Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 1/12/23: Biden Caught Second Time w/ Classified Docs, Pete Buttigieg Airlines, Ukraine Funding Scrutiny, Republicans Demand Santos Resign, SCOTUS Decision Union Rights, The View On Katie Porter, Working The Matrix, Childhood Obesity, Richard Wolff On 2023

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss Biden caught with a second trove of classified documents, Pete Buttigieg's failure to hold Airlines accountable, a Navy Secretary warning that excessive Ukraine funding might threaten our own military, Republicans demand George Santos resign from Congress over his constant lies, SCOTUS to make a decision on union rights and whether striking workers can be held liable for a company's damages, the hosts on The View upset that Dianne Feinstein is facing challengers like Katie Porter, why workers need to 'Break the Matrix' on their relationship to their job, the rampant and difficult issue of Childhood obesity, and an exclusive interview with Professor Richard Wolff on 2023's economic future.AUSTIN LIVE SHOW FEB 3RDTickets https://tickets.austintheatre.org/9053/9054To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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BreakingPoints.com. Good morning, everybody. Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. We got some breaking news this morning. More Biden classified documents, a lot of questions here. Very uncomfortable for him. Trump, of course, celebrating the latest developments. So we'll bring that to you. We also have the latest in terms of that massive airline FAA failure yesterday. Grounded flights for a while.

What exactly happened? Who exactly is to blame? Talk about that. Also, questions on our support for Ukraine coming from a surprising place. Military leaders starting to raise questions about how much we are shipping them and what it might mean for our own national security. We also have some updates on my favorite member of Congress, Mr. George Santos. Some new lies being revealed, some sort of like amusing ones. This guy is just, he just never stops. Also, some of his fellow New York Republicans calling on him to resign, but he is holding fast. He is not interested in leaving.

So we will bring you all of those updates. We also have oral arguments in a big case in front of the Supreme Court this week that could crush workers' right to strike. And some interesting commentary from our friends over at The View on Katie Porter's announcement for Senate. Richard Wolff, Professor Richard Wolff, will be back on the show previewing the economy for the year. Sagar is looking at childhood obesity. And I am looking at which professions make people the happiest and which make them the most miserable. But before we get to any of that, Sagar. Live show.

Put it up there on the screen. February 3rd. You guys know the drill at this point. Paramount Theater, Austin, Texas. We have a great show planned for all of you and the tickets are selling very, very well. Last chance probably to see us for at least for a little while before we go and pause the tour and go back eventually. So this is the last chance, guys. There's tickets who are widely available. Reminder to the Lifetime members, if you go ahead and buy a ticket, we will fully reimburse the cost and you'll be able to participate in the meet and greet. But with that, let's get to the breaking news that

happened just last night. Let's put it up there on the screen, guys. President Biden, turns out, even more classified documents were found in a second location for hoarding classified documents in President Biden's office. This was at a, quote, second location associated with Mr. Biden. We haven't exactly been told what that second location is. The previous one were some documents that were actually found by President Biden's lawyers before the midterms at the Penn-Biden Center, which is kind of like a think tank, which he had put his name on and eventually had been paid nearly a million dollars a year to preside over, basically put his name on the front of the building. So what are these documents?

Well, we don't really know a whole lot. As some people are saying, we actually don't even know the entire number. I was actually listening to Joe Rogan yesterday, and he said, nearly 10? Come on. He's like, you know, you can't say nearly 10. Nearly 10? It's either 10 or 11 or 12. Like, you know the exact number.

Just say the number. In terms of what was in the documents, by the way, is a little bit of a difficulty. It's because it's almost exactly mirrored to the same accusations against President Trump. They are sensitive intelligence memos and briefing materials concerning Ukraine, Iran, and the UK. So Ukraine in particular raises a lot of flags, not only over what's happening there. We should all remember President Biden was actually the basically point person by the Obama administration in the anti-corruption moves on Ukraine. This is why the entire Hunter Biden Burisma payments really mattered is because Biden himself was probably the foremost authority over Ukraine while he was in the Obama-Biden administration. Iran and the UK, I mean, I guess UK doesn't particularly matter, but Iran is the same one where I believe in the Trump

documents, aside from the North Korea documents, one of the nuclear powers that they had said, you know, we'll remember they said, oh, it contains nuclear material. It was actually intelligence regarding Iran. So lots of questions also about what exactly was in the document. It raises the even more so, I guess, pervasive problem of how many classified documents are these people all holding on to? How hard is it to just not do this? Why? Why are you entitled to your briefing and intelligence memos

from when you were the vice president to be held? Another key point is that President Biden doesn't even have the smokescreen that Trump has, which is Trump at least was the commander-in-chief. Technically, if he had gone through the process, could have declass least was the commander in chief. And, you know, technically, if he had gone through the process, could have declassified the documents if he want. The vice president has no declassification authority.

So he just straight up grabbed classified. Again, was it him? Was it staff? I don't know. But clearly there was a sloppy process that was all going on there. But this is tremendously embarrassing for the Biden administration.

Oh, absolutely. And you pointed out aptly, the more you read about the timeline, it is very clear these people knew about this before the midterm elections. And it's January 12th. And we're only learning about it now. Yeah. Why? I think we all know the answer to that one. Yeah. Yeah. It would have looked really bad and a big distraction before the midterms. And so they managed to keep it quiet until now when they think they can sort of like weather the storm and get through it. Right. I mean, there's a lot to say about this.

Number one, I do have to say, I was listening to CNN on my way in last night to the city. And I wanted to hear the way that they were handling all of this. And it really was kind of hilarious because, listen, it is true. Trump seems to have gone to greater lengths to cover up his documents. And that may ultimately be what gets him in the most trouble. Like, it's not the crime. It's the cover up, that sort of thing. But the pains that they went to, to preface literally every sentence they said with, this is way different from Trump and it's nothing like what Trump did. And it's like, you know, also, how do you have so much confidence in that? Because we still don't know a lot of details. You know,

we are still learning, especially with the second batch of documents, we are still learning. We don't even know where they were found. We don't know why they were brought there. We don't know the details of what level of classification. We don't frankly know whether there was some sort of cover. I mean, there appears to have been a like temporary cover up to keep the American people from knowing before the midterm elections. So anyway, it was amusing to watch them go to such great lengths to insist, this is totally different from Trump, has nothing to do with Trump. The other piece of this is, what does it mean for Trump? Because, listen, the way the justice system should work is it shouldn't really matter that there's this

other thing going on with another dude, with another president. It shouldn't really matter that there's this other thing going on with another dude, with another president. It shouldn't really make a difference for Trump's case. But the DOJ, these are especially the people at the top, these are fundamentally political actors. And the biggest question has always been whether they would be willing to take the political risk in order to indict Donald Trump. And this makes things more challenging for them. And Trump knows that. I mean, he's out there actively celebrating. They are delighted in this turn of events. So, you know, where I was previously extremely confident that Trump would be indicted by the Justice Department,

probably for this exact reason, because the obstruction charge seems so sort of clear and they have him sort of dead to rights, this makes their case a little bit more challenging. Of course it makes it more challenging. As you said, look, any case involving presidents or current or former presidents of the United States is going to be inherently political. And for the other problem is, as you said, the facts of the Biden administration's conduct here is actually not clear at all. According to what we've seen, these documents were actually held amongst his personal information, including apparently the funeral arrangements for Beau Biden, the departed son. But like, why are Ukraine documents

co-mingled with funeral documents regarding the president or the vice president's then departed son? So look, it's a little weird. And also, you know, there is going to be an investigation. The Justice Department has put in charge a Trump appointedappointed U.S. attorney to actually—or a Trump-appointed special counsel to actually investigate all this. And I think it does push the timeline on any potential action going forward. And it just reminds me kind of of a Hillary Clinton case and so much more, which is, you know, the lengths to which media went to try and basically whitewash what the Clinton people did while in the State Department was absurd, especially. Yeah, go ahead. I just love the yo-yo.

Yeah, it's like every time. Where it's like, depends on who is accused of having these classified documents, people determine how they feel about like this. Now it's like, ah, this is no big deal. You know, whereas previously with Trump, this was a grave threat to national security, etc, etc. So listen, personally, I think it does matter. I think it's important.

I thought Hillary Clinton, like, I thought they let her off the hook. I think anyone who, you know, is willy-nilly with serious classified documents and especially engaged in a cover-up, I think that is incredibly serious. So, people need to kind of pick how they feel about this and apply it consistently. Not that I expect that to happen. I just think we need to end kingly practice where these guys just hang on, apparently, to whatever they want. It's like, you're not a king, you served as president, now you're out. Like, that doesn't mean that you're entitled to everything that ever happened to you in office. Kind of nuts when you think about it. Very true. Okay, so that's everything

that we know right now. Let's go ahead and move on and let's talk about Pete Buttigieg, my favorite subject, air travel. So as CounterPoints did a phenomenal job doing yesterday, we had a complete shutdown of air travel in the United States for several hours up until 9 a.m. Eastern time. I don't have to tell you that causes massive cascading delays both international and within the country. There were even some stories of planes that were literally halfway through in the air and had to turn around and go back. Oh, I miss that. What a nightmare for people who had to participate. I believe it was Marquise Brownlee who talked about that, the tech YouTuber.

Anyway, so all eyes on our Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg. This is now the third massive meltdown of U.S. air travel that has happened under him, the second in just a matter of weeks. What's going on? So we turn to our great secretary in the middle of this crisis, and he says, I have no idea what's going on. Here's what he said after air travel was actually resumed. Let's take a listen. Well, now that the system is up and running, our primary focus is to determine that root cause. And I've directed FAA to figure out exactly how this happened, the timeline, piece by piece about what was known overnight going into last night and then coming

out of it. And most importantly, as you might imagine, a critical system like this has a lot of redundancy built into it with backups. So we need to understand why with all of that redundancy, it still rose to the level that there had to be a ground stop lasting about an hour and a half and the kind of delays that we saw. This is an incredibly complex system. So glitches or complications happen all the time. Glitches or complications happen all the time. I have no idea what happened. What do we pay you for? You know, look, let's go and put the next one up there on the screen. There were 10,000 flights that were delayed or canceled just yesterday. And passengers, of course, just having a complete nightmare. Also, anybody who flies a lot knows this, which is that if the morning flight gets delayed, those flights fly five legs after that. If the 6 a.m. gets delayed,

that means the 9 a.m. is delayed, which means the noon and the 4 p.m. and the 6 p.m. and the 7 p.m. So you can go all the way down the line. It was a nightmare traveling yesterday. And it's just one of the, look, we are, have one of the nation's most robust air, you know, we have so much air travel that occurs in this country due to our geography. Used to be, we were kind of the shining light of aviation across the world. We've had complete meltdowns in our system all under this man. People are like, what is he supposed to do? You know, oversee the computer programmers? I'm like, yeah, actually. Because the Inflation Reduction Act, infrastructure bill, oversee the computer programmers? I'm like, yeah, actually, because the Inflation Reduction Act, infrastructure bill, and others actually gave a billion dollars to the U.S.

Department of Transportation specifically to update FAA computer systems. Now, in terms of what actually went wrong, news came out this morning. It says that a computer programmer effectively uploaded like a damaged file and that's what corrupted data and that's what brought down the whole system for several hours okay but you know my question is like why is it even possible to be that vulnerable for one of the most critical systems in the entire united states where you ground every flight you know that stuff hasn't happened since like 9-11 in terms of no flights that are allowed up in the sky this is a total breakdown in the FAA system. Also, we should remember, Buttigieg was bragging about the FAA and its ability to handle some of the critical infrastructure

in this moment when the airlines were actually blaming the FAA for many of the delays several months ago. And he specifically pointed to things that he was doing within the FAA to make it operate better. I mean, I just think this highlights like a basic lack of competence because, you know, fool me once, one problem, okay, you know, we can talk a little bit. Although the one problem actually lasted several months. This is the third major meltdown. This is the worst year in like a 12 month or so period in modern history of air travel since 9-11. That is now all happening under Pete Buttigieg. And billions of dollars in commerce are being lost.

But put that aside. Think about the people who this stuff affects. It's not a joke. People are flying to funerals sometimes, to weddings. You know, I mean, it ruins people's lives whenever you have stuff like this happen. And the stress and the extra money that some people have to undergo. It's just outrageous. You know, it's not just for the rich. A lot of working and middle-class

people are very affected by this. Yeah. I mean, and Pete is supposed to be Mr. McKenzie. So he's supposed to be, you know, expert at making these systems run super efficiently, et cetera, et cetera. So there's that. And I agree with you. If it was just this one incident, you could say, you know what? Not really his fault, like it's the old system, who could know, etc. When you look at the pattern of one crisis after another crisis after another crisis, it becomes very clear. This man is wildly unqualified for, and by the way, uninterested in actually doing this job. Pete Buttigieg is basically good at two things, and they're related things. One of those things is getting rich people to donate money to his campaign. That's number one, wine cave, remember all that. Number two is saying a lot of words that basically mean nothing. Those

are the two things he's good at. And last time there was a big airline crisis with Southwest and whatever, I saw Claire McCaskill on Twitter. She reposted one of his cable news appearances. She's like, oh my God, he's just so good. And it's like, Jesus Christ, you all are the hollowest people on earth. The man is failing at his job in every way you could possibly measure. He's got to be the worst cabinet secretary in the entire administration. And yet he goes on cable news and he's able to like bullshit and spin in the entire administration. And yet he goes on cable news and he's able to like bullshit and spin for a few minutes. And now you're like, oh my God, he's so amazing. It is so shallow and so ridiculous. We all know the reason he's in this

job. It's because he did what Joe Biden wanted him to do in the primary when he was told to do it. He didn't want to be OMB secretary because he wanted the glamour of being cabinet secretary and being a part of the infrastructure package and traveling around to his ribbon cuttings. This has been a disaster for him politically. It's been a bigger disaster for the country at a time when, you know, I don't know that the transportation secretary has ever been more important. No, this is probably since 1975, the deregulation of airlines and arguably during 9-11 has never been more important. Because you had the supply chain crises.

You've had these airline crises. And again, to make it really clear on this, this man has a lot of power to hold these airlines to account. There are all sorts of issues here where basically they book out a flight schedule they know they can't possibly achieve, but they're able to goose their revenue and their earnings by booking people on flights that everything has to go absolutely perfect in order for it to happen. And they took all this money from us, they got bailed out, and then they pushed their staff out. So they're wildly understaffed, again, at their own, like this was their own failure. Multiple politicians, Ro Khanna, Bernie Sanders, others, David Dayen and the American Prospect,

they've been pointing out ways that he could use his power in order to make sure these airlines are held to account and actually have real measurable fees and that passengers are being made whole when this happens to him. Hasn't done it. He'll go on and he'll bluster on TV and they have not charged a single major airline. And then you're right. He was also part of perhaps the biggest Biden administration betrayal of working people, which was crushing the rail workers and sending them back to work and siding with the bosses there. So it has been one catastrophe after another catastrophe after another catastrophe. And I don't know if this is related or not. You know, Debbie Stabenow, who's the senator from Michigan, she's announced she's retiring.

So that opens up an open seat there. Obviously, it's going to be highly competitive, both in the general election, also in the primary. Pete had just moved to Michigan, which is, I guess, where Chastin is from. Yes, that's right. And so I don't know if this is why, but he's already announced he's not going to go for that seat.

I mean, my biggest hope out of all of this is that this has actually really damaged his political career and that people actually care about the substance of the fact that this man was totally unable and unequipped to do what was a really important job at a really important time. Oh, tremendously important job. And look, we're not just talking. Put the data up there, please. I went ahead and pulled this from earlier this year.

Take a look at 22 versus 2019. In January of 2022, for US airline cancellations, 2.8% 2019, more than double, 5.6% in 2022. And it remained elevated from January to September, with only three months in 2019 through September where things resumed. But the delay number was also a catastrophe. It remained above 20% all the way from January to August. That's almost one-fifth of all flights in the United States that were delayed under Pete Buttigieg with a normal delay rate of somewhere between 14% and 15% on average

in the pre-before times. Again, he has actual unilateral authority to levy fines. Furthermore, in terms of the actual behavior of the airlines itself, like, look, the airlines are greedy and they have been doing everything they possibly can to juice their stock price. And in fact, one of the problems is all of the airlines are required to try and contribute to an FAA infrastructure upgrade, given the fact that they benefit from it. And as our friend Matt Stoller pointed out, put this up there on the screen, they have been trying to avoid contributing to FAA infrastructure upgrades specifically so that they can do stock buybacks. This was a key part of the

Southwest Airlines story. Southwest Airlines' meltdown happened just three weeks after they issued or announced a new dividend to stockholders because they said that profits were good and that they're well prepared for holiday travel. Those profits easily and should have been reinvested in their staffing system, which would not have required them at one point to cancel 50% of all flights worldwide in the middle of one of the busiest holiday travel seasons. He has authority to look at all of this. And I am watching this. It's insane, as you said.

We have never needed a good transportation secretary more. Is he individually responsible for each one of these things? No. But he has oversight authority and needs to tackle this with the crisis. Every single one of us knows that he cares more about going on CNN to talk about the gay marriage bill. That's all he's actually good for. Going on Fox and being like, no, Brett Baer, let me tell you why I'm actually doing it. By the Biden administration, it's the best thing. Look, man, all of us want to do is catch a flight. And we have a reasonable

expectation that it's going to be on time. And then if it does get canceled, that you won't get bilked for the money that you already spent on a very inflated ticket. Definition of an empty suit and bigger picture. Think of what it says about the Democratic Party, that they're like, you know, big up and comers, the bench that they are so excited to build the bridge to the future with is Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg. I mean, two of the least equipped, like least talent in terms of actually doing the job. Now, Kamala is also even terrible on TV. Pete is just a complete empty suit.

He is a BS artist. He's good at that. He's good at like his little cable news appearances. He is very good at that. Does that help you get your flights? Does that help the rail workers who needed an administration to have their back? Did that help our supply chain issues to get solved? No, not whatsoever. When it actually mattered, when you actually needed content and someone who was capable and someone who's willing to stand up to the airlines who are powerful, moneyed interest,

nowhere to be found. And the last thing I'll note here is even the mainstream press has taken note. I saw a piece this morning in Axios. Now they frame it as like, oh, some of this is unfair, et cetera, et cetera. But it is starting to be noted in the outlets that Pete cares about very much that this has gone extremely poorly for him. Good.

Maybe it'll encourage him to do his job better. But I'm not going to hold my breath next time. I don't know that he can. I don't know he's capable of it. Even if he wanted to, I don't know that he's capable of it. I saw somebody say, Crystal Sager, you guys should just drive to Austin. It's probably easier at that point.

That's what Kyle would like to do. He hates flying. That's a whole other discussion. All right, let's go ahead and talk about Ukraine. Major kerfuffle here in Washington. The Secretary of the Navy made some true comments, which he then had to walk back after a massive outcry from the pro-Ukraine community, both on Twitter and within the

government. So let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. The original comments from the U.S. Naval Secretary were, quote, we may need within the next six months, the U.S. Navy may need to choose between arming itself or arming Ukraine. These were comments that were made to defense reporters. Now, afterwards, and this is also a press story, because that reporter ended up deleting that tweet at the request of the naval secretary. Wow. Because he said he needed to fully explain his comments in context. So, all right, I'll give you guys the context, which is basically reiterating exactly what he said. What he said was that he was chastising defense companies for using the pandemic as an excuse for not delivering weapons on time, and that the weapons

and the missile interceptors and many other things that were coming to the U.S. and ordered by the U.S. Navy were not arriving in a timely manner, and that if that were to continue to be the case, which all indications seem that it be, that we would then have to possibly choose to deliver deliveries of weapons to Ukraine and then also deliveries of weapons to us. He says, quote, we are monitoring that very, very closely. This comment was enough. Actually, clearly, it got wrapped on the knuckles by the Biden administration because the Naval Secretary himself put out a tweet trying to further explain his comments. Now, if you're this reporter, how do you delete a tweet of accurate quotes by the Naval Secretary at his request? How does that work? By the way, if he needs more context, the Navy Secretary can give the context. It's not your

job to do PR for the U.S. Navy Secretary. Clearly, the Navy Secretary was telling us the truth, which is that there is a supply crunch and that it is possible we may have to choose between arming ourselves or arming Ukraine. And by the way, that is a longstanding problem that people in the U.S. munitions industry and others have been talking about for months now. It is not a surprise.

We've been talking about it here on our show. You know, it doesn't take a genius. Just go look at what their actual publicly testified comments before Congress are. I believe we've covered that several times here on the show. It also underscores to me why some of the chief diplomacy pushers in the Biden administration, and this is shocking, it's not the White House. It's not the National Security Council. It's the military. Chairman Mark Milley has basically been the one, along with many

of the secretaries of the armed services, to push peace in Ukraine. You know why? Because they can see the $100 billion of their weapons that are depleting US stocks from all sorts of ammunition, surplus, and including the supply problem, the Javelin missiles, which we talked about here previously, reducing stocks, or not even saying reducing stocks, but you know, Ukraine is not the only part of the world, last time I checked. Some stuff could pop off anytime, Taiwan, elsewhere, where you would want to ship weapons to allies. Well, we may have to actually choose between the two. And that's a terrible situation to be in. That's literally what the job of a military planner is. So I think these are tremendously important comments. And I think these are tremendously important comments.

And I think that the cover-up of the comments, Crystal, are even more revealing, more so than the comments themselves. Because it shows you that if you tell even a sliver of the truth about what this situation looks like, you can still support Ukraine. But you just have to be like, look, if you care about your own country first, then clearly you're going to have to ask some questions. They don't even want this information out there. It's just about acknowledging something basic, which is that some of the choices we're making with regards to Ukraine require trade-offs. Yes. And that's effectively what we've been, what the press has been unable to admit the entire time around, that, you know, our limitless aid to them, the type of weapons that we're shooting, that we're sending rather, the provocations with

regard to Russia and escalation, the economic sanctions. Like, all of these things are not just clear-cut good. They have tradeoffs. And that part of the conversation has never been allowed into the press. It reminds me of when there was that report. CBS, were they the ones that did the report on how a lot of the early weapons that were being shipped in, how nobody really knew where they went. And there was no accountability for whose hands they were ending up in. And there were concerns that were being raised by Europeans about these weapons being resold on the black market.

And it was effectively the only reporting we have gotten on that problem from the mainstream press. And they published the report. They put it out. We covered it. And just as soon as they published it, same thing. They deleted it. Massive pushback came and they ended up deleting it, massively editing it, effectively apologizing,

saying like, oh, this may not reflect the way things that are happening now. It's like, no, you did an actual piece of journalism and you are cucking yourself to the defense establishment and to the administration rather than exposing what is a very real concern and potential trade-off. Same exact vibes here. Yeah. As Bridge Colby says, doth protest a bit too much whenever it comes to the comments and what they reveal about the defense supply chain. And look, it actually comes on the heels of a very complicated situation in Ukraine. It's not like things are actually going well for Russia. In fact, let's put this up there on the screen. They just replaced their own military commander again

after just three months. The previous general commander had been somebody who was well known for his work in Syria, for the deployment of air power in order to bolster the Assad regime. Well, the new military commander that they have gone ahead and put into place, there's, look, there's a lot of criminology that's happening right here as to what exactly all of it means. But in general, you know, when you're replacing military commanders every three months or so, just not a particularly good look. That's not really how competent military should be run. And it's an implicit failure acknowledgement really on their part as to what exactly all of that means. I mean, really, I think what you can point to is that having the demotion for the previous joint commander, I can never say the name, Serevokin, was actually being framed as an increasing in the status of the operation by appointing possibly a more higher-ranking commander. It could set the stage for a couple of things. There will likely be, and this I'm reading from some defense analysts here in Washington, it is likely that this could show you that there will be a spring offensive rather than

just more of a defensive air campaign waged across Kyiv, which we've seen, you know, going on Kyiv and critical energy infrastructure. This would be somebody who would be able to marshal forces, some 150,000 mobile forces and others. Then possibly there could be a second draft in Russia, although domestically, you know, who knows how that will all come to bear. Overall, what people are genuinely trying to read the tea leaves and look at is that this is a signal that the Russians are not giving up, that they're actually probably going to move in an even more offensive direction come in the spring offensive whenever the weather gets better. There was a Financial Times article that put it this way. They talked to an expert

who said they're just shuffling the deck because they're in a dead end and have no idea what to do. These guys are all old men pushing 70. They don't know how to fight a modern war. The person likened the reshuffle to a classic Russian parable about a group of forest animals who form an incompetent instrumental quartet and ask a nightingale for advice only to be told, quote, arrange yourselves any way you like. It will make no difference. You will never become musicians. Yeah, that's funny. So that's the other way to look at it is, you know, they're trying to reconfigure. And there's just no doubt that this has not gone the way that Russia thought it would go, that much of the world ultimately thought it would go. There were failures from the beginning. Those haven't really,

the ship hasn't really been righted. And also the previous dude who was in charge, there was a lot of criticism of him also from the like hard right nationalist hawkish faction, which seems to be incredibly influential with Putin and the Kremlin. I mean, they're the ones whose critiques they consistently seem to respond to. Yes, exactly. And let's also get to this next part. This one, look, you got to take this with a massive grain of salt. It's CNN. It's also reported by the U.S. intelligence community. It's possibly true, so let's put it up there on the screen, about how Russian artillery fire appears to be down nearly 75%. There's two ways from some of the defense analysts that I looked at as to what that means.

Number one is that they are running very, very low in the amount of artillery that they have. Number two is that they're saving their artillery right now for the possible spring offensive come later in a few months. Now, either way, it's not a good situation, what we just talked about with the US. Whenever you have to husband arms and try and strategically deploy them and you don't have a surplus, that's a problem because, of course, there are trade-offs. So there are two ways to go about this. It could be that the ceasefire that was ordered by Putin on Russian Orthodox Christmas and during the holidays was one way to try and conserve ammunition amid some of the pushes, the small pushes that they're making right now, and push things all towards the spring offensive. Or it

could show you that they just have, and this is probably undeniable at this point, a systemic problem in terms of resupplying their military. And they still don't have the supply chains to make all that up, even with arms purchases from Iran and from North Korea. Let's go to the next one here, please, because this is also important. There is still fighting that is happening in Ukraine. There's a salt town by the name of Soldar. I'm probably saying that incorrectly, so I apologize to everybody which is in the region. The reason why this matters is because there are competing complaints as to what exactly has gone on in this town. The Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian defense ministry says that they continue to contest the town.

The Russians say that they have basically taken it. The reason why it even matters in the first place is because it's strategically important. It is a town in eastern Ukraine and is right on the front line. And in terms of battle setbacks and more, who wins some of these smaller skirmishes, especially after Ukrainian victory, not only in their offensive, but also, you know, in more recent ones like Bakhmut and elsewhere, that the Russians should be able to try and contest some of these towns because they would serve as key supply areas for any sort of spring offensive. TLDR, it's very complicated. There's really no way to say, no, who's winning, who's losing. Definitely the momentum is on the Ukrainian side. But, you know, Peter Zayhan,

who we had on the show, he made an excellent point on the Joe Rogan podcast, something that's always stuck in my mind, which is if you look at the history of all Russian wars, the first year is always a total shit show. And then they just draft their entire population and they throw as many bodies into the meat grinder as possible. And they just, frankly, have a very different view of loss of human life in terms of its value

within their military and they're willing to eat casualties that no western democracy ever would and that by doing that they end up usually winning the war uh that said it's not an actual total war in terms of moscow it's not like the population necessarily has bought into it the way they did with hitler's invasion and all of that so there's still a lot of caveats for that analysis but i think it's it important, you know, one to consider in the likelihood of some spring offensive in 2013. Yeah. And it's obviously very difficult for us to assess from here how the domestic population in Russia really feels about what's going on and what their capacity for suffering and sending their sons and husbands and brothers into war as, you know, grist for the mill,

what that capacity and willingness ultimately is and whether there would be some sort of domestic real pushback more so than what we've seen thus far. It's just very hard for us to see from here and really accurately assess that. But, you know, the other piece with this battle for this Solidar, this salt mining town, it also would be a really important sort of moral victory for Russia, which hasn't had anything that could really crow about to their population domestically with regards to this war. And it also does show you that if they are able to succeed here, which, by the way, they're claiming that they already have, if they are ultimately able to succeed here,

I mean, it shows you that this is a long way from finished, that the result is far from inevitable. And so it's an important, I think, warning sign there as well. Yeah, that's right. All right, guys, let's talk about my favorite member of Congress, Congressman George Santos of New York's third congressional district. Mr. Santos has, of course, been caught and admitted at this point in any number of lies. You literally can't even keep track of all of them. The latest one, which I love, is he apparently lied to like a local Republican official in New York. The guy was like, oh, I'm into sports. And Santos was like, I was a championship volleyball player when I was at Baruch College.

Impressive. Number one, he didn't go to Baruch College to start with. And number two, there's no signs he's ever played volleyball. So anyway, that's my latest amusing George Santos lie that has just been revealed. He is facing increasing calls for his resignation, specifically from other New York elected Republican officials who, you know, feel burned by this guy, I'm sure, and also feel like if you're not in Congress, if you're like the local executive and you've got to deal with this dude for anything, I'm sure you're really not super happy about this situation. So anyway, Santos in Congress yesterday, getting cornered by reporters, having to have his like little

bodyguard try to fend him off. Let's take a look at that. You're accused of fabricating almost every single part of your life. Why do you deserve to represent a people of New York? Do the way. Did you illegally? Mr. Santos, there's some campaign finance concerns and questions about your finances. Can you answer these? Can you guys give me a little personal space, please?

A little personal space? Why won't you answer our questions? Congressman, you seem to be dodging questions about your finances and about your background. Congressman, what about those new accusations? Also, who is still willing to work for this team? Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know who that guy is. There's some question about he might have been working for Madison Cawthorn's office previously.

That's quite a resume. He really knows how to pick them. I mean, look, money's money. You know, some people need a job. Some people just like being in the middle of the action, no matter what that action is. Here in Washington, you can work for a liar, for a cheat, and not only do you get rehired, you get promoted. So, you know, if anything, I admire the chutzpah. But as you said, Crystal, he's facing calls from his own local Republican Party officials for him to resign. And that's

probably the most scathing and also the direction which Kevin McCarthy and House leadership are all looking towards. McCarthy said yesterday Santos will not serve on any of the flagship committees while he's- Yeah, but he's still giving him committee assignments. He's just not giving him the choicest committee assignments. So he's standing by his man ultimately. And Santos voted for him in all 15 rounds and they have a four vote majority. So there's a lot of political calculation going on here with Speaker McCarthy. But we did pull some of the criticism from local New York elected Republicans, which, I mean, they really did kind of go in on him yesterday.

So let's take a listen to a little bit of that press conference. George Santos' campaign last year was a campaign of deceit, lies, fabrication. He deceived the voters of the 3rd Congressional District. He deceived the members of the Nassau County Republican Committee, elected officials, his colleagues, candidates, his opponents, and even some of the media. His lies were not mere fibs. He disgraced the House of Representatives, and in particular, his fabrications went too far. Many groups were hurt. Specifically, I look at those families that were touched by the horrors of the Holocaust and feel for them. He has no place in the Nassau County Republican Committee, nor should he serve in public service,

nor as an elected official. And I believe that gentleman who was speaking there is the sort of the executive for Nassau County. And he's also said, listen, I'm just not going to work with this guy. And he's come up with an alternative plan because obviously the local county executives, they have to interface a lot with their federal counterparts, especially with regards to constituent services and getting their issues resolved. He's like, I've already worked out a plan with the other members of Congress that represent this county. He's, you know, he's a Republican, but he says, I have a good relationship with Chuck Schumer.

We've already got a plan so that constituents aren't going to have to deal with this man. And I'm not going to deal with this man because how can you work with someone who has literally lied about every relevant fact in terms of his biography. And, you know, the political calculus for these folks is a lot different than the political calculus for a Kevin McCarthy, which we just laid out. He's very interested in having a majority and having as big of a margin as he possibly can, having only those four votes to be able to work with and deal with here. For these guys, you know, this is a swing area. Voters are clearly not impressed with this man. They are, I'm sure, on a personal level, like, what the hell?

This guy lied to us to our face. And so they have a very different political calculus at play here, both on a sort of like personal animus level, but also in terms of them being able to hold on to their own elected positions and not be tarred with all the lies and all the ridiculousness of George Santos. I'm sure people are furious. And Santos, I mean, the guy, he just will not let up. He tweeted this after the call. I was elected to serve the people of New York's third district,

not the party and the politicians. I remain committed to doing that and regret to hear that local officials refused to work with my office to deliver results to keep our community safe and lower the cost of living. I will not resign. I mean, he probably needs the cash from this position.

Yeah. It's the reality. It's very possible. I don't really, you know, with arch narcissists like this, it's just very difficult to see, like, how much they're willing to understand what they're willing to compute. I've talked about the Fyre Festival guy,

Mark Shkreli, you know, people like that. Just people, they seem to have an almost pathological need to obfuscate the truth or to always have like a last-ditch gambit where they can get themselves out of it just this time. Yeah. And that's what really comes through with Santos. These type of fraudsters are so remarkable. Like when you look at SBF actually being another one. Yeah, that's true. You know, even today, SBF, literally while you were talking,

wrote a whole blog post. She's like, I didn't steal any money. I still don't know what happened with it. It's like they have to cling to. Wow. There's a lot of similarities, you know, between all of them. And one of them is that they all appear to reach, like, high status in America, which is even crazier.

Yeah. I mean, there are some benefits to being able to be, like, pathological in that way and assert it with such confidence. And you can see, I mean, in this case, listen, there are plenty of politicians, including the current president of the United States and former president of the United States who have lied, stretched the truth, made up anecdotes. I was thinking too about Kamala Harris and her whole like freedom story that she invented out of whole class so like politicians making up anecdotes and embellishing their resume whatever none of that is new okay but the like the fact

that seemingly every detail of his biography was just completely fabricated and the shamelessness with which he was just willing to tell whoever was in front of him whatever they wanted to hear like that's what makes me laugh so much about the volleyball thing. Like, some random dude expresses some sort of, like, vague interest in volleyball, and he's ready to go with, oh, I was a volleyball champion at my college that I didn't go to, and we won the league championship. I mean, he invents all these, like, super specific details

about what rank he was in his class and all of this stuff. It really, really is remarkable to me. I just am fascinated by the mind and sort of like horrified by the whole situation. In terms of his future, you know, right now, Kevin McCarthy is standing by him, not pressuring him to resign, giving him committee assignments. At the same time, he has some serious legal questions that he's going to be facing. You know, it's not illegal to lie to voters about your resume, but it is illegal to lie to the Federal Election Commission about the source of your campaign cash. And obviously, there are some big questions about how exactly he ended up being able to contribute $700,000, I think, is the number of supposedly his own money into this campaign.

When very recently his income was relatively low, he was getting kicked out of apartments. It looks like the campaign may have financed his own living situation during the campaign, also illegal and also something he lied about. There's a lot that's really fishy in terms of his campaign finance report. Like, there's this rule that you have to have receipts for any campaign expenditure $200 or over. So, they have all of these expenditures that are like $199.99. I mean, just the sketchiest possible stuff. And there are already inquiries into that. It looks like the Congressional Ethics Office, they've received formal requests to investigate him as well. So they may be looking into it. But he could be in some actual legal trouble here, even if there's no mechanism to force him out of his seat. The most they can do is basically what these New York Republicans did yesterday and try to completely ice him out. But if he refuses to leave until the next election, there's not a whole lot you could do about it. We've had this happen before. We should all remember it.

We've had people who have been literally indicted and have not only gotten away with it, who got reelected. So look, I personally put my trust in the people of New York's third district. I think they're probably rightfully outraged at this, and it's just not going to happen. Absolutely. And this is a swing area. I guess the last thing that I was thinking about with regards to this is we've talked about the failure of the media to pick up on any of this. We've talked about the failure of the

Democratic Party to do any basic opposition research instead focusing on like whatever he said about January 6th versus the fact that he made up every significant part of his life. But there's also like the Republican Party. Oh, I agree. Didn't do a single bit of vetting on this dude. And the thing that's confusing to me as well is this is an area which, as you can see, there are other significant, well-known Republican elected officials. So it's not like there's nobody home in terms of Republican parties, quite well organized, funded, et cetera. And this was a seat that was well in play. It was a slightly Biden district, but that's exactly the kind that Republicans were expecting and hoping to pick up this year. So you didn't field anyone in the

primary other than this dude, and you didn't check this dude out at all. So sort of party failures, institutional failures all around with this one as well. Yeah, absolutely. At the same time, we wanted to update you on a really significant case that the Supreme Court heard this week. There were oral arguments on Tuesday with regards to a case between a company and a Teamsters local union where the company basically says that the Teamsters there, they went on strike and they created, caused damage and the loss of some concrete and some damage to these trucks. And they want to be able to sue the Teamsters local union for those damages. Now, the union side of the story is that the workers actually took a lot of mitigating steps to try to make sure that there

was not this type of damage and there was not this type of spoilage of the concrete. So let's go ahead and put this up on the screen from SCOTUS blog here. They say cement truck drivers went on strike. A lawsuit by their company may pave the way for restricting workers' rights. And basically, Sagar, there's two questions at stake here. Number one, is the Supreme Court, do they really even have jurisdiction over this? Because there's already settled law about how you decide whether there was like intentional damage, which just like any sort of property damage, you know, you are liable for. No one is doubting that. But these claims are supposed to be settled by the board that oversees this, the National Labor Relations Board. So question number one is, should this even be in front of the Supreme Court? And then question number two is like on the merits of the case here, this is going to be a real chilling signal for any

workers and unions who are contemplating going out on strike. Because ultimately, part of the pressure and the point of a strike is to withhold your labor to inflict some economic damage on the company. That's your whole source of leverage. That's why a strike is such a powerful tool. So if you are curtailing the ability to leverage that power that you ultimately have here, no one's saying that you can like go out and actively sabotage or actively damage property, then you could really put a hold on this grassroots labor movement and a lot of the more militant activity that we've been seeing recently. Yeah, I think it's actually, and this is something that we've always tried to emphasize here. You know, the SCOTUS cases everybody hears about, like gay marriage and abortion, like definitely matter.

I'm not saying they don't, but you know, there's a lot of worker stuff, banking regulations, administrative stuff that gets litigated at SCOTUS on the day to day level, which has a huge impact on all of you. And nobody does ever any scrutiny with the judges on how they're going to rule on this. There really is not a solid prediction as to which way this is all going to break. The cement workers who are saying, or the cement driver, the cement company, their essential allegation, as I understand it, is because damage occurred when the workers went on strike, even though the damage was not

their fault, that they are somehow liable for it because it was part of their job responsibilities. And yet this would challenge almost a backdoor legality of striking itself because how can you possibly have a strike without inflicting economic damage on the company? It basically is a backdoor outlawing or at the very least, imposing a lot of economic damage and fines on any of these companies. And this could set a different legal standard through which strikes actually even happen, rendering actually the NLRB even more useless, because how can they litigate anything if you have a civil judgment that can always be levied against unions and against workers themselves? I mean, this would be very chilling in terms of the impact that it would have at a broader

level. That's exactly right. And what the company is saying, and this is why this could be so pernicious, is that they deserve to be able to sue for these damages because of the timing of when the workers went out on strike. They're saying that timing is what created the economic harm and damage to their company, even though, again, the workers took some measures upon themselves to try to mitigate the spoilage of the cement here. And so they're saying like, oh, no, but you can't even go out during that time at all.

So you can see how that could be applied if, you know, if the court sides with the company, how that could really be an issue for people who are considering striking across the country. One of the comments that was made from one of the justices, I think it was Justice Roberts, was that, OK, we're trying to figure out the difference between the milk spoiling and killing the cow. Yes. And, okay, well, that's an easy explanation to see. Okay, they're not at work to milk the cow in this example. So the milk spoils or to deal with the milk and put it in the fridge or whatever. Okay, very different from you actually murder the cows. Everyone would say you can't murder the cows, right?

But what you see here is, you know, the cement is sort of the milk in this situation. The cement was ultimately spoiled because the workers weren't there to do the job because they're out on strike protesting for better conditions or whatever they were ultimately fighting for. So it is much more analogous to that sort of a situation. So if they rule even that out of bounds, well, then you've opened up Pandora's box for companies to go after unions and to go after workers and to really make it very difficult for workers to strike in any case whatsoever, which is a core fundamental right. This is the tool that workers have in order to be able to force companies to the bargaining table ultimately. Yeah, we're going to try and track it as well as possible. Oral argument, so decision's not going to happen for quite some time, but could be a landmark case.

Yeah, one to definitely keep your eye on and one that, you know, has profound implications that the media will barely cover or touch on. All right, one more important story. So there's a big fight that is already underway for Dianne Feinstein's Senate seat in California. There is a lot at work here because, first of all, Dianne Feinstein, as we've tracked, and we'll get into some of these details earlier, I mean, her mental state has significantly deteriorated. There's all sorts of reporting that has come out about how she barely knows where she is, what she's doing, what vote she's supposed to take. There was one story that was particularly troubling about how she wasn't up to being chair of the Judiciary Committee anymore,

which is incredibly powerful and incredibly important. And Chuck Schumer, who has a close relationship with her, he was dreading this conversation he was going to have to have with her, to tell her, break this news to her, whatever. So he does it. He has this difficult conversation, tells her she can't be chair of the committee, and then comes to realize later on she doesn't remember having the conversation. She doesn't remember it at all. So he has to go back and have this whole conversation all over again. So she has not yet said that she's stepping down for the seat, but people are already with the writings on the wall here, they're like, we can't have this person

who doesn't even know where she is holding this important Senate seat in California. And you have a lot of potential primary contenders, including Adam Schiff, including potentially Ro Khanna, including Barbara Lee, who just yesterday broke, told the Congressional Black Caucus

she is planning on running, and just yesterday broke, told the Congressional Black Caucus she is planning on running, and also Katie Porter, who has officially announced. And it has been very amusing to watch the media's decorum meltdown over the timing of Congresswoman Katie Porter's announcement for Senate here. The ladies at The View took this one on in spectacular fashion. Let's take a listen to what they had to say. Now, the seat she's running for is currently occupied by Dianne Feinstein, the oldest sitting senator at 89. And it's widely speculated that Feinstein will not be seeking another term. But since she hasn't actually made that official yet, some people are saying that Porter is making a disrespectful move by not waiting. What do you

think? Yeah, I was surprised. I was surprised, though, because I think what we saw when we saw the Democrats during that House chaotic moment when they were trying to pick speakers was this unity. And I think that unity came from the fact that Hakeem Jeffries waited his turn and waited for Nancy Pelosi to sort of bless him and say, yes, I'm going to step down. You may step up. This, these people hate democracy. There yes, I'm going to step down. You may step up. Oh my God. These people hate democracy.

There's just no other way to put it. There is so much going on there. I cannot imagine looking at the world and being like, it was great and beautiful that there was no dissent and that he just waited his turn and to be blessed by the Queen Nancy Pelosi. And God forbid, Katie Porter step up and disrespect Dianne Feinstein.

What about the disrespect of the people of California? Yes, thank you. That you're allowing this person whose brain doesn't function to represent them in an important and critical way. What about the disrespect of the people of the entire country? Because this is a woman who has had a lot of power within the Senate, but no, no, no, you've got to wait your turn. Wait to be blessed by the powers that be. Just insanity. She's literally senile. She has no idea what's going on. There are 39 million people who live in the state of California. They deserve, like, I don't know, somebody who's actually working

on their interests. She's also an arch narcissist because look,, I don't know, somebody who's actually working on their interest. She's also an arch narcissist because, look, I got, you know, I feel sympathy for her and her family in terms of that, but it becomes a whole other thing if you're going to inflict your narcissism on 40 million people on the entire country. She refuses to resign. She refuses to acknowledge the own problems that she clearly has in doing her day-to-day function. She's actually filed the paperwork to run for reelection. And there's also a story here about the Democratic Party being just basically rigging the process, keeping her in power. Look, it is absurd that she has stayed in office for the last 10 years. She should have been gone when she's 80. Her husband very recently died. Apparently, she took that very hard. And look, I mean, the stories that you're going to hear out

of Capitol Hill are insane. This woman has no clue what's happening. I bet you she can't even fly by herself. She wouldn't even get on the right flight. But she has to be completely held like this. She has tremendous power in terms of her rank in the Senate, in terms of the least past committee assignments. But, God, there's a lot of day-to-day constituent stuff. Like, the people of the state of California both deserve a senator who actually knows what they're doing, that can call officials

and stuff on their behalf, and there's no way that she can do this. So, look, what do you care about Katie Porter or not? Like, clearly, Feinstein needs to go, and if she refuses to leave, she's got to be challenged. Yes. There's no way around it.

I'm sorry. I mean, the decorum humping from the media who are, I mean, the underlying story is probably they like Adam Schiff because of all of his like January 6th

impeachment and all that stuff. And so they're trying to tamp down any momentum from Katie Porter. Again, however you feel about him

because they probably prefer Adam Schiff. But just to give you a little bit more detail about how clear cut the mental decline is here, let's go and put this up on the screen. I mean, you have so many reports now like this one. This is from the San Francisco Chronicle. So local newspaper colleagues worry Dianne Feinstein is now mentally unfit to serve, citing recent interactions. Here's the lead of the story. They say, when a California Democrat in Congress recently engaged in an extended conversation with Senator Feinstein, they prepared for a rigorous policy discussion like those they'd had with her many

times over the last 15 years. Instead, the lawmaker said, they had to reintroduce themselves to Feinstein multiple times during an interaction that lasted several hours. Rather than delve into policy, Feinstein repeated the same small talk questions like asking a lawmaker what mattered to voters in their district, the member of Congress said, with no apparent recognition. The two had already had a similar conversation. Again, this is apparently someone who has known Dianne Feinstein for at least 15 years. And in the course of one conversation, had to reintroduce themselves to her multiple times. I believe this is also the story where they tell about how Senator Feinstein was speaking at a funeral of someone who, again, she was extremely close to. Had known for years and years and years, sort of this, you

know, leading figure in terms of the local California political scene. She gets up, gives this kind of small talky, incoherent speech at the funeral and sits down without even acknowledging this person's passing. And the whole point of her speaking at this funeral was to acknowledge this individual and their contributions. And it was so bad that her staff actually made her get back up and say something about this person who had passed. Again, we're out of the realm of sad. She's not a private citizen. She's a public elected official. Her health is a completely justified thing that people, by the way, the other cowardly thing in that article is that not a single one of these people actually says their name. They don't go on the record because they don't want to screw with her.

Nancy Pelosi, by the way, is somebody who has publicly said that Feinstein is fine and that her mental faculties and all that other stuff are there. This is a total cover-up, and it's honestly BS. It really, really pisses me off because these people are not kings. They're not entitled to their positions. This whole wait your turn fetishism that The View has is just corrosive to any actual Democratic representation. It's really disgusting. And the last piece of this story, go ahead and put this up on the screen from Alex Salmon, who wrote a good write-up that I encourage you to read if you're interested in the different candidates who may step up here and what those dynamics are going to be. The tweet here says, new Dianne Feinstein has not given any indication she

is stepping down. She has, in fact, filed the paperwork to run again. But there's blood in the water and California Dems are going for it. Barbara Lee just told the Black Caucus she's running. Katie Porter is in. And like I said, the two other people that there's speculation about is Congressman Ro Khanna and Adam Schiff is almost definitely looking to run here. But part of the important history that Alex gets into in this piece is that back in 2018, these problems were already apparent. And not only did Feinstein have a challenger in the primary, Kevin DeLeon, who apparently now is embroiled in that whole LA City Council thing. I don't really know the details, but I didn't put that aside. He stepped up and challenged her in the primary. And the California Democratic Party actually

endorsed him, probably because, number one, Dianne Feinstein, like her politics kind of suck. And number two, because these problems were already apparent. And the National Democrats are the ones who stepped in and saved her. Reading here, Barack Obama in his very first endorsement in the 2018 cycle backed Feinstein. Later came the support of Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and others, including Adam Schiff. Actually, Feinstein ends up out-raising de Leon by almost 20 times and ends up winning the race. So this is a total problem of the National Democratic Party's own making. And for the media to take, oh, poor Dianne Fein, you got to pay your dues and you got to wait and you got to wait to be patted on the head. They just literally hate democracy. There is no other takeaway you could possibly have. Media does this with a lot of people, too.

You know, they covered up for Strom Thurmond. They covered up for Thad Cochran. Both of those guys were totally, completely senile. And there was, like, basically nobody talking about it on Capitol Hill. So it's just totally bipartisan. Joe Biden comes to mind. That's a whole other conversation. I don't know what it is.

I can't imagine interacting with a senile person, being my job to report on public officials. They're not totally senile. I'm like, oh, this is fine. Completely fine. Whatever. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? All right, guys, so this is an amazing story.

A software engineer was recently arrested for replicating the scheme from the 1999 movie Office Space in order to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from his employer, Zulily. So here's the report. A software engineer siphoned more than $300,000 from his employer by introducing what prosecutors called a, quote, a series of malicious software edits that wired money into his personal account.

Now, if the scheme sounds like the plot of Office Space, that's because the authorities said it was partly inspired by the movie. When asked about the money, the 28-year-old engineer told authorities it was all gone because he invested it in GameStop. Too perfect. Now, Office Space struck a nerve with an entire generation of miserable white-collar workers zombying through their days, waging petty battles with the copy machine, their co-workers, and their hated bosses, wondering if there was anything more to life than a tedious groundhog's day of mind-numbing and soul-crushing work. You're living the American dream, but you hate your life.

In the movie, these office workers at some anonymous tech company, they decide they're going to make a break for it, and they siphon off enough money from the company for them to break out of the dull monotony of their lives. Now, a version of the fantasy that many a white-collar worker has, I'm sure, indulged on their grinding commute, contemplating their self-constructed prison of mortgage payments, lifestyle expectations, and private school tuition payments. Well, art imitates life, and life apparently imitates art. A brand new study shows it's not just your sense that white-collar workers,

like lawyers, bankers, and other corporate office workers, are deeply unhappy. They really actually are, by their own reporting, some of the most unhappy, unfulfilled, stressed-out people in the entire country. Washington Post had this write-up of information that was gathered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, quote, the happiest, least stressful, most meaningful jobs in America. I'll get to those professions that actually report the highest levels of happiness in a minute, but let's start here with the misery index. There are two industries, or near the bottom across the categories of happiness, meaning, and levels of stress.

The first is labeled professional, scientific, and technical services, a sort of white collar catch-all that would include your lawyers, accountants, and tech bros. And the second is finance and insurance, which is pretty self-explanatory. These white collar workers got the degrees, they got their credentials,

they got the upper middle class incomes, and now they find themselves doing work that is boring and tedious at best, actively soul-crushing and immoral at worst. They're basically inessential workers, many layers of which could be removed with no one really noticing at all. This is not to pity them. After all, they are usually earning good money and benefiting from a society that has been designed to cater to their cultural and consumer tastes.

They're oftentimes even treated as actual human beings in their workplaces with needs and wants rather than the interchangeable cogs that blue-collar and service workers usually find themselves treated as. The data, though, does reveal something interesting about human nature, specifically what feeds our soul and what crushes it. Now, it's so surprising that this is also one of the groups that did a big rethink during COVID. Working remotely from home with none of the office mini dramas or coffee breaks, many had a big realization about just how small their actual work was and how strange it was that they had oriented their whole lives around those work tasks, sacrificing family, hobbies, community time, and so much more. These are the people who are no longer racing for extra work and weekend hours, but are instead moving to lower-cost places, leaning into an identity that exists outside of the workplace, actively changing their priorities and their goals after having been forced to take a break from the other end of the spectrum, kind of as an outlier in terms of happiness, meaning and low stress, is agriculture, logging, and forestry. Apparently, deeper research crowned

lumberjacks the happiest of all workers. But basically, anyone who worked on a farm or in a forest in nature was pretty content. If office work is abstract and disconnected, farming and logging are tangible. They're concrete. One entails sitting indoors, staring at a screen. The other requires outdoor physical activity, working directly with the land. I want to glorify it here. Logging is dangerous. Farmers saddled with debt have been committing suicide at high rates and are being forced off their land by giant agribusiness. But it again says something essential about human nature, that we find great satisfaction in being outside, doing work that is physical and is also measurable. Similar values are reflected in an analysis

of which activities people found made them happiest and gave them the most meaning. The top of the list was religious and spiritual activities. Close behind was physical activity and caring for others, whether it was their own family or non-family members. Additional data showed that we found ourselves happiest when we were at a place of worship, at the home of someone else, or outdoors. These activities are at the core of what makes us human, contemplating the existential beyond our day-to-day survival, using our bodies and labor to shape the world and provide for ourselves, provide for our

families, caring for our tribe as deeply social and interconnected people. But because these activities are often not economic, don't result in much of anyone profiting from us, we've been trained by society to push these activities to the sidelines and to devalue the very things that make us the happiest and most embody our humanity. This set of values is also the antithesis of the obnoxious grindset ecosystem, which implores you to double down on putting money and things over family, spirituality, and mutual care. Bottom line, maybe don't write malicious code to steal from your employer a la Office Space. But whether you're a white-collar worker, blue-collar, or service worker, do make this the year that you rebel from the program and find small ways to feed your own soul. That would be a real way to break free from the so-called matrix, and it would be good for the whole world. I was endlessly fascinated by this list of like, who's happiest?

And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, so how are we looking at? Well, as I've probably said ad nauseum at this point, if there is only one good thing to come from COVID, it is millions of people getting in touch with their own health. You understand the power of regular exercise, good diet, regular sleep, other very basic care routines which can yield insane dividends as you begin to age. It certainly was the case with myself, and I've heard now from so many of you. But there's a flip side to people like us. People actually took away from COVID that the medical system can triumph over nature. That those who believed most fervently in masks and multiple

booster shots and lockdowns. It's almost a transhumanistic idea that man has advanced so far from natural pathogens that by extension all human conditions can be beaten by human ingenuity. Our entire medical system is effectively designed around this idea. Why? Because it does two things. Number one, it takes medicine into the realm of hidden knowledge. Drugs, pharmacology, outside the realm of common sense, and also into the realm where they can give you something to fix whatever is wrong with you. Two, of course, when you happen to tell you what's wrong with you, what specific drug or expensive tool or surgery that you need, they also happen to charge you for it. That, in a concise way as possible, is how I can try to capture Western medicine. One where medicine often trumps common sense and

age-old biology, and is now often impacted by ideology to protect the feelings of patients over their actual long-term well-being. For adults, this is of course vitally important, but where it is arguably the most important is children, for whom it is our solemn duty to of patients over their actual long-term well-being. For adults, this is of course vitally important, but where it is arguably the most important is children, for whom it is our solemn duty to protect, especially from our own pathologies impacting them. That's where I want to spend time today. The new regulations that were released by the American Pediatric Association regarding the troubling spike in childhood obesity. Childhood obesity is a genuine crisis that actually exploded during the pandemic, especially over the last 20 years. BMI indexes for children have gotten so out of control,

they literally had to remake the chart last month to include how fat some kids are today, because they did not even exist at that weight level in the year 2000. According to the latest data from the CDC, some 20% of all children in the United States are obese, not overweight, obese. It's actually worse though. Kids are younger and being more obese over time. 12% between two and five, 20% between six and 11, 22 between 12 and 19. Obesity itself, especially that of young people, is one way for a ticket to all kinds of horrible health conditions throughout your life. High blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, joint problems, heart problems, overall all-cause mortality goes way up.

It is probably the single biggest crisis afflicting kids today. Naturally, we expect the American Academy of Pediatrics to want to do something about it. And they have, in the most Western medicine way of all time. The new guidance says, basically, we should use drugs and surgery much earlier when treating childhood obesity. That drug includes a possibly revolutionary new weight loss drug known as semaglutide and surgery options which can run the gamut. Now, obviously, we should all have a lot of questions. The drug seems to work well in adults temporarily. How well does it work in children? Are we sure that screwing with insulin and gut function and GLP in children will not impact their overall development over time?

As far as surgery goes, so the solution to childhood obesity is to just slash and burn somebody's stomach and then hope that it's okay for the rest of their life? Is it reversible? How will it impact them throughout puberty? These are all great questions. Yet, as Dr. Vinay Prasad points out, the new American Academy of Pediatrics guidance with respect to semaglutide is based on, quote, two small studies of weekly injection amongst children as young as eight. And even within those small studies, they showed, quote, significant adverse effects. Those two small studies were all that they needed to then recommend this for all children afflicted by obesity in the United States. Do people realize how crazy this is? What's worse is that when you read deeper,

you understand this is part of a broader ideological project to emphasize medicine over lifestyle. In fact, one of the experts who helped justify the new guidance, the co-director of the Center for Pediatric Obesity Medicine at the University of Minnesota, said, quote, obesity is not a lifestyle problem. It is not a lifestyle problem. It is not a lifestyle disease. Let me ask you a question. Have you ever been to a food scores region on

the planet that has an obesity problem? If the answer is no, then obviously it's a freaking lifestyle disease. For parents who find it difficult to feed their kids healthy, nutritious meals, you will always have my eternal sympathy in this country. When they bring their kids into the doctor's office for help, we should have redirected some of the billions of dollars I'm sure is going to be spent on these drugs and on surgeries to basic stuff, making sure kids have access to healthy food,

exercise program, they're gonna burn more calories in places like gym class than they did previously, solving childhood obesity. It will require an entire reorientation of the way that we approach health, where lifestyle is first, not secondary. Drugs and surgery are the last of the last resorts. For too long, they have just been too willing to let us get sick and then sell you a type of cure. For adults, it's immoral. For children, it is a crime. We have to stop it. And unfortunately,

the drug makers, the doctors, the medical guilds, they're always not going to be on your side. The best thing that you can do is to try and keep yourself and your kids healthy. It's very hard, but it's not as hard as being reliant on a drug for the rest of your life. So when you read the guidance, it's totally nuts. And you know, this is the other thing with COVID. They really taught me. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. A lot of big questions about where exactly the economy is right now. Are we headed to a recession?

What is the Fed going to do in 2023? And how is it going to affect you? To answer hopefully some of these questions and gain some insights, we have one of our favorite guests, Professor Richard Wolff. He is a professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He's also founder of Democracy at Work and host of their show, Economic Update. His latest book is The Sickness is the System When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself. It's always great to see you, sir. Good to see you, sir.

Thank you. Glad to be here. So hot off the presses, we have a new inflation report that I wanted to get you to react to. And I know you haven't had a chance because it just came out to dig into all of the details. But here are the headlines. This is from The New York Times. They say the consumer price index climbed by 6.5 percent in the year through last month. That's down from 7.1% in the November reading as prices declined slightly on a monthly basis. That annual inflation rate was the slowest since October 2021. And they attribute that to a drop in gas prices and also airfares. They go on to say that the economists and Fed officials are more specifically focused on a so-called core inflation measure, which removes food and fuel

prices to get a sense of underlying price trends. Less good news there. They say that measure climbed by 5.7% in December from a year earlier, compared with 6% previously and in line with what forecasters had expected. So can you just explain that for our viewers a little bit in non-economist speak and what you make of that latest report? Glad to do so. In non-economist speak and what you make of that latest report. Glad to do so. In non-economist speak, and that's certainly the better way to go, even for the economist, if I'm going to be honest, what these numbers tell us is that the inflation our economy is suffering slightly diminished over the last month. Prices are still going up, which means we have an inflation, and they're going up in historic terms much higher than they did for the last 30 years,

but not as high as they were rising in the previous months. So it isn't that we're in a deflation, prices are not coming down, it's that they're not going up quite as quickly as they did before. But the sad news, wrapped up with that, is that wages, which were going up, not as fast as prices, not even close, but those are in even worse shape. That is, they are not catching up. In fact, they are shrinking, even relative to the diminished rise in prices. So if you're thinking about what this means for the average American consumer going to the supermarket or the department store as the prices, and therefore what you can afford to actually consume keeps shrinking. Got it. And Professor, in the context of everything we wanted to discuss today, just a broader check-in with the economy, how do you look at it broadly in terms of the outlook for the next year or so? Well, I'm afraid the problem is, and it comes right out of these numbers, that what we're seeing is a slow, painful reduction in the inflation, far less than what

people need if their standard of living is to improve. And we're paying the price for that modest improvement by laying off workers in large numbers, by a recession that we're either in or coming close to. There's virtual unanimity in the financial press, left, right, and center, about a recession this year. The only real debate is how soon will we get, how bad will it be, and how long will it last? So we're paying a heavy price. It's a little bit like noticing in those numbers that airline prices have slightly diminished their increase. They've been zooming up. And the beauty of the story is the service we're getting from the airlines is laughable. I'm trying to be polite literally over the last few days.

So, yeah, the price isn't going up. But what you're getting for what you're paying is shrinking really seriously. And I think that's a general prediction for where we're going. We have not solved the underlying problems of this economy. Our levels of debt, government, corporate, and individual are higher than ever and rising very fast. The inflation means people's income isn't enough, so they're going out on a limb again using their credit cards and every other way of getting credit. That's a very dangerous story, has been the cause of trouble twice in this new

century, and is building up again now. There ought to be a lot more concern, and I suspect there would be, except the folks in charge always have a hard time admitting to economic problems and so paint a very rosy picture. I'm not among them. And I tell you, most of my colleagues, even though that's unusual, agree with me on this. Yeah. One of the big heavyweights in terms of neoliberal economist Larry Summers, who was former Treasury secretary and served in other high level positions in terms of advising presidents on the economy, took some time out from his luxury tropical vacation to call explicitly for higher unemployment.

Let's take a listen to that, and I want to get your reaction on the other side. I've been speaking in a different way about the Fed in the last couple of months than I had been before, and that's because, for whatever reason, they have come around to views quite close to mine. They think inflation is the primary concern. They explicitly recognize that there's going to need to be increases in unemployment to contain inflation. What do you make of remarks like that, Professor? Well, to be honest with you, I'm outraged. I find this a level of relaxed calm about wrecking people's lives, millions of people

to be unemployed, because that's what we're talking about, given the size of our country, millions of people losing their jobs or losing hours if they have the kind of jobs that vary that way. That's an enormous burden to put on them, on their families, on the communities they live in that depend on their ability to spend. All of that in a breezy conversation made worse by the fact, and this is crucial, that it isn't true. Raising interest rates and squashing down an economy by doing that isn't the only way to deal with an inflation. And I won't even bother you with reminding everyone that the reason we created the Federal Reserve over 100 years ago was to prevent inflation, not to come in after it's done its

horrible work and fix it, but to prevent it because it's such a burden. They failed at doing that, and there ought to be a bit more of an acknowledgement and admission of the failure. Having said it, let me remind everyone there are other ways of dealing with an inflation. I'm going to give you two quick examples. Number one, 1971, Richard Nixon, hardly a progressive in the office of president, goes on radio television August 15th, and he says we have a terrible inflation, which they did at that time. And I'm going to do something about it right away, which he did. He declared the following. As of tomorrow morning, any business that raises the price of anything, you're going to get a visit from government officials and they're going to arrest you and throw you in jail.

That's how we're going to stop the rise in prices. And to be fair, he said, the same applies to unions or workers who push for higher wages. We will do the same. This policy is called, and it was called this then, a wage price freeze, because literally that's what it does. It was passed, signed by the president. 90 days was the first length of it. It was extended. And you know why? It stopped the inflation on a dime. Does that kind of policy have problems? Sure. But every policy to deal with the failure of an inflation has its costs, its risks, and its problems. But to deal with this as if there were nothing other for us to do than to schedule a recession for millions of people, is not only unfair and unjust, it's not altogether honest.

And Mr. Summers, who's a colleague of mine, he knows this very well. Wow. I think that is all very well said. So great to have your expertise on these matters, Professor. Thank you so much for taking some time with us. Thank you, sir. My pleasure. And thanks for covering it in an open way.

It's really a big help to the national conversation. Our pleasure. All right, guys, thank you so much for watching. Really appreciate it. We had a great CounterPoint show yesterday.

They had the breaking news segment. They did a really good job. They had some very touching tributes, you know, to suicide victims and elsewhere. So anyway, I love the show. I'm glad that they're on Wednesday. And you guys get

four straight days of content, which premium members you guys seem to be loving. Don't forget about our live show in Austin. Otherwise we've got great content all for the weekend and we'll see you on Monday. Yeah. Also people are super psyched to meet Mac and Griffin. Oh yes. Yes, they were. Thank you. Thank you guys. We're very nice to Mac. Yes. Griffin in particular got a kick out of it with his mustache. Thank you for giving them a warm welcome because I can assure you they are doing a phenomenal job. So we're super grateful to have them and super grateful for you guys for making it happen. Have a great weekend. We'll see you back here next week. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results.

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DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily, it's your Not the Father Week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth

millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. He's trying to give it to his irresponsible son. But I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. They could lose their family and millions of dollars. Yep. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now.

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