not responsive to the question of how this is all going to work out. So in any case, Sam put out an Akman-esque host here in response to these questions and some others and concerns that he has been.

getting the very fact that this post is so lengthy in my view is a red flag to begin with because if you have simple answers like oh yeah our revenue is going to like here's our revenue trajectory and that's how we're going to fund it that doesn't take you know however many words this is to be able to put out so let's go and put d2 guys up on the screen here this also got originally a community note that i'll get back to i'm going to read this even though it's a little tedious because i do want to get into what he's claiming here so he says i'd like to clarify a few things first the obvious one, we do not have or want government guarantees for open AI data centers. We believe governments should not pick winners or losers and taxpayers should not bail out

companies that make bad business decisions or otherwise lose in the market. If one company fails, other companies will do good work. What we do think might make sense is governments building and owning their own AI infrastructure. But then upside of that should flow to the governments as well. We can imagine a world where governments decide to offtake a lot of computing power and get to decide how to use it, and it may make sense to provide lower cost of capital to do so. Building a strategic national reserve of computing power makes a lot of sense, but this should be for the government's benefit, not the benefit of private companies. The one area where we have discussed loan guarantees is as part of supporting the build-out

of semiconductor fabs in the U.S., where we and other companies have responded to the government's call and where we would be happy to help, though we did not formally apply. The basic idea there has been ensuring that sourcing the chip supply chain is as American, as possible in order to bring jobs and industrialization back to the U.S. and to enhance the strategic position of the U.S. with an independent supply chain for the benefit of all American companies. This is, of course, different from government's guaranteeing private benefit data center build-outs.

So just on that first part, right, he's saying, oh, no, we totally, like, if companies fail, they should go under. We totally don't want the federal government backstopping our data centers. But we do think here's some ways that government should actually backstop data centers. and, you know, it may be more for their benefit. But, of course, it would benefit Open AI as well if, you know, the government is getting involved in the business of building this strategic National Reserve.

In theory, it's not a horrible idea. It's that in practice, what it would be done is a way for Open AI to offset its huge capital expenditure onto the taxpayer while they get to benefit from it. Now, in theory, if we were to build or own some stake in the day, I mean, this is one reason I was very pro the Intel deal. The whole reason that I thought we should have taken 10% in Intel is like, yeah, at the end of the day, this company basically destroyed itself

on the back of shareholder capitalism, and you do need some impetus in terms of a national strategy to say absolutely not, no, we're going to take a stake in this company. We're going to guide you in direction of the nation. The issue with just having that and then basically privatizing, what is it, socializing the biggest cost center for these people is it would actually be a boon to their stock price while also not getting anything from them in return. What are the public things that we would all want from Open AI? From me, for me, what it would be is this whole porn suicide thing, it's over. It's over.

Like anything that subsidizes or encourages addictive or mental health, you know, behaviors which are detrimental to the user, absolutely not. I think that we should all have a real say in that. And as a result of us, let's say, taking some of that off, a huge amount of your compute power is going to go to stuff, which we think is more beneficial. Why don't you actually solve cancer? Why don't you actually, you know, go and point at some of the directions that we think that you should do? That's what we, you know, as a society, we should try to use this technology, especially if we're going to bail it out or provide some of a subsidy, then into the benefit of what we can agree as, like, a democratic society for what we want from it.

But instead, that's not what's going to happen. David Sachs said there will be no federal bailout of AI. He's the White House AI czar. We'll see. To be honest, I'm not sure they have a choice. Like, if you allow it to fail, you are, we are in a full-blown recession, full-blown. Like, we have no manufacturing. We have nothing. Yes, the interest rates would come down, but, I mean, stock portfolio will crater. Do people remember dot com? I mean, at one point, stock went down by 99%.

Like, we will see a full-blown meltdown in assets for the boomers. So they'll have nothing if you're trying to retire. I mean, you know, it could be worse, but for them, like, their stock portfolios will melt. They will have nothing. Younger folks, of course, will bear the brunt because reduction in stock means no hiring. No hiring, you know? And then there'll be a huge mass layoff. And then what?

Like, at that point, no one's going to be buying many houses because a lot of people use margin accounts, like the rich people who buy how they use margin accounts on their assets to buy, and there'll be no tax subsidy. Like, it'll be bad. Yeah. bad. I don't know if they have a choice but to bail it out. We don't have anything else. That's that and that was the logic of the bank that was like, listen, we all know that this is not, but like, what if we let these institutions fail? We don't know what that looks like.

Like, that could be a total like calamity. Yeah, it would have been a calamity. That you can't recover. So yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be ugly, but we don't know. And so too big to fail is, it means that there's, they want to make it the logic such. that the government has no choice or feels that they have no choice anyway, that the pain of allowing this organization to fail is so great that it's not like you need Sam in there advocating. The logic of the system is what makes it too big to fail. And yes, we're already there.

I mean, these tech stocks are covering up so many glaring disasters in the American economy. If you put the tech stocks, the Magnificent Seven or whatever, aside, And you look at the rest of the performance of, you know, consumer stocks and banking stocks, et cetera. Our stock market is actually underperforming even the European indexes. So the fact that we have, you know, Nvidia primarily, but all these other tech stock, Tesla, which is completely overvalued, insanely overvalued, that these things keep going up and up and up creates the illusion of momentum and growth in the economy that, you know, that Trump can hang his hat on and that a bunch of rich people are benefiting from. meanwhile everything else is stagnating and so if that goes away and you deal with the fall out of that oh my god so we are already really in a disaster it can't go down it can't we don't have anything else we don't have pensions in this country we only have 401k that's right we have no

guaranteed cash the number has to go up if the number doesn't go up we're fucked the whole country is a bet on the i i mean the music will stop 50% of all consumer spending in the united states today's from the top 10% who are doing so on the inflated value of their stock portfolio. What would happen? You know, what was that term you said about NAFTA, a giant sucking sound? Yeah. For real.

If there is a 99% drop in the QQ or the tech stops or something like that, game over. Like air travel, done. Consumer spending, done. Housing market, done. Like, everything will collapse. And if you're poor,

you may root for that because you're like, oh, them. It's like, yeah, well, they control your destiny too, okay? So they're going to be at the, I don't want it to be this way. I'm just telling you. You're going to get fired. You're going to make it so that you can't get a job. Interest rates and all that will go down for them. It's not going to be to your benefit. So it's just, I don't know. It's very dark. If they don't radically change something soon, which of course they're not going to do, we will face this political question. And in my opinion, they absolutely will get a bailout because the alternative is so catastrophic. I mean, it genuinely be catastrophic, I think, to the U.S. economy.

Put D4 up on the screen as the last element we'll throw to in this block just to show you the amount of debt that's already being taken on in order to finance the AI data center build-down. And you can see, you know, in 2024, it's like a, you know, very minimal amount. And now you just have this absolute explosion in debt-backed financing of these data centers. And, you know, so you've got... Nobody asked for this, right? Communities in uproar, political system already showing the signs of being roiled by this. And you have all this debt being taken on, these companies already too big to fail. And then, you know, these inklings from, from Altman. And he's not the only, he's just the only one dumb enough to like say it out loud apparently that, you know, they're looking for the federal government to help them, help them continue this build out and to be there for them. And, you know, when if they fail.

So that is, that's the, that's the landscape we're facing right now. Not looking very good. On the podcast Health Stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night. Yes, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally, a double board certified physician. And I'm Hurricane Dabolu, a comedian and someone who once Googled, Do I have scurvy at 3 a.m? On Health Stuff, we're talking about health in a different way. It's not only about what we can do to improve our health.

but also what our health says about us and the way we're living. Like our episode where we look at diabetes. In the United States, I mean, 50% of Americans are pre-diabetic. How preventable is type 2? Extremely. Or our in-depth analysis of how incredible mangoes are. Oh, it's hard to explain to the rest of the world. Like, your mangoes are fine because mangoes are incredible, but like you don't even know.

You don't know. You don't know. It's going to be a fun ride. So tune in. Listen to Health Stuff on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And she said, Johnny, the kids didn't come home last night. Along the central Texas plains, teens are dying. Suicides that don't make sense.

Strange accidents and brutal murders. In what seems to be, a plot ripped straight out of Breaking Bad. drugs, alcohol, trafficking of people. There are people out there that absolutely know what happened. Listen to paper ghosts, the Texas teen murders, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Robert Smith. This is Jacob Goldstein. And we used to host a show called Planet Money.

And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history. And some of the worst. people, horrible ideas, and destructive companies in the history of business. Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing. It's like not having it at all. It's a very simple, elegant lesson. Make something people want. First episode, how Southwest Airlines use cheap seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airline business. The most Texas story ever. There's a lot of mavericks in that story. We're going to have mavericks on the show. We're going to have plenty of robber barons. So many robber barons.

And you know what? They're not. not all bad. And we'll talk about some of the classic great moments of famous business geniuses, along with some of the darker moments that often get overlooked, like Thomas Edison and the electric chair. Listen to business history on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. One more story here before we get to our guests that we wanted to make sure to highlight, because it just really is so illustrative of the twisted relationship this country has to Israel and the way the logic of it permeates every administration, whether it is Democrat or Republican. Let's put this up on the screen. This was a scoop from Reuters and Huffington Post

fleshed out some of this reporting as well. So they say scoop. The U.S. gathered intelligence last year, this was during the Biden administration, that Israel's military lawyers, Israel's military lawyers, warned there was evidence that could support war crimes charges against Israel for its military campaign in Gaza, that's according to five former U.S. officials. They say the previously unreported intelligence described by the former officials as among the most startling shared with top U.S. policymakers during the war pointed to doubts within the Israeli military about the legality of its own tactics that contrasted sharply with Israel's public stance. Two of the former U.S. officials said the material was not broadly circulated until late in

the Biden administration when it was disseminated more widely ahead of a congressional briefing in December 2024. Even before then, lawyers at the State Department had repeatedly raised concerns with U.S. Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, that Israel might be committing war crimes, according to five former U.S. officials. As early as December 2020, lawyers from the State Department's Legal Bureau told Blinken in meetings they believed Israel's military conduct in Gaza likely amounted to violations of international humanitarian law and potentially war crimes. There's so much in here that is important. And I know none of this will be surprising to you guys. But again, I think it's important to dig into exactly how this all unfolded. So there were three different things going on. First of all, there was a State Department assessment that we that had been reported on previously. And at least one State Department official resigned over the watering down of this assessment. And the fact that once it went through the leadership, they changed the conclusions, they watered it down. Why? Because the minute that you say Israel is committing war crime,

It means by our own law, we are not allowed to send them weapons. It also opens up the possibility of war crimes charges against our own officials, because if you are complicit and you know that their intent is criminal, then you yourself, if you are aiding and abetting pat, then you open yourself up to charge. So you had that report internally that was basically like watered down and quash. You had a refusal to actually engage in any sort of an in-depth assessment. So everyone's just sort of like covering their eyes and ears and pretending like they didn't know what was going on here. So if they can avoid making an assessment, then they can pretend, play dumb.

And, oh, we think they're the most moral army in the universe. They told us that there was Hamas under that school bus or under that church or under that mosque or under that hospital or whatever. And then you have this, which is Israel's own lawyers and military, saying we think we're committing war crimes. And the way they got out of this one is by saying, well, we didn't come to our own independent assessment. So the fact that the Israelis think they're committing war crimes and that it spoke specifically to intent, which is also the key way that they always dodge. Oh, accidents happen.

War is hell, blah, blah, blah. But they don't intend to murder all of these babies and women and innocence. So since it spoke to intent, that's what created a further difficulty for them. And so they're dodged there, which was led by Brett McGirk, was the most aggressive. aggressive advocate for Israel in the administration saying, we can't do nothing. We were not going to change course. We're not going to, you know, we're not going to bring any of this to light whatsoever. In any case, the reason they were, their argument there was basically like, oh, well, we didn't come to our own assessment. So the, you know, the Israelis, they think that, but we haven't come to our own assessment. So we're just going to say and do nothing. I mean, it's just so incredibly disgusting. And then the Trump administration was briefed on all of this coming in. And of course, here's the difference between the two. In the Biden administration, there was some hand-wringing about it, and they did nothing. In the Trump administration, there was no hand-wringing about it, and they just continued to fully fund and support the genocide. Yeah, I mean, but this is why the Biden one, I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I appreciate a little bit more honesty, because for them, they were always hemming and hauling.

The fact is December 2023 on, they got a briefing, and they said, hey, this is probably happening, and they decided to just cover it up as a secretary of state. And by the way, again, at the very same time, they were justifying U.S. support for Ukraine. because they said that Russia was violating international norms and Putin is a war criminal who had to step down and Russia was committing a genocide in Ukraine at the very same time of what was happening in Israel. There was no consistency between the two. This is why the whole human rights thing is a farce.

It always has been. And instead, they took it to the max conclusion, I think, with the way that they conducted themselves, like, broadly. And so, I don't know. For the Biden administration in particular, really what I think I'm shocked by is the same what happened with change. where in all of his New York Times obituaries and everything, even the political reporters and

others, they would say, oh, he was a patriot. He died a patriot because he stood up to Trump. Like, that's the only lens that they look at politics. Even right now, Jake Sullivan is launching a new podcast with Vox Media. Like, how can you, if you're Vox, right? And Harvard, also, the Harvard Kennedy School. I think Brett McGurk, who is a. genuine demon. He's on CNN. I think he got, he's on CNN, and I think he also got hired by Harvard. That's what I'm saying. Like, these people, they suffer no consequences. Like, the entire political elite is like, oh, you worked for Biden? Good guy. Checkmark, right? They never look at you. They don't analyze your actual actions and the consequences of what they mean, as long as you are

opposed to the right side, or if you speak in the right language. And that's like, that's basically what all like current democratic neo-lib politics is centered around. I just think it's so crazy that a guy like Sullivan and them can not only get the H-KS deal, but like launch a pocket with no shame, nothing. It's like acting like a victor. Like, sorry, dude, you actually presided over one of the worst foreign policy periods in American history, period. End of story. Like, there's no question about it. Put E2 up on the screen because this is also very telling. I recommend you read this whole Huffin Post piece because it gets into some of the details about who it talks about the Brett McCirk piece more deeply.

But here's what they said. They say Biden officials worried that attaching their names to a recommendation to limit American support for Tel Aviv would hinder their future career prospects. The former senior official said, which is in itself appalling. Yes, it is. It is appalling. And to Saugers' point, think about this, okay? Actually, like, cutting off support for Israel's genocide.

That would hurt their career prospects. But the fact that they were complicit in that and engaged in a multi-year cover-up, that has no problem for their career prospects. You know, they're getting podcasts. They're going to Harvard School, other Ivy League institutions, corporate boards, whatever. World is their oyster. No problem there. And so that is the sort of logic that pervades government.

Now, I think on the Democratic side, there is a shifting, for the politicians, there is a shifting political calculus that they are grappling with now. And you see it in primaries that are playing out across the country. Obviously, you saw it the New York City mayoral race. You see it in terms of, you know, the members of Congress now who are having to look over their shoulder and worry about what did I do? What did I say? Where am I going to locate myself now? And are wildly at odds with the Democratic base on the issue of Israel specifically. So there is some changing political calculus that is happening right now as we speak. But up until this very moment, all of the costs and the consequences were on doing the right thing. We're on asserting an

independent foreign policy. We're on checking the abuses of Israel, calling out their war crime. You know, Tony Blinken was running around the State Department talking about how this was ethnic cleansing. Like, they knew. They knew. Of course they knew. I mean, again, this is not going to be a surprise to you. But they played dumb, and they covered for them. And they did it the whole time right up until the end. There was a final debate about, okay, we've got this intelligence from Israel. Should we on our way on the door do something that would be, you know, basically a virtue signaling because we know the Trump administration is going to come in and they're going to completely reverse course on whatever we do. But at least it would send a signal that, you know,

this is unacceptable and kind of lay a marker down the way that Obama did when he let that settlement vote get through in the UN Security Council. Like this is something. And Biden did it on some other things, he took Cuba off the, like, state-sponsored terror list or something like that, to sort of, like, again, it's like a signal of the direction they think foreign policy should go in. And they said, no, even that, because we're worried about, you know, was

the Harvard school going to hire us then, is you know, am I going to get my podcast? Am I going to be able to go to SKDK as the chubby Indian guy ultimately? Who does not look like me, to be very, who does not look like me. He doesn't. He's just fat and where's this

it's not fair. It's not fair. Okay? I think it's the glass. I actually think it's the glasses. That's what I think. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah, he still has a job. So, yeah.

These guys, I don't know. Their calculus, I mean, their calculus was correct. No, of course it was correct because look at Cheney and all of the Iraq war people. They're all doing the exact same thing. Like, it's like, I'm serious. I watch these people walk around town, even today, take a stroll down K Street. You'll see Paul Wolfowitz. You'll see all these guys.

They have no shame. They live completely normal light. Nothing happened to them. It's sick. Yeah. And now the next general. it's the same thing. And it happens over and over and over and over again. They'll be on CSIS panels till the day they die. And it's like, why does nobody pay a price for being bad

in this country? That's one of the things I appreciate about what Rokanez said about Chuck Schumer today. Oh, right. He's like, not only did he help march us into Iraq War, but he gave Netanyahu a blank check. Like, it's not an accident that those two things are connected to, by the way. The people who tend to be for endless war are always for endless war. Like, they're always, and this will set us up well for the next point. talking about the trillion-dollar war machine. But in any case, I am somewhat hopeful that the logic, the just cynical political calculus, when you see someone like Seth Moulton coming out and being like,

I'm not going to take A-PAC dollars after he went to A-PAC and found out they weren't going to give him any money. By the way, but he sees the cynical political calculus now, if I'm going to win a Democratic primary, is to say no A-PAC money. That is an absolute sea change. So we'll see how that translates into future. American foreign policy, how it translates into future position for it, the Democratic Party. But this is, you know, the cover-up here, just disgraceful. No one, no one who was involved in

this should ever be forgiven. That's right. All right. We got our guest standing by. Talk about a book trillion-dollar war machine. Let's get to it. On the podcast Health Stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night. Yes. I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally, a double board certified physician. And I'm Hurricane Nibolu, a comedian and someone who once Googled, Do I have scurvy at 3 a.m? On health stuff, we're talking about health in a different way. It's not only about what we can do to improve our health,

but also what our health says about us and the way we're living. Like our episode where we look at diabetes. In the United States, I mean, 50% of Americans are pre-diabetic. How preventable is type 2? Extremely. Or our in-depth analysis of how incredible mangoes, are. Oh, it's hard to explain to the rest of the world that, like, your mangoes are fine because mangoes are incredible, but, like, you don't even know. You don't know. You don't know.

It's going to be a fun ride. So tune in. Listen to health stuff on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. She said, Johnny, the kids didn't come home last night. Along the central Texas planes, teens are dying. Suicides. that don't make sense, strange accidents, and brutal murders. In what seems to be, a plot ripped straight out of Breaking Bad. Drugs, alcohol, trafficking of people. There are people out there that absolutely know what happened.

Listen to paper ghosts, the Texas teen murders, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What do you get when you mix 1950s Hollywood? a Cuban musician with a dream and one of the most iconic sitcoms of all time. You get Desi Arness, a trailblazer, a businessman, a husband, and maybe most importantly, the first Latino to break prime time wide open.

I'm Wilmer Valderrama, and yes, I grew up watching him, probably just like you and millions of others. But for me, I saw myself in his story. From plening canary cages to this night here in New York, it's a long ways. On the podcast starring Desi Arnaz

and Wilmer Valderrama, I'll take you in a journey to Desi's life, the moments it has overlapped with mine, how he redefined American television, and what that man for all of us watching from the sidelines, waiting for a face like hours on screen. This is the story of how

one man's spotlight lit the path for so many others, and how we carry his legacy today. Listen to starring Desi Arnaz and Wilmer Valderrama. That's part of the MyCultura podcast network available on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Joining us now is William Hurtung. He is a senior researcher at the Quincy Institute and is the author of this excellent new book. The Trillion Dollar War Machine, how runaway military spending drives America into foreign wars and bankrupts us at home. A very apt time to be joining us. Thank you very much, sir. We appreciate it. Yes, thank you. And I should point out my co-author, Ben Freeman, did all a heavy lifting. Okay. All right. He just put me on there as a courtesy. All right. Well, hopefully you can you can speak to the facts of the book as well. I thought it was good to go ahead and start with Secretary of War, Pete Hexat, here, saying that the United States is now currently to a wartime footing and how that fits a little bit potentially with your book. Let's take a listen to Pete Hexaf.

We're not just buying something. We're solving life and death problems for our war fighters. We're not building for peacetime. We are pivoting the Pentagon and our industrial base to a wartime footing. Building for victory, should our adversaries, F-A-F-O. All right, how does a wartime fitting fit here with your book about the trillion-dollar war? Partly which war? Is it Venezuela?

Is it in China? It's pretty different. Well, what we point out is pretty much every president in the post-World War II period has made noises about streamlining the Pentagon, better strategy, keeping us out of war. they've pretty much all failed or gone back on those promises. Oh, sorry. Donald Trump is an interesting case because he said things on the campaign trail, like, I'm going to drive the warmongers out of Washington.

I haven't had any wars. I'm going to be a peacemaker. And yet, you know, we're attacking boats off of Venezuela. There's a lot of tough rhetoric. There's a nuclear buildup. So I think he's conflicted, partly because some of his base is sick of war. He has to at least give a rhetorical, you know, bone to them. But, you know, we're at a trillion dollars.

Actually, there was concerned writing the book if it would get above a trillion wild that was in production. So I said, well, we'll have stickers, you know, it's a subscription. 1.2 trillion. Keep counting up. And I think, you know, it's such a, we've invested so much in that tool that there's a tendency to lean towards it. And I think there's also strategies, not just about money, but, you know, if we want to have military primacy, fight wars all over the world, it's going to be hard to go below that trillion, especially when you got the tech folks, Lockheed Martin, fighting over the. that pie. The way to solve that is just increase it. Yeah. Given both a piece of golden dome, new fighter plane, and that's just going to be, it's like a sedimentary rock. You keep adding

layers and you never make decisions. And that's not really going to lead you to a viable strategy. Can you talk a little bit more about that internal logic? Because, you know, you might think, okay, Cold War's over. Maybe we can, you know, reel back in some of the military spending. That doesn't happen. It just keeps going up and up and up with a war on terror. Okay, we're on of Afghanistan. Now maybe we can reduce military spending. No. just keeps going up and up and up, such that now, as you point out, it's over a trillion dollars. What is the internal logic that makes it so that we just continue to expand and expand and expand military budget?

Well, I think if we go back to the end of the Cold War, Colin Powell said, I'm paraphrasing, I'm running out of enemies here. Yes. I got Cuba. I got North Korea. So they came up with this two major contingencies strategy, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, to at least put a floor under the Pentagon budget. And that tends to happen.

But as the war on terror was winding down, lots of writing about China as the new pacing threat. Some of those reports are written by people with tight ties to the arms industry. I think for some of them, it's just a marketing technique. Say China, get money. Other than just believe it. But if you're in China, you can tell the difference, of course. One of the things I always try to focus on is that money doesn't equal quality. In fact, that might be the central kind of element of it, is that we keep pouring money into this broken system.

but the actual output of, let's say, the innovation, of its ability to, let's say you end up in a conflict with China, does anyone really believe that the trillion-dollar investment is going to materialize into something better? According to even the Pentagon cutouts like CSIS, they're like, no, we couldn't even win a war like this. So what's the logic? We keep pouring. Is it good money after bad? Is it just the corruption? Well, unfortunately, it's more of a money-making machine for contractors than a well-considered plan.

The F-35 is not performing as advertised. Congress keeps adding more. Some people say aircraft carrier can be taken out by a modern missile. We're building with $13 billion a pop. There was the territorial combat ship. Even the Navy didn't want it. They said it's not useful for China, can't defend itself. And it wasn't even about production.

The places that maintained it in Florida and Virginia kept those in the budget. So if you're putting things in there because it's built in my state or my district, that's not a plan. Right. And that's not going to build you the best weapons. So Silicon Valley is coming in and say, well, we're different. and we're going to have that fight. But my feeling is, well, okay, if you want to give us tools that work, that's fine. But don't tell me what our strategy should be.

Don't tell me what our priority should be nationally. There's a bit of hubris and kind of, you know, we're the people that are going to save humanity. I'd rather they just were suppliers. Yes, right. Yeah. Talk a little bit more about that dynamic between the legacy prime contractors, the Boeing, the Lockheeds of the world and like the Palantiers and Palmer Lucky's outfit of, of the world and how they're selling themselves and, you know, what that could look like in

terms of the budget, in terms of what it means for our national priorities. Yeah, well, the Lockheed Martins are giving them a good argument because it's almost a monopoly. Five big companies get a third of what the Pentagon spends and build most of the weapons. They put Boeing in charge of the new fighter plane, even though it's failed on every major project for decades, probably just to keep them in business. So Palmer Lucky has a chief strategy. officer, Christian Brose, who's been talking about this for a long time.

And basically, they have this thing, well, they put a, like a pamphlet out, rebooting the arsenal of democracy. And it's quite a good critique of the big companies and the kind of sclerotic system. But they're overstating what they can do. They are competitive. And if they didn't have billionaires behind them, they never would have made it. It would have been bought up by the big company. So in that sense, fine, shake it up.

But the exchange is get rid of all regulation, trust us. you know, we're the wave of the future, technology will save us. That's never worked before. The electronic battlefield in Vietnam, the impervious Star Wars, the fact that we had precision-guided munitions didn't win us wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So it's got to be motivated people, the country's behind it, the strategy makes sense. Otherwise, you can do damage, but you can't, technology itself is not going to win you a war. They seem to be kind of selling their technology as if it would.

Yeah, if anything, technology is always the folly and the problem. that leads to reality where you're like, wait, these guided munitions mean nothing when you can't build, like, have a bullet that rolls off of a factory. As you've looked at what's happening in Russia, it doesn't require all that much technology. As long as you have a decent industrial base, you can survive for quite a long time. And they have an advantage because our stuff takes a long time to build. Once we've got word of stocks, their stuff isn't great, and our stuff takes a long time. So Ukraine has a do-it-yourself drone program. Right. They take Chinese, you know, commercial drones. They put a camera and some weapons.

They're suicide drones anyway. They don't have to be perfect. So they're kind of falling back on low-tech, even though Silicon Valley says their technology is winning the war, a closer look would say otherwise. Yeah, I totally agree. I heard from my entire time here in Washington. The fifth generation warfare will be unlike anything you've ever seen. It'll be about cyber. It'll be all about this. Where the next major conflict in Europe looks more like World War I than it does like World War II. If anything, we've reverted backwards, and the cost, you know, for all the stuff we poured money into, doesn't seem to have yielded basically anything except a lot of profit for people who live in Northern Virginia. Yeah. And, you know, then if you have a new situation, it's hard to address it. All that money's tied up. You know, if you wanted to move towards more nimble, cheaper systems, first of all, the Pentagon wants the best, and that costs more. Right. Second of all, all these members are like, not in my district. And then the guy here says,

Well, if you vote for my weapon, I'll vote for your weapon, suddenly you can't budge and you can't be agile. And it's also ultimately, you know, Congress doesn't debate strategy anymore. They debate like, hey, isn't my weapon great, which is shameful. I mean, they had a whole report about what should our nuclear strategy be. And the Senate Armed Service Committee, you know, the questions were like, well, we have a hypersonic missile that can, you know, take out theirs and don't we need more of those? Finally, Senator Warren said, what all his cost? The co-chair of the committee, who was former lobbyist for North of Grum in the big nuclear comes up, oh, cost is not an object here.

So they never discussed, do we have enough? It was just about money. And, you know, Congress is supposed to, well, okay, we know. It's supposed to be a deliberative body that's looking at the future of the country. They're tied up in this whole money game. So very few of them will speak out. And the ones who do can't bring enough folks behind them to move the needle, you know. How has this block down other potential?

priorities that perhaps the American people have? Well, you know, it's certainly a significant component in the deficit, which is now close to being, the interest on the debt is close to being the biggest item in the budget. So that's not available to us anymore. And then depending how you look at it, if you want to reduce the deficit, if you want to invest in other areas, medical research or environment, that's a shrinking, you know, window, especially with tax cuts. So some people would say, well, you know, we don't want the government to go big into public investment.

But no matter how you look at it, we just have very little flexibility as a country for any kind of change. And so, in a sense, we're lagging. And to the extent we keep throwing that trillion more in, it's sort of like if you're a weightlifter, but you can't bring your arms below your shoulders. You're not really equipped to fight anybody. Somebody knows how the box could take you out. Right. Such a good point.

So how do you get under control? I mean, you've got all these members of Congress who have their own individual incentives about this or that that effectively serves as a jobs program in their district. You have a bunch of people making tons of cash. How do you reshape this ecosystem? I think it's kind of a societal effort because the whole lobby is kind of embedded in our society. But there's certainly people on the right who are tired of this.

They don't like corporate welfare. They don't feel like we should be throwing this kind of money at endless war. People on the left, centrist. If you're a military reformer, which we used to have 100 people in that caucus, you know, build more reliable weapons. train the troops better, they can't work through this system anyway. So I think you need

kind of a coalition that says, all right, we know this doesn't work. Let's start by fixing that. And then we're going to debate what our strategies should be. So that means more transparency, not letting people go straight to industry from government and lobby for them, or now to VC firms that invest in emerging tech. Or like if you have a government commission, have some people who aren't on the payroll, that would be novel. So I think it's a difficult process. And really, People have to say, okay, if defense is our top priority, let's do it right. So, you know, it's public education, but people have to feel like they can make a difference. And there's a big deficit, obviously, in that now.

That's the problem across the board in terms of policy. So I think it's almost like a large cultural shift. We've had those before, but you never know when it's going to come. But you have to at least have the information, have the arguments, and people have to look a little more broadly about where they get their information. because the mainstream media, whatever they're framing might be, they're just reducing coverage of this stuff. I mean, some papers don't have a real Pentagon report. They just report when the budget comes out.

And we need a lot more than that. I totally agree. Everybody go buy the book, trillion-dollar war machine. We'll have a link down in the description. Thank you for joining us, sir. Yes, thank you. Thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you tomorrow.

And she said, Johnny, the kids didn't come home last night. Along the central Texas planes, teens are dying. Suicides that don't make sense. Strange accidents and brutal murders. In what seems to be, a plot ripped straight out of breaking bad. Drugs, alcohol, trafficking of people. There are people out there that absolutely know it how. Listen to Paper Ghosts, the Texas Teen Murders, on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

On an all-new episode of I-HeartRadios Las Culturistas, Jennifer Lawrence is dishing. Jennifer Lawrence. Let's go! From her hilariously awkward run-ins with A-Lister's. I don't know what I was expecting, but he was just like, nice to meet you. To her unfiltered take on beauty treatments. I'm so upset I think the Botox before that. And a jaw-dropping reveal you won't see coming.

I don't know if I can announce this, but I'm just going to. Open your free IHeard radio app. Search Las Culturista. And listen to the full podcast now. I'm Robert Smith. And this is Jacob Goldstein. And we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history.

And some of the worst people. Horrible ideas and destructive companies in the history of business. episode, how Southwest Airlines use cheap seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airline is. The most Texas story ever. Listen to business history on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.